Kelsey Vale couldn’t help but feel that this woman she befriended, Ray, was a rather strange individual. She was suspicious to an exceptional degree. From their very first meeting, Kelsey had been curious about her red eye and strange hair color, but she pushed aside her doubts because she had literally just seen Ray respawn. It was an irrevocable fact that only humans could respawn. That was the will of the goddess and the will of the pantheon.

She had witnessed Ray’s inhuman strength when she tossed Jantzen over her shoulder like a weightless doll. Ray then managed to lift a slave collar while its suppression enchantment was activated. Only some of the best enhancement magic users could do something like that and Ray was still learning enhancement magic.

Then there was Ray’s absurd mana pool and her insane learning speed when it came to magic.

Any one of these things taken individually could be shrugged off as a coincidence, a blessing from the gods, or as talent. All of them combined, however, started to paint a picture in Kelsey’s mind, though she didn’t want to believe it despite all of the evidence in front of her.

The final straw was the day Ray returned from a failed excursion. Not only had she displayed an impossible ability to regenerate, but she then summoned a Lord-type familiar, which supposedly could only be summoned by the descendants of the ‘rulers’. If it were only that, then Kelsey wouldn’t have come to the conclusion that she did. She didn’t know who these ‘rulers’ were.

However, the raven lord had called Ray by a different name: ‘Lady Raymond’.

Kelsey felt a chill run down her spine when she heard that name. There was only one person in the world who used the name ‘Raymond’. Any humans who had once had that name, whether as a first or last name, had changed it centuries ago. No human wanted their name associated with the archenemy of humanity. She had once read in a book that even monsters didn’t dare to steal her name. Even her name itself, Ray, was a syllable of the legend’s last name.

Her suspicions were blooming into certainty. She hadn’t confirmed her hypothesis, but she was starting to think that Ray just might be the infamous Evelyn Raymond.

If Ray wasn’t the Monarch of Ages herself, she was most likely an immortal. Even if that were the case, Kelsey wouldn’t be all that bothered though. She had known Ray for several weeks now and considered her to be a friend. Based on what she had seen, either Ray was an incredibly skilled actor, or something had happened to her.

An immortal, let alone the real Evelyn Raymond, would not struggle with a full-body enhancement, nor would she be attempting to learn basic magic. It was recorded that the real Evelyn Raymond had already mastered elemental, arcane, dark, and nature magic to a level that humans could never reach before humans ever came to Hanulfall. Her skill in martial arts and assassination techniques, combined with her mastery of magic, had made her a figure so fearsome and powerful that she was the subject of many children’s stories. Of course, she only appeared in the stories told by children trying to scare each other.

However, there was a problem that Kelsey couldn’t get around no matter how much she thought about it -- Ray had respawned in the temple.

By divine decree, only humans had the right to respawn. If Ray were an immortal, and especially if she were Evelyn Raymond, there was absolutely no way that any of the four gods would ever allow her to respawn if she died. They would rejoice and shower blessings and miracles for life on whoever managed to accomplish the feat.

So, was Ray just a human after all? A very peculiar, gifted human? But there were too many things piled up that Kelsey couldn’t make herself believe that Ray was a human. She felt like she was only missing one piece of the puzzle so that she could say definitively who or what Ray was.

There was only one way to obtain this magical piece of missing truth.

***

When Ray tried to visit Eileen in the temple, the High Priestess refused to see her. She left a message for her saying ‘I’m busy right now so go play with your sword or something.’

Ray felt her heart tighten a bit when Sister Eileen refused to see her, but she pushed the feeling aside and trained her sword stances, and practiced her enhancement. She hadn’t shown it to Master Rambalt yet, but she succeeded in performing a full durability/flexibility enhancement of her arm the evening that she stayed in the goblin camp.

Instead of practicing to increase the area of the enhancement to her other limbs, she decided to further develop the enhancement that she would later apply to her entire body. As it was, she could move her arm and joints, but her skin was rigid. It was obvious at a glance that her arm was enhanced.

Not only did it look ugly, but her skin would tear if she punched things too hard. Because of her regeneration, it wasn’t that big of a deal, but she wanted to complete a ‘perfect’ enhancement. For it to be visually perfect, her skin needed to be more elastic to keep up with the massive impact forces.

First, she performed her usual enhancement. After her arm stiffened, she confirmed that she could move each of her joints smoothly. Her fingers twitched and bent with no delay and her wrist, shoulder, and elbow all felt normal as well.

She focused on the sensation of ‘elasticity’, imagining the stretchiness of rubber, and willed her skin to take on similar properties. Before her eyes, her skin seemed to snap into place. She reached out carefully and pinched her enhanced right arm with her left hand. The skin felt a little stiffer than usual, but it stretched between her fingers.

There was also no pain. She wasn’t sure what part of the enhancement dulled the sensations in her arm, but it was a welcome change. Pain was unpleasant.

The edges of her mouth tilted upwards into a smile. Increasing the elasticity over a wide area was much easier than increasing flexibility in multiple small areas. Though she still needed a little more practice with the visualization to make her skin feel more natural, the result of her experiment was a resounding success.

Ray turned her attention to reinforcing both of her arms simultaneously. She could reinforce only her left arm or only her right arm with ease but doing both at the same time took exactly twice as many reinforcements to focus on and maintain, but the difficulty felt like it increased exponentially.

She struggled briefly to add durability to her left arm. She could easily do it if she let go of the elasticity enhancement on the right arm, but she refused to let it go. She would persevere and perfect a total body enhancement, no matter how long it would take.

Mort observed her quietly as she went about her practice. They could feel each other’s general thoughts and feelings, so he knew how intently she was focusing, and he didn’t want to interrupt that. She knew he was being considerate and paid him no attention. It gave him a much-needed opportunity to learn more about his new master. If he wanted to please her as her servant, he needed to know as much about her as he could.

When Ray went to her lessons with Master Rambalt, Kelsey wasn’t there. It was the first time that the priestess had missed, which was a bit concerning. She recalled the priestess’ overly familiar actions and worried that her absence was related to any possible ulterior motives.

Her concerns aside, she was secretly glad to get yet another one-on-one lesson with the grungy elementalist. She recognized the fact that Master Rambalt usually ignored the other students and only answered her questions, but she preferred it that way. It made her learn faster. He only helped other students if he felt like they were on the verge of a breakthrough. He told them that he needed to be a part of that process if he wanted his name associated with their future accomplishments.

Ray set aside her concerns about Kelsey and began to study dark magic.

“Dark magic is fundamentally different from the enhancement magic that you have been practicing,” Master Rambalt explained. “Each of the three types of dark magic have the same foundation, but beyond that, they are only vaguely related to each other. Obliterator magics are flashy and destructive, while dominator magics are sly and manipulative. Both are most effective when you use your familiar as a medium. You supply the mana and weave the spell while your familiar operates as the source. In practice, this will mean that you select a spell to cast and begin to cast it. Lord Mortimer Perseus Raventon the Dark will finish the cast and operate the spell for you. Naturally, the spell will also be cast from the raven lord’s location, which has various applications in battle.”

Mort looked up from preening his feathers.

“I will be a most reliable aide for thee!”

“The third branch of dark magic, becoming a dark mage, is a little different. It requires physical contact with the subject whose injuries you intend to take upon yourself. Physical contact with your familiar is also sufficient. You invade the subject’s body with your mana, encase the injuries or source of ailment and convert them into mana, and then return it to yourself. Due to the laws of magic conservation, namely the conversion of material into mana, the converted mana will lose its form and return to its original state. This means that you will receive the injury yourself.”

Ray nodded to show that she was following along.

Master Rambalt withdrew a small knife and held it against his finger. With a deft motion, he swiped the blade across the skin, drawing a red line.

“You will practice removing these paper cuts,” he ordered.

Ray reached out and touched her instructor’s palm with her finger. She pushed her mana out and into his hand and urged the mana to move towards his finger. Her mana rebelled, seeking to spread outwards wildly. Ray fought against the natural flow of the mana and forced it in the opposite direction with all of her might.

Finally, the mana began to inch towards the small cut and Ray enveloped the tip of her teacher’s finger. She could feel a vast amount of information encompassed in that one finger and shuddered, turning her mind away from it since she couldn’t process it all. She focused the mana on the cut and willed it to convert into mana. The edges of the cut closed as she felt a foreign substance enter into her own mana. She latched onto the foreign substance and followed it to its source, attempting to pull all of it out.

In the blink of an eye, the cut disappeared.

Ray withdrew her mana and raised her corresponding finger on her right hand, waiting. A cut appeared on the tip of her finger and then regenerated.

Success!

Ray looked up at Master Rambalt, hoping for praise.

“Not bad for a first attempt,” he observed dryly. “You couldn’t use that on a battlefield though. It took you three minutes to remove a paper cut.”

Ray grimaced.

“It wouldn’t kill you to give me a real compliment…” she grumbled.

She turned around and stomped away to start meditating.

Hearing her grumble, Mort decided it was his chance to improve her impression of him.

“Lady Ray, your performance was absolutely superb!”

“Shut it, you stupid bird.” Ray spat out, waving him off.

Lord Mortimer Perseus Raventon the Dark fluttered in the air helplessly. Though he would never admit it, he felt like he had just made the first mistake in his life.

The problem was that he didn’t know what he did wrong, and Ray didn’t feel like telling him. Her feelings made no sense to him.

The next couple of days were the same for Ray. Her concern grew as Kelsey continued to ditch her lessons in the magic tower, but Ray couldn’t seem to find the priestess when she wandered around the temple. When she asked, the other priests simply replied that they didn’t know where she was.

She attempted to consult Sister Eileen, but the High Priestess continued to refuse to see her.

Ray felt uneasy but there didn’t seem to be anything she could do for now.

Every morning, she practiced fighting with her longsword and her battle hammer. Siegfried said that he would teach her to fight with a two-handed greataxe and a bec de corbin once she became more proficient with those weapons.

At first, she had wondered what the difference between her current training and a warrior’s training was. Siegfried explained that warrior’s trained to master one or two different weapons and fight using that style. What he was teaching her was the guardian style of using any large weapon to turn the tide of a battle. With her strength, agility, and seemingly bottomless endurance, she could charge into armies as a whirling tide of destruction. Towards that end, he encouraged her to also learn berserker techniques if she ever met a person who could teach her.

Honestly, she couldn’t really call herself a guardian-in-training, as she wasn’t learning any of the purely defensive techniques. Rather, she was more like a juggernaut-in-training. If she learned berserker techniques and a full-body enhancement and then combined all three of those with her unnatural regeneration that even Siegfried didn’t know about and her superhuman basic stats, she would be a demigod on any battlefield.

And that wasn’t the only thing she was learning. She continued to practice her dark magic under Master Rambalt’s tutelage. She resolved that she would start learning obliterator spells after she had the ability to convert a wound the size of a standard sword cut in under twenty seconds.

She wasn’t even close yet though. At best, she managed to convert a ‘paper cut’ in under a minute. Her enhancement was progressing at a snail’s pace as well, from her perspective. After three more evenings of diligent practice and meditation, she could perform two more simultaneous enhancements than before.

Ray was aware that the speed of her growth was so unnaturally fast by human standards that she had already progressed far more than she should have in a year of study, but it wasn’t enough to satisfy her.

Finally, on the fourth day after Ray returned to Cairel, the dead trainee adventurers began to respawn.

All of the trainees were summoned to the training grounds in the martial quarter for a discussion led by the teachers.

Ray went merrily, humming to herself as she strode through the streets. She entered the training quarter and stopped as she felt a host of eyes settle on her. Most of them were doubtful but one set of eyes was particularly angry and terrified at the same time.

She turned to meet the eyes of the man glaring at her with deep resentment. Her eyes widened.

Oh, shoot.

“I told you not to take the risk,” the voice in her head chimed in.

Ray noticed the doubtful expressions in the eyes of almost every other person in the room and shuddered as she felt a chill roll down her spine.

Her god had been right. She made a mistake. She would try her damnedest, but she wasn’t sure how to get out of this one.