Fusion

Before he could continue his train of thought, Miss. Klein once again spoke to them.

"For now, I'm going to show you how to fuse two mana spheres."

She then formed two mana spheres and positioned them beside each other. "These mana spheres are made by mana, which has formed a thin membrane, so to fuse them you will have to either connect one of the membranes to the other and then remove the separating part, or you form a new sphere over them. The first method has a high risk since it is very difficult to connect them since one has to have a high amount of control to bring them close enough to each other without them interfering and destroying each other."

She then slowly brings the two spheres closer to each other until they touch. In the instant, this happens a small explosion happens.

"As you see, failure will result in an explosion, that would completely distribute the medical essence into the air, leading to you losing all of it. The best way to merge them is to start at a small point and then extend it."

She too demonstrated this. She brought two newly created spheres beside each other and then got them into contact at a small area before expanding the opening between them until the new sphere looked like an elongated sphere. She then dismissed it and once again formed another two spheres.

"Now to the second method. While it is much easier and safer, it will reduce the efficiency, since there will be a bit of additional air in the new sphere.", she then too brought the two spheres next to each other and then formed another around them, while explaining, "The closer you can create the new sphere the lesser your losses in efficiency. Of course, the difficulty will increase as well. And remember not to be disheartened if you fail the first few times. Especially for the first method.", she paused and then continued, "I think for now you should practice the second method. Start with a wider sphere around and then slowly decrease the distances until there isn't really any space between them. This way you can slowly train your control."

"Then wouldn't having mental energy be better?", Serge asked.

"Not really, since it doesn't allow one to control mana. And for this, you will need good control over your mana, which means that it should be easier for you.", Miss. Klein answered.

After this, the two of them practiced forming the new mana sphere as close as possible to the others while maintaining a high success rate. According to their teacher, being able to be successful in nine out of ten cases would be the best time to decrease the distance between the spheres. And as Miss. Klein had expected, Serge managed to reach a smaller distance than Ivan.

"Alright, that's it for today. Practice hard and think about the offer.", at the end of class, she reminded the two.

"Goodbye, Miss. Klein", they said their goodbye before leaving. They had one more class before school ended and they could go to the dungeon.

Soon it was the end of school and Irena, Greg, Serge, and Ivan went to the training field to wait for Pia, who didn't let them wait for long.

"Hey", they greeted each other before directly proceeding to the dungeon entrance hall.

Having already experienced the first floor before they easily managed to clear the normal rat groups. This time Serge who too was a melee fighter shared the heavy load with Ivan since both of them had a high enough level. Seeing the way Irena blocked the incoming rats, Ivan was once again impressed with Susan who had managed to do the same thing with a much lower level.

Still, even though it was much easier for this group, it still took them some time to finally reach the rat boss.

"Alright, Ivan has already told us about this guys attacks, so everyone should be careful of his tail.", Irena as the team leader once again warned the others.

Ivan was the one who should take its aggro, according to the plan, so he shot towards the rat lord and used his sword to slash at it. Like before he didn't use his flame blades since they were still training their coordination and using it would defeat this purpose.

This time everyone was warned, so the rat lords tail attacks were dodged. There was only one close call when the rat lord rushed at Greg who didn't have time to dodge. Luckily Irena was able to use a skill called 'Frost Shakles', to stop its charge momentarily, enabling Greg to dodge after all.

After killing the rat lord, the group unlocked floor two and the others too got the prompt that they had finished the quest 'The Spirit of the Training Dungeon (1)'.

"Great this went well and much faster than yesterday.", Greg exclaimed happily.

"Yeah. There are still some small problems but our coordination is surprisingly good.", Irena too was happy.

"Should we try the second floor?", Pia asked. She seemed eager to continue but to her disappointment, Irena shook her head.

"I don't think that's a good idea. All of us already did the dungeon yesterday and we have to do it again this week, so we should take our time to rest."

"Oh."

Since Irena had decided, the others didn't talk back but instead followed her out of the dungeon. They then sat down to talk about how they did. Since everything went quite well this too didn't take long and they said goodbye to each other.

"Let's go training.", Irena proposed. They hadn't trained during the break which most people would consider stupid. Normally everyone would use their training skill every day since it could only be used so much each day and the cap would reset every morning. As such missing out on a day of training would mean losing the time forever. But because of the grade of their training skill, they hadn't felt compelled to do their training every day and instead decided to take breaks.

And it wasn't like this was bad. According to some studies, taking breaks from training would slow the progress but at the same time strengthen the effects. Which sounded weird to Ivan when he had first read about it. He had thought that the effect would be equivalent to the progress but after reading some more papers he had understood what was meant.

The main point was control. While it was possible to progress fast which meant constantly strengthening one's cells, this would make the brain slightly unaccustomed to them, which would lead to a reduced ability to bring out the full strength. Of course, this problem only existed for those that had high-grade training skills which provided such rapid growth.

"Sure.", Ivan instantly agreed and they went into one of the rooms especially prepared for the students to execute their training skills. Similarly to these at the Alliance these training rooms had a slightly higher amount of energy that could be absorbed, which increased the efficiency of the training skills. While they weren't as good as the training room in the Alliance it was still notable.

They sat down on the mats at the floor, opposite to each other and then touched Ivan stretched out his hands to hold hers. As always she showed no notable reaction when their hands touched but Ivan couldn't help to check her out. It was the first time he had the time to do it, since the end of the break.

While her eye was still glassy and dead, the pockmarks, which covered half of her face, seemed to be slightly lighter, but it was barely recognizable. Besides that, her hair had become longer as she had let it grow ever since they had started training together and it was now shoulder length and silky.

While he was looking at her, she had closed her eyes and started to use the training skill. The resulting resonance forced Ivan to hurriedly starting to use it too.

This was the first time he had used the skill, ever since he had reached level fifty. The feeling was completely different. Before he had only been able to feel the energy circulating through his and Irena's body, before slowly vanishing into his cells. But now that the effect was directly available he could feel the energy entering his cells and slightly changing it.

He used his secondary soul form to observe these changes closer but was unable to understand them. The only result he got was that the way his cells strengthened seemed to be kinda inbalanced. At least that was the best way he could describe it. Some parts of the cells would get strengthened more than the others. This increased the speed of his cells improving but he felt that it should be better if all of his cells would be improved.