ALL NOVEL CH.478 A Week of Recovery
Surprisingly, I wasn’t called to meet with the Goddess. I was honestly expecting to get yelled at, but I didn’t. Maybe the System Agents and the Goddess realized that what happened with Lady Janina was a mistake. How should I have known that Ra can actually almost kill her?
But luckily she didn’t die, and even better, she is awake, so I can have a little chat with her.
“How are you feeling?” I started what I knew would be an awkward conversation.
“Good. Missing my scales, but they’ll grow back.” Lady Janina responded.
She looked a lot better than she did yesterday, her ‘skin’, which I’ll call skin until her scales reform, was looking nice and healed, no burns left anywhere. Her scalp had also healed, and some of her golden hair had begun to grow back. I wonder why the hair grows back faster than the scales?
“That’s nice to hear. … I guess I should apologize.”
“For what? I got injured because I’m weak.”
“I should have called Ra off before it got to that point. It wasn’t a fight to the death.”
“For your monsters it is. Yes I know they can come back from the dead, but it still is.” Lady Janina reasoned. “... How is the coast? I hope they are behaving.”
“... I may have kind of taken command of it. I chose a few of the older dragons to take commands of different sections while you are recovering. I hope that is fine with you.” I told her.
“Of course. It is how I assign things when I leave the Coast. … but there is something more bothering you, isn’t there?”
“... I got two System titles. One is Dragon King, the other is Ruler of the Dragon Coast, but it does have a temporary tag.”
“Ah! A dragon king! I’ve never met one. There was one during my predecessor's time, but never one with me.”
“... should have guessed something like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Of course some super rare once in five-thousand years title would just drop onto my lap.”
“You do seem to be that kind of person.” Lady Janina said, as she chuckled a bit.
“Yeah. Could do without all of the issues that come with them. … but let’s talk about the coast a bit more. Do you approve of what I did there?”
“Why wouldn’t I? As long as they don’t start infighting, it will be fine with me. … I suppose I should thank you for it. There hasn’t been a single territory battle since you started visiting. They are able to blow off the excess energy with your summons, so they don’t challenge each other.”
“Glad to be of service then. … did the dragons really fight that often?”
“A lot of them did. You know that when we are young, we use the dragon avatars to go to human settlements and live like humans for some time.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of that.”
“But after we come back from those adventures, the coast life gets boring, so a lot of the returning dragons start fighting each other, because it is the most fun they can have.”
“I need to make you guys some videogames or something. Or maybe somehow better the Factory VR so that the dragons can go into the Factory to have fun. You guys even know Soul Magic, so all I really need to do is make a dedicated path for you all to visit. That way, you will have something to do, and my monsters will have more people to play with. … because admittedly, they also get bored and fight each other. They just do so in the Factory where death is an inconvenience at most.”
“That would be nice. … and if I ever try to fight that Phoenix Dragon outside of the Factory, remind me not to do so.”
“Phoenix Dragon? Yeah, I guess that is an accurate depiction or Ra.”
“... A quick question. Can you use the scales you gave me to help you regrow your own scales?” I asked.
“No. They are no longer a part of my body. It has been too long.”
“Do they like expire or something? Because I’ve kept most of them in my Storage, and Storage stops the passage of time. So they should have only been removed from your body about … 30 minutes ago or something.”
“No. I evolved when I shed, so they are part of my old self. They can no longer support my power.”
“... I see.”
“But I wouldn’t mind having one. I can turn it into protective clothing and it will make me feel more secure.”
“Yes! Of course. I’ll give you a few.”
“Just one, please.” She insisted.
“... alright. Just one.” I agreed, and handed her one of her scales.
We talked for a bit more, I made sure Lady Janina got a nice meal, and then I left the MedBay. Lady Janina could technically leave already, as she said she is healed enough to walk around in her human form, but I ordered her to rest for one more day.
I’ll also have Lua check her out, but dragon biology is confusing, and it is even worse when it is a dragon in a human form.
The next day, I was happy to see Lady Janina out of the MedBay and walking around HomeBase in a new dress she made from the scale I gave her.
I made sure to give her some shoes, while she also visited Wilma in the workshop to get a few accessories.
Having Lady Janina on HomeBase was fun as always. Just her general knowledge about pretty much everything was fantastic. And since it was her real body here, not just her in a dragon avatar, she was quite a bit more powerful than her avatar self.
Which meant that we were able to ‘cheat’ when it came to Soul Magic, and we got both Alice and Nevelle to transfer a piece of themselves into custom avatar dolls I made for them.
Yes, I still call them avatar dolls, even though the variants I made for the girls are closer to dragon avatars. My avatars are avatar dolls, the ones Lady Janina makes are dragon avatars. Just for simplicity.
We also found out an interesting fact about avatar dolls. Well, I kind of knew it already because of my monsters using it, but this was an even better check.
The dragon avatars limit the power of the person inside of them. We established this fact way back. But there is a catch. If the person who takes over the dragon avatar, or avatar doll in this case, is weaker than the doll's maximum power, their Strength will actually increase a bit.
This didn’t apply to Alice, as she overpowered the doll, but with Nevelle, she was actually just a bit weaker than the doll, so her Nel half, which was in the doll, could physically overpower her Vele half, which was in her real body. Despite the fact that Vele had all of Nevelle’s skills and stats.
So while dragon avatars do limit the power of powerful beings, they can boost the power of weak people. And when I say ‘weak’, I don’t mean some LV.1 person. As long as your Strength stat is below 1400, the avatar doll can physically overpower you, as they are at right around 1450 Strength.
The other great thing about having Lady Janina here was that she knew how to work with dragon scales, so I took her to the Factory with me, and she showed me and Wilma how to do it.
Because of it, and the info we got from Dragonic Knight and Van'Dalgyon the Dark Dragon Lord, we were now more than set to make some dragon scale armor.
I left designing Ria’s armor to the girl herself, Agunan and Wilma, while Lady Janina and I worked on my stuff. And not just because mine will be made of Lady Janina’s scales, but also because she said she wanted to design the armor of the new Dragon King.
After the armor designing, Lady Janina wanted to show me a secret technique of hers. I didn’t even ask, she just said that since I’m now a Dragon King, I deserve to know it.
And oh boy it was a nice technique, because it explained how Lady Janina can win against some of my OP monsters, but still ‘lose’ to Ra.
Yeah I know she didn’t technically lose, because Ra died while she survived, so technically Lady Janina won with heavy, if not lethal, injuries.
But back to Lady Janina’s technique.
“I suppose you could call it Power Copy or Power Imitation or whatever you really wanted to. I don’t really have a name for it, because I never needed one.” Lady Janina began. “I made it when I saw the Hero and his party. They had powerful armor and equipment, boosting their power beyond what their body can naturally do. Even temporary power gains from skills, like your Summoner's Unity skill. So of course I wanted something like that.
So I learned how to boost myself by the same amount as what my opponent had boosted themselves. It is especially effective against some of your monsters, as they rely entirely on boosted power. Be it that serpentine fire dragon, Uria, or the great soldier of Obelisk. They both boost their power beyond what their bodies can really handle, so they practically radiate the excess energy, which is easy for me to grasp and use to boost myself as much as they boost themselves.”
“... so that is how you win against a 10k Uria, but lose to 9k Ra. Ra doesn’t boost its attack in the same way, instead it just turns the boosted attack into original attack, which you cannot copy.”
“Yes. But that isn’t the only reason I lost. There is also the dragon that fought me before the Phoenix Dragon. Slifer you called it, right? The weakening attacks it uses are quite debilitating, and I hadn’t fully recovered from them when I took one the Phoenix Dragon. Had the Phoenix Dragon not been as powerful as it was, or had it radiated excess power that I could have grasped, the fight would have gone differently.”
“Alright. … I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was my own hubris that caused it. I should have realized that you now have Divine-Beasts that don’t rely on boosted attack since that Slifer Dragon didn’t. I should have asked for a rest break after the first match.”
“Yeah, I guess Slifer’s effect doesn’t count as boosted attack either.”
“Be it boosted or not, it doesn’t let any of it outside of its body. It can handle all that power.”
“... maybe if I had more cards in hand it wouldn’t be able to?”
“We can test that later, because for now, I want to teach you this technique. It may not be the best against humans, because most humans wear armor at most, and copying that boost is challenging. But against monsters you might run into in the wild, and more importantly, with your monsters, it will be very effective.”
“Yeah. I guess if I can copy a 10k attack boost, that would be nice.”
“Let us hope that you can.”
By the end of our training session, I got the basics of this technique down. I think I’ll call it Psych Up, based on that move from the Pokemon games that copies your opponent’s stat buffs.
I could now sense the ‘boosted energy’ that leaks out, which is already nice since I can feel when opponents boost themselves, but copying it, yeah, that is still in the works. But I’ll get there.
Also, this isn’t a skill or anything. It is all done with Draconic Magic. And Lady Janina was quite impressed by the power boost my Draconic Magic got because of my Dragon King title. Even if she said I cheated a little.
In total, Lady Janina spent about a week on HomeBase recovering. She ended up falling in love with the mana hot spring, because she could use nearly unlimited magic while bathing in it to boost her scale growth. Because of that, HomeBase for the first time ever used over 50% of the daily produced mana. Normally we use maybe 20% on a high usage day for comparison.
Because of all of that mana, Lady Janina had regrown her scales and she was going to return to the Dragon Coast tomorrow. It will be sad to see her go, but it was nice to have her here, even if it was just for a week.
