VRMMO: World's First Glyphborne

The moment he opened the door to the gym, the pungent stench hit Jason square in the nose like a boxer with bricks in his gloves.

It nearly sent him physically stumbling back as he realised just how right Elise had been.

He scanned the room, until he saw the weights bobbing up and down above a weight bench, and slowly wove his way around all of the other expensive machines they had purchased through their definitely not insider trading.

Valerie lay on the bench, her brow creased with concentration as a small pool of sweat had formed within that crease and trembled with every one of her movements.

Jason watched her pumping the iron up and down, nodding his head softly in approval at the weight she was lifting. It was roughly 250 kilograms, or close to 1500 cheeseburgers as Elise always made sure to say whenever she was around.

While it was still shy of the world record before magic was available, and far from the limit of human capabilities in the new world they had leapt into, it was impressive for someone of Valerie’s build, and was even more impressive when you realised that the weights weren’t even touching the bar, and neither was Valerie.

Although she had her fingers loosely wrapped around the bar, it actually floated just an inch or two above her palm. Similarly, the weights were not properly mounted on the bar, and actually floated roughly six inches off of either side.

Yet every time she pumped her skinny noodle arms up, both the bar and weights would rise.

What Valerie was training was her bloodline. Strengthening it like you would with any muscle, by constantly straining it and then letting it heal back even stronger than ever, as well as working on her control at the same time.

Each part of the excercise required a different level of her bloodlines magnetic ability. One level of strength to lift the weights, another to keep them level with the bar, and a third to keep the empty bar just above her palms.

Switch any one of these and the bar would go through the ceiling, or the weights wouldn’t lift properly, or they would end up on either side of the room and lifting out of sync.

As for her actual muscles, they were still lacking. She had been healing and fighting against her disease, but it hit a wall in terms of how buff she could get. For whatever reason, her healing factor was not as powerful as her Dawd counterpart, and fighting her disease constantly was naturally draining on her system.

After all, it was not curing her, just undoing the damage, to which her disease was trying to undo in turn. It was a constant war in her body that eventually reached a stalemate.

The diminished strength in her healing factor could also be seen by Valerie’s right hand, as she only had half of a ring finger on said hand.

She had cut it off in a moment of madness to test if it would regrow. Evidently it did not, and Beans was too eager for a snack to give Valerie a chance to reattach it. Thus she truly earned the name of Stumpy.

Jason waited for Valerie to finish her set and, when Stumpy finally let the weights float down to the floor, he finally spoke up.

"Wipe your head Stumps, or else you might drown yourself when you sit up. Got an ocean of sweat in that forehead divot." He laughed, leaning in a machine with his arms crossed.

Valerie tilted head eyes up, glaring at him, before grabbing her towel and reluctantly wiping herself off before she sat up.

Despite spending an entire week in the gym, her figure was still like that of a stick figure. Even a starving child would give her a sandwich and tell her to put some meat on her bones. But it was something that she had come to terms with by now, because really she had no other choice.

"What do you want? Did something go wrong?" Valerie asked with a serious glare. She used the bar like a cane as she pulled herself off of the bench, hung the towel around her shoulders and started to re-hydrate with her bottle of Electro-lite, a ’healthy’ and refreshing energy drink.

"Oh no, not at all. In-fact your little invention was a great success. Say..." Jason started to ask coyly, before he was immediately interrupted.

"No, I can’t make it smaller. Not yet. God I wish I could. But I can’t. Not at my skill level, and not with the materials we have on hand."

"Damn... Oh, speaking of materials, A lot of the equipment we brought back got broken in the latest fight. We need to get them repaired again, and all the Dawd blacksmiths are already full on orders or are getting suspicious of us.

Plus, it’s getting really expensive. They are definitely overcharging us. Think your merchant friend could hook us up with someone reliable?"

Valerie thought for a few seconds, rolling the problem around in her mind. It was possible that Midas might know someone, that kid was all about connections. But he was in a different city that she had never been to, and it would take days to get there, and that was if she could get something out of him.

It just wouldn’t do. However...

"I think I actually know someone who might be able to help us. Someone on this side. It will definitely be expensive, but we’ve got more money to burn on this side anyways."

Valerie said with a smile, before tossing the weight bar down and summoning her cane from across the room like a parlour magician, before hurrying out of the room. Leaving Jason looking utterly baffled and confused, as she refused to elaborate any further.

Eventually he simply sighed, and started to wipe down the bench that Valerie had simply left before cleaning up her mess.

Valerie, unconcerned by such things, quickly showered and changed into something that didn’t reek of sweat before heading out of the house. She didn’t know how or when, but at some point between her talk with Jason and her leaving the door, Lucy had heard the words ’city’ and ’shopping’ and eagerly invited herself on the little trip.

The two soon-to-be step sisters hopped into the Brick and took off, heading back to the city that Valerie had once called home.