Heaven's Greatest Professor

Every morning, they would wake up at sunrise and spar with one another. Well, in most mornings, Warden simply didn't sleep. A couple of hours of meditation were enough to keep him rejuvenated for the most part. That was, unless he were to complete laying layers after layers of runes into a weapon.

"You don't tire, do you?" the captain asked after they finished their round of sparring, which lasted over an hour.

"Recovery does come in handy in almost everything," Warden grinned.

"Recover, huh?" Agnes scowled, feeling the rush of competitiveness, which was a rare sight for her, to be honest. "I don't have that attribute."

Others only could manage a few minutes to a quarter of an hour in their spar, worse for Caleb with his relatively small source of spiritual energy. Regardless, it was only Captain Agnes who could meet with his intensity in the spar. While they didn't go all out with their power, it was still a high-intensity spar where they put everything out of their body and the master of their weapon.

Only most sparring, they would simply spar with their weapons, which on most occasions came to a standstill. However, if Agnes was to use her spells… it would be him at her mercy.

The girl was at the very precipice of silver rank. Warden didn't know what she was waiting for to not advance yet. All her attributes had reached the bottleneck, along with high efficiency. Unless she hunts down some dragon, there was no way she'd grow more staying in the same rank.

"So why haven't you advanced yet?" Without bothering with making blind conjectures, he asked her directly. Perhaps he could gain some insight from her thought process as well.

"It's a little complicated," she said. "As you know, I don't follow the natural class process like most people. Advancing is a little tough for me."

"Is that a damp in confidence, I hear? Madame Captain?" Warden joked. With the bantering growing between them, he didn't have to worry about offending him. "Aren't you supposed to be the single most unique individual in the world?"

She snorted. "If I wanted to advance, I could have advanced a couple of years ago, but of course, that would have left some crack in my foundation."

"What stopped you?"

Agnes didn't answer immediately. She thought about the topic and seemed to wrack her brain to come up with a solid answer. Even still, it sounded like an excuse for her real reason. "The path I walk is unique. It is the path of darkness. Any single mistake can magnify into a terror in my heart.

I may fall into the darkness of my own creation… so I must tread carefully and cautiously."

"Hmm," Warden hummed. He didn't hold on to the question, even though he felt she wasn't telling the full story. "Silver rank advance, I wonder what it's like? Is it like the same as Iron?"

"Almost, just more painful from what I hear," Agnes said. "I reckon it will be different for you and I, and you know why."

Both of them didn't go through the class system. While Agnes had her Darkness path herself to advance, Warden had the [Void Prison Realm], whatever that thing meant to be. The Fate domain didn't stand for any kind of mediocrity, and Warden barely had itched its power.

"Well, my iron rank advancement had been smooth—" Warden stopped, remembering the weird event where he absorbed a dungeon within himself. He was simply a glorified subspace now with that… he wondered what would happen in the next turn.

"Anyway," Agness said, changing the topic. "I maybe cracked some of the repairs you made in my breastplate in the fight the other day. Can you fix them?"

Even though she said that, she unequipped her equipment to hand him the breastplate. And the armguards, too. She was just as good as him at damaging her equipment. Unfortunately for her, she didn't have a couple of legendary-grade items or self-repaying one lying around. Other than her sword, perhaps.

Warden clicked his tongue but accepted the request. She wasn't simply paying him with sparring, either. She had given genuine contribution points almost equal worth of his work and time.

At first, he thought bad about taking it, considering she only received a fifth of her direct contribution with the condemned debuff—yeah, Warden was calling the cut that—not to mention, the charges of an accomplished runesmith were already high.

She had given him Sixteen hundred contribution points for repairing her breastplate once. Multiplied by five, that was eight thousand credits for any regular soldier. To earn this number of points, she would need to kill at least four hundred orcs in the iron rank on her own. Perhaps more, considering an iron-grade orc gave points between ten to twenty-five points.

"Don't worry, I'm loaded," she had said it when he mentioned giving her a "Madame Captain only discount". In the end, he had to take her word for it.

"We'll be reaching the base by the evening," Kevin said, after coming back from his scouting. He was a different person on the mission, compared to the sloppy alcoholic guy whom Warden wasn't familiar with.

The last four days hadn't been completely like a holiday, considering they couldn't be spending time in the 2nd fold of the rift holidaying. However, the captain hadn't been in any rush to go back at all. She mentioned she was paying back for wasting her paid holiday with this.

Thankfully, the captain seemed to be fed up with this barren land, as she didn't slow them down anymore. Warden was really missing out on having a good bath, and many of them would agree with that sentiment.

Sadly, they couldn't just go back to the main camp through the warped way gate. When they finally returned to the base in the evening, they were asked to wait, until a superior officer came to verify their findings. It was an Essence vein they were talking about, of course, they want to verify.

Other than Warden, none of them can leave for the time being. As for the exception for him... well, there seemed to be a situation where he needed to change the infantry for another one.