Calvin's task seemed impossible, bordering on insane, yet he stubbornly kept at it, though Hannah could tell he was incredibly restless.

  Half the time he would be pacing as he practiced, and nearly every time he stopped after yet another failed attempt to gaze longingly out at the tunnels where his Relfow packs frolicked and mock-battled one another. He obviously wished there was an option to punch and claw his way to success in this too, but that wasn't how magic worked. Not arcane magic, and not divine magic.

  Despite his increasingly twitchy mindstate, Calvin kept going.

  And so did Hannah.

  For the first time since they entered the dungeon, she found herself progressing at a faster rate than the prodigy disciple. Her background in divinity meant she was already deeply in tune with the resonance of the holy, and with such a shining example as Dominic standing right in front of her she could hardly help but be inspired to even greater depths.

  The revelations that had hovered for so long just out of reach came nearer every day.

  She'd long ago lost track of time. Their lifetime in the dungeon was so far removed from the life she'd lived before, she could hardly recognize the person she'd been before entering. She was ashamed of how weak and passive she'd been back then, a scared child despite her decades of life experience.

  Or perhaps it was simply being around people who believed in her that allowed her to overcome her weaknesses and move forward. Instead of constantly putting her down and treating her as nothing but a commodity to be traded about as it benefited them, Dominic and Calvin had treated her with respect from the start. And the more closely they got to know each other, they had only grown warmer and kinder.

  Dominic was strict and unforgiving when something had to be done, his standards were nigh unto perfection, but she couldn't deny he got results. And the moment she exhibited actual distress, he would pause her training without hesitation the same as he did for Calvin.

  Calvin was a mouthy little brat, as though the years on the street had packed so many things he wanted to say in there that now he was S-Rank he couldn't help but say whatever he thought when the whim struck him, but.. He was kind. Loving. Honest.

  And... she loved them both. Though she missed Alec's warmth and steadiness, this chaotic duo brought a different type of stability. An inner foundation that she increasingly believed would never be shaken.

  It was only when she opened her status sheet for the first time after a particularly prolonged series of exercises in expanding her aura that she saw exactly how much she'd changed.

  Hannah Abel’s Status Screen:

  Level: 160

  Specializations:

  Divine Power [LvL 78]

  Blessing of Dominic [Aura] [LvL 126]

  Blessing of Dominic [Area Effect] [LvL 107]

  Knowledge of Healing [LvL 84]

  Guidance of the Divine [Lvl 94]

  [Expand into other Miscellaneous Specializations?]

  Titles:

  Divinely Chosen [Unique, S Grade]

  The One With Mercy [Epic, A Grade]

  Hope Giver [Epic, A Grade]

  Blessed By A Demigod [Unique, EX Grade]

  First Saintess [Unique, EX Grade]

  No mention of the Goddess anywhere. Guilt tightened her stomach, the reflexive urge to apologize for her abandonment... but faded a moment later. Why should she feel guilty? She'd been the one doing all the work until now anyway, while the Goddess never bothered to show up once.

  Still, even if her faith had been fading in her later years, it stung to see her decades of faithful-ish service denounced so plainly as meaningless.

  It wasn't meaningless, she told herself, taking a deep breath. It had put her in the right place to become who she was now. To learn the truth, to find someone she truly could devote herself and her service to without any need for doubt or fear.

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  The opportunities she'd missed were part of the path that led her to the greatest opportunity anyone could ever have received. Only Calvin had precedence in the demigod's esteem, and Hannah was not the sort of woman to neglect her duty once she knew the path.

  And the new title? She’d never received any notification for it.

  First Saintess [Unique, EX Grade]

  Description:

  Those who came before could not know, but she has seen.

  Cryptic, but… oddly reassuring. If there was no Goddess to betray in the first place, then it wasn’t a betrayal to have converted her loyalty fully to Dominic.

  And truly, when she let herself acknowledge it, that was what had happened. He had fully satisfied her lifelong yearning for divine guidance and protection. Satisfied and then some.

  She would stand proudly as his First Saintess, whatever the rest of the Church had to say about it.

  Hannah shook herself out of her thoughts. Maybe she should check on Calvin. Seeing how twitchy he was, perhaps he needed more reassurance, from her, a more equal figure? It couldn’t hurt. And she could always fall back on teasing if it went wrong.

  “Your master is right, y’know?”

  Hannah’s voice made Calvin look at her, tilting his head. They were taking a break—a small one, since he did have to go back to grinding, but it would be long enough for him to feel refreshed.

  “You’re doing amazing, and I do believe you can do this, kiddo, as frustrating as it is. I mean, if you can’t do it, no way anyone can.”

  “Oh, you’re trying to cheer me on?” Calvin asked, a smirk spreading on his face. “My, my, my, oldie, how nice of you.”

  His voice was laced with sarcasm, but they’d gotten close enough that Hannah could sense the gratefulness and appreciation present in his voice. She rolled her eyes, fond yet exasperated, “I’m not old enough to be termed an oldi—”

  “You’re thirty.”

  “No, I’m in my early twenties!” Or at least she had been before entering the dungeon. How long had it been? No, that didn’t count, surely.

  “Same thing!” Calvin wasn’t about to let it go, but this was a comfortable rhythm.

  “That is not,” Hannah argued, “in fact, the same thing—”

  Calvin kept going.

  And, eventually, though he lost track of the days and hours and weeks, he managed to shrink the fireball to the size of a fingernail, and actually maintain it.

  He looked at the small, bright blue sphere of fire perched at the tip of his finger with a triumphant and satisfied expression. He should be proud, but…

  “Should I make it even smaller, master?” he asked hesitantly. He only wanted to linger on his satisfaction once he was completely sure he’d truly accomplished his objective. This was what his master had initially asked for—the size of a fingernail—but that could just be the first goalpost. He might have to make it even smaller, to the smallest size possible. He couldn’t quite relax the sustained, background tension—lingering ever so slightly—that had been his eternal companion throughout this whole process.

  Brute force was one thing. Learning fine control such as this? Mhm, yes… He wasn’t confident at all when it came to such precision.

  Calvin would be creating an entire world, after all. It surely wouldn't be this easy, take just this one step?

  His master hummed thoughtfully. “Hmm... You could make it smaller if you want, but you have enough mana flow and control to create a large enough space for your pets right now. It’s not like you plan to make them live there permanently. You can keep expanding the space and improving it whenever you take them out.”

  Calvin nodded and let out a breath. That worked for him. A part of him did want to continue, try and push his boundaries further, but you know what… The rest of him was just glad he’d gotten it over with.

  That he’d actually managed to do this at all, to satisfy his master. He knew he was putting in ludicrous amounts of effort, but actually seeing them translate into results felt… quite… fun. Satisfying. Relieving.

  Additionally, his Pure Mana Specialization leveled up rapidly with all the practice, even though it hadn’t prompted too many System Notifications for its level ups. Gah, he really did like those recurring translucent blue things, didn’t he? It had become his strongest Specialization, which amused him. He didn’t quite understand why he found it funny—perhaps because it simultaneously felt like he'd put in a lot less effort for training his Pure Mana compared to grinding against the monsters and also like he'd put in a lot of effort?

  Or perhaps probably because the levelling up of Pure Mana was more a perk than the goal, and the fact it'd gotten stronger than Specializations that he'd actually tried to level up…

  “Just a few more steps now,” his master said, and Calvin felt an overwhelmingly strong flash of joy at the pride in his tone. “You’ve compressed it from the outside, now compress it from the inside at the same time. The smaller the shell between interior and exterior, the more easily you’ll be able to control the space you build inside it. A thicker shell isn’t going to be a problem per se, but it does add a stronger barrier when you want to change things. So I’d say try to get it to at least ten percent thickness, but even if you go up to twenty-five percent it’s not a problem.”

  Calvin nodded and sighed, resigned to another torturously long process, but to his surprise it was almost easy to poke a hole in the center of the fireball and push the mana outward. The fireball wanted to explode, so it was happy to spread out.

  The hard part was maintaining the outer shell, but after so long he could do it in his sleep.

  It didn’t even take a few thousand attempts, and he was moving along so fast he didn’t even bother to stop until he got it all the way down to five percent, and then he held it up. A perfect hollow shell of a fireball.

  “Now,” his master began, breaking Calvin out of his reverie. “This part is far less tricky than what we've done so far, but it’s twisty to comprehend. What you have to do is believe that that tiny fireball is a world.”