Chapter 2231: Tiny Terror |
--- Kat ---
With Kat free, Appoline was quite keen to go and get some more herbs to fix the chronic shortage of healing potions. At the same time, the worry was that Kat wouldn’t be all that strong and might not be able to defend whoever she was left with. So some testing was needed first. Vanilla even volunteered herself as a target dummy for a few of those tests.
First up, demonic fire. Vanilla volunteered for that immediately, but nobody else was keen on it. "It’s really not safe," insisted Lily.
"Counter point, it will never be safer then it currently is and I really want to know what will happen," countered Vanilla.
"It might be permanent though!" insisted Lily.
"And it’s better to know NOW. I’m a powerful regenerator and an elf. I’m going to live for a massive amount of time even at my current rank. The chance I encounter no further demons before my death is miniscule. So I need to know," Vanilla stated firmly.
"Can you regrow your hair?" squeaked Kat.
Vanilla looked at Kat who was currently sitting on Lily’s shoulder and sniffed, gazing upwards with a haughty expression on her face. "Can I regrow hair? Ha! What a question. Does the elf king have a harem? OF COURSE I can!"
"Well... why don’t I burn away a tiny bit of your hair?" Kat squeaked out as an offer. "That way you’re not likely to get hurt, and if it doesn’t regrow its just a few strands of hair." Though... should she know who the elf king is?
Vanilla pouted at Kat’s suggestion. "Fine. That’s not going to hurt at all though..." Kat rolled her eyes and Lily held her arm out, allowing Kat to slide down and hop off Lily’s hand at the end as if she’d been launched from a slide. In truth it required a bit of effort to make it look smooth but a bit of gliding and she was able to land perfectly on Vanilla’s shoulder.
"Is there any particular strand you want gone?" asked Kat.
Vanilla shrugged, nearly causing Kat to fall off when she did. "Whatever is fine. Maybe something on the side? I’ve got plenty of hair there so it can blend in. I’m really not worried." Kat nodded and carefully grabbed one of the longer strands of Marigold’s hair and held it out. She glanced at Marigold who nodded. Kat summoned up her demonic fire and held it to Vanilla’s hair... and nothing happened.
"So... performance issues?" asked Marigold.
Kat glared at the elf. "It’s because I don’t want to hurt you idiot. My flames don’t burn things I don’t want them to... unless they’ve gone out of control anyway. Give me a second." Kat focused on the hair, only the hair. She tried to reframe her mind. It wasn’t Marigold’s hair, it was simply part of the test and... when Kat opened her eyes it had frozen over. Kat was still looking at it when Marig-VANILLA reached up and snapped the frozen bit off.
Vanilla eyed the frozen bit of hair before shrugging and clearly activating some sort of technique. Kat had grabbed onto the bit of hair that wasn’t frozen just in case... and then she was swallowed by the wave of hair that followed. Vanilla continued to grow her hair until it had dropped all the way down to her ass. Kat had been knocked off her perch by the wave and was currently flying around, keeping the same bit of hair in hand.
It had also quite clearly grown. Sure it didn’t quite reach the same length as the rest around it, but that was because it had been ’cut’ by her ice. So really it was the correct length. "So... did that feel weird at all?" asked Kat. "Also what are you going to do with all of this hair? I thought you were going to just repair the one we damaged."
Vanilla shook her head. "Hair is all dead. It’s not really part of you anymore except for right at the top of your head. I can grow more, basically as much as I want. It costs almost no mana... but I can’t just repair a single strand of hair."
"Really?" asked Kat as she sliced off a bunch of her hair with a fingernail, giving her a clearly lobsided cut... for a few seconds until it grew back into its natural shape.
"Ok that’s some bullshit," commented Vanilla. "Your hair just grows back however you want it?"
"Apparently," Kat offered with a shrug. "I mean, I knew it did that and I’ve had it happen before in combat and stuff but I’ve never bothered to watch it like that."
Vanilla rubbed her temples. "Alright well... I think this has actually taught us just about nothing. Can you burn off a finger or something now?"
Kat frowned, "I’d really rather not... and I’m not sure I CAN? Like, maybe a bit of skin but unless I want to risk my flames going wild, which I really don’t want, I’m going to have to ’want’ to try and freeze whatever we select and honestly that’s going to be hard because you’re a friend, I mean, you remind me of a friend of mine." *Huh... I guess it IS true she reminds me of a friend... because she is that friend.*
"Fine whatever, just do your best," grumbled Vanilla.
Kat nodded and summoned up her demonic fire. Pressing it against Vanilla didn’t really doing anything until Kat managed to clear her mind, forget about who she was targeting, and make it a bit more aggressive. Of course, as soon as she heard moaning it was pretty damn obvious who she was hurting, and the ice stopped.
Still, opening her eyes she found that a pretty large section of Vanilla’s arm had been frozen. Vanilla frowned at it for a few moments before breaking some of the ice on the edges. "Hmmm... I mean, it hurts sure and I can’t actually heal it when the ice is there... but removing the ice fixes things pretty easily." Vanilla slammed her arm into the wall, shattering the ice and leaving her bleeding... and then the skin on her arm swiftly knitted itself back together.
"Let’s test something else..." Lily offered as she grabbed Kat and hugged her for a moment before moving over to the garbage crate and started to pull out some stones. Kat rolled her eyes at Lily but leant into the hug as best she could with her current size. Once Lily had the stones lined up she dropped Kat down. "Try to lift those."
Kat nodded and picked the first one up... but she overcorrected and it pulled her backwards. "Ok this is weird..." the stone didn’t feel like I weighed anything, it was extremely light when she was trying... but it seemed like the little tricks that let her mostly ignore physics when they were inconvenient weren’t working properly. Normally if she picked up something heavy, she could just move it around no trouble. Now, there was very obvious trouble.
Kat let go of the stone and tried to be more careful when she picked it up. This was actually kind of annoying as her feet were slipping as she tried to lift it up. Using her wings helped, but that wasn’t what she wanted. Still, if she got the stone directly above her head, Kat could barely feel the weight and moving around wasn’t an issue.
Speed however, was. When Kat was asked to run around, she found that while her legs moved at the same speed they would if she was full size sort of. She was able to get up to respectable speeds... but the fact the bracelet was still applying restriction meant that she wasn’t actually THAT fast. It meant that she could be outrun unlike before. Flying was weird though.
It was actually somewhat comical because Kat could fly around the room carrying Lily in her human form no trouble at all. So... how that worked she didn’t know. Her strength was also a bit weird. Kat could punch a rock with no troubles... but the impact seemed lesser? Or perhaps it was an issue of being more precise.
If Kat punched a rock at full size it would shatter. Now it just left a small fist print in it. A deep one, but one that didn’t spread out properly. Which meant it was time for Vanilla to act as a punching bag. Kat kicked, punched and scratched Vanilla in a number of places. Even across her eyes once, when Vanilla moved so that instead of slicing into her cheek, it went through her eye.
That was when they decided to call it there. Vanilla was pouting. "Come on, I can take more..."
"You also made the testing worse on yourself without input from anyone else..." glared Lily.
"I regret nothing," confirmed Vanilla.