Overlord: Blue Citadel Alternate

For the first week of the Princess's stay in Underground Capital, Ninya and the Druid Dyne were training constantly in the Arena. Vertum wanted to see how much they could level up using the Power Suits, leather collars with broken iron-like chains protruding from them, that give more experience to the user.

The two didn't necessarily take well to the appearance of the suits if they could really be called that. Vertum wasn't very fond of their appearances either, though they did make him give a soft chuckle. Especially as Ninya was endlessly flushed in the face. It was embarrassing, considering her life debt and all.

It literally felt to her, that she was like a slave!

However, when they began fighting monsters restrained by the Floor Guardians in the Arena, creatures from YGGDRASIL which were about ten levels over their own, it was clear how effective they were.

With the right buffs, they were capable of doing a large yield of damage per second, at least compared to what they would do without the buffs.

It was like taking thin slices out a cake, but with his assistance, they were cutting two inches per second. While he couldn't see the health bar though, this was mostly his estimates in his head and what he was seeing with the NPC creatures generated in the arena.

This was mainly an experiment to see how fast he could speed level the adventurers. Grinding in the game was not really fun, but it had its perks. Though this was his promise to them, making them stronger. Doing this only helped him, as it was likely they will be sworn to serve him.

That and he wanted to be able to test the new mineral they had found, which when appraised, gave them the idea that they'd be able to surpass the level cap. He wanted to see how far it could take someone of this world forward.

At the same time, if they were able to use this to surpass the bottleneck created by this world, then it was likely he'd have to strip-mine all of the dragon-shaped stones. He couldn't let them fall into the hands of the other nations.

Plus if he did that, it'd only serve to let him and his loyal people grow stronger and even more unstoppable than they already were.

He already knew it worked on him, having used one of the dragon stones prior to the beginning of these training sessions. He was now level one hundred and one, another level added to his ArchMirage Racial Class. Now when he took upon his Draconic form, he was a foot larger in most aspects.

A mirage Dragonoid had a maximum of sixteen feet in length for their dragon form. An ArchMirage was the same, as its size wasn't usually what improved during its increasingly long lifespan.

So during the training he mostly kept to the background, only stepping in if one of the Magic-Users were in trouble, or had a chance of dying. That was the last thing he needed during the experiment, it would only cause him to get delayed results.

He already found that levels were lost during a regular resurrection.

Boy was Vertum a slave driver. Their training went day in and day out. The only time they stopped was to eat, sleep and regenerate Mana or to guzzle down a mana potion made by him.

Using Nfirea's potion knowledge, he was also leading another experiment while still helping them. Multi-tasking was something he seemed to be much better at doing in this world.

Decanters everywhere on a randomly placed table, liquid boiling over, strange colors and hues going about. Then there was the smell of Platinum ++ Asgard Tea, it had a wonderful fragrance and a bitter taste, but at the same time tasted rather good.

The resource's game description, which happened to be the same as its appraisal, did it justice. It made him rather happy that he had an entire garden of tea that would probably never run out as long as he continued to take care of it.

Plus, this was the only place that the tea could grow as the gardens in the first level emulated the biome from that world. Vertum sighed at the very idea of it going extinct permanently.

It almost made him want to cry.

Even as he was thinking about this, he was using the Zolue Solution as he crushed several healing-oriented herbs into a paste. He wanted to be able to recreate a red potion, or something close to it.

Diluting already existing ones didn't seem to do the trick. All it did was give a weaker effect and they were considered lesser potions, the small ones at least.

So far he was able to create purple ones which did a rather large amount of healing compared to the blue ones made by this world's alchemists and potion makers. He was sure it was entirely thanks to the boy's knowledge, which made him chuckle a bit at the irony.

He had killed the boy, right after his grandmother was killed by the strange Clementine female. She was definitely creepy during their first meeting. Either way, that didn't matter.

As the adventurers were fighting the monsters for a number of days during the week, they leveled up a couple of times thanks to his aid. It would've taken them months if not over a year to reach this high without the assets he was pouring into them.

Even then it continued for that week. Between meetings with the Princess, who wanted to solidify their dealings and learn more about his plans, they rested for extended periods of time every other day. That, however, was only after the third day of training.

By the fifth day of the first week of training, Brain had joined the training sessions along with the dark armored Knight he had spawned sometime prior.

During their training in the Arena, it seemed they were not the only ones leveling up.

Under the tutelage of Gemini, the ranger and warriors of the Swords of Darkness continued to train with the Oni. She belonged to a race they had never seen before and very could be considered exotic.

Lukrut was easier to motivate through sheer flirtation, allowing his skills to increase at a steady rate with the help of the Power Suits distributed by Vertum.

On the other hand, constantly working out in the form of melee combat with swords and various other physical weapons, Peter was harder to keep motivated. Sure getting stronger worked for the first few days, but as time went on he was getting bored. While a poke from her horns of the threat of death could keep him going for hours at a time, it wasn't healthy.

So on the Sixth day of training, Lukrut and Peter joined the others in the Arena.

Princess Renner became one of the spectators, watching as things went on, with her escort on standby. Though they too were given the permission and even the option to join in the training.

However, he did not offer them the Power Suits but instead offered them the potions he had been experimenting with. He wanted to see how well they worked on a higher level of humans from this world, rather than the lesser leveled ones such as the Swords of Darkness.

During these demonstrations, he did not allow the Princess to even know of the Dragon Stone's existence. The last thing he needed was for the Kingdom to know they could surpass their preordained levels and very defined limits.

Based on his observations, the data in which his guardians were able to extrapolate by looking at the nearby Kingdoms... Though part of this knowledge about the humans being the weakest race came from the Slaine Theocracy who knew this as a fact. Hero class individuals were rare to come by, and the small number of Godkin was no exception, as not all of them could surpass the world limit.

Vertum himself being a dragon had higher base stats than a typical human even at level one. So at level one hundred and one, he was higher than any known dragon! The question was, did he have a good enough build to fight them one on one?

After thinking about it, based on the historical notes on the Greed Kings, he could estimate that he could take on several dragons considering the low level of Lords out there. None of them seemed to be notably working together.

That and the only one with a conscious, or a benevolent presence was the Platinum Dragon Lord. Though the Bright Dragon Lord seemed to be strange and a pervert, he could relate to the breeding experiments in which he had done with Enri.

Still no results, however, seemed to be shown with that particular subject.

The training continued on for over one week and far into the second. Even after dismissing the Princess with his plan, on the last day of his 'boot camp,' he used spells to keep them revitalized and fighting with the monsters.