“Welcome back, my Lady,” Garside’s raspy voice sounded out. The old butler bowed in greeting as Scarlett exited the carriage in front of the Freybrook mansion’s courtyard. “I presume the latest excursion fared well, judging from your premature return?”

“It did.” Scarlett glanced over at the two other servants behind him. Marlon and Harriet. “Are the preparations finished?”

“They are. We inspected the articles delivered this morning. They all comply with the directions you gave.”

Scarlett nodded. “Good. Bring them to the training ground for now. I will deal with it later.”

“As you wish, my Lady.” The old man stepped aside as Scarlett walked past.

“What was that about?” Allyssa asked from behind. The young Shielder and the rest of Scarlett’s entourage had exited the carriage right after her. Most of their clothes were covered in dirt. Fynn’s, especially, looked like they’d rolled through mud several times over and been left out in the sun to dry.

She had been reluctant about having him ride in the carriage like that, but they hadn’t brought a spare change of clothes, so...

“I am planning on performing some experiments and required certain materials to conduct them,” Scarlett replied absentmindedly. “I had put Garside in charge of guaranteeing their quality before I begin.”

“Oh? What sort of experiments are we talking about?” Rosa asked, the bard hefting her hurdy-gurdy over her shoulder. The instrument, at least, was devoid of any muck on it.

“Perhaps you will see at a later time,” Scarlett said as they crossed the mansion’s courtyard.

It had been several days since they returned from Elystead, and they had been pretty active following that. Shin and Allyssa continued working with her after getting the go-ahead from the Guild Branch, and they had also started preparing one of the unoccupied storages in the mansion for Allyssa’s alchemy. It could apparently be quite volatile.

In the last few days, they found and cleared two dungeons. Being a low-level area, the items and artifacts found here weren’t the best, but they were still worth a decent amount. Scarlett had previously scrounged together around 30000 solars in a week, after all.

Eventually, she was going to exhaust the dungeons in this area, but that just meant making full use of her knowledge. Afterwards, she could just go to another area.

The dungeon run they’d just returned from had been no issue at all. That was a given. Her current party was comprised of people who would all probably be over level 30 in game terms. And like Kat, Fynn could most likely solo all the dungeons in this area, considering he was close to level 40 at the start of the game.

Of course, he wasn’t exempt from some of the more unfortunate realities of dungeon diving.

Scarlett glanced back at the white-haired young man. This dungeon had been an underground cavern a few hours’ travel away. It had been home to several caves filled with murky pools of water, which in turn had been home to overgrown alligators, several of which the young man had ended up wrestling.

She was just thankful she didn’t have to do those things.

After entering the mansion itself, their group split up in order to wash up from the trip. Scarlett went to her chambers to clean herself off and change from her ‘adventuring’ attire to a more comfortable, dark-blue one-piece dress. Molly, the maid, had stayed near her quarters and offered to assist, but Scarlett brushed her off.

She assumed things like that were more common in this world, but Scarlett found it bothersome having someone else help her with changing. That was one matter where she didn’t mind diverging too much from how the original might have acted. Not unless she was putting on some dress that was hard to do by herself.

Truthfully, she’d become more lax with details like that ever since returning from Elystead. Maybe it was because she had already told Evelyne part of the truth, and didn’t feel as much pressure to ‘blend in’ as she did before. Although, considering how ingrained many of the original’s antics were in her by now, there were still several things she couldn’t diverge on even if she wanted to.

After changing clothes, Scarlett headed to her office and sat at her desk. After jotting down the loot they’d retrieved from this latest excursion—it was good to have it written down, both for her own sake, and for Evelyne’s later on—she took some time to look through her notes about the remaining dungeons in the Freybrook area.

Some had a couple of items that could prove useful, but there wasn’t anything she needed. For now, she was checking the dungeons off in the order she felt surest of finding them.

The next one she was planning on locating was a hidden-away copse somewhere to the east that she was hoping Fynn could find with his senses. That would save them the irritation of having to look for it for several hours. The entrance to today’s dungeon had taken over four hours to find, which had been somewhat of an oversight on Scarlett’s part. She would prefer if she could avoid such time waste in the future.

After looking over her notes, Scarlett then pulled out her status window.

[Name: Scarlett Hartford]

[Skills:

[Mana Control]

[Pyromancy]

[Greater Pyrokinesis]

[Minor Hydromancy]

[Greater Hydrokinesis]]

[Traits:

[Dignified August]

[Supercilious]

[Cavalier]

[Callous]

[Overbearing]

[Conceited]

[Third-rate Mana Veins]]

[Mana: 3149/4327]

[Points: 6]

[Skills Menu:

Upgrades

[Greater Pyromancy] (10 points)

[Superior Pyrokinesis] (25 points)

[Hydromancy] (5 points)

[Superior Hydrokinesis] (25 points)

[Greater Mana Control] (10 points)

New skills

[LOCKED]]

Her total mana was still pretty measly, all things considered. She couldn’t quite remember what her base had been at first—before getting the [Depraved Solitude’s Choker]—but it had at most increased by a few hundred points since then. She had to actively use her mana to increase it, after all. And even then, it only grew at a rate of about 10 mana per day. Considering her goal was to reach a minimum of 25000, she still had a ways to go. More items would help.

For her skills, as she had upgraded her hydrokinesis to [Greater Hydrokinesis] a couple of days before she left the capital, she’d had a decent amount of time to get used to the upgrade.

Just like when she upgraded pyrokinesis last time, the difference between [Hydrokinesis] and [Greater Hydrokinesis] had been very notable. Now she could even put some genuine force behind the water she controlled, which opened up several potential avenues. She was quite excited about upgrading her two main skills even further in the future, when she gathered even more skill points.

That was, of course, another reason why she was clearing these low-level dungeons at the moment.

Scarlett glanced at the clock at the edge of her desk. It might be a good idea to get herself something to eat soon. While in the capital, she’d missed the meals here.

Scarlett surveyed the items lying on the stone courtyard before her. It was an array of different-shaped metal pieces, ranging from palm-sized to anvil-sized. One, in fact, was an anvil.

She had moved herself to the training ground that was behind the mansion and stood near the wooden targets that were set up at the far end of the grounds. Once more, she had changed clothes, now into a simple set of black leggings with a white overshirt. It didn’t exactly fit that much with her current preferences, but it was the first thing she had found now that her usual set of clothes for these kinds of things were dirty.

She should look into getting more clothes that weren’t just different kinds of dresses.

Scarlett bent down and picked up a thin slit of metal that was on the ground. It wasn’t anything special. Just ordinary iron, barely a millimeter thick. That’s what her request to the blacksmith had outlined.

A benchmark test, if you would.

She raised her free hand, holding out her index finger for no other reason than that it felt fitting. Then she conjured a thin stream of water in front of her nail. The action came a lot easier to her now than it had before she upgraded hydrokinesis, and something this minor didn’t even come close to taxing her mind nowadays.

She lowered the small water-knife she’d created towards the edge of the metal piece, and the liquid split over it.

Well, that was expected. This was tricky to do correctly. She’d only ever tried it on paper up till now.

Letting the water vanish, she formed another blade yet again. This time, she put even more attention on maintaining the shape’s rigidity. She also focused more on making the edge of the blade as thin and sharp—or what at least approached ‘sharpness’ when working with magically shaped water like this—as she could.

Interestingly enough, she had noticed that she could use her hydrokinesis to force water to act more like a solid. A bit like ice, maybe. She wasn’t sure if what she was doing was just increasing the density or if that was even how Newtonian fluids worked—she wasn’t a real ‘science person’, and it was only thanks to Mythbusters that she even knew a term like that—but it worked, and that was all that mattered to her.

Although she had to admit that it was pretty hard.

Once more, she tried cutting downward with her blade, and this time the water didn’t split as soon as it touched the metal. Instead, however, it bent like a very watery piece of wire, trying to maintain the shape she was commanding it to.

She tried asserting even more force, and even though the water became even more contorted around the piece of metal, the edge of the metal piece also started bending under the pressure now.

It wasn’t a knife slicing through butter, but she hadn’t been expecting that either.

While [Greater Hydrokinesis] gave her a lot more freedom with what she could do with her magic, she had quickly realized that it didn’t magically make her proficient at it. Or well, it did. But there were limits to it. For example, how she had difficulties just getting this right.

She felt like she had the power, but not the precision, to do what she wanted now. Upgrading [Mana Control] further might help with that somewhat.

If she wanted to cut through this metal with her hydrokinesis, for example, she could probably create a decent enough blade of water and just force it through, with enough practice. One problem was that she had no idea how viable of a tactic that was in this world. For all she knew, that could be one of the most inefficient ways of attacking possible against the people here.

Another possibility was using the water more like a saw, or maybe even like a water jet cutter. She had imagined herself moving the water back and forth at extreme speeds to replicate the effect, walking around with an industrial-grade weapon at her fingertips.

Of course, after actually trying it, she realized that was considerably harder than just making the water act more solid. It was also insanely mana expensive.

Not to mention she had some major doubts about how effective that really was, too. She was pretty sure that water jet cutters back in her world didn’t actually use pure water, after all. They had some abrasive substance mixed in with the water.

Although maybe she could replicate that somehow, even in this world?

She had lots and lots of interesting ideas, but her current skill-level limited her possibilities, and some of them were questionable in their usefulness. There was also a limit to how much pressure her hydrokinesis could produce, which was the most important deciding factor. And she had no idea where that limit was.

She did have an idea of how she could measure it, in a pseudo-scientific way that did not at all speak for her general intelligence. But she’d always lived by the adage that “if it works, it ain’t stupid”, and she would continue to do so until it no longer worked.

... Or she actually had to get serious about things.

Putting the metal slit back on the ground for later, Scarlett shifted her attention to a small iron ball lying on the ground. She picked it up and gave it a small shake. It was lighter than it looked because it was hollow inside, filled with water now instead of metal.

She closed her eyes as she held the ball in her palm.

Although the idea of her becoming some kind of water samurai with her hydrokinesis was pretty appealing, this experiment was what she had been most curious about. She’d tried lifting a bottle of water before, which had worked without issue. So she assumed that her ability to control water wasn’t entirely limited by sight. She was curious exactly how much could be done with that.

For some time, she stood there, trying to get a sense of the water inside the iron ball in her palm. Eventually, she succeeded, albeit the connection felt somewhat hazy compared to what she was used to. The ball floated up as she moved the water, though it felt like there was a certain lag to the motions because she was moving the water itself and not the ball the liquid was pushing against.

Still, the sphere did move back and forth through the air at her command. She tried putting some force behind it and aimed the ball at one of the wooden targets. It struck the target with a bang, but it was nowhere near strong enough to get through the magical barriers the wooden dummies sported.

She would have to explore the limitations of this particular use of hydrokinesis further. For now, she wasn’t banking on making a weapon out of it. But what she was interested in was if she couldn’t couple this with the alchemy that Allyssa used.

She tried using her hydrokinesis to make the ball fly again to bring it back to her, but—perhaps because of the distance—she couldn’t establish a connection with it. Eventually, she went and picked it up herself. Putting it back on the ground, next to the other items, she turned to the anvil.

Somehow, the blacksmith had created a fist-sized hole in its side and made it partially hollow on the inside. Through the dark hole, she could see vague reflections of a surface that she assumed was water. There were a few other items similar to this, but the anvil was her focus. It was the true benchmark, in a way, for her abilities.

She took a step back, so as not to be next to the anvil if it were to topple over, then raised both hands. Raising the water was much easier when actually having sight of it.

At first, the water stopped as it reached the anvil’s ceiling. But she pushed on. A vein on her forehead tightened as she clenched her jaw. Just as she reached her limit, the anvil rose a short distance into the air, slamming back into the ground as she fell to her knees.

Panting, she eyed the anvil. She’d never been one much for the gym, but she imagined this was how it was when you tried to bench something just above your limit.

Staying like that for a while, enough to let her pulse calm down, she stood and studied the remaining items.

The anvil might be too much for now, but she still had lots of other things to experiment with.