Chapter 60

Almost before Natalie knew it, the first week of classes had passed, and the weekend was on her.

Not that the weekend meant time to rest. Though pleased she hadn’t embarrassed herself with her debut spars, she had a long way to go, and not for spellcasting alone. Her more traditional skillsets needed work. Failure in the dungeon meant endangering her, Jordan, Sofia, and her other teammate’s lives. Natalie had zero intention of resting on her laurels. A mindset, she assumed, shared with most of Tenet’s studentbase.

So, she set a more brutal pace during the weekend than the schoolweek itself. Without a long break of academics and an enforced lunch hour to hamper her, she worked herself to exhaustion. It wasn’t an unfamiliar process. She wouldn’t have ever qualified for Tenet if so.

Once those grueling training hours were completed, she met with Jordan. Unlike their typical post-workout sessions, though, they took a more focused approach. Instead of collecting energy—though that would happen shortly—they focused first on strategy.

Natalie had been making steady progress filling up her Carnal Energy resource. She had yet to expend it on anything since her first-to-second advancement of Carnal Harvest. They’d wanted to see whether the resource decayed slowly, encouraging her to spend it rather than hoarding. As it turned out, no. Hence Natalie’s consistent generation—because the next question had been whether there was a cap. Perhaps there was a large one, but in the days she’d steadily been collecting, she hadn’t brushed against the limit.

“Okay,” Jordan asked. “How much do you have, again?”

Carnal Energy: 122

“One twenty-two,” Natalie said. “Probably enough to take everything up a tier. Maybe kick harvest up once, but probably not.”

The excitement of the first week of classes had had Natalie pushing off from making a decision. There’d been practical reasons to hoard and not choose what to advance, like wanting to see if there was point decay or limits in place, but she couldn’t persist with that test forever. With the dungeon opening tomorrow, it was time she decided how to allocate the points she’d earned.

They had, of course, talked about what Natalie should do, but there were good arguments for multiple paths. Keep rushing Carnal Harvest, thus advancing how quickly she earned further points? Advance Illusion, maybe making the skill easier, and certainly more powerful?

Or even Heavy Weaponry, that amusingly—and aggravatingly—named skill. The two of them had a hunch that progressing the skill wouldn’t only come with a size increase.

“I think taking everything forward once is smart,” Jordan said. “It’s cheap, and Illusion and Empower will be useful for the dungeon. But you should keep a healthy reserve. Being able to catch up your level two skills as soon as they come will be nice.”

The last strong point for building up a backlog, rather than rushing advancement. Not only was having Carnal Energy on hand for when she needed to Empower skills smart, possibly saving them down in the dungeon, but when the day came that Natalie hit level two, and received new skills, having plenty of Carnal Energy on hand to progress them—assuming they were useful enough to justify it—would be extremely practical.