Zuri was relived that she made it back along with most of her teammates. The first week was very relaxing, especially after such an important mission of recovering one of the paragons, not to forget the death of a fellow teammate. Even though she wasn't particularly close with Zoey, Zuri felt a little bit sad that she was killed off. She tried not to think too much about her death, but it soon lead to thinking who might get seriously injured or even die in the next mission.

She heads out of the mansion to practice honing her abilities and experiment a bit. She decided to work on and hopefully improve her defensive abilities so she can be more well-rounded as a magic user so she can contribute more towards the team. Ever since she made the decision that she would work on bettering herself, Zuri spent a few hours everyday casting defensive abilities with a variety of strength, shapes and sizes. When she first started out, it took quite a while before she could throw a shield of some sort up. Over time, she could throw up shields further away from her. However, to avoid spending too much mana, she only keeps them up for a very short period of time as she was only working on executing these abilities and the time required to throw them up.

Zuri eventually learned that Felix and Travis have made good use of the power that the paragon had, allowing any of us to create a world from their own imagination. She finds her way to the place where Felix and Travis usually hang out to do their research. Zuri nods and smiles as a greeting before she hurries and takes the confined paragon and enters the room that was rigged with complex runes that allowed her to take advantage of it's power. She closes the door behind her, the paragon on the palm of her hands as she places it close to her heart, closes her eyes and starts imagining a very simple but peaceful field of grass as far as you can see with a few trees scattered around. She opens her eyes in awe as everything looked so realistic. She begins to fall in love with such power as she terraforms a small lake that runs through the land. Zuri places a few animals such as tigers, rabbits, birds, and elephants scattered around the grassy field and sky and says [color=0072bc]"This should be good enough."[/color]

She throws up a few dummy targets at different ranges to sharpen the accuracy of her offensive abilities, throwing a large unrefined crystal shard that bolted towards the target directly at center mass, piercing right through the target and landing very far away. Zuri wanted to optimize the use of her mana so that she doesn't spend excessive mana on each and every spell she casts. She starts giving it some thought, thinking out loud [color=0072bc]"Hmm.. I could make the shard smaller.. but then I'd be less effective.. Maybe sharpen the rough corners so it does more damage? But that would only make the cast times slightly longer.."[/color] as she continues to put more thought into optimizing this spell. [color=0072bc]"I could try to create a shard that doesn't last as long since it loses it's purpose after it hits the target."[/color] Zuri finishes before she raises her arm again, creating a runic circle and applying these properties onto it before shooting out another one at the furthest target.

The shard strikes against the target dummy and knocks it over. A few seconds later, the shard fades away. Zuri could feel that it used less of her mana, quite substantially in fact. She decides to replicate the same rune, however adjusting it just slightly so it shoots six smaller shards, with the same amount of piercing power. She aims it at the closest target and throws the spell without any hesitation. It acts similarly to a shotgun shell. Zuri felt like there is still lots to do to optimize her most basic spell, but she wanted to jump straight to moving targets. She spawns three men that looked exactly like the ones they the group was killing to recover the paragon a few weeks ago. [color=0072bc]"That should do it."[/color] she says as they start walking in one direction.

Zuri aims her runic circle in the general direction and throws a shard a little ahead of where they will be, compensating for the travel time but not gravity as her shards travel directly towards the target. It strikes against one of the target's arms, taking it off completely. [color=00aeef]"Ouch."[/color] she comments before she thinks about adding lock-on with her projectiles. The two men started running towards her, however they were all unarmed so she didn't feel that worried. She quickly adjusts the runic circle and aims it directly at the two targets so it can lock-on before moving her runic circle a little bit off target to see if her changes actually works. Two projectiles shot out and traveled with a curve, however both projectiles strikes the same target. [color=0072bc]"Guess I've still got some more work to do."[/color] she says as the last target started to get very close. She throws up the runic circle that shoots out a scatter version of the basic attack and aims it directly at center mass. It blows him away, showering the grass with the blood of her enemies before the shards vanished, leaving holes in his chest.

She repeats the same steps using different spells with different targets, ranging from armed targets with guns to magic users, practicing her defensive abilities and adjusting her spells on-the-go as she experimented. It wasn't long before she has spent three whole hours inside this illusionary paragon world. There was an awful lot of dead bodies and blood all over the place, but she felt fine since they were all but real. Zuri spent a bit of time adjusting the lock-on mechanism so it would strike each target at least once. She looks up into the sky, locks onto a handful of birds that were flying in the sky and shot out enough lock-on shards with a few extras in case a few of them missed. It followed each bird like missiles before striking most of them down.

Zuri felt a bit fatigued from all this use of magic since she wasn't used to such long practice sessions. [color=0072bc]"I guess it's time to take a break.."[/color] she says as she takes out the paragon and triggers it so that this world would collapse on itself so that she could exit this room. It takes a few minutes, but it eventually finishes, revealing the room that she was in before constructing the world as she reaches for the door handle and opens it slowly. Zuri takes a peek outside and sees Travis and Felix still at it. She walks up to them and asks [color=0072bc]"Shouldn't you two get some rest?"[/color] as she places the paragon back where she found it.