A Wizards Misadventures

~~Level Five~~

"Explain," she growled as she looked up at me.

"As I said, I visited somebody like Doctor Stylish. A biomancer, if you will," I said calmly. "I wasn't exactly normal before but now I'm not really… I'm much less normal than before, which is saying a lot."

"Saying a lot with very little," she growled again. She knelt down, her face near my abs, and her knife shifted to a chisel as a hammer from ice formed in her other hand.

"Really?" Esdeath ignored me as she hammered down on my stomach. I barely felt it. "You know how this looks, right?" Esdeath paused as she looked down just a little and coughed as she tossed the tools aside.

"Your body is absurdly tough, almost as hard as dragon scales with only skin. How?" she demanded, her tone almost jealous.

"Magic," I said.

"Obviously. How?"

"Well you know I can travel worlds, right?" She nodded. "Well I collected biological samples of exotic lifeforms and brought them to this biomancer to be made into me. I didn't expect the procedure to take so long or I would have offered prior warning."

"Assimilating danger beasts into a human? I suppose… oh my. Ultra class?" She looked at me with a feverish curiosity.

"That system of measurement doesn't really work for anything besides subjective measurement, but I killed a few very strong creatures, yes. My heart, for one thing, was replaced with a type of living metal. Even if you pierced it, it could keep pumping around your blade."

"… I will forgive you for your absence if you provide similar upgrades to me, if lesser," she bargained.

"I'm not stupid, Esdeath."

"Then why did you take so long to return?" she snarled.

"Because my previous body couldn't work. At all," I said slowly. "I couldn't just slap together some inadequate replacement. All this had to be brought together from scratch."

"From scratch? Are you not in your original body?" Esdeath looked at me a little skeptically.

"Technically this is my fourth but yes this is a different one."

"How… you don't use a teigu..." she said in realization.

"I'm a magic-user."

"Most magic users are weaklings," she said in disdain.

"Well I'm quite clearly not. It's likely that your magicians are incompetent or too rare to make any serious research. I had a dead civilization to take knowledge from and a more advanced society than yours. I had a lot going for me, not to mention that I'm apparently quite talented." Esdeath bit her bottom lip lightly, which I realized was actually pretty cute compared to her other habits of torture and slaughter, and thought for a moment.

"Have you been holding back in our fights?" she asked with more suspicious looks.

"I've been restricting myself to one school of magic, yes, though it's one of my most versatile ones and the progress I've made with it was real. I also wasn't really restricting myself in melee combat, though I've always used a type of my magic to supplement it."