Eventually, everyone is mobile except Xue, who seems to be pretty seriously injured. They have to drag her to the teleport array, and she winces as they do so. Once out, Sen turns to her.

“You ok Xue?”

She has a bit of an embarrassed look on her face as she replies. “Yeah. It’ll be three hours before I can play again though.” She then logs off immediately, leaving Sen a bit confused. Lynna and Jennifer are giving him and interesting look as well, leaving Sen even more confused. The rest of the group heads back to the car, and Lynna drives them back to the road. This time, they realize they can set the rented vehicle to head back on its own, and simply fast travel back to Falan.

Once they get back, most of them head to their respective schools to rent one of the array rooms in order to practice their muscle enhancement skills, as everyone has maxed out the current tier of their bone enhancement skills.

Sen, the odd one out, needs to go buy a sword, so he heads over to Clay’s Smithy. Getting in, he's greeted by the familiar stands of armor and weapons on concrete, which seem to move to a different position each time he visits. He waits a while like usual until Clay comes out from the back, where he had heard the hammering coming from. As he enters the room, Sen holding his sword point down into the concrete floor, Clay looks over it and shakes his head.

Sen feels a bit guilty, this isn’t the first time that he’s completely ruined a sword. Clay would have murdered him after losing the top half of his sword in the tournament if it wasn’t just a G ranked blade.

“I need a C ranked sword.”

Clay glares at him. Every time Sen comes to upgrade his sword, it’s only after it’s been severely damaged. Sen can’t help it though, some monsters just have ridiculous strength or abilities which often cause his weapon issues. Clay sighs, then lets out a nod, going back into the smithy portion of the building before returning with a new weapon.

This blade is slightly larger than his last, which Sen appreciates, as he’s grown around around half an inch in the past month, and isn’t showing signs of stopping. Sen is touched that Clay has remembered to account for that, but figures he’s never seen anyone else visiting this shop, excluding the girls when he brought them to get new weapons, so Clay can probably easily remember his few customers. Sen shakes his head, he's thinking of a computer program like it's a human being.

Most people simply make do with the cast weapons that are sold at the more large scale stores, as even cast, with an energy pattern imbued into them as they’re formed, they’re far stronger than normal steel. Sen had actually tried blacksmithing in the past month, and while he finds it to be a very relaxing and enjoyable experience, he isn’t willing to spend the time to learn it when he needs to hunt monsters as well.

He still has no idea how Julie manages to keep up with both learning new arrays and hunting, even if her memory is ridiculously good. Sen pays Clay twenty C ranked crystals for the weapon, trying not to wince as he does so. He’s going to fall a bit behind in stats until they do some more dungeon runs, though the girls will have to replace their own weapons in the near future as well.

Once Sen has gotten his new weapon, he heads back to his school. He rents a D ranked array room to enhance his sensing of energy, and works on the C tier version of his muscle enhancement skill. He’s almost completed it, as with the experience from his Bones Like Wind, and the following skills, it has gone far faster.

The different muscle enhancing skills, like the bone versions, each have their own advantage. Earth gives endurance, water gives flexibility, wind gives speed, and fire explosive power. Sen almost regretted not going with fire when he’d found out, but while explosive power may be better against mobs, the ridiculous speed and wind control make his swordsmanship even more effective. He doesn’t only rely on overpowering his opponents, but beating them in skill.

After two hours, he’s finally completed the C rank muscle enhancement skill. The only one he has left is the one for skin enhancement. That one will be the hardest, as it treats the entire skin as one large organ. He already has the skill book for the F rank version, but has been putting it off due to how complicated it seems.

Pulling out the book, he slowly goes to make more and more patterns. While it isn’t entirely impossible, as the energy tends to continue the flow as he moves to the next part, the slightest stray control will cause a chain reaction messing up everything that came before it. He slowly builds each flow, carefully places each eddy and swirl, and lets the raging torrents flow where they need to, but isn’t messaged by the group, and so simply continues to practice.

Eventually, he completes it, and is amazed when the energy passages in this skin, bones, and muscles start to link up of their own volition. When they’re done, Sen experiences a massive spike in his feeling for the wind. Where before, he could maybe sense things a good five meters out, and control the wind within a meter, both of those numbers are now doubled. He’d read that there would be an improvement upon practicing all three, but he hadn’t expected it to be this exaggerated.

Thinking it would be amusing, Sen tries to condense the air into the smallest amount he can, making a small ball of heavily compressed air. Just to see what it will do, he sends it flying towards the target dummy in the center of the room. When it hits, a loud clap sounds out, and the target dummy is knocked over, while Sen is holding his ears that he’s pretty sure have broken eardrums.

Playing halted by the pain, he checks the time. Not only does he have like ten unread messages, it’s been nearly six hours. He pales, he’s missed dinner! Running out of the room, he logs out immediately.