At first, Hannah was perfectly content to sit by and watch. She knew some about arcane magic, but Holy Power worked differently and was another sort of ability altogether. Even so, watching the kinds of concepts Dominic taught his disciple was both fascinating and intriguing. It almost felt like she'd be able to adapt them to her own specializations if she were to learn just a little bit more.

  But then the theory portion ended, long before Hannah could find her epiphany—the god would probably continue if she asked, but she didn’t want to interrupt their flow—and they moved on to practicals. Which was Calvin making a ball of fire and then somehow hurting himself terribly with it.

  He didn't seem to burn himself, she saw no sign of damage—and when she rushed to heal him there was nothing to heal—but yet every time he summoned the spell he flinched and tensed and gritted his teeth as though it were doing something very wrong.

  His master didn't act outwardly sympathetic, but she'd grown used to his placid calm. It no longer felt callous to her, but somehow reassuring. Calvin could push himself to the edge of death over and over but the moment he was in any actual danger, Dominic would stop the world itself in order to protect him.

  Hannah herself was only along as a result of this aggressive protectiveness, and through the months or years—it felt like lifetimes but she had no way of tracking the time in the dungeon—she'd come to trust in Dominic almost as fully as his disciple.

  Calvin's discipleship was an enviable position to be in. Even if Hannah knew she'd never be able to handle it herself, there were hundreds—okay, maybe tens if they knew what it truly entailed—of people who'd kill to get this kind of focused specialist training. And yet Dominic hadn't sought out the richest or most powerful or potentially helpful people, but a neglected orphan and a broken saintess.

  "Is there anything you can teach me?" It took hundreds or thousands of repetitions before she worked up the courage to ask, but she finally managed to convince herself Dominic wasn't going to smite her for speaking out of turn. She did still blush at the selfishness of it, but she wanted it for good reasons!

  Dominic turned to regard her, one eyebrow raised, head slightly tilted.

  "Only if you want to," she added hastily. "But if Calvin is going to be doing magic things that don't require my services then I figured I might as well have something of my own to practice too. And I could work on my current specializations but most of those are meant to be used on someone and I..." She blushed harder and turned away. She'd completely ruined her chances, hadn't she? "Thought you might have something different to suggest for me," she finished a bit lamely.

  Silence. When she peeked up, it was to find Dominic watching her with the same neutral curiosity.

  She bit her lip and bowed, backing away. "Sorry to bother you."

  "Quick to give up today, are we? Where’s the feistiness of blaspheming a god that you kept displaying?"

  She looked back up, faint hope sparking in her heart.

  Dominic chuckled. "If you are eager to learn why wouldn’t I guide you, dear Hannah? You are a close friend of my precious disciple, are you not? At this point, a quasi sister of his, even.”

  Hannah exhaled in relief. “Thank… Thank you.” Though her pride would once have bristled at the thought of being given special treatment only because of who she knew—nepotism, ew—it was far outweighed by the glee at a chance to learn from someone of the demigod’s stature.

  "The bigger question is what you want to learn."

  "I... whatever you are willing to give me?" She hadn't thought about that question at all. Even being given scraps would be more than she could have dreamed of under normal circumstances.

  "That doesn't narrow it down at all. Surely you must have some idea of the direction you want to take your advancement?"

  Hannah hesitated, then admitted, "I don't even know what the options are." There wasn't any point trying to hide her weakness or ignorance from the demigod.

  "Assume the options include everything you've ever seen or imagined—no, anything you could ever imagine, and even more—and start from there."

  Hannah's eyes went so wide they watered. "A-anything?"

  "I can extrapolate some additional options from there once we narrow it down with the basics."

  "I..." She swallowed. She'd only hoped to get a few tips on how she could practice her magic while Calvin improved his, but it sounded more like she was about to get personalized instruction from a master of... well, everything. The escalation was so overwhelming she didn't even know where to start.

  "No need to rush, take your time and think about it." Dominic smiled fondly at her, before directing the smile over at Calvin, who was scowling in pained frustration at the fireball in his hand, breath uneven. "We'll be here a long while yet."

  Hannah swallowed at the reminder of just how intense Dominic's idea of training could be. But from what she'd heard, Calvin was supposed to be building an entire world so naturally his would be more extreme. Right? As long as she started small and stuck with things within the domain of sanity, her own practice should be much less painful.

  Hopefully. Yeah? No way it’d be this insane.

  Which left her with the much bigger question. When not restrained by obligation, social pressure, and the whims of those above her... what did Hannah actually want to become? What kind of Saintess would she choose to be if given the opportunity to advance along her own paths in her own way?

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  She opened her stat page and scanned it for inspiration, thinking over each of her specializations, where and how she'd gotten them, and the way it felt when she'd used them.

  Healing, helping, enhancing... but never enough. It was always insufficient, always targeted at the wrong people, for the wrong reasons. The few times she did get to help outsiders it was always at the behest of others who wanted to exploit and profit from her abilities.

  Granted, they'd been the ones to arrange for her to have these abilities in the first place but that didn't mean she felt any better about leaving the most vulnerable people in the city to their own devices.

  "I want something big," she said before she could stop herself. "Something that goes on and beyond my immediate reach. Something they can't take away or control. Something... just something to help."

  Dominic tapped a finger to his chin, a faint smile on his lips. "I think we can come up with something like that. There's a particular sort of aura I can teach you, though it won't be easy to reach the width you're after, I can promise that with enough practice it'll do what you want. It doesn't directly do much to any one person but when spread over an area it does dramatically increase quality of life and stability of health for those within its range. It's normally used by battlefield support healers in my line of work but it should be just as viable for you as a citywide—at a certain point, worldwide—general pick-me-up."

  Hannah nodded eagerly, her heart racing at the thought. "Please, show me."

  "First, we're going to have to work on your aura control. You already have an area effect specialization, correct?"

  Hannah nodded. "Blessings of the Goddess, yeah."

  "We're going to start from that as a base and then adjust things to better suit your new goal. First, use your existing ability and spread it as far and as strong as you can, then maintain it until you run out of divine power. Your goal while you're doing that is to pay close attention to exactly how it feels. The shape of it, the flavor of it, the density. How much strain it is at the start, then later on. Where that strain most resides. Everything. Once you're finished, we can discuss the next step." Dominic tapped a finger against his chin. “We’ll probably make two variants, actually. One as an aura and one as a localised imbuement. The latter won’t be as permanent but it can linger in place so your people won’t be left completely on their own if you go traveling.”

  And so it was that Hannah became the second student in their impromptu magic training. She couldn't push herself as far or as relentlessly as Calvin did—the kid's willpower was inhuman. But even with taking regular breaks to sleep or play with the roaming Relfows that Calvin had tamed who still wandered the dungeon and were always happy to put on a game of chase or lie in a fluffy feathery pile with her.

  Dominic mainly stood by his disciple, correcting Calvin's errors and offering occasional advice, but he did pause every few hours or so to check on Hannah's progress. He took his commitment to teach her very seriously, it seemed. Far more than she deserved.

  And so the time went on.

  Millions of attempts and thousands of hours of effort. Enough to make even the most patient person want to rage quit, let alone Calvin, who was most certainly not the most patient person in the world.

  “Hm, I don’t understand how,” Calvin grumbled. “I’m just doing the same thing over and over and getting nowhere. Every time I start to think I’m changing something, it comes apart and I have to start over. And this is just the first step.”

  Unlike grinding in the dungeon, this… felt too repetitive. Too repetitive, without occasional flashy screens, without a sense of… progress, or even true effort, making him reluctant to take breaks or enjoy himself. Having to start off all over again, running around in circles. It felt… oddly frustrating, in a way he’d only barely experienced all the way back when he’d first tried to teach himself how to write and read.

  “The most important step, and the hardest,” his master assured him calmly. “This isn’t something just anyone can do, but I promise it’ll be worth it. With sufficient familiarity and control, you can turn your subspace into more than just a section of a world. This is the first step on the path to qualifying as a god, you know.”

  “Doesn’t that mean it’s impossible? Like the boss, some things are just beyond the current me?” He laughed, perhaps a tiny bit manic. “Even more than the boss, since this is god territory… that’s way more than a mere SSS-rank monster, isn’t it?”

  His master put a hand on his shoulder and shook his head gently. “I know what you’re capable of. I’m not going to send you through something like this if it’s going to end up futile whatever you do. That’s why we retreated from the boss, yes? You have what it takes, in this case. Right now, right here. I’ve seen the spark in your soul. You are every bit as qualified for eventual godhood as I am. Creating a subspace is difficult and painful, yes, but I promise you, it is not impossible.”

  Before Calvin could say anything, his master continued, just as gently, just as kindly, just as soothingly,

  “There is change, even if you can’t see it. You’re exercising your mana control and your channels every time you cast the spell, every time you try to shrink it.” His master paused a moment, regarding Calvin with a pensive expression. “How about this. Just cast the spell for now. Don’t try to compress it.”

  Calvin did so, suppressing a wince. He’d long ago started to associate spellcasting with the proceeding inner pain—the inner pain he just couldn’t get ‘used to’ the same way he’d gotten used to the pain caused by Relfows to a major extent—even if they weren’t actually connected. It felt so strange to just let his fireball linger, not to crush it and stab himself with the mana backlash immediately. For a long moment he could only stare at it, as his frustration slowly lost its sharp, skittery edge.

  Magic truly was beautiful, even when it was so far from what he needed it to be.

  His lip trembled. Without even realizing it, tears began seeping out of his eyes. He blinked in surprise, trying to wipe them away, when… His master put an arm around him and held him, gentle, stable, secure.

  The sheer warmth he felt wiped away all his attempts at deciphering just why he was crying.

  All he could get himself to do was watch the fireball as it flickered above his palm, enjoying the warmth, this unfamiliar warmth he’d craved for so, so long. By now he was so used to trying to hold onto the fireball even as he crushed it out of existence that it was second nature to maintain its stability for something as trivial as this.

  “I want to show you something,” his master said, once Calvin was able to get a hold of himself again and had stepped back with an embarrassed cough. He was sure his master wouldn’t have minded if he lingered in the hug for however long he wanted to, but he wasn’t quite used to physical affection, at all.

  Dominic nodded toward the fireball Calvin still held. “Do you remember what it looked like when we started?”

  Calvin tilted his head, “I think it looked the same, didn’t it?”

  “That’s where you’re wrong.” His master took Calvin’s other hand in one of his and snapped his fingers over it.

  A fireball appeared, the same color and shape as Calvin’s own, but…

  He blinked. “This is the basic fireball? Really?”

  His master nodded and smiled. “It’s hard and it’s slow, but it is absolutely not pointless.”

  …Calvin’s fireball was visibly smaller, brighter. And when he prodded at his master’s basic copy, he could feel the looseness of the threads.

  “You’ve got everything you need to succeed,” his master said softly. “All you need to do is keep going.”