Anima Academy [Complete]

[Requiem_Jeer]

Due to some tooth pain, It's been impossible to focus on writing. Thus, no chapter next week.
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"You live here?" Peter said as they walked through the neighborhood. "This is the rich part of town, Elite jobs must pay a bundle!"

"They do." Casimir confirmed. "But I didn't buy property here, buying houses isn't really something worthwhile for adventurers, so I live with Master Southwind." Casimir could have rented a place for a year, and could probably have afforded a nice place, but Master insisted.

Illivere perked up at that information. "Do you mean Gisra Southwind, the Archmage?"

"Yep." Casimir said casually. "In case you didn't notice, skill in combat is experience based, but skill in magic needs good teachers." Or absurd talent, but that's rare. "She's been wanting to meet my students anyway, so now's a good time for that." After all, there was a non-zero chance the brats would die, if the trail they followed was a trap and they prepared it well enough to be dangerous to an elite-ranked assassin. The number of unknowns was the big reason why he was against them participating… But he couldn't coddle them forever. The enemies being beyond them is far from a sure thing, after all. Speaking of coddling… "Just as a precaution, a tip: Go limp."

"Wait, what?" Faron asked.

"You'll know." Casimir said cryptically. "Here we are."

Master's house was surrounded with a solid stone wall, thoroughly enchanted to repel intruders harmlessly. Less obvious was the steel core with a second set of much less polite enchantments. However, Casimir knew everything there was to know about invoking the safeties, and was able to key his students as guests without an issue. "Master isn't home at this time of day, she schedules all of her business meetings to take place over dinner so she doesn't have to cook. If we hurry, we can be gone by the time she's back." How long she takes depends entirely on exactly who she was meeting with. Meeting with the Headmaster? In and out within thirty minutes. The potion merchant who buys her work? Midnight would be Casimir's best guess. Casimir didn't actually know who she was meeting with, so he was flying blind today.

"Wow, look at all of those books!" Peter said in wonder as they entered the home.

"I never imagined a private collection larger than Father's…" Illivere whispered, the faintest hint of awe in her voice.

Faron seemed vaguely disgusted as he looked around. "Does this house have any furniture or wall that is not a bookshelf?"

Casimir chuckled at the common first reaction. "Most of the doors aren't bookshelves yet." He said, unhelpfully. "That table over there isn't a shelf." It was, in fact, a book. 'How to properly check the health of your home', by Koradarok Slingmaster, a druid from the Giant's Forest. As expected for a book handwritten by a giant, it was five feet wide and seven feet long. A collector's item, as Master had the contents transcribed into a smaller tome ages ago. She also was insistent that the title meant 'your tree' rather than 'your home', but when conjugated as a possessive, they were the exact same word in their language, so it was a semantic argument that she was just being stubborn on.

Distractions aside, Casimir set his students down, ignoring their further gawking at the surroundings and went to fetch the equipment. They were kept in the second basement, where environmental mana was controlled via a series of elaborate enchantments encapsulating the room. A necessary precaution when one was dealing with higher quality enchantments, but it was still helpful when making lesser works. By trailing a mana-coated finger along one of the shelves, the trapdoor to the first basement was revealed, unlocked, and disarmed. Once down there, Casimir double-checked if Master had added an extra trap as a test to the entrance to the second basement, but seeing nothing new he conjured five wisps of mana and traced the unlocking runes in a sequence, which activated the teleportation circle to the second basement for exactly long enough to activate under his feet and no longer.

After arriving, he waited for the space mana distortions to clear and be sucked up by the mana scrubber enchantment, only after they deactivated did he move to the desk, opening the work journal to the proper date. "Okay, what's finished and what still needs work?" He mumbled to himself as he read his Master's handwriting, flipping back along the last few weeks to double-check each item as completed. "Good, she finished the boots." The kids were only getting their presents a few days early, so he expected it to be mostly finished. "The only thing that still needs to be done is… the set of rune spikes." Do they really need those? Well, it's damn useful when you need to disarm an enchantment without having enough oomph to budge the matrixes, or to do so while outside the blast radius, but Casimir could manage perfectly well without. Checks complete, he grabbed the wooden chest the equipment was stored in, confirmed that all the items were inside, and left through the teleportation circle.

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"I can't believe it…" Illivere said as Casimir locked the basement again. "Runes in Ink, Chisel, and Filigree, a basic primer on enchanting by Lusanna Highwind, annotated by an Archmage!"

Hana was breathing heavily in shock at her own finding: "Resurrection and why it's terrible, by Archmagus Oathsworn… Illivere, your father wrote this? I've never heard of Resurrection being possible!"

Casimir decided to cut in: "That's because it doesn't." All four students quickly put the books they were looking at back on the shelves. "Incidentally, if you want to borrow that, Illivere, feel free. All the other books I've lent y'all came from here, after all."

Peter raised his hand like he was in class. "Teach, why did the big guy write a book about it if it's impossible?"

Casimir snorted. "All that book does is point out that when people 'die', there's a small window of opportunity, roughly ten minutes, where one can still heal them from, if you used the spell matrix in that book. Problem is, it takes so much mana that you'd need to set up a big ritual to make it work, and by the time you've done that? Too late." There's been attempts over the fifteen years since that book was written to build on the Archmagus's work, make the spell more practical, but the numerous issues with deployment have yet to be fully managed.

Faron hummed at the description. "Maybe if…"

Casimir interrupted him. "We can discuss resurrection at another time." He dropped the chest on the book table, opening it and starting to sift through it. "If you're coming along, you need some better gear." That got their attention. All four crowded around Casimir, and he waved them off. "First, I've gotten y'all some Heartstring tunics, standard stuff. On top of that, suits of leather and padded armor, like mine." While the Archmagus's additional funds did go a long way, it wasn't dragonhide money, so he got the stuff that was local, and thus cheaper: Needleboar hide. Most didn't look at those monsters and think 'good leather', but the skin needed to be pretty tough to keep the needles from falling out faster than it could grow them back. "On top of that, Faron gets some better chainmail." In the stories, mithril gets a pretty impressive reputation, but it really wasn't that rare or special. It was light, tough, and didn't interfere with your mana flows, but it also provided minimal magical protection for the same reason. Which was why it paired well with shaping magic, as that interference could cause critical stability faults in armor plates created with it. Like most materials, it was good for some things, not so good for others.

Peter immediately started removing his armor, grinning in anticipation, while the girls went into the washroom to change. Faron followed suit after the girls were out of sight. After a few minutes, the group was back together, well protected. "Weapons now." Casimir continued. "For Peter, you get cast mithril axes. They have an active enchantment, so they'll be a lot better once you've learned to use them." Normally, mithril wasn't a great material for hammers or axes you wanted to swing with in melee, but that's what weight enchantments were for.

Peter looked at the back ends of the axes in confusion. "Um… Why is this side pointy?"

"Because picks are better at dealing with shells and carapaces." Casimir replied. "Also plate armor." Well, except force armor, but again, that was what weight enchantments were for. "Anyway, here's some throwing knives. Cheap and disposable." Casimir put some light spells in them, to make them usable as lanterns by throwing them into walls, but otherwise they were just good steel. "You three get knives too." He brought out four more knives, these ones larger and sturdier. "Utility knives, you could kill stuff with them but they're more for carving up monster corpses and general usage."

"Faron, you do get one backup weapon for when you're short on mana." He passed the wannabe knight a third ax. "Or if Peter loses his." It was pretty difficult to determine which weapon to give the boy as a backup, but mage-knights had to deal with significantly different weights, sizes, and weapon types as it was, so the appeal of standardization settled the matter.

"Now, I'm frankly amazed at how many weapons you've brought to the sessions, Illivere." He said, somewhat annoyed at the difficulties posed by her near-effortless mastery of whatever weapon she brought. "But here's a Heartwood bow, a set of Heartstrings, and some simply enchanted Heartwood arrows. Don't put exploding or burning arrowheads on these, okay?"

"Of course." Illivere said, examining the etchings in the arrow shafts. "These will be excellent baseline projectiles."

"Glad to know you like them." Casimir replied idly. "Now, Hanna." The girl startled, as she tended to whenever she was directly addressed. "You don't really use weapons much, so Master made you a spell focus instead." He brought out something resembling a thin club. "This will store large amounts of life aspected mana, and it's got some enchantments to make it decent at blocking and hitting people, but mostly it's just a reusable life mana potion for you to use. Invest mana into it, pull it back out later." It was more of a sorcerer's weapon, but she still mostly used life magic spells, so it should last her a while.

Casimir glanced over his students, newly equipped. Peter was posing, lost in his own world as he soaked in imaginary cheering. Faron was forming plates of mana over his armor, testing the interference or lack thereof. Illivere had her etching tools out, high quality enough that Casimir didn't bother replacing them, enchanting some of her arrowheads. At a glance with detect magic, Casimir's best guess was she was priming it to warp into some metal snarl once it penetrated, making it difficult to remove without a lot of extra damage.

"Um…" Hanna began. "How does this work?"

"We'll have to wait for training in the fancy bits." Casimir said with a frown. "For now, just take these." Casimir passed out their potion belts, loaded with inexpensive but effective potions, as well as backpacks that were, for now, just extra armor on their backs. Once they get back to doing real jobs, they'll be their most profitable pieces of equipment. "You'll only be needing the combat kit, so we'll review the potions on the way and ignore all the extra stuff in there. I'll explain it later."

"Right. We tracked the spy to a trap door in Halin Park before breaking off pursuit." Illivere said, already walking towards the exit. Casimir closed the chest and stacked the books the kids took out on the book-table for later shelving.

Time for action.

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Halin park was a pretty typical example of city greenery, a few sparse trees in a field of grass, with one section of dense-ish trees, the whole thing enclosed with a fence enchanted to suppress monster formation. High-quality ones, of course. Random alleyways had a bigger chance of forming monsters than the park if everything was properly maintained.

Peter went straight into the trees, walking about thirty feet into it before waving his hand and moving the layer of dirt that covered the trap door that he described on the way here. Casimir tuned his senses to detect magical traps, and nodded as he found none. "This looks to be an old military maneuvering tunnel, built back when Anima was still concerned about invasion from foreign powers." Casimir said as he carefully examined the cracks of the door for mechanical traps. "Most of them were eventually collapsed or repurposed, but this wouldn't be the first one I've seen co-opted by criminals." Assuming that they were criminals, instead of, say, inexperienced spies that the Archmagus sent to keep tabs on his daughter.

If that was what this was, this shouldn't be dangerous, but as long as it's a possibility, he'll have to remain calm until it's confirmed one way or the other. Using some mana to shape some lockpicks, Casimir quickly and efficiently opened the lock on the trap door, a very nice inset deadbolt built to foil the two most common means of magically bypassing locks. "This kind of lock was cutting edge when it was built, before I was born, but you see these mechanisms everywhere nowadays. If you can't open one of these, don't claim that you can pick locks." It was somewhat interesting that they didn't bolster the security, but security through obscurity was a thing. The real defenses would be deeper inside.

"Give me a few minutes to check for traps before following." Casimir told his students before opening the door, once more evaluating the ladder and floor both magically and through enhancing his otherwise ordinary senses. Once more finding nothing, he dropped down and examined his new surroundings. The room was bare, but from the size and small divots in the ground… "This was a storeroom. Free-standing shelving, so probably provisions rather than weapons." Casimir kept his senses open, but after another few heartbeats deemed the room safe. "Alright, come on down."

With the trapdoor securely in place, unlocked but with Casimir having re-camoflauged it, anyone looking at the entrance won't immediately suspect something amiss. "Let me set an alarm…" Casimir brought out his enchanted bell and tied a string to the trapdoor. "There. If anyone opens that, it'll alert me." It was a bit lazy, and more to the point obvious, to use an enchanted bell rather than something more mechanically complex to disguise the alarm sound, but he didn't know how big this tunnel was, so he wasn't going to risk not hearing it by being too far to hear it go off.

Casimir glanced between the two exits to the room. "The question is, which way did they go?" Okay, it was showtime. Casimir focused, establishing some short-duration mind curses to ensure that he wouldn't be distracted and remain focused on what mattered.

Peter focused and cast a curse upon himself. "...This way." Oh? Had he… Casimir didn't see that coming.

Casimir hummed as his student confidently went into the left hall, looking intently at the floor. New plan. "Okay, you've impressed me." He must have gotten Attune Senses to work before he followed the guy, and memorized the mana profile while he was at it.

Peter grinned smugly at the praise, unable to resist bragging. "If we lost, I was going to tell you about how I caught the guy's mana."

"Always have a backup plan." Casimir said, echoing his own words. "You've taken them to heart. Okay, you can keep going, and I'll follow. Hanna, keep your senses tuned to spotting traps, I'll only intervene if I see one that's extra dangerous."

Emboldened, the group of kids walked with purpose, while Casimir skulked behind them. While completely escaping detection was out of the question while the kids were involved…

That doesn't mean they won't make fine bait. Assessments of their exact capabilities versus various projected enemies showed promise, as Casimir put even more mana into his mind curses to expand his senses and accelerate his thoughts.

This was a much better Final Exam for the semester than what the Academy has to offer anyway…

 

[Requiem_Jeer]

Stealth, as a high ranked adventurer, was always a very tricky thing. Casimir prided himself at being very good at sensing magic, to the point where even notoriously stealthy monsters were able to be detected before they could go on the attack. This allowed Casimir to stay further away than most people would need to be in order to gain useful intelligence.

The other half of the equation was the hiding part. The key to stealth was not in being completely undetected, but in being below the threshold of attention. This was best achieved in one of two ways: By sneaking when your enemies are not alert for threats, and by creating a distraction, diverting their attention from looking for you. All processes that exist could be explained by a magical equation, after all. The layman could be forgiven for thinking that mana only existed as what could be used in magic, but that was because you could only use mana of a certain purity in magic. The impure mana that composed what could be perceived with the physical senses still worked by more or less the same processes a wizard bent to their will, and understanding the mana interactions of living creatures was vital to understanding the latest innovations in curse magic.

In the case of stealth, it can be explained that a mind could only use so much impure mind mana in order to sense things. As a rule, this is used up by evaluating the most obvious things in the area, a loud noise will use up that attention before a more quiet one, and that rule is extended to all possible senses.

In other words, Casimir didn't need to be invisible, just less visible and quieter, both physically and magically, than the group of novice wizards that were stomping down the derelict guerilla tunnels. He adjusted the web of mental curses he had cast on himself, ignoring and dampening unneeded things, such as blocking out his students from his magical senses, and calming his emotions to improve his focus on the job. The adjustments narrowed his senses, allowing him to better detect things ahead of them while relying on the handful of alarms he placed as the group advanced to alert him to anything behind the group.

Sure, he could just use more and more mind mana to instead just allow him to process more and more information, allowing him to detect everything important at once, but not only is that incredibly wasteful in situations as controllable as this, it was loud, magically. While it was largely grandstanding and sorcerous pretension that caused people to make statements along the lines of all mana types being unique and unlike all others, for mind mana it pretty much held true. Among other things, mind mana tended to broadcast itself, without any prompting. It was how Mind Reading worked, by picking up on the impure emissions people output just by thinking and purifying them into something the caster could understand, although it was supposedly incredibly difficult to get anything as complex as words with the spell. So using heavy amounts of mind mana to look around might as well be shouting from the rooftops that you were looking for something, to things with mana senses. Frequently worth it, but not now.

These curses, the ones with tradeoffs that could be partially camouflaged as normal thought, were much more subtle, and easily hidden from magical senses through concealing enchantments, like the one on Casimir's choker.

So as such, when his students fell for the most basic trap in the book, a door with an enchantment keyed to activate whenever someone tried to force the door open when locked, Casimir got to fully experience Peter's swearing as Hanna healed his burned fingers. In their defense, the enchantment was gilded into the other side of the door, and heated up the metal door handle just through conduction, so it wasn't poorly hidden, but their magic senses were better than that, right?

"If they didn't know we were here when that went off…" Faron observed. "They certainly do now, idiot."

"Shut up." Peter said petulantly, before resorting to the adventurer's usual lockpick: brute force. He used Resist Fire on himself, before grabbing the locking mechanism and using Metal Warp to literally tear it out of the door, opening the damaged door with a grunt. Casimir made a mental note to move up the lockpicking lessons, in the event that they survived their own hubris in wanting to participate. "There, it's open."

"Functional." Illivere commented, cutting short any further argument.

"...Let's go." Faron said, swallowing what he was going to say. After they passed the door, Casimir ducked down and collected the tiny amount of purified copper that composed the trap, adding it to the small ball of the stuff that he kept in his trap-making kit. Gilded enchantments had many advantages over carved and inked ones, as long as you had the magically conductive metal to make them work. Gold was the preferred medium for such enchantments, due to how soft it was, but copper was cheaper, better for traps that he didn't count on being able to recover later.

After a few more twists and turns, which sorely tested Casimir's ability to keep track of the various unexplored tunnels and if something was leaving them, Peter stopped at another door, which was also trapped. "He went in here." He said, but holding back on opening it.

Hanna hummed as she analyzed the door. "I think it's trapped. With… I can't tell if it's fire or water mana. Both?" It was ice mana, actually. It has parts in common with both other kinds, so it was a pretty understandable rookie mistake.

"Let me see." Illivere said, scanning it herself. "It's a freezing enchantment. One moment…" With a precise burst of fire mana, she was able to break the gilding of the enchantment, which caused frost to coat the handle, but as the trap couldn't reset itself after the damage, Peter was able to repeat his previous feat to bypass the door.

Past the door was a room that made Casimir immediately think 'safehouse'. It had a cot, a desk, and some cabinets, and while he couldn't see them yet, it probably had a few hidden exits.

It was, however, empty, so whoever they were tracking, had left somehow. Casimir slipped in while his students were searching the cabinets, speaking up after going right behind them. "Find anything?"

Casimir's students immediately jumped up in surprise, Faron swinging his arm while coating it with some force armor. Casimir bent forward to avoid the attack with a whole inch to spare, rolling his eyes at the poor reflexes of the other students. "At least one of you is alert." He said, causing Peter and Hanna to flinch in shame. "Again, did you find anything?" Casimir repeated.

Illivere brought out some papers. "It's in code." She explained while frowning.

Casimir frowned. Codes and languages were more Hana's thing… He's picked up a little, though. Casimir applied an mind acceleration curse on himself to help him process things. "Let me see." Hrm, the letters were Elven, which didn't help that much, given how 90% of languages Casimir knew of used either Elven or Dwarven characters. After looking through a few more pages… "It's in seatongue, ferrian, or potealish, from the letters." Or something more obscure that also used that particular distinctive accent mark on some of the letters. "Assuming the code uses a single language, at least. My bet is seatongue." Given the use of pirates in the previous attack, it seemed the most likely.

Still, if there was evidence like this… Casimir checked the cabinets himself, opening a sealed compartment that his students missed that contained… a code wheel! Also a few other cryptography tools, but with this, it would be a lot easier to crack the contents of the letters.

Peter rubbed his temples as he looked around the room. "I can't tell where he left from, he's been everywhere here." Well, Casimir supposed he should consider himself lucky Peter managed to follow the trail this far, tracking using Attune Senses was far from easy.

"What's this for?" Hanna asked as she examined a metal bowl with ashes within.

"Burning things." Casimir replied. "Like the papers he used to translate these documents." They must not have gotten around to decrypt these ones, if they still had them instead of burning. "Or the ones he received before this." He put the documents away into his bag. "It'll take hours to work through this. I'll handle it later. Anyone find anything else notable?"

Illivere spoke up first. "I have located a mysterious lever."

"Perfect." Casimir said, checking out the mechanism himself. Safehouses weren't usually decorated, so the light sconce, with a fresh reservoir of pnuma oil, being in the center of a carved mural depicting one of the founders raising Anima from the sea was pretty suspicious. The lever wasn't the sconce itself, but instead it was a sea monster's single horn that concealed a hinge that allowed the section to be pulled from the wall. "Let me check it for traps."

Focusing, Casimir couldn't see any enchantments beyond the normal ones that were in literally all of the walls here, protecting the area from monster formation. Still, it meant that pulsing a bit of metal aspected mana to examine the mechanism wasn't going to explode anything.

After assessing it, Casimir pulled at the monster horn, careful not to pull it too hard, and tugged it to the side before it was fully extended. "This is a much more complex mechanism than I expected to find." It actually looked like the kind of complexity you'd see in some of the older kobold warrens, the ones that manage to fester for long enough to spawn the strongest kobold subtypes. "It's a lot newer than everything else here." Was the monster that contracted this a Kobold Prince? They're clever enough for such matters, but the very idea that kobolds could exist long enough to spawn one, in Anima, was ludicrous. But if there was such a being outside of Anima that was transported inside… that had potential for an idea. Or it could be some foreign country with the mechanical skill to pull something like this off, but not the magical… speculation was useless right now.

Nevertheless, after the sixth click of the gears, Casimir moved the lever back to the vertical track and pulled it all the way down, which finally allowed the facade the mural was carved on to swing open. "Here we are. Peter, has he passed through here?"

"Oh!" Peter startled at being directly addressed, before walking into the tunnel past the door. "Hrm… Yes, I think he did." He turned to the other students. "Come on! We've almost got him!"

Casimir set up another alarm on the broken door, and again on the now open secret door, before following the bait once more.

Dealing with people as your enemies instead of monsters was so annoying…

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After a few dozen meters past the secret door, Casimir noticed the man struggling with another mechanism ahead. It seemed to be of equal complexity to the last one, which meant that it was annoying to go through even if you did know how. From the man's cursing, which Peter could probably hear by now, he had screwed it up and was going through the process of resetting it so he could try again.

As expected, Peter rushed forward once he heard his quarry, and the other students followed. After a brief struggle, Casimir approached the man from behind, examining him for more suicide enchantments. Ah, there. "This is some clever work." Casimir said idly as he brought out his disarming tools. The mental curse that was restraining the man's thoughts flexed in strain, as he desperately avoided thinking of anything that would set off his suicide enchantment. "Talk about a hair trigger on this choker, needing Taboo to prevent you from accidentally setting it off. Naturally, it's nearly impossible to disarm." The man relaxed, then groaned as his Taboo probably gave him a headache as it siphoned mind mana from his system. "Guess you figured out that you were etched to burn after your buddies didn't come back, eh?" The curse flexed again. "Don't worry, you're going to walk away from this." Casimir lied, and the man groaned again as his headache redoubled from his Taboo saved his life again.

Casimir pulled out his focus spikes one at a time, tuning the mana appropriately for the points he needed to affix. He'll need… six points, so six spikes. The enchantments were well-designed, but Casimir got the impression they were… simplified. Something that the enchanter cut some corners on so it didn't take too long to make each one, or so they could give it to some less skilled mages for production. Casimir expected something like this to attempt to hide its structure through needless complexity, but it didn't. It certainly wasn't made by the same hand that created those crappy booby traps. After each spike was tuned appropriately, he floated the lot and had three of them hit the first set of points, and after the mana pulse made the enchantment shift, the other three struck the collar on three different points, venting the mana in the enchantment out as hot air, Faron letting the man go and getting some distance.

After the collar was successfully disarmed, Casimir removed the Taboo curse with even less effort, maximizing the mana efficiency by placing his fingers on the four points on the man's skull that corresponded with the matrix's vulnerable points before forming a negative mind void on the relevant fingers, destabilizing the matrix. "There." He spent one more moment to ensure that the free-floating mana was also removed, ensuring his headache remained. "Now, our questions."

Illivere made the first one. "What were your orders?"

Peter asked the next one without waiting for the man to answer. "Who's your boss?"

Faron, not to be left out, threw in a question of his own. "What are their plans?"

Despite usually being pretty happy to stay quiet, Hanna had one too. "Where were you going?"

The man groaned, his head presumably swimming at the various questions combined with his head's freshly-squeezed status. Just where Casimir wants him to be. "Stop… loud…"

Casimir turned the man around, so that he was looking only at Casimir instead of his students. "Now, I can fix your headache. Something so simple is nothing compared to that suicide choker you had." The miserable look on the thug's face brightened a bit. "Problem is, I'm a bit lost." Casimir lied. "So if I do that, you're going to need to help me out. How am I supposed to get through that door, and what's on the other side?" This wasn't something Casimir actually needed to know, but it was important to start things off with something verifiable.

"Okay, okay." The thug said, clutching his head. "You've got a deal." Normal hangovers were, surprisingly, really complex to fix instead of prevent, but this was much easier, as it was caused by magic. Really, any mind curse built to wear off by just letting the soul dissolve it, the simplest kind of curse, will do the job. But if it was to be done quickly… The man groaned in pleasure as his headache abated from the calmness curse. "Okay, that door leads to another one of the safehouses that got built between the tunnels. The latch is supposed to go if you bend the lever halfway, pull it down two thirds of the way, pull right and hold for two clicks, then left and back up again, hold for three clicks, and then all the way down…" Casimir stared at the man, not because he suspected he was lying, but to test him. "I got the clicks mixed up…" He admitted, explaining how he was held up. "You reset it by bending it out all the way and pushing it in, pulling it out when the clicks stop."

Casimir subtly pulsed the metal detecting spell once more after checking for a magical trap, and confirmed that the mechanisms worked like the man said they did. Fantastic. He reset the mechanism and followed the man's instructions, noting that a magical trap suddenly primed after the first set of clicks, but after reviewing the mechanism again, finished the instructions and the latch opened up without setting off the trap. "Alright, let's settle in."

As promised, the other side was another safehouse, much like the first one. "Now that we're all here peaceably, and you no longer have death hanging over you, " for now, "-it's time to have a conversation." The man nodded smoothly, the artificial calm numbing him to fear. Strong emotional stressors fought against calming magic, but that only applied to immediately obvious ones. Knives pointed in your face? It would take a more complex and powerful curse to keep one rational in the face of that. When it came to more abstract dangers, like the knowledge that the person in front of you could kill you in an instant, calming curses were substantially more effective. "Now, who controls these tunnels? Who made these safehouses?"

Having already agreed to help, the calming curse made him resistant to changing from that course. So, he talked. "The tunnels are controlled by the boss." Casimir raised his eyebrow at the simple explanation, but fortunately he continued. "No one knows who the boss is exactly, but he calls himself 'The Herald of Malice' like one of those arrogant adventurers do sometimes." Has Casimir ever heard that title before?

After a moment of silence, Casimir decided that he probably wasn't going to remember it if he hadn't yet. "Okay, and why were you watching my students?" This was playing dumb, just a little bit, but at least he had managed to confirm that these were criminals and not the Archmagus's idea of being protective.

The calming curse fluctuated a bit, but not enough to be noticeable to the target. Casimir reinforced his own calming curse to ensure that he can remain rational and present himself appropriately to manipulate the man. "Uh, I was just keeping tabs on the girl for the boss." He said, taking a moment to choose his words carefully. Hm, he may be lying here. "I wasn't told why." While Casimir was sure that was true, his bullshit detector was going off.

"Speculate." Casimir ordered, observing the painful flex of mana as the lazily constructed calming curse was tested.

"Ah! Ah, she's rich, I noticed that, so my guess is her family has some kind of treasure that the boss wants." Interesting that he didn't immediately go to 'money'. It's quite telling as to how this Herald fellow operates.

Right, next question: "What kind of resources does this guy have? Who or what are your partners?"

Suddenly, the secret door, closed behind them, started clicking, as if it was being opened again. Casimir idly realized that he had neglected to alarm their path past the first secret door… As he realized this, the thug calmly explained: "Around here? That'd be the kobolds."

Casimir expanded his senses again, finding, to his dismay, that they were surrounded. The secret door opened to reveal the lightly furred kobolds, basic warriors by the looks of them, pointing seven spears through the doorway as the other door to the room opened up, seven more spears poking out as well.

"...I see." Casimir said. This could be tricky…

 

[Requiem_Jeer]

One of the first lessons you learn in magic is that it's fundamentally a matter of just willing things to happen. If one was willing to concentrate at something and had access to some pure mana to manipulate, you could make pretty much anything happen. The type of mana limited what you could do, with truly pure mana being a theoretical exercise, and if you didn't understand the nature of what you were manipulating, it was pretty scattershot as to being able to make the mana do something useful. The fact one had to actively concentrate on making something happen for the entire duration of the effect is why it was called active magic.

All other forms of magic were just ways to overcome the drawbacks of active magic. Shaping, curses, and enchantments were three different ways to make mana keep doing something beyond your active attention at it. If you were unskilled, all three only created temporary effects with varying amounts of duration, which was why Faron's weapons were so fragile, tending to explode when they were damaged unless he was able to concentrate on fixing them.

Spellweaving, on the other hand, attacked the opposite problem that active magic had. It was slow and inefficient with its strength, as your will could only direct a limited amount of mana per second, although that amount did increase substantially with practice. But by building up mana in the stable structure, it eventually overflows and spills out all at once in a quick, efficient, and frequently violent way.

Casimir has fought many kobolds in the eighteen or so years that he's been an adventurer. They were furry little bastards the size of eight year old children… mostly, with faces somewhere between dogs and bears, with hands that grew metal claws out of the fingers, quite capable of climbing sheer rock. Larger varieties existed, but like most humanoid monsters, they had a hierarchy, so you only got stronger variants when you had enough of the weak guys around.

In other words… This was really more of a spellweaving kind of job. With the ease of long practice, Casimir started the battle by converting a large chunk of stone mana, raising a wall of stone at the 'front' door, trapping all of the spears that were poking through it.

Faron's armor and weapons were already shaped, so he used his force shield to shove the lot of them into their fellows, the mana construct utterly uncaring of the narrow points of the spears like a wooden or even metal shield would be. Hanna was already building up a powerful Fireball, Peter readying a Magic Barrier to shield the group from any backblast.

Seeing that half of the battle was dealt with for now, Casimir turned back to the stone and painted a stone reinforcement enchantment on the wall with his combat brush. With a quick infusion of additional mana, the wall shifted subtly as the enchantment took effect, becoming hard enough to give a kobold's typical stone-breaking toolset a very difficult time… for as long as the enchantment lasted. There should be plenty of time.

Right when he finished, Hanna released her spell, Peter bringing up his barrier right as it passed the doorway, a muffled boom sounding out a second later. It was a good start to the battle. Now… Casimir focused on his senses as his students continued to fight to determine how difficult of a fight they were in for. Given that they're using the most basic of kobold tactics, this was probably not directly led by a competent commander. Or maybe the competent one was on the other side of the wall Casimir erected…

Faron moved with hard-earned precision, each swing of the water mana shaping bearing deadly intent, before shifting in shape to allow him to swing again, minimizing his recovery time and removing one of the primary ways small intelligent monsters deal with adventurers, as they couldn't grab the weapon and pull it away. Peter laid curses on him, invigorating his body to keep going, speeding his movements, and focusing his mind, supplementing the vanguard's energies with his own mana. In the event that a kobold managed to duck under Faron's shield and rush past, they met their end by Peter's axes.

Illivere had nocked an arrow on her bow, and was waiting patiently for the right moment to intervene. Hanna was casting some kind of life spell, Casimir didn't bother trying to figure out what it was.

Behind the battle, the crystallized mana of each kobold's monster core fluctuated slightly with their heartbeat, which was detectable with mana sense, so from the staccato sounds of it… Casimir estimated somewhere between forty and seventy kobolds in the force that the kids were fighting. In the force behind the reinforced stone wall, which even now was getting struck with mining picks? Three times that many, at least. There were a few stronger kobold variants, but he couldn't pick out any that were strong enough for Casimir to worry about his odds individually.

But quantity had a quality all its own, and as much practice as he's had for dealing with a set of four weak enemies in close quarters recently, that doesn't help that much when you're outnumbered so severely. Still, maybe there was a plan he could use… Casimir pulsed some stone aspected mana in the ground, feeling out the shape of the cavern to get an idea of what the layout was beyond the now blocked door. About a foot of arched stone, fifteen more of dirt, and more stone were the obstacles if they tried an upwards exit. It was probably just a road up there. Downward, there was a massive roughly constructed cavern right at the edge of Casimir's senses, a few hundred feet to the south and thirty deeper. Casimir would bet money that was where the bulk of the kobolds were camped out. The tunnel with the kobolds went perpendicular to the door, a large thoroughfare that was probably expanded from its original dimensions by the kobolds, or maybe just originally meant for supply wagon shipments in the event of military occupation, such extreme situations being the purpose of most of these tunnels.

Ah, but the wall to the left… there was a smaller passageway after only four feet, most of it dirt. That had potential. There were kobolds moving in it, but it was just why the kids haven't run out of kobolds yet. Briefly, Casimir checked their status. The kobolds were efficiently retrieving their dead, ripping the monster cores out and feeding them to the strongest one, increasing the monster's strength a minor amount for each one. Casimir frowned at the odd action. It wasn't completely unheard of for monsters to do that, but Casimir had never seen kobolds specifically do it. It was more commonly something goblins did, and even they ate all of the bodies instead of extracting the core, which given that it represented well over half of the mana within a monster, was the objectively smart thing, even if there was some wastage.

The kids, on the other hand, were doing just fine. Faron was running on pure magic and spite, but that was normal for this kind of situation. Illivere had been sending out arrows enchanted with piercing to score multiple kills with each shot, carefully lining up each one to preserve her ammunition and minimize friendly fire. Naturally, Faron's force shield didn't give a damn whenever the kobolds launched the arrows back, as the kobolds couldn't launch it with enough power for him to care and piercing only helps against physical barriers, not magical ones. Just one of the many tips in coordination Casimir's been drilling into them. Peter was still watching Faron's back for kobolds that tried to squeeze through, but the kobolds had wised up and were no longer attempting that, instead pressing Faron with all of their might. Hanna was switching between keeping Faron and Peter's body going with life magic and copying Illivere's tactics by taking potshots with Propel.

Come to think of it… normally, kobolds wouldn't dream of fighting like this, rushing a chokepoint to die. Was that monster core eater ordering them to go to their deaths? Monsters did have a sense of self-preservation, it was just easily ignored. If they were coordinating with the other side, the one still trying to get past the wall, the more powerful kobold will rush in right when that wall breaks.

Grinning at his idea, Casimir focused on the strongest monster core in the bunch. You could cast a curse at anything you can sense, it just got harder and less efficient the further away they were and the more that was between the two. Taking out one of his combat-quality mind mana potions, he opened the stopper and drank it down in one smooth motion, as combat potions were only about two ounces of liquid, easily drunk in one gulp. You needed a high mana density for it to be useful at that dosage, but this was a pretty good time to break out the consumables. With the extra chunk of mind mana, Casimir constructed a curse to infect the kobold battle leader's senses, deluding him into thinking things were going according to plan.

With that done, Casimir shattered a small section of the left wall by simply punching it with a little extra oomph, and the Delusion curse translated that into the reinforced wall that he had already seen shattering. "Ack!" Casimir shouted. "They're flanking us!"

The kids were confused, but the battle-leader rushed in, ignoring what his own eyes were telling him as he shoved his diminished retinue aside to shove his stolen thrusting sword towards Faron as he was caught flat-footed by the attack.

It was appropriate, that the kobold was promptly caught equally unprepared for Casimir shoving his stiletto into the kobold's skull and detonating some fire mana out of the tip, creating a spurt of steaming liquid when the knife was removed. Plucking the sword out of the kobold's grip, Casimir whistled at the quality. "Where did this joker get a mithril basket-hilt?" Basket-hilts were known among adventurers as military blades, as they were amazing when dealing with human-sized enemies or smaller, but tended to invite getting your wrists broken if you weren't careful against anything bigger than a horse. Against kobolds? Probably a better choice than Casimir's stiletto. "Good balance, he kept the edges sharp, too." The remaining kobolds had retreated along the tunnel previously noted as being the route between the two sides of the battlefield.

Faron was panting, turning towards the safehouse's enchanted chamber pot and vomiting into it. Ah, he's caught a bit of mana sickness from all those curses that kept him going. His tolerance for it was still relatively low, as despite how well the kids have taken to the training, they still have less than a year of acclimating to the life of an adventurer. "What was that?" He asked.

"I cursed and baited the kobold's leader to come and attack." Casimir explained. "You four did a good job, keeping them back until I could get a good picture of the situation." Casimir looked at the sword more closely and gave it a few test swings. "...Illivere, do you remember how to enchant mithril?" Enchantments were a lot more particular than curses were, as each substance required some adjustments to your enchantments in order to properly do so. If he had instructions or notes, he could manage well enough, but he hadn't bothered memorizing any mithril runes.

"Yes." Illivere said, taking the sword from him as he handed it over. "Hm. Etched seems best, given the design seems poor for gilding. We don't have enough time for that, though."

"I was talking about inked runes. I have some stuff here that should hold up for a bit." Casimir fished out the alchemical paint he used for whatever random enchantment job he needed that the normal paint won't cut it for.

"In that case…" Illivere said, not missing a beat from the new information or wasting time by questioning whether she had some of that stuff in her own pack (she did), took out the brush from her enchanter's kit, dipping it into the paint the second Casimir removed the lid from the jar and quickly sketching out… It looked like she was going with a not-quite-basic sharpening enchantment, which honed the edge and made it difficult for things like blood and viscera from staying on the blade. Exactly what was needed for dealing with unarmored enemies like the kobolds.

After taking the sword back, Casimir channeled mana through the enchantment just so, reinforcing the paint and protecting it from the rigors of combat. The stuff wasn't perfect, but it would probably last for a couple hundred sets of kobold guts before it started to fail.

Checking the wall again… The kobolds were still trying to break the wall, but the number of kobolds there… Where did they go? The mining effort was a pretty transparent attempt to make their enemies think they hadn't changed plans, but if it was a full retreat, such a tactic would be pointless. Faking a retreat was pretty normal kobold behavior, but these… are not normal kobolds.

"Oh! Speaking of which…" Casimir jabbed his fingers in the battle leader's neck, touching the core and promptly sucked all of the monster's residual mana into it, melting the meat and bone as the kobold's body rapidly rotted away and sublimated into nothing. "I wonder what Master will make of this?" Casimir wasn't terribly conversant in the analysis of monster cores, as the dense but impure mana had very few uses for an adventurer or wizard. But few was not zero, and an unusual specimen was always noteworthy to someone. "Hm."

"Master Toomes?" Asked Hanna, confused as to his action.

"...Stay here." Casimir eventually said as he picked up the sword's sheath and affixed it to his belt. "Rest up, I'll take a look around. Illivere, copy the enchantments on the first wall on this second one. Don't forget to bind more mana while you're in there" He went to the thug, who had fallen unconscious from the backlash of his terror breaking the calming spell. "...There. He'll stay down for a few hours." Casimir said as he weaved a curse into his soul to put him into a deep sleep.

Casimir started off his stealth mission by rushing towards the kobolds trying to get through the wall and killed all three with two swipes of his new sword.

"Now… Where did you mutts go?" Casimir murmured to himself as he focused on his magical and magically enhanced senses once more.

How in the world were kobolds able to keep themselves hidden in Anima for this long? This smelled like trouble.

 

[Requiem_Jeer]

Entire household got sick this week, lots of lost writing time. No update next week.

-----------------------

Kobolds, as monsters went, were usually pretty weak. They were similar to goblins, froggols, orcs, drakkin, and others in that they aped having societies, but any attempt to treat them as people eventually led to tragedy as they reminded everyone that they were just as malicious as any other monster, just with the ability to plan and deceive. Collectively, they were known as tribal monsters.

Spawned kobolds were universally weak and stupid, but if enough gathered in one place for long enough to build camps… They started creating stronger varieties. Each generation of kobolds were stronger, smarter, and more magically potent than the one before, which was why the extermination of such were generally pretty important, if routine, jobs.

But this group was weird. The innate magic of kobolds was in metal-shaping, which included transmutation of other materials into metal. This allowed them to make complex mechanical traps and mechanisms. The power was initially weak, slow but able to form crude but effective weapons in a few minutes. As the kobolds gained strength, they could create increasingly precise components, which are essential in creating the kind of gearwork those secret doors had. From that, Casimir could rate this group as an elite-ranked threat… but that group was barely a standard-rank threat, with the only aberration being that cannibal battle leader, and Casimir took care to kill that one personally.

As he stalked the tunnels, tracking the faint but extant trail the kobolds left behind, Casimir contemplated possibilities. Because cannibalizing the fallen wasn't normal kobold behavior, perhaps the battle leader was deviant in their battle strategies as well, seeking to attack with the tiny fraction of the main force's strength rather than wait for backup under the assumption that their personal strength could carry the day if there were any that were strong? It would have skewered Faron if Casimir didn't interrupt…

The main flaw in that idea was that even 'strong' kobolds weren't terribly dangerous on an individual level. Sure, once you get to the fourth generation; which required over a year of unopposed raiding of the countryside to accomplish; you started to get kobolds that could consistently beat standard-rank adventurers on their martial prowess, but that one wasn't even that level of strength.

Casimir found the kobolds, about eighty total, conferring amongst themselves, chattering in their incomprehensible language of yips and growls… well, Casimir knew a few other scouting types who claimed to be able to understand them, but even they admitted that there wasn't a whole lot to miss, kobolds only seemed to communicate on matters of business, only missives like 'do this', 'help me', 'danger', and 'attack from that way' ever got exchanged, even when the spies swore up and down the kobolds didn't have any idea they were in the area.

The cavern was a more typical kobold arena, wide open so the kobolds could press a numerical advantage, with plenty of uneven terrain and trenches the kobolds could slip through for cover or flanking maneuvers. All entrances and exits were small and easily blocked off and definitely trapped, to cut off escapes. If Casimir fought them here without an overwhelming opening attack that killed at least half of them, his chances of survival were… low.

Magnus would just turn the whole floor into a bowl, and Hana would toss a whirlpool of water to churn them to paste, if they were here. Could he do something similar? Their conference made about two-thirds of them be in a relatively clear area in the middle… He does have a few bombs… Luci would just use One Hundred Arrows of Light, he could do something similar with Propel, right?

…No, he probably couldn't. On both counts. Kobolds aren't entirely mana-blind, even if they're one of the less magically inclined of the tribal monsters. Metal sorcery is expected, and they can usually sense stone mana well enough, due to the similarity. He won't be able to shape the terrain fast enough and subtly enough for them not to be able to slip the net. He couldn't track enough targets with propelled knives or arrows to kill more than maybe a dozen? Two dozen at most. Not enough.

Still, like most tribal monsters, they had something of a weakness in their reliance on leadership. Kobolds were only threats based on their coordination, and while their chains of command were robust enough that they could still pose a serious threat even with all of their battle leaders killed, there was still that moment of chaos in which Casimir could capitalize and do some damage. Kobolds organized themselves in squads of nine, eight spearmen with a warrior to command them, with a battle leader commanding somewhere around four to nine warriors. While it was difficult to pinpoint the warriors from the spearmen purely on magic sense… the battle leaders were had five times as much magical power in their core in comparison, so they were easy enough to pick out. Monster leadership always went to the strongest varieties, as they were usually the smartest as well as strongest.

Picking out the two remaining battle leaders as well as the metal sorcerer kobolds that were accompanying them, Casimir brought out one of his quivers of specialty ammunition: wooden arrows. Specifically, they were heartwood, just like the ones he gave to Illivere, although these had wooden arrowheads instead of just being shafts. The Elven Archipelago was lousy with plant-like monsters. The internal materials of two of them represented one of their most valuable exports: Heartwood, which was a dense wood that's as hard as steel with half the weight, and heartstring fibers, which make up the famous heartstring shirt.

The reason why it paid off to have some pure heartwood arrows, arrowheads and all, on hand was because some monsters had either protection against metal things specifically, or had some kind of allergy to life mana, and wooden arrows could deliver that a lot better. In one notable case, the blood of a vampire ignites when exposed to wood, which is strange but there are more violent alchemical reactions out there in monster biology so Casimir doesn't question it. In this case, he was using it to prevent the metal sorcerers the kobolds had from detecting the projectiles too early.

Sneaking into the ambush room to a good vantage point wasn't easy, but it was do-able, and it was a lot easier to pick out his exact targets as well as at least a few of the warriors now that he had eyes on the room instead of just sensing the stone or using magic sense to pick them out. Lining up each shot as he slowly gathered force mana, after about five seconds he launched the eight arrows, skewering most of the kobold's leadership in the head and splattering their subordinates. Running a finger loaded with force mana along the quiver he had taken then from, each one was teleported back to their recall rune. The enchantments were only good for a single recollection per arrow per hour, which was great for assassinations but not so good for pitched battles. For what must have been the thousandth time, he resolved to get back to trying to master space aspected mana.

But there was a reason Casimir was listed as an assassin, and that reason was because of how many of their tools he used for his work. He drew his new sword as he dropped down from the ceiling above the exit and cut down the few kobolds that scrambled to cut off any escape, making extra sure to lop off the head of the warrior competent enough to do that so quickly. "I'm keeping this." Casimir said to himself as he ducked through the tunnel once more, without the metal sorcerers they can't just close it in a second, they need to actually work the mechanisms in order to seal things off.

Now he was back in more familiar ground, with poorly coordinated kobolds rushing through a narrow gap. With a weapon that had an extra two feet of reach, he was able to parry the spear thrusts and lop off the heads of every fuzzy little bastard that tried to stab him without a problem. Well, at least for the first twenty, then the number of bodies got too large to hold and he had to back off from the wave of meat, and once the kobolds got to spread out a little bit in the larger tunnel? Casimir erected another stone wall and started to book it back to his students.

With the kobold response in chaos, there wasn't anything stopping the group from leaving with their new prisoner, after all.

----------------

There was one bright side to Casimir arranging for his students to meet Master Southwind for the first time while carrying an unconscious man's body along with a sample of the first room's complex locking mechanism: It meant that she went straight to business. The whole story was told within minutes, and with a minimum of drama.

"So let me see if I've got this straight." Master said, not amused but also not angry. "You found a hidden kobold enclave in the old guerilla tunnels, and they're friendly with this Herald guy?" Casimir nodded at the summary. "...Why are the kobolds such a big deal?"

"They're weird, that's why." Casimir explained. "The thing about tribal monsters is that, like all monsters, they have a certain amount of ingrained behavior, and that behavior changes based on how powerful and thus intelligent that monster is. If you see signs that they're acting in a certain way, that's a sign that there are stronger varieties of monster around and you need to tell the adventurer's guild so they can send a stronger team to deal with it." Casimir tapped the salvaged mechanism. "This is good metal, and it's more complex than can be achieved outside of trained specialists in magical metal shaping. You need strong kobolds to get this kind of thing, a warren that's gone undestroyed for at least a year, more likely two or three years, and the fact that no one's ever seen a kobold in Anima before… There's a lot of possible explanations, but none of them are good."

Another nuance about tribal monsters was that they didn't tend to form in the same place as each other. You could occasionally get situations where you got kobolds in the mountains but the nearby desert had orcs, for example, but like most monsters, the variety you'd see if you stayed around one place was limited, usually less than twenty or thirty kinds. On Anima, you mostly saw drakkin. Little lizard fuckers that, like dragons, were natural wizards that could use a few simple spells, but with a wide variety of mana types. They also liked screwing with the geomancy, trying to manipulate the environment to produce a real dragon they could serve and learn from. Needless to say, they were exterminated when found with extreme prejudice.

"I see." Master said, slightly confused. It made sense, while some people heard 'archmage' and thought 'one of the deadliest people on the planet', the truth of the matter is that all that was required for the title was mastery in multiple disciplines of wizardry. Archmage Southwind was very respected in the fields of curses and enchanting, and did some collaboration in the negative magic journals, and was capable of at least holding an intelligent conversation on other magical topics, but monsters? Battle? The only reason she even attempted to learn these things was in how it helped her design enchanted goods, and she usually just bounced ideas off of Casimir whenever she needed to do that. "Well, if it's a problem, it's a problem. What do we do? I'm not sure I like you trying to resolve it on your own." She gave a reproachful look at Casimir, conveying that she knew quite well that if his students weren't there he would have spent a lot more time down in those tunnels.

Peter slammed his fist on the book in front of him. "We take them out, together! They're not so tough."

Master was fortunately smart enough to see the immediate issue with that. "Didn't you have quite a bit of trouble with just a few dozen kobolds?" After Peter froze up, she turned to Casimir. "How many kobolds do you expect to find?"

Casimir waved vaguely. "Well, some of the possibilities are things like only a small number of kobolds are here from a larger but foreign warren, but given the quality of the traps? Somewhere upwards of one thousand kobolds."

"Far too many for all of you to take on." Master concluded. She swept up Illivere in her arms and cuddled the unflappable girl. "It would break my heart if anything bad was to happen to any of you." Always the attentive student, Illivere went limp as she was squeezed by the exceptionally tall elf.

Hanna coughed to get everyone's attention. "Ah… We could post a job in the adventurer's guild?"

Casimir snapped his fingers and pointed towards the shy girl. "She gets it. This is a big job, and we're not really suited towards it. When I was running solo, I would never have been given a job against a tribe of drakkin or kobolds or whatever. Sometimes I was just attached as a scout or trap expert for a team that was given such a job, but never solo. Anything I could take on alone could be taken by a team of lesser rank with less overhead." Really, preparing for hordes of enemies was long overdue, in Casimir's opinion, but when you never have to face them, it was an easy thing to put off.

Master set Illivere back down, the girl flushed as she took some deep breaths now that she was capable of it. "Well, I suppose I could contribute some money to the job…"

Waving her off, Casimir explained. "Nah, no need. Tribal monsters, and this goes double for kobolds, also don't have the kind of valuable materials in their corpses that regular monsters do, just some low-quality cores for most of them plus whatever scrap metal you can carry off, so the guild has a budget from the government for this kind of thing. Trust me, once Purz takes a look at this machine, he won't even wait for the capital to confirm the quest before he sends for a team suited to it." Guild policy made sure that all guildmasters were at least veteran-ranked adventurers over the age of thirty, and that pool was usually tapped to help assign quests and assess the adventurers, to help see which ones were competent at the work. It was the main reason why about one in three guild halls had one of those subordinates that really ran the place, but it was good policy when it worked, like with Purz.

Who would he give the job to, though? "Given the cowards we usually see at the local guild hall, he may need to bring in people for this." Academia was one of the sleepiest places Casimir had ever seen, when it came to quests. Yeah, the monsters here were all stronger than on the mainland, but when you live on an island, the usual monster-extermination sweeps the military makes are actually capable of keeping things clear for the most part. It was why he left, back when he was a recent graduate. "I'm not sure how well the mage knights would handle a trap-filled kobold warren if we went to them."

Faron seemed offended at the idea of the mage knights not being amazing. "Those traps weren't that bad." He mentioned.

Casimir chuckled. "That's another reason these kobolds were weird." At the confused looks, he elaborated. "These kobolds were being very subtle, focusing their mechanical skill to keep the hidden portion of the tunnel network they made around the real tunnels hidden. That's not normal kobold behavior, a normal kobold warren would use a heavily fortified and trapped underground base as a staging ground for quick raids, killing as many intelligent beings as possible while also looting food and metal to further enhance their war machine." The best way to explain intelligent monsters and their malice, in Casimir's opinion, was that monsters were in an eternal war of extermination against all other nations. "Normally their traps are lethal things, pits, spikes, swinging blades, primed crossbows… That kind of thing." The designs of those doors just screamed kobold make… except for… the facades…

Peter was the first one to pick up on Casimir's idea. "What is it, Teach? You think of something?"

"Ah, just a thought about the designs." Casimir said, waving it off. "The internal mechanisms are kobold make, through and through, but the disguises were a bit too… artistic. It's a clue." One that pointed to dwarven sensibilities, to be honest. "I've never seen kobolds hide a door in a mural before…" That isn't to say that they can't blend in their hidden passages, but Casimir was certain that the mural wasn't there before the door was installed. It was kind of a strange place for a mural, after all.

"Maybe these documents will answer some questions." Master said, leafing through them. "The code wheel?" She asked as she held out her hand. Casimir passed it over without comment. "Casimir, why don't you get some food started while I work through this? Tea, too."

Of course. "Alright. Do any of you four have to leave right now?" Casimir asked his students. All of them shook their heads. "I'll escort y'all home after the meal. Any objections to mealbread? It's a dwarven recipe from the Fractured Mountains." It's also Master's favorite to eat while working, so he'd be stuck making one just for her anyway if he made anything else.

With no objections, Casimir started preparing the flatbread, beans, and other assorted ingredients for the creation of the portable tubes of food.

This is going to take up the entire break, isn't it?

 

[Requiem_Jeer]

As it turned out, the coded documents weren't as useful as Casimir had hoped. They explained John's (which as it turns out was the thug's name) task, and what kinds of information he was supposed to report to his boss… But the information was so thorough that none of them had any idea which parts were important or not.

"What's the common thread?" Casimir asked himself out loud, pacing as Master Southwind snoozed on a force cushion she had set up. "Movements are obviously useful, but clothes, associates, food preferences, transcribing a selection of things she says exactly, actions taken while alone… are there decoys among this?" On one hand, a boss that's paranoid enough to spring for suicide enchantments would definitely be paranoid enough to make decoys within the orders… on the other hand, it was such a thorough protection that adding yet another layer of obfuscation would likely be more trouble than it was worth.

After exploring and dismissing several possibilities, Casimir gave up. "Screw it, going to bed. I have a lot of crap to do in the morning."

---------------

Guildmaster Purz, as expected, immediately understood what Casimir dropped on the table in the back office of the guild hall. "...Where did you find this?" Was his first question.

"In one of those guerilla tunnels, hiding a secondary tunnel network. There were plenty of kobolds behind it." Casimir replied drily. "I can't fight that many kobolds by myself, Purz. My students help, but they're not going to be enough either." One of the fundamental truths about being a high ranking adventurer is that there's no such thing as an attack that you can either deliver or withstand all day. Every kind of attack and defense imposes a cost on one's mana and stamina, even if some are very efficient about it. There are a few tactics that can help you recover such things mid-fight, but tribal monsters are generally smart enough to ruin any bolthole if you give them time to execute it. "I don't know enough about what I'm working with, and given this? It's entirely possible they can replenish their numbers faster than I could deplete them if I tried to bleed their warren." Not to mention the kobolds might decide to just go on a rampage in one of the towns if he tried. Whatever was holding them back from raiding settlements like normal kobolds, who knows how well it would hold up if Casimir tried to press the issue.

The elderly Aviost closed his eyes as he thought on the matter, only opening his beak to speak after a long moment. "There hasn't even been a hint of kobold activity in over a decade."

Casimir nodded grimly. "There's some joker hiring foreigners to act on their behalf, too. They Call themselves the Herald of Malice. Ring any bells?"

"Hm. Sounds like a cult." Purz said, unimpressed by the title. "I've never heard of a spirit called Malice, though. Must be new." Or it was just foreign.

Ah, Casimir didn't think of that. Obvious, in hindsight. "Ah crap, emotion spirits are a nightmare." All mana types had variations, where aspects of the whole were emphasized more so than the others, which reflected the nature of mana as a whole. Most wizards didn't really bother with unbalanced mana types when casting, except for Alchemists dealing with relevant materials. When dealing with Spirits, on the other hand, the distinctions were very important. "I do remember a cult of Hate, though."

Purz chuckled at the similarity. "...I remember that. That was a fire spirit, so maybe this Malice thing is less literal?"

"We can only hope." Casimir said, seriously. "I don't need to tell you how terrifying kobolds can be if they get the self control to stay quiet this long, or travel this far, so we need to get some serious dungeon delvers here to handle this." Even Veterans could likely manage it if they were capable dungeoneers, if the kobold situation was only as bad as it appeared to be. Assuming Casimir helped them, of course.

The old Aviost nodded slowly, thinking through his options. "There's a problem with that." He admitted. "Over in the Bladespire mountains, there's a new dungeon that was recently discovered." In adventurer parlance, dungeons were basically any underground area that had a significant monster population. They're usually discovered when a small army of them breaks out to wreak havoc on the surrounding area. "Filled to the brim with all kinds of monsters: goblins, ogres, undead, there are reports of dragons… it's a big mess. Money is flowing like water into adventurer pockets over there." The Bladespire mountains were a natural border between several nations. The mana flows naturally sharpened the local rocks, which when combined with the high winds made it utterly inhospitable to life unless you had a rather large amount of magic supporting your travels. The kind of bounties the Culdean League alone could post if threatened…

…Crap. Most adventurers willing to travel veteran rank and up will jump at that kind of chance. "Maybe the mage-knights…" For the same reason the guerilla tunnels were abandoned for long enough that the kobolds could set up shop, the modern military weren't exactly conversant in underground operations. As an island nation, there were very few underground areas to speak of, and the ones that did were usually protected against monster formation just as a matter of course. If these were drakking or goblin caves, it wouldn't be a big deal, but kobolds? Those knights will almost definitely need a lot of babysitting to not get overwhelmed by traps and ambushes.

"I'll ask them." Purz said. "You can't attack a kobold warren with a conventional army, though. I'll need you to scout the situation out more thoroughly, so they'll be willing to send their best." Yeah, Casimir expected that piece of bad news. It is what it is.

"Just make sure they send someone for the prisoner." Casimir said as he patted the broken machine. "I have to finish off my classes, have the paperwork ready for an official reconnaissance quest when I come back in the afternoon, please."

Purz sighed the sigh of the condemned. "I'll get right on it, Elite Adventurer Toomes." He walked towards his office, grumbling about the massive pile of steaming trouble Casimir dropped on him.

That makes two of us, old bird.

----------------

"Today is the final exam of Introductory Curse Magic." Casimir began as he paced through the testing center, looking over his students. From his personal ones, to the various other associated headaches, and to the headaches belonging to other teachers. "By now, you should be able to cast all of the basic curses on command. As such, the final is simple: we will call you up, one at a time, and you will perform all twenty curses in the order we tell you to on one of these test animals." Casimir patted the pig on the back, who snorted in response.

"I'd be careful with 'em." The test pig's handler, a brown-haired man wearing leather overalls that were magically protected against muck and grime said with a wry grin. "If you screw up the curse, the pigs ain't gonna like that. Watch your fingers." The nervous looking kids became even more nervous.

Casimir waved off the warning on behalf of his students. "Now Hal, don't go scaring them." A good portion of the students calmed. "I'll regrow any lost fingers, don't you worry." Even more students looked nervous at that news than before Casimir spoke.

"Professor Toomes!" Shouted Ruzum, always reliable when it came to pointing out when he was slacking. "If there are test animals, why did we not practice on them before?"

Casimir chuckled at the naive question. "It's cheaper to get y'all to curse each other, that's why." Literally every curse wizard skilled enough to teach is capable of effective cursebreaking and healing magic, so a mistake extreme enough to cause serious damage among the students was unthinkable, especially when you consider the massive level of bookwork involved before you let them start casting. "But if you do screw up, you're not hurting each other's grades this way." According to Master Southwind, there was a bit of a problem with some students trying to scam a passing grade by getting their partner to screw up back in the day, but that was before even Casimir's time learning at the school. But she's been teaching for sixty years, so she's got plenty of such stories. Elves…

"Moving on, " Casimir said, "First we're going to do full body curses. That means Strengthen, Warmth, Invigorate, and Glow." To make things fair, Casimir floods each pig's system with foreign mana, making it so that the students that test first don't have a disadvantage. All of those tricks to bypass that defense were only useful for combat cursing, anyway. If you wanted to make something permanent, you flooded the body with mana beforehand to ensure a stable environment to place the spell matrix.

This class took the final exam as a group with the other four classes on the subject. Between those five classes, there were three professors, four adjunct professors like Casimir, and the one tenured professor that's in charge of the course, the esteemed Archmage Haverdasher.

As such, administering finals was a long and arduous process, even with a dozen extra proctors to help keep things moving. Call a name, instruct them to cast each of the curses in whatever random order you come up with, and after each one assess the quality of the curse. Once completed, dispel the curse and reset the pig's system for the next curse. And that's just for the full body curses. You have to repeat the whole process for the four other curse categories, for twenty total spells each student, and with one hundred students…

It's exhausting. To make things even worse, as literally the only proctor that had training in combat casting, he was able to go through his parts of the test in a third of the time, meaning that Professor Haverdasher promptly just put even more student evaluations on Casimir's plate.

There was one bit of fun on that end, however. "Peter Wood." Casimir announced, and Peter sauntered up to the pig, oozing confidence in his performance.

"Right here, Teach!" He said, mana dancing in his hands. "What first? Hit me."

How precious. He thinks he's going to get the regular test. "Force curses first. All five."

Peter's eyes widened. "There's only…" He looked at the evil grin on Casimir's face. "Right." In the amount of time it took half of the other students to cast one curse, Peter quickly cast a force curse in all of the tested categories: Strengthen, Bounce, Muffle, Weight, and the one not normally on this exam, Stability. That one lowers the center of gravity, making it very difficult to be knocked over.

The pig did not appreciate the stacked effects, but they didn't cause a resistance reaction, so Casimir cleared it without trouble. "Mind curses." Naturally, Peter was slower with mind mana than he was with force, but that's true of most students in the school, given force mana's primacy in the curriculum. Calm, Mind Shield, and Sharpen Sense were cast with the ease of long practice, but he couldn't be blamed for not putting in much effort to master the full body Reflex curse or the auto-function Ignore curse. Still, his insistence on doing as much studying with mind mana as possible to allow him an excuse to spend time in Illivere's presence was still worthwhile, so he was able to cast them without much trouble.

His work with life mana went just as smooth, all four of the required curses cast with ease and the bonus mana interaction curse, Sterilize, with only moderate difficulty. This was good, as the three mana types were collectively Casimir's favorite ones to use. You couldn't really heal most things without life mana; mind mana enabled so many new kinds of spells it made your head spin, although ironically making someone dizzy could be done in a few other ways than the Dizziness curse; he didn't even need to go into why he liked force mana.

Of course, those three mana types represented eleven of the twenty exam curses, so the amount of practice he put in those was also understandable in that respect. Let's see how he does with one of the other five mana types on the exam. "Light mana." Casimir said next.

"Uh…" As expected, he locked up a bit. He did cast Glow and Blur after a pause, and then Sunsight, which is the curse that protects your eyes from flashes of light, and after another moment he remembered that Casimir did show him how to make pretty much any full body spell into a variable focus one, so made the glowing pig shine out a more focused light out of its snout, a bastardized Shine curse. "...I don't know any auto-function light spells, Teach." Peter admitted.

Casimir sighed. "Peter, the reason why these are considered basic spells is because the matrices are as simple as they get: mana type and effect type." Time to see if he has what it takes to be considered a curse wizard instead of just a wannabe. "Think of the auto-function spells you do know, what they have in common, structure wise. Then, think about the nature of light mana, what those other spells have in common." Peter nodded along with his lecture.

"Auto-function spells have a simple structure: If this happens, then the curse activates and does this. Trigger, effect." Unless you could blend mana types in a single curse, there was some pretty severe limitations on what a curse could set as a trigger, as it had to be something that related to the mana type of the curse. Bounce took a normal force mana interaction and added more power to it, purge toxin could only act on toxins that affected you, etcetera. "This is what divides a wizard from a spirit mage. We cast our spells through understanding the mystical forces that dictate the natural world, and by creating the structures of spells, the magical effect happens not because we desire it to, but because that is the natural result of those conditions." This was partly leaning into wizardly arrogance, as while it was theoretically possible for a perfectly designed and executed spell structure to create a spell when the wizard doesn't know what it's supposed to do, merely by following the casting instructions, in practice the wizard's intent to create the effect smoothed over any mistakes in either the design or in the wizard's recollection of the details. "You know light aspected mana, how to create it and shape it into a stable structure. You've learned many auto-function spells in the past. Your advanced spell project, Attune Senses, was created by way of adding auto-function and mana interaction components onto a variable focus spell." Peter looked at the glowing pig, putting more thought into it. "You can do this." Casimir said in encouragement.

"I can do this." Peter repeated. First, he dissolved the other four curses he put on the pig. Smart move. Then, he gestured to where he had left his bag, and his slate jumped out of it into his hand. Casimir passed him a piece of chalk and he quickly sketched out the beginnings of a spell matrix. After a moment, he filled in a few bits, nodded to himself and started casting on the pig.

As expected from the spell matrix he drew, the pig suddenly looked very strange, as most things tended to have things like shading, and shadows. Instead, it looked more like a particularly terrible illusion, as the pig started glowing or darkening in exact proportion to the ambient light hitting it. Peter frowned at the result, clearly expecting something different.

"Ah, the Paintskin curse." Casimir said, grinning. "It's not remotely useful, as any benefit you could gain from it can be done better with a different kind of light curse, but it's an auto-function curse nonetheless." He gestured to some of his fellow proctors. "Making up a curse you've never seen before means you can call yourself a curse wizard with pride."

Peter grinned at his achievement, an ear to ear smile at accomplishing something he wasn't expected to be able to do until at least another whole semester passed. Casimir continued. "Now, fire mana."

"Got it, Teach!" He said as Casimir cleared the pig's system once more.

He didn't manage to get five curses for every mana type, but he gave it a good try.

 

[Requiem_Jeer]

Purz pulled through on the official quest, fortunately. So Casimir had a half dozen maps of the intended tunnel system, the ones the kobolds didn't dig themselves, and a mission to map out the new tunnels while the government assembles a group of knights and puts them through a crash course on fighting kobolds, as few of them have ever had to do so before.

Casimir hated mapping quests. Well, kobolds were generally unpleasant to deal with, as their universally metal weapons made their melee combat strength annoyingly high, and even if their more intricate trap mechanisms could be enjoyable to examine… there was still the matter of the dangerous traps that he was responsible for disarming safely. Responsibility sucked.

But… if you want something done right, you can't let something like that stop you from doing things yourself. First, Casimir went to the same area where he found the kobolds in the first place. Impressively, they had already fixed the damage and sealed off the entrance that the kobolds knew Casimir knew about, replacing it with solid stone. The mana density of the stone was slightly higher than the surrounding parts, so it was clearly fixed magically. Kobolds weren't very good at stone magic, but they could still use it, if slowly. The finesse and speed of the repair… that was another unusual facet of the situation.

Still, while they did make it a wall instead of a door… to an adventurer, the difference between a wall and a door was the thickness, and this? This was the thickness of a door. Just to be thorough, he pulsed stone mana throughout the cavern, allowing the shape of the terrain to percolate in his head as he brought out one of the maps, sitting at the desk that the code wheel was in to do the delicate work.

Now, despite his familiarity with the technique of sensing terrain with stone mana, he was far from an expert at it. He could only discern shapes within a couple dozen meters, instead of the hundred meter radius a trained stone sorcerer could manage. While the amount of mana used was low, it was still pretty loud, magically, so Casimir made sure to keep his senses alert for any attempt to sneak up on him. It wasn't quite as loud as an equal amount of mind mana, as mind mana was by its nature extremely easy to sense.

After ten minutes of careful sketching, Casimir was confident that he had adequately mapped out this section. Now, should he go through the stone wall, or go around to the other entrance?

…He's still undetected, so no need to go breaking doors in yet. Packing the maps back up, Casimir maneuvered around the tunnels to get to the other section they had found that was already on the maps. On the way, he found a kobold scouting party, but there were only six of them so it was a simple matter to lop off their heads with his fancy new sword and destroy the body with the condensing technique, which also provided a small amount of extra income for the mission with the empowered monster cores. Well, less 'extra income' and more 'grocery money', but the point was to make sure the corpses weren't easily found. Besides, the special soap that removed his scent worked a lot better on cleaning off monster goo than blood. Kobolds have way too good of a sense of smell to not take such precautions.

Scouting out monster encampments and dungeons was a common solo task, before his sabbatical. Every time one gets discovered, there were plenty of smart types that preferred to contract out the most dangerous parts of dungeon delving. Some people thought that the value in dungeons were the rare monsters, as they only tended to form once there were enough other monsters around, conditions that only dungeons generated. What people forgot was that most dungeons were ruins left by some other civilization that fell for some reason, and thus there was actually a goodly amount of treasure in most dungeons… but it got cleared out so quickly that only the first few teams to go in ever got any. Which was mostly the scouts, of course.

It was the only reason such jobs weren't hilariously expensive, anyway. But this time there will probably be no notable treasure. Just Casimir and his civic duty was what kept him here, occasionally pulsing more stone mana to map out the secret tunnels without actually entering them.

It was after the first time Casimir found and defeated a proper ten man squad of kobolds that he was sure that the kobolds knew he was around. Was it killing the scouts that gave him away, or the stone magic? Still, even with the easy sections mapped out he still needed to find a route into that large cavern he spotted the first time, and none of the original tunnel system he was in was close enough to it for him to detect it.

This called for some clever improvisation. Ideally, he'd have another team create a distraction so he could penetrate further into their defenses. Could his students… no. They'd die. Probably. Instead… he took out his paint and enchanting brush, creating a quick magical trap for the next kobolds who come to check on the latest casualties. Once completed, he quickly dashed back to an exit, leaving through some warehouse owned by the city currently filled with a stockpile of road building materials and dashing like a thief towards another entrance, this one at a customs checkpoint. This part was mostly luck…

After finding an entrance to the hidden tunnel system, he waited for his moment. Then, as expected, the enchantments he set exploded with mana to his senses, assaulting the kobolds caught up in it with a crude but powerful mind curse that convinced them they were under attack. Within minutes, they should be able to communicate with the other kobolds and draw most of the combat ready force over there, leaving this entrance with a token number of defenders at best.

Having waited long enough, Casimir went through the motions of this particular secret door mechanism: two-thirds down, then left, hold for two clicks, right, up to one-third, right again, four clicks, then left and all the way down, finishing the unlocking by pulling the lever outwards before returning it to the neutral position. Really, once you've seen enough of these, they're not that hard to figure out, it's just a number puzzle. It has to be, as the kobolds need to have a way to unlock it without having access to the creator.

Still, now that he was inside, it was time to move up to the edges of his map and pulse more mana, then retreat to a discreet location so he could mark it all down. When he was halfway through the drafting, a massive pulse of stone mana moved through the terrain, his mana sensing spell interpreting it as a shuddering grinding sound echoing through the tunnels. Good thing he was perched on a barrier rather than touching the stone…

…Crap. If there was any proof that the kobolds had some monster with stone magic on staff, that was it. The pulse came from deeper into the complex, from the big cavern he was just now making the marks on his map for.

Well, he didn't get to be elite-ranked by giving up when he needed to change tactics. This new result did explain why the kobolds eventually converged on wherever he used the terrain sensing spell.

This time, he inked a little magical trap where he was, before making two more after sneaking to other locations, before casting the spell once more in a fourth location, synchronized to when he set the other three to go off. With four simultaneous locations, none of which was where he was drafting his maps, the kobolds weren't going to get anywhere by following those instructions.

"That's where the traps are." Casimir whispered to himself as he finally detected the place he was going to label the 'warren entrance' rather than just as regular tunnels. It appeared to be a scything blade trap, even without sensing the metal directly the thin line of talc painted to resemble the rest of the wall was a dead giveaway. That little trick isn't something you'd find in a new kobold warren, but he already knew this place was held by high tier kobolds.

After a few more distractions and chaos sown, including a few war parties that he had to kill due to being spotted while drafting the map, Casimir was pretty confident that he had the entirety of the tunnel system on this side of the warren, all four entrances of it, mapped. He wasn't going to assume there wasn't another exit somewhere that didn't connect to these tunnels, after all. Nevethreless, that's enough work for now.

It was a mapping quest, after all. That meant killing a few dozen of the groups that had been patrolling, exhausted from a long day of frantically searching for the assassin in their midst, was strictly outside of the contract.

Luckily, Casimir's rich enough that he doesn't need to care about headcounts on kobolds.

----------------

"Alright Adventurer Toomes." Guildmaster Purz said once the meeting started. "This is Knight-Commander Carpenter. He'll be the one leading the knights into this kobold warren." The Knight Commander was a middle-aged freckle-faced human, his blonde hair and fair features only marred by the massive scar he had across his upper lip and cheeks, ruining any chance that he could grow a mustache while giving him a mocking parody of one made out of scar tissue. "Knight-Commander Carpenter? This is Adventurer Toomes. He's the one who discovered the kobold problem, and the one who accepted the mapping quest you authorized."

With the introductions handled, Casimir took out the scroll case he stashed in his enchanted bag and started bringing out the maps. "As you can see, the kobolds have a substantial network of tunnels that amount to about triple the official guerilla tunnels. Even for kobolds, this kind of work would take months. Doing it under everyone's noses? They have backup."

"So they have other monsters under their control that's helping them?" Knight-Commander Carpenter asked.

"My bet is the other way around." Casimir retorted. "These kobolds are restrained, disciplined. Something in this main chamber pulsed out stone aspected mana, I assume in an attempt to locate me for its minions. Whatever they have, it's strong, and given that the kobolds have different behavior, the simple answer is that they're under the control of another monster that's smart enough to do this kind of plot and capable enough to bully the kobolds into going along with it." The question is, what is their plot? Yes, having a powerful warren of kobolds under your control is a useful thing that could be bent to many ends… but what end was this particular mastermind going for?

"Hm. Tell me, Adventurer Toomes, what would you recommend as an approach?" Knight-Commander Carpenter questioned, although something about how he said it made Casimir bite back a sarcastic response.

"Well, first you'd want to draw out as many of them outside their defenses as possible." Casimir began. "When I was scouting, they sent out over four hundred kobolds to try and kill me. Small parties at first, but after I went through…" Casimir took out the bag of kobold monster cores he collected during the job, allowing them to spill out on the table. Fortunately, the horrible smell only came up when the blood red spheres were damaged, or wet. "-this many, they started sticking together with their roaming groups, and taking on over thirty at a time is too much for me to risk when I'm alone."

Purz picked up one of the kobold cores, examining it. "You bothered collecting these?" He asked, somewhat incredulous. "You even compressed them… Why?" It was a fair question, even that whole bag, with over a hundred cores, only increased the quest pay by a fifth, and that estimate was optimistic. Military quests paid well.

Casimir shrugged. "It's easier to lose a tail when the monster corpses aren't in good condition. I'm pretty fast at it by now." He took out the nearly empty bottle of scent neutralizing soap he had. "Speaking of, do you have any of this in the storage room? Take it out of my pay." When Casimir says that it pays to be thorough and clean up any stains after every fight, he meant it, but it could apply equally to the literal payment made to the alchemists as to the dividends of not getting sniffed out by little bear-dog men with pointy bits of metal.

Purz picked up the bottle and looked at the maker's mark gilded on the glass bottle. "...Yeah, we do. I'll get it after the meeting."

"Good." Casimir said, collecting the cores back into the pouch and then placing it back in his enchanted bag. "As I was saying, a good start to any operation would be for me to skirmish with them and lure out more kobolds before the mage knights come in and clear out the larger groups. That'll take care of a few hundred of them."

The Knight-Commander contemplated the plan. With a meaningful glance at his bag, where the kobold cores were kept, he gave a firm nod. "We've already lost strategic surprise, so that would be a good start." He started going through the maps with more detail, matching up the sheets that connected to one another and spreading them out in an attempt to get a clear picture. "Four choices, huh?"

"Minimum." Casimir replied. "I'd like to spend tomorrow trying to find other entrances and exits to the tunnel system they're using. While I'm not concerned about kobolds trying to abandon their warren, I can't say the same for whatever's calling the shots." Of course, tracking the specific exits is a bit of a fool's errand, but you can't set someone to sense the bastard making a new tunnel magically until you've removed the possibility of them using pre-existing tunnels. "That reminds me: Given this warren's demonstrated capabilities, we can't rule out that the tunnel system will change its layout between now and when the operation occurs."

That particular possibility earned Casimir a snort from the Knight-Commander. "So like real enemies, then?" He waved off Casimir's concern. "I've already stationed diviners to observe the area around the clock for large scale magic, we'll catch any redecorating they try to do."

"If there are any other sets of tunnels in this area, by the way, you should probably tell me." Casimir added. "If you don't, I'm going to find them anyway, and I'd like to avoid any misunderstandings from any twitchy security forces that may or may not be with the government."

"None that I know of." Smoothly replied the Knight-Commander. "If you find any, assume they're criminals or made by the kobolds." Or both. "Only set I know of is in Nexus." Well, naturally the government would have some secret facilities in the capital city. Casimir would be disappointed if there weren't any.

"So you can feel free to get these copied, I'll pick them back up after I take a look around in a few places outside of town that would be a good spot to hide a secret cave." Casimir said, leaning back and stretching as he prepared to leave. "Anything else you'd like to ask me before I get some dinner?"

"No, this is good work for the first day." Knight-Commander Carpenter said, still looking through the drafted maps. "The knights will complete their anti-kobold tactics course by the end of the week, just get us as much information as you can in that time and we'll eliminate this threat to the country." He chopped his hand, manifesting a blade of air around his fingers for emphasis. "It's a simple operation. Get in, kill them all. Easy."

Casimir frowned at the cavalier way he was treating this. It was bad luck to say such things about a mission…

Well, as long as he was ready for when it all went sideways, Casimir would probably pull through. Unless that stone magic source decides to make things complicated.

Which it definitely will.
----------------

 

[Requiem_Jeer]

Whatever that mysterious spellcaster was, they continued to attempt to act against Casimir as he scouted out the kobold warren.

When military and adventuring intersects, the adventurer generally has to adjust their work as appropriate. Not just in the sense that a military unit requires more… babying is accurate, although he'd never say it out loud to them. The individual soldiers, even the strongest ones, aren't as strong as an adventurer of equal experience, due to many minor differences compounding into a larger picture. Adventurers are better equipped, they've experience in more varied terrain, they're more used to surprises and being ambushed, and acting as a unit will always be slower than the reflexes of a veteran adventurer. Also, they demand more detail in their maps.

But also because the military has access to more resources than an adventuring guild, much less a team would have. When an adventuring team has a map where all the exits to the dungeon are labeled, they use that information to know where to put little traps to slow down any attempts to escape, or to make it easier to track the fleeing monsters. The military just parks an infantry unit and some fortifications next to each and every one of them, twenty men each on a rotating shift. With another set of shifts of diviners keeping attention on any magic strong enough to make a fresh exit, with even more soldiers and fortifications dedicated to keeping them safe and to muster in the event of a breakout.

Are they concerned about the spellcasting monster undermining their foundations? Nope. They have enchanted stakes that reinforce the ground and interfere with any other attempts to affect it, which both prevents that problem and also lets them stick a temporary fort on swampland, much less the heavily root-threaded soil in this part of the country.

So in some ways, Casimir's job is much more difficult. In others? Easier than ever. But today, 'more difficult' is the name of the game.

"What are you doing here!?" Casimir hissed at the collected novice adventurers.

"We're questing." Peter said as if it was obvious. "You said it was probably safe to quest a bit as long as I kept my senses open for spies." Well, yes, but that was because Casimir was fairly certain that whatever was pulling John's strings had burned their network and retreated to avoid getting hunted down, with the kobolds being the distraction to give them enough time to go. At least, that was Casimir's conclusion after acting on the extra information John had once he got the really good interrogation spells going.

But 'the enemy is laying low' is not the same as 'walk right into their allies base and pick a fight'. "You're telling me someone put up a quest for dogsteel." The steel that was created by kobolds was the main reason anyone could make money out of attacking warrens, but it was only a worthwhile endeavor in two circumstances: if there was a supply shortage of good steel, or if you could con some suckers into accepting way too little money for it. "How much are they paying?" The guild shouldn't have even posted a quest, given that it's a military operation now…

Illivere responded first: "Five silver per ingot." Given that Casimir made sure to teach them how to shape metal into ingots for easy looting and transport, that was potentially quite profitable for their level… if it wasn't for the fact that it was too dangerous.

"At least you're not getting cheated…" Casimir admitted. "But this is a quest that's too difficult for novices."

"Unprepared novices, maybe." Peter bragged. "All we need to do is take down those fancy secret doors and kill any kobolds that try to stop us." Except for the fact that Casimir's been riling them up all week and they've been coming out in groups way too large for the kids to handle.

"This isn't a normal kobold warren." Casimir insisted. "I told you guys that last time you were down here. Just wait until the operation tomorrow, you can scavenge the dogsteel the knights leave behind, maybe even protect them from a flanking attack."

Hanna and Faron finished harvesting the secret door he had found them scavenging, five dense ingots of dogsteel scooped into their loot bags. "We're done!" Hanna proclaimed, satisfied with a job well done. Then she noticed Casimir's expression. Squeaking in fear, she hid behind her much larger teammate, peeking out from behind his waist to make sure she knew when to run.

"It's good to see you again, sir." Faron said respectfully.

Casimir rubbed his temples, doing a quick check of their surroundings. "Kobolds incoming." He said, noting two separate grounds approaching. "This way." The familiar rumbling of the stone monster's tremorsense echoed throughout the cavern to Casimir's magically attuned senses. "Quickly." He added.

To their credit, Casimir's students moved without complaint, Peter even grinning at how the argument ended without having to concede the point. Unfortunately, unlike whenever Casimir moved around after being noticed… the students couldn't conceal their steps and position from the stone monster's senses. While Casimir did his best to provide some distractions, attempting to throw the monster off, with an extra four pairs of feet Casimir could only curse as stone aspected mana surged, cutting off their escape with a stone wall that rang with reinforcement magic. Magic that Casimir probably didn't have the oomph to break through.

"Well… crap." Casimir said as he drew his sword. It had a more permanent set of enchantments now, the design inlaid with a mithril/silver alloy. With his Master's improvements to the sharpness, he should be able to cut through kobolds without getting the blade stuck in a corpse, which is one of the most common ways one loses their weapon when battling groups of monsters.

As the kobolds advanced, the students fell into a support formation to Casimir. The hall they were trapped in was wide enough that Faron and Peter were able to fight at Casimir's sides, holding back the press of bodies with their magic and ferocity in melee. Illivere focused on supporting Peter, while Hanna instead supported Faron.

They had learned lessons from their last engagement with these enemies, and quite honestly Casimir could admit that their assistance in keeping the dog men's numbers from being leveraged against him was vital in him not dying. Hanna channeled her magic into effective spells that could kill multiple targets with minimal friendly fire, like Wind Disc and Lightning Bolt, and helped hamper their advance by using some life spell that Casimir couldn't immediately identify to have mushroom-vine things gather the corpses and bind them into obstacles the kobolds had to maneuver around. Illivere was radiating some kind of active mind spell at the kobolds, and as active magic was a lot more difficult to identify effects with than more organized magic, Casimir was pretty sure it was why the kobolds kept getting in each other's way and kept going around the corpses instead of trying anything clever with them.

Suddenly, the rumbling sensation of the stone monster's tremorsense echoed once more throughout the battlefield… but the pulse didn't come from the central cavern.

"Ah, Casimir." Said an impossible voice. "It's been a while. How's David been, lately? Luci wouldn't forgive me if I didn't inquire while I had you."

The kobolds had stopped coming, with the last of them cut down. Casimir focused once more on his magical senses… of course. "Magnus." Casimir said, as calmly as he could manage. "Kids, remember the monster lore lesson from three weeks ago. It's relevant."

----------------

The guild hall was pretty busy this time of day, as word had gotten around about an elite-ranked adventurer teaching lessons and a lot of the other novices and standards decided to listen in, which Casimir allowed.

"Today we'll be talking about revenant-class monsters." Casimir began. "Undead monsters, as you know, manifest in improperly warded areas where the bodies of intelligent beings rot, potentially years after the body can no longer be identified. The quality of the undead depends on how magically potent that corpse is. They can also be created artificially, although the specifics of that is forbidden knowledge." Artificial monsters were something that has been pursued by military researchers for centuries. Undead were the only kind that is widely known to be possible, and while Casimir did know the theory behind it; as it was a combination of negative, curse, and enchantment methodologies, it was forbidden for a reason.

"Revenant-class undead are the strongest varieties. While the specific level of magical power required can vary, if you have an elite or heroic adventurer die on a job… You'll want to recover the body." Unless the soul was destroyed with negative magic. While it's not the preferred method of preventing high tier undead from forming, it has been confirmed to work. "What distinguishes a Revenant from a more ordinary undead monster is that it retains full memories and prowess from when they were alive, with additional powers and properties as well."

"Which kind of revenant-class undead depends on the nature of the deceased's magic. This is relevant because a Revenant will have additional powers on top of their magic based on what they were. A wizard forms a lich, which is a projection. Their monster core is external to their body and usually hidden, they cannot be permanently destroyed until you have destroyed their monster core. Sorcerers instead form Wraiths, which are kind of like… loose and heavily aspected mana coalescing around their core, which floats around and has a certain set of magical defenses to allow them to move, speak, etcetera regardless of their mana type. It's the closest any monster ever gets to being a proper spirit, honestly."

"Sir!" Faron said as he raised his hand. "Are Wraiths different based on the mana aspect of the sorcerer?"

"Yep." Casimir replied. "Air, fire, force, mind… Wraiths that are formed from those are fast and have fragile cores that can be relatively easy to destroy. More solid aspects, like metal and stone… Those are massive pains to deal with, as they armor their cores more densely than dragonscales. Pray you never have to deal with a Stone Wraith, as they're smart enough to stay underground, where their home field advantage is nigh insurmountable."

Now, where was he? Oh yes, Mummies. "Now, one of the things that distinguish the four primary categories of spirit mage is what kind of Revenant they spawn. Priests rise as mummies, for example…"

----------------

"David doesn't like talking to me, so I'm afraid I can't say much on how he's been doing." Casimir said as he paid close attention to what kind of magic the Stone Wraith was doing during the discussion. Nothing yet, but that didn't mean much, given the environment.

"She'll be devastated." Magnus said without a trace of sympathy, a joking smile on the floating stone mask that was his face. His monster core was still mostly quiescent, the reinforcement enchantment he placed to cage them didn't have an active mana feed. "With that out of the way, I believe it's time to move on to the primary matter of business?" Which was killing them, naturally.

"How do you exist?" Casimir asked. "I thought it was impossible to become a revenant if you were killed with soul-shredding."

"That would be telling." Magnus replied. "Oh but where are my manners? I believe I still need to be introduced to your little loadstones there."

"Of course." Casimir said. "Students, this is the Wraith formerly known as Magnus Stonefist, The Indomitable Pillar. Magnus, this is a novice-ranked adventuring team I've been teaching. I've become a teacher at the Academy, you know." Pointing to each individual student, he introduced them by name. "This is Peter, Faron, Illivere, and Hanna." Casimir made sure to emphasize the pronunciation of Hanna's name, to be clear on the difference between her and Hana.

"Charmed." Magnus replied, shaping a stone hand that stroked his stone beard. Was he distracted enough? "I wouldn't have taken you to be the teaching type, but then again, you were always very dwarfish when it came to your magic, quite respectable in your dedication to mastering your spells. Not like David at all." In hindsight, they really didn't treat David very well as a group, did they? He was only kept around because he was Luci's little brother… "I suppose it does make sense that you would eventually retreat into some research program eventually."

"What's taking so long?" A decrepit feminine voice rang out from nowhere. The sour taste of space magic suddenly invaded Casimir's senses, as a Mummy wrapped in cloth scriptures depicting the Nine Blasphemies of Helel, erupted from nothing. "You know that the Master wants this…" Luci turned towards the group, and Casimir started sweating at having to deal with two elite-ranked revenants. "Oh, you're just being a coward, I see how it is."

Casimir resisted the impulse to shout in offense. He thought he had a pretty good shot at at least scoring a mutual kill! Which is pretty good given the circumstances. Casimir subtly drew his knife in his off hand, unlike Wraiths, the special properties of a Mummy had to do with advancing their magic, rather than making them difficult to kill, and it would not be the first time he had to kill a Revenant of a friend. He can do this.

Magnus, on the other hand, was very offended. "You know as well as I do how slippery this bastard is. He's the one who killed the Master the first time, after all."

"With help." Luci insisted. "Those brats are not helping, those are acolytes at best."

"Which is meaningless." Magnus retorted. "Casimir couldn't protect a chicken coop, so they're not an exploitable weakness." Casimir was suddenly reminded of a journal he read in Master's study once, about another adventurer's experience with fighting the Revenants of dear friends. Invariably, Revenants savored inflicting misery on those they knew in life, using words and cutting insults. Master always thought it was because the soul that was used as a component for their formation resisted using violence against those they loved in life, and used harsh language to provoke a fight rather than be the first attacker.

"Should I kill them first, then?" Luci said, with an odd wavering in her voice… Casimir was probably imagining things, Master's theories on the remnants of personality in Revenants were incredibly optimistic, and couldn't possibly be true… right?

Still, if her theory was correct… he could maybe get them talking more, right? "Hey Luci." Casimir asked. "How does your casting work, as a mummy? We talked about this before you died, remember? Does your understanding of the magic you used in life expand, or is there a replacement spirit that grants you echoes of your old magic?" Luci always favored the second explanation, but Casimir thought it impossible for a spirit to be able to grant such a wide variety of magic to former spirit mages.

"That's a secret!" Luci snapped, sounding a bit more like herself… well, more like her grandmother, anyway.

"Does that mean I'm right?" Casimir baited, giving his best roguish grin to his former teammate.

"No!" She insisted. "I'm right, and don't you forget it!" Gotcha.

Magnus seemed to understand what she just did, as the stone mask that formed his face shattered with the force of his palm meeting it.

An opportunity! Casimir leapt backwards, stabbing his stiletto into the right spot to shatter the simple but powerful stone reinforcement enchantment with a quick negative siphon, using the absorbed mana to blow a hole in the wall. His students did not need any orders to rush through that wall. As Casimir ran, he gathered mana and released it in a scattering pattern into the stone, creating unstable mana voids and growth points that created a small tremor… and absolutely ruined Magnus's ability to affect the stone around them for at least a few seconds.

Another weakness to Revenants was that they tended to fight exactly like their old selves. If you push them to make a snap decision, they'll leave behind the inherent sadism and violence that a monster would ordinarily have and just do whatever they would when alive… which a lot of the time is still pretty violent.

Luci, on the other hand… her first impulse when a fight breaks out is always the same: blind everyone. An immensely bright flash of light shot out from the hole, accomplishing absolutely nothing as Peter had already integrated the Sunsight curse into the regular set he passed out to his allies for most situations, so he could do the exact same trick Luci just pulled.

Which meant that the group had time to reach the nearest exit, rushing out into the military fort in a panicked mess. They were already ready, as Magnus's opening salvo had put them on high alert. The revenants were smart, however, so they didn't pursue and instead retreated back into the main cavern, the only place that Casimir had yet to get close enough to map.

Knight-Commander Carpenter arrived, scowling at Casimir's students. "Report." He barked out.

This is not going to be a pleasant conversation…

 

[Requiem_Jeer]

"What I don't understand, " said the Knight-Commander after the explanation. "-is why no one put the Adventurer's guild on alert for unaccounted for dead elite-ranks."

Casimir shook his head. "They were accounted for." He explained. "The Soul-Devouring Dragon was a master of Negative Magic. He killed them with Soul Drain, they shouldn't have been able to form into Revenants."

The Knight Commander digested that information. "What about Necromancy? Could the dragon have kept the souls and turned them into Revenants?"

"Unlikely… but I don't know enough to call it impossible." Casimir replied. Necromancy was poorly understood, as experimentation was forbidden and what little information did exist tended to be locked away. The Archmages of the Negative Magic department might be able to assess viability. "The Soul-Devouring Dragon is dead, for one. I led the Hero-ranked team The Gold Hunters to its lair and we killed it within the week of Magnus and Luci's death. They'd need to have both reanimated them and sent them away in that time frame, and given that they mentioned a master…" It was unusual all around, really.

"About that." Knight-Commander Carpenter said. "Is that normal for Revenants? Having a master? If you ignored the fact that they shouldn't exist, were they otherwise normal?"

Casimir nodded. "More or less. Revenants, like all intelligent monsters, have a certain amount of antipathy and sadism towards all life. As they still retain most of their personality, you should see more exceptions to the blind spots all such monsters have in common than you see, but you don't. That said, masterless revenants have been known to kill themselves, if they were exceptionally disciplined or honorable in life. Usually, revenants are commanded by Crypt Lords, a monster that is, from an academic standpoint, not considered undead despite having so much in common with the subtype." It was why Revenants were usually accompanied by many examples of lesser undead. "So I'd expect the main cavern of the warren to have a population of undead." Maybe even additional revenants that Casimir didn't have a personal connection to.

"Well, all we can do for now is incorporate anti-teleportation measures into our fortifications." Said Knight-Commander Carpenter. "What limitations does she have on that spell? I was unaware that it was one of Helel's miracles."

"It isn't." Casimir explained. "Luci's always preferred to gain an academic understanding of how spirit magic worked, and that allowed her to use nonstandard spells within the mana types provided by Helel's connection. In particular, space magic from the Banishment miracle." Casimir shrugged. "However, I suspect that she will only be able to teleport either herself or other durable undead, as she wasn't able to teleport things consistently without inflicting some kind of damage to them." It was a handy feature when one wanted to teleport bombs into the midsts of enemies, but it wasn't useful for most things you would want teleportation magic for.

"Well that's something." The Knight-Commander said. "Wait, if she's bad at space magic… I'll need to talk to some of the Specialists."

Casimir chuckled at the clear eureka moment. "Luci's magic senses have always been somewhat mediocre, so whatever plan you have, it should work." After a pause, he added: "Well, exactly what benefits Revenants get over their skills in life is far from being completely understood. But it's worth preparing, I think."

The Knight-Commander stood up and started to leave the tent. "Right. Lots to do, report first thing in the morning tomorrow for the assault." He started calling out for his elite subordinates for the last minute preparation.

Casimir lazily saluted. "Yes sir." Turning to his shamefaced students, Casimir frowned at them and sharply gestured for them to follow him.

They shrank a bit at Casimir's withering expression, but dutifully followed instructions.

---------------

"-nearly ruined everything, to the point of getting everyone killed, with only blind fucking luck being responsible for our continued survival!" Casimir finished off his fiery, invective-laden rant at his students. "What do you have to say for yourselves?"

The four of them glanced at each other, silently communicating on who would be the first to speak up. Eventually, Illivere cleared her throat. "We wished to contribute."

Ugh. "You're still novices. You should have just taken a normal quest and take on random monsters, something you can handle." After a moment, Casimir decided to ask something of substance. "How did you get a quest for dogsteel, anyway? There shouldn't have been any, given that the kobold issue was a military matter."

After a moment of silence, Casimir sighed. "I guess it doesn't matter. You wanted to fight kobolds, so you found an excuse."

"They weren't doing anything!" Peter suddenly shouted. "There's a potential invasion and the army just sits on their butts and has you dive in alone to do their jobs for them?"

Why must he be cursed with students that were so stupid? "Even adventurers don't wander into kobold warrens without scouting, Peter." Casimir gestured in the direction of the warren. "When you have a problem big enough to call the military, like an infestation of monsters that aren't native to the area, containment is important. I've been exhaustively cataloging every entrance and exit to that warren over the last week, and if you had the patience to wait until literally tomorrow, things would have been fine!"

Really, that was overstating things. Knowing that there was an unknown but potent stone magic using monster and knowing that there were at least two elite-ranked revenants supporting the warren were two very different things, and as a result, their fumbling actually provided valuable intelligence.

But that didn't mean it wasn't a stupid move on their part. How to punish them? …Has he ever had to punish them before? There was the usual 'succeed in training or get more training' stuff, but actual punishments? Not really. "Your gear." He eventually said. "There is to be no adventure, and to that end, all of your gear will be locked inside Master Southwind's residence. Then, you will report to Professor Thorne with the instructions that he put you through as much physical training that is magically possible." Given that Casimir and Thorne had actually theorized what such a regimen would look like, they would be kept busy for days.

With Casimir's judgment rendered, Faron saluted sharply, accepting the punishment with grace. Hanna, on the other hand, looked like Casimir had instead ordered her to chop off a limb in penance. Peter was somewhere in between, and Illivere's impassive face was as rigid as stone, the ordeal ahead of her enough to crack her ironclad composure and paralyze her with stress.

"Get going, or I'll tack on something else." Casimir said, shooing them away. He didn't bother threatening them further to ensure compliance, Faron will make sure of it. If not, he'll just expel them. He spent way too much time on threat assessment for this kind of mistake to be acceptable.

Now it's just a matter of dealing with the monsters wearing his friend's faces. This is going to suck.

----------------

Anima, as an island nation, did not have the largest army in the world. However, Casimir would dare anyone to find a nation with a more elite force than the mage-knights. Each one was trained thoroughly both physically and magically, utilizing shaping magic to create weapons and armor with enough power to render themselves basically invincible against any combatant not backed up with magical augmentations of some kind.

On top of that, the army included many powerful wizards with more specialized magical roles, and each mage-knight was trained in collaborative casting to allow those specialists to unleash truly massive spell effects.

There were still less elite troops, naturally, only capable with basic magic and equipped with enchanted arms and armor, but those usually just manned guard posts and the fortifications that the specialists created.

So when Casimir learned that the unit of mage-knights that were sent to assist numbered three dozen, with four specialists, his first reaction was "These kobolds are hosed." Sure, on an individual basis Casimir could take any two of them, but when you have forty full fledged wizards working in concert, there were very few monsters that were both organized and powerful enough to defeat them.

Besides, if any of those things show up Casimir will just kill it himself. The Revenant's presence caused the plan to bait a few hundred kobolds out for slaughter outside of their defenses to be scrapped.

Instead, they skipped straight to the part where he leads the group and handles the traps, so he was still in front. Not that this was an imposition, as two of the specialists were domain wizards, and the first thing they did once they entered the underground was, with the help of a literal barrel of alchemically stored stone mana, establishing a Stone Domain, flooding the area with stone mana and shifting it slowly to follow the formation of knights. Within this doman, the tunnels flexed wider, to allow the knights to move with ease, and the attempts for Magnus to seize control over the stone around them were rebuffed with the ease of warding off an insect. As a powerful Wraith, it wouldn't be nearly as easy when the revenant was close or within the area, but from a long distance like this? It was overkill.

That said, domain magic was incredibly powerful, and was not easily contested… but there was a reason it was considered primarily a defensive discipline, as when the magically reinforced and heavily trapped entrance to the warren came up, the domain's advance halted like water meeting a dam.

Knight-Commander Carpenter noticed immediately when the otherwise innocuous dead end failed to bend aside to their advance. "Time to earn your pay, Toomes." He said with a savage grin.

"On it." Casimir said as he shifted a section of wall aside, grabbed the lever, and pulsed mana to double-check if the mechanism had changed. Casimir hummed. "They changed the settings, give me a minute." It needed to end in that state in… three moves. The lever had four positions, each tick doing that, that, that, and that… so four ticks there, three there, that's a flip operator, triggered by pushing in that position… what order? Three steps, six possible combinations… definitely not that one first… "Got it." He pulled the lever down two thirds of the way, pulled it left, let it click four times, ignored the magic trap priming, put it back to the top, shoved the lever into its own base, pulled it back to the two-thirds position, pulled it right, let it tick three times, finishing by letting go so the lever could snap back into its rest position while the primary bolt clunked open.

"How do you do that?" One of the mage knights that Casimir didn't catch the name of asked.

"It's just a number puzzle." Casimir said, waving the question off. "Once you learn what the gears mean, it's just math." He couldn't even take credit for the discovery on how the bloody things worked, he just read the book some long dead wizard wrote and spent two hours a day solving paper examples of the puzzles for weeks until he could do it all in his head. That was back during that big kobold population explosion back when he was a fresh veteran-rank, though. "If you want to do this for a living, talk to me after this is over and I'll point you to some books." Some adventurers liked to say kobolds were too stupid to change their designs even if adventurers could bypass them, but honestly the list of people who could solve them in less than twenty minutes of careful examination and without taking out a chalk slate to solve it was quite small. It was still a very effective defense.

Especially as the second he stepped through the door, Casimir signaled for a stone wall from the domain wizard as he had to stop and jam enchanted metal spikes through the stone and into vital parts of the other traps that were going to go off despite him having opened the door without setting any off, as the kobolds armed them while Casimir was working. "It's clear." Casimir said as he leapt up to perch on the ceiling, allowing the knights to charge right into the oncoming wave of kobolds after the stone wall, riddled with metal crossbow bolts, receded.

As the battle continued, Casimir dropped back down and disarmed the jammed traps properly and recovered the enchanted spikes. After discarding half of them that were broken back into his loot bag with some of the salvaged trap parts, he set the spikes back into the leg holsters he added to his ensemble for the quest and looked at the bored-looking Specialist wizard that was hanging in the back. "They do anything yet?"

"Nope." Replied the taciturn wizard. "Not a single mote of space magic, and nothing beyond tremorsense from the wraith."

Troubling. "Maybe they're rabbiting?" He could only hope.

"I'll be ready when they do." Said the wizard. He put his hand out, his skin looking even darker in the poor light of the cavern. "Specialist Coralblade, by the way." Casimir shook the elf's hand as the knights finished up their battle.

"Elite Adventurer Toomes." Casimir replied, although he was 90% sure the elf already knew his name. With that, the two lapsed back into silence.

"Alright Toomes, you're up!" Shouted the Knight-Commander. "Lead us to the main chamber."

The entire area was reinforced by Magnus' wraith, so the domain wizards had to actively fight off each attempt to attack the group through the terrain rather than just taking control of the local stone and blocking any attempt for Magnus to stop them. In other words, they were waltzing into a completely different stone aspected domain, and that really slowed things down.

Fortunately, despite the annoying loud thrum of Magnus's attempts to prevent the group from penetrating their defenses and the even louder scraping noises of the domain wizards defending against it, Casimir was still able to use metal mana to sense the traps, examining their shape and disarming them with the same ease as before, although he had to leave his enchanted spikes behind for expediency's sake. Small groups of kobolds tried to do a flanking maneuver or five, but they were easily repelled by squads or even pairs of knights before retreating.

But that was why he had the mage knights supply him with two hundred of the bloody things over the week, as they really weren't that special to make, they just used higher quality steel and enchantments than one would normally use for something disposable. But if you really had to disable traps quickly, jamming or breaking mechanisms normally protected by two inches of solid stone was the best option. The reinforcement of the stone that Magnus provided made re-using them an iffy prospect anyway, half of them were dulled enough to break the etched enchantments after a single use. Even his mithril-gilded set would likely require reforging after three or four uses under these conditions…

"Clear." Casimir said after one last strike with his trap kit's hammer, driving yet another spike into a spring-loaded blade trap, preventing it from resetting after he deliberately triggered it. "It's right through here, big column with four floors, this is the second floor, central shaft with rooms around them. Can't tell exactly how many kobolds are in there…" All the interference from the domain conflict dulled Casimir's ability to sense the subtle mana of monster cores. "Hundreds at least, though." He also couldn't tell what was there beyond the kobolds, as Magnus's presence was overwhelming everything in the section of the room he was in. "Wraith's a level or two above the entrance, can't tell what's around him."

Coralblade, having slightly better senses than Casimir, called out a correction: "The Mummy's done something with space mana, can't tell what, but it's lasting. Can't tell where, either." Is that what that high-pitch whine his mana senses is detecting is?

Casimir thought for a moment. "No idea what that is." Usually she restricted herself to using the Holy Sword miracle before a fight, as Helel was rather light on appropriate spells. Pun intended.

The Knight Commander grinned at the impending violence. "You all know your parts in the plan. For the glory of Anima!"

Everyone there, Casimir included, shouted as they charged into the enemy's base.

 

[Requiem_Jeer]

The plan was pretty simple: the first thing that Casimir does disables any mechanical traps that they have set up, but you usually didn't see that in the main chamber, so all Casimir had to do was disable two hastily constructed ones in the floor with a trio of enchanted spikes Propelled through the stone.

Any actual ambush attacks towards him was to be blocked by one of the domain wizards, who bent the stone domain into a crushing force effect right ahead of Casimir, which made the massive wave of dogsteel bolts plummet down from the air and into the ground, ruining the traps even further.

With that out of the way, Casimir spared a moment to examine the battlefield as the knights rushed into it. Kobold warriors typically had a decent sense of what tactical situations favored them, and strived to fight only in those situations. Unfortunately, the more common kobolds they commanded were easily distracted at the opportunity to fight and kill, so you usually saw a quick charge whenever you engaged kobolds, even when the advantage was yours. The rest used those idiots as a distraction to disengage and fight on more favorable ground, typically.

The thing was, this fortified cavern represented the best possible conditions for battle, and they knew that. So all of the less intelligent kobolds charged the formation of knights en masse, ripe for the slaughter. In these conditions, the knights deemed the bets combination of shaped arms and armor to be the same setup that Faron had used in the initial battle: force armor to make the universally sharp and dense dogsteel weapons unable to penetrate, and water weapons to allow for rapid reconfiguration and to minimize friendly fire as the kobolds did their best to either stay at reach with spears or to slip within the guards of the knights to knife them in the gaps of the shaped armor.

But that wasn't what Casimir needed to worry about, as the knights had things well in hand when it came to the bulk of the forces. The cavern was a typical example of kobold engineering, the layout being a single large shaft surrounding a metal pillar that had ladders on all sides. The shaft held four floors, with the entrance the group had used being on the second floor. Kobolds used a hexagonal layout for each floor, with three to six rooms on each one, depending on the warren's needs, but no matter what there were six metal bridges connecting the central pillar to the rooms. The Revenants were not immediately visible, so Casimir immediately assumed Magnus would be in the most inconvenient possible location: above them.

"Watch for collapses!" Casimir called out to the domain wizards, as he leapt out towards the central pillar, activating a few of his mobility curses to allow him to easily scramble up the ladders as he scouted things out with his physical eyes, as mana sensing beyond the borders of a domain you were inside was unacceptably difficult.

As expected, the kobolds didn't like him doing that, but his senses were able to detect and avoid any attempt to spoil his footing and he was too nimble for their uncoordinated volleys to accomplish anything. He mumbled as he observed the kobold's positions, using the enchanted nose ring that he had been provided to convey his messages to the Knight-Commander. "Second floor, full excavation with four sections. Sorcerer support in section two…" Casimir leapt to the kobold sorcerers, allowing them to form a spiked barrier to impale him… before using that same barrier as a pivot to redirect the force of his movement upwards magically, bouncing off the ceiling to get inside their protective circle and decapitating all four of the magical support with two swings of his sword. "...neutralized."

Casimir grabbed the back of that spiked barrier and swung it around, injuring many but killing few of the other kobolds that were supposed to protect the sorcerers. With that bit of breathing room, Casimir leapt out of the area just in time to avoid the stalagmites that suddenly formed in an attempt to perforate him. "Too slow!" He announced to Magnus as he scrambled back onto the central metal pillar, which drastically reduced Magnus's ability to attack him.

"Now where are they?" Casimir mumbled, climbing the central pillar to check the other floor. Activating the enchanted nose ring again, he started rattling off troop dispositions to the Knight-Commander. "First floor, six segments, mostly clear. Just a few emplacements that they're reloading in segments two and five. " At Knight-Commander Carpenter's confirmation, sent to the enchanted earring he was wearing for this operation, he continued. "Third floor, three segments… Revenant spotted!" Magnus had attempted to conceal his position by hiding in a private hutch, but the domain that the knights were pushing forward recoiled in a way that it only would when a competing one was there, and the magic that wraiths used to animate their distributed body parts was essentially a small domain, so that was a dead giveaway… or a decoy.

Still, if he doesn't have line of sight, that was an opportunity. Casimir ran across the air, creating tiny platforms of force rather than touching the ground, his weight curse making him light enough to travel on such weak barriers without pause. There were a few kobolds that were a bit higher tier than normal in the same area, but it was a work of seconds to dispatch them.

However, those seconds were an opportunity that Magnus used to notice the anomalous movements of his guards and open up his hidey hole, exploding out a bunch of stone shards that unerringly traveled straight to Casimir rather than scattering and hitting his minions.

Casimir immediately leapt upwards towards the ceiling, preparing a stone wall to block the homing shrapnel spell. Unfortunately, the stone was too strongly held fast by Magnus's aura, and Casimir instead was forced to rely on his armor and reflexes to minimize the damage.

"Who's slow now, eh?" Shouted the floating collection of rocks that impersonated Casimir's old friend. He attempted to use that ceiling to entrap Casimir, but a small mana void inserted into the stone with a tap of his finger slowed down Magnus's spell long enough for Casimir to leap clear.

"Still you." Casimir replied as he used more tiny force barriers to remain at least half a meter from any stone surfaces as his sword flashed as it served death to the kobolds. In response, the wraith gathered more mana and used Magnus's favored strategy: armoring up and advancing to put boot to ass personally.

Where the hell was Luci? Casimir couldn't detect a hint of hostile mana beyond stone and metal from the kobolds and Magnus, so this probably wasn't a trap, just typical monster arrogance.

The wraith moved forth on a wave of stone, moving the ground to move himself rather than dropping his stance. He shaped a hammer of stone, runed and intricate like one would see in a mural of a legendary battle, and began to attack Casimir with it, his wide swings simple to dodge as Casimir sheathed his sword and reached into his secondary space-magic satchel, which held only one thing.

"You know Magnus, becoming a nigh-immortal wraith isn't going to change the fact that you suck at fighting anything that's not a crowd or ten times your size." Casimir commented as he brandished his ax.

Now, Peter's hand axes well good pieces of work for most situations, not ideal of course but the enchantments allowed even those tiny things to pack enough of a wallop that the normal issues for using lighter weapons were minimized, and allowed him to become more comfortable at the kind of skirmishing that Casimir is best suited to teach.

But a set of enchantments that allowed a forearm sized weapon to hit like a lumberjack's swing was even more effective when one used an axe so large that it was typically considered to be appropriate for executions instead of combat. Granted, such enchantments also required a lot more mana to power when dealing with such a large weapon, but that's why he only uses it when he really needs a big hit.

Casimir twirled the feather-light weapon, deflecting a barrage of stone chips that Magnus tried to sneak past him as he advanced once more. Casimir swung his axe, forcing Magnus to back off and abort his swing or else get bisected. "You're using that thing?" Questioned Magnus. "You can't hit anything with that that you don't practically tie down, why bother?"

"I wanted to give you the chance to dodge." Casimir replied glibly. "It's not like you could dodge a thing that didn't send a letter a day in advance."

At that insult, Magnus roared as he built up his stone armor even more, switching from the configuration he called 'Stalwart Gate', with straight lines and broad facing, to instead his 'Grand Golem' configuration, which incorporated so much stone that he needed to constantly reshape it in order to move properly, as he looked exactly like a statue of himself if he was triple the height. His new hammer was also just as intricate as before, but the runes were instead configured in a way to allow him to enchant the thing on the spot, a truly advanced sorcerous technique. When Magnus was alive, it was an exhausting spell that amplified his strength, defense, and even speed to tremendous levels, enough to match a dragon blow for blow.

As a wraith, the rules changed a bit. They were one of the closest one could get to being a spirit without actually being one, so breaking their spells forcibly caused pain, which made them slower and less efficient repairing shaped armor than someone of flesh and blood.

Casimir ducked a swing, rolled to avoid a kick, and then leapt away as the tearing sounds of space magic put him back into panic mode. Such instincts saved his life, as Luci fell through the space rift she had created, sword first.

"Damn it!" Cursed Magnus. "You screwed it up!"

"You're the one who wanted to ambush our scout!" Retorted Luci as she re-assembled the various tears and distortions space rift travel caused in her ragged, desiccated body. She gestured with her glowing sword, clearly based on Helel's Holy Sword but instead of light aspected mana, it gave a foreign whirring and grinding sound that Casimir belatedly realized was space-aspected mana. He definitely didn't want to touch that.

Mummies were the rarest kind of revenant, as the churches were quite invested in performing proper funeral rites to their clergy. As such, the exact capabilities of that subspecies was rather thin on the ground. Luci's tacit admission that her magic was because of an alternative spirit that empowered mummies was quite useful, even if it's unclear whether it works the same for wendigos and hungry ghosts, or monsters in general. What is known is that while they generally can cast any miracle of their former patrons, they also gain the ability to cast warped versions of those same spells. It was why Casimir preferred the theory that the revenants just understood the spells they were using and just cast like a wizard would instead.

Activating his nose ring again, Casimir mumbled a message to the Knight-Commander: "Both known revenants are with me."

His earring provided the commander's near-immediate response."First two floors are secured. Expect support shortly."

Their argument over, Luci flexed the fingers of her off hand into the familiar prayer mudra that indicated that she was preparing to use some kind of magic in an instant, although as spirit magic didn't build mana in the same way as more manual magic, Casimir could only guess what effects she had readied, beyond the knowledge that it was a spell granted by her patron rather than manually casting. Magnus presented the base of his hammer, and after leaping onto it, Magnus launched Luci forward before charging himself in her wake.

With a quick gesture, Casimir stuck his ax into the ground, and instead of falling back, he cast a mind curse in an eyeblink, which didn't actually do anything important beyond making her unable to perceive his ax, but it didn't need to, as it forced Luci to make the decision to either commit to her attack pattern before Casimir could capitalize on whatever he just did or to abort so as to not fall into whatever trap he just laid. He was prepared for either option.

Seeing him apparently prepared for her, she immediately picked the latter one, holding out her space sword in front of her, only to use it as a pivot to change her direction, as if it became locked in place for an instant. "So that's what that does…" Casimir noted. It looked useful.

Magnus, assuming correctly that cursing him through that armor would be prohibitively difficult, continued on his attack vector, preparing to crush Casimir with the several tons of stone he was walking around with.

Casimir instead picked his ax back up, measured his swing, and zipped in the opposite direction that Luci went in to avoid the overhand swing, expending the accumulated mana in his armor's force absorption enchantments to do so as fast as possible, and after catching himself and channeling that force into his swing, made the feather-light ax instead weigh about two tons as it expended its internal reserve of mana.

Needless to say, when you swing something that heavy, even a multi-ton construct of mana tends to just fall apart. Casimir cursed as Magnus moved his monster core just in time to avoid the cutting force, but the top half of his golem body was still shattered and scattered towards Luci, who had to abort whatever she was going to do in favor of deflecting the barrage.

Despite that, Magnus still needed a moment to recover from that blow, so Casimir was able to use a followup swing of lesser but still impressive power to cleave his wraith body in half, although frustratingly the revenant's core still moved out of the way just in time.

Luci wasn't idle, either, as she used the Light Body spell to partially turn parts of herself into light, significantly increasing her speed and forcing Casimir to escape and stow away his ax, or else find out what a space-aspected blade can do to someone.

Despite the learning experience that was sure to be, Casimir chose the former option and allowed the knights that had finally arrived to rush the pair of revenants, swapping out their water weapons for metal hammers, good against the stone armor.

Luci was still hilariously dangerous, however, so it was a good thing that Casimir focused on cursing her as Specialist Coralblade came up the ladder. Luci grunted as Casimir applied a large weight curse, followed by a spasm curse on her arms, forcing her to focus on keeping hold of her space blade.

Luci arrested her weapon's position, invoking her patron's miracles to break the curses after a second of delay and a set of four mudras, ones unfamiliar to Casimir. As she grabbed her space blade again, Coralblade finally accomplished the task he was brought along to do: completely ruin any magic the revenants decided to cast.

The space blade immediately started to destabilize, forcing Luci to concentrate on keeping it from exploding in her hand, eventually releasing the mana in some kind of spatial cutting spell… which was also countered by the negative wizard the army had attached to the operation.

"Magnus!" Luci shouted. "Back to the Master!" On cue, the animate stone that was being suppressed by the knights halted all motion, and the malignant lights in the mummy's eyes faded, her flesh dissolving into dust as both magical cores vanished to Casimir's senses.

…How did they do that!?

 

[Requiem_Jeer]

The kobolds were pretty easy to clean up after the revenants retreated. Whatever investment their master had put into them, they were clearly written off after Luci deemed it too dangerous for them.

For his part, Casimir made sure to gather the weapons and tear apart every single trap and take the compressed ingots of dogsteel for himself. In the next few weeks, a team of military engineers will lace the tunnels with some magical alarms before slowly filling them in with solid stone, both removing the potential for the place to form into a proper dungeon and altering the nearby garrisons if anyone else decides to dig out a tunnel complex in the same place. Where possible, future military patrols for the whole country for the next few years at least will include diviners trained in underground surveying specifically to catch more plots that have dug out their own cave systems.

At first, Casimir thought it was a little bit overboard, but Knight-Commander Carpenter explained that while the monster suppression patrols were all well and good, the idea of there being a real plot with monsters having secret bases to hunt down has a lot of the troops quite excited. Which made perfect sense.

Still, there was plenty to do in the aftermath. "So that's the situation, Abbess." Casimir explained.

Abbess Redpoint couldn't really hum, but gave the Aviost equivalent of one as she digested the news. "The Guiding Light, a revenant… We knew that she wasn't in the arms of the Goddess, but to think she was in the clutches of The Adversary?" The Helelites generally accepted the Malignant Force Theory behind monster formation, where there was a 'dark god' that deliberately corrupted impure mana flows into manifesting monsters. 'The Adversary' was the name they decided to use for that god. There were too many holes in the theory for Casimir to truly accept it, but his days of pointlessly arguing with priests are behind him. "Darker news would be unimaginable." Wait, if Luci's not-entirely-reliable admittance to a spirit replacing Helel with her magic instead of having some way to hijack the goddess's miracles means anything, the Helelites could be more correct than Casimir initially thought…

Nevertheless, he still had some empty platitudes to deliver. "Were the situations reversed, Luci wouldn't even hesitate to dedicate herself to the liberation of our souls, and I intend to make a similar " if less zealous and ironclad, "-oath." Granted, Casimir still doesn't know how the hell they managed to escape, but he's got some theories, and ideas. He's currently operating under the theory that it's a negative space magic technique, as while even Specialist Coralblade didn't detect a whiff of space magic attributable to the escape, negative magic spells are notably more difficult to pick out among louder magical effects, there was still the remnants of that space blade complicating any such detection, and space magic can be harder to detect than other mana types if the spellcaster is beyond your range of detection.

Between those three facts, a hypothetical 'reclaim' effect that draws the mana of a monster core across a long distance could be very difficult to detect and trace, and if one could hypothetically reform the monster around the core… For normal monsters, the difference between that and making a new monster is meaningless, but for a revenant?

"Thank you, Mister Toomes." The Abbess replied to his half-assed oath. "If there's anything we can do to help you in your quest, don't hesitate to say so."

Casimir grinned. "Well, it would be super helpful if you could make it an official quest." At the Abbess's blank look, he elaborated. "If you put in an official bounty request for Luci the revenant, it means I'm not trying to use Adventurer Guild resources on a personal matter. Further, quest rewards can be used as collateral for loans, if I need some extra money to track her down." Granted, Casimir would heavily discourage anyone from making such risky loan terms. The real point is to allow Casimir to hire other elites or even a hero or two just by giving them a cut. Not to mention that the guild was occasionally willing to dip into their cut of a quest reward for expenses if it meant that the quest gets done, for high end requests. "You'll need to send a request to the regional church, they'll know what to do. If you can, also place such a bounty for me and Luci's friend, Magnus, who is the other revenant I mentioned. I wouldn't want to be forced to leave the job half done, as it were." Bounties had minimums related to the level of threat involved, so this was also a polite way of asking them to pay up to do the thing that Casimir was going to do anyway.

One of the common sales tactics adventurers used when pitching their services is playing up how onerous the guild's regulations and requirements are, although it depended on the target whether the point was to convince them to pay extra for discretion or to, as in this case, refuse discounted work. Most people never really interact with the adventurer's guild, but they did interact with, say, the merchant's guild, or the cursebreaker's guild, and they did plenty to give all guilds the reputation of being anal about every single document and procedure being followed to the letter. It helped that he wasn't entirely lying about the part where having a quest meant he could access guild resources he couldn't for a personal vendetta. He just had other options when it came to accessing those resources, the simplest one being paying for the quest out of pocket. It was probably what the kids did for the dogsteel quest, which did exist, as even if they could find someone to buy dogsteel for that much no one would post a quest for it unless they already knew about the kobolds but not about the military being called in to deal with it. Unless they had an ulterior motive, of course.

With the option to pass on the difficult parts of the request, particularly the budgetary aspect, to someone else, Abbess Redpoint brightened and opened her beak to reply cheerfully: "It's the least we can do, Mister Toomes. I'll write to him right away." The local church looked wealthy, but that was because good architecture and magical goods were really cheap near the Academy, and local governments were usually pretty quick to offer cheap land to the Helelites, if only as a check on the cursebreaker's guild to stop them from price gouging people for healing magic. Thus, they probably couldn't afford one elite bounty quest, much less a double header.

"I'll be off, then." Casimir said, bowing out of further conversation before it could turn to more uncomfortable topics, like Luci's empty tomb.

"May Helel's Light be with you." The Abbess said in farewell.

----------------

When Casimir finally got around to checking on his wayward students, they were in the twenty-first hour of their training marathon, each wearing naught but some linen wraps and loincloths as they experienced an even more extreme version of the physical training mage-knights are put through.

"How are they doing?" Casimir asked Professor Giltblade, who Thorne had probably asked to cover for him as he attended to other matters, like sleep.

Aviost expressions were more subtle than human ones, but they were a large enough portion of Anima's population that Casimir could tell that the Professor's glare towards his students as they ran around a track while carrying bags filled with what was probably dirt was more theater than her genuine feelings. "They are performing adequately." She replied. "I can't believe that girl, going along with such suicidal impulses." Ah, right, Professor Giltblade was Hanna's sponsor before Casimir took over by taking her on as a personal student. "Doesn't she know how important she is?"

Casimir raised an eyebrow. Unimportant people generally didn't get into the Academy without citizenship papers like Hanna did, but Casimir didn't generally put much thought into why Hanna was so favored. "Important to who?" He said, just putting that out there.

Professor Giltblade stilled. "Ah, right. You don't know." Casimir hoped that was a prelude to actually telling him what was going on with her. "Put simply," Nope. Just the sanitized version. "Hanna is from one of those places where a druid conclave is the only thing that resembles a government. Her mana attunement is tied to the elder spirit there." 'Mana attunement' rather than 'spirit bloodline'? Kind of an odd choice of words… Was she some kind of experiment to see if a sorcerer could become a wizard? Professor Giltblade never struck Casimir as the experimental type, she seemed more of a historical and anthropological kind of researcher…

Still, that gives Casimir a lead to follow up on once this whole revenant matter was put to rest. "I see." He said. "Still, I better check on them. Thanks for keeping an eye on them."

The aviost's head fluffed up a bit, a sign of embarrassment. "I was just doing a favor for Thaddeus. Not for you."

"Still thanking you." Casimir replied as he approached the track. Exactly as he arrived, his students were slowing down to greet him, placing their burdens down as they recovered. "You followed my instructions. Good." He started on Illivere, suffusing her system with mana as he wiped her soul's slate clean of the functional but rickety curses she had sustaining her workout. Illivere slackened as her vitality instantly dropped from losing the curses propping her up, but Casimir was ready and just telekinetically set her down gently.

When Casimir and Thorne had theorized the most amount of productive physical training possible with magic, they had started with what the mage-knights already used. Normally, they would use purely active magic backed by life and mind mana potions along with mana-rich food to sustain themselves, but if one was willing to mix in some other tricks… Thorne argued that getting the kids to magic themselves was more important for their development, but it also ran into issues with mana sickness, with the length varying based on many factors. "As expected. Your curse magic training mitigated mana sickness. How many potions have you drunk?"

Faron saluted as he replied. "Five pairs, sir!" Half the normal rate? That would quarter the mana sickness issues. Thorne must have been dosing them in accordance to what he was sensing rather than any actual schedule. Excellent, he doesn't need to make them rest before the second phase.

Still, as Casimir inset a more delicately optimized curse into Illivere's soul, he hummed to inform his students that he was considering their futures. "Well, the operation was a success. There are no more kobolds in those caverns, and all of the dogsteel has been salvaged." At his student's dismayed faces, Casimir chuckled and moved on to clearing Peter's curses. "Tell you what. For every hour you keep training, I'll give each of you one ingot of it for your quest." None of them actually need money, even during the break students who had tuition paid for could live in the dormitories. Point is, completing quests for their adventuring resume was important for promotion. "If I run out of ingots, you'll all get a surprise." Seeing as how the number of ingots he had harvested, it would be two weeks of training before he ran out. It wasn't happening.

"That's a pittance. Five ingots." Peter immediately counter-offered. He wasn't entirely wrong, given how much time they could be expected to gather in that amount of time of kobold hunting, if the warren was ordinary.

"You know that actual miners would be ecstatic to earn that much per ingot of smelted iron." Casimir replied as he started on Hanna. Her soul was always a little strange, a bit too neat and orderly, now that Casimir looked at it a bit closer, but not strange enough to be more than a curiosity. He just chalked it up to spirit bloodline strangeness… but maybe it's something more? "Two ingots."

"Deal!" Peter said, giving up way too quickly. Casimir mentally added 'contract negotiations' to the list of adventurer cultural expectations he still needed to teach them.

Whatever, they still weren't going to last long enough to make him run out, even at twice the pace. The current limit to this kind of training was one and a half days, and while Casimir had heard rumors of how long a mana cultivator could last on training with minimal breaks for biological necessities, Casimir doubted that even the outright cruel combination that his Unending Vigor curse represented could make them last that long before something gives out.

Either that or they'll be strong enough to go to standard rank on physical strength and speed alone. One of those. Finishing up with Faron, Casimir started stripping off his own armor. "Okay, now you guys know how to feed mana into a curse, so let's start by generating some extra mana, eh?"

Once his students are good and broken down from their youthful arrogance, he'll get right on to following up on any leads the Adventurer's guild and the military can scrounge up surrounding Luci and Magnus's actions. He'll probably need to hunt down signs of undead, take another trip to the Soul-Devouring Dragon's cave to check for any sign of it returning to the area…

But first, Casimir needs to outlast them. Simple enough.

----------------

Casimir did his best to conceal how utterly baffled he was at his students as he dismantled the Unending Vigor curses. Yes, it included some mild mind control to extend the time they can keep going and to help with pain, but he was pretty sure that what he just did to his students would qualify as magical torture if it went to a ethics panel. Hell, he subjected himself to the same stuff and all he had to keep him going was stubborn pride.

In other words… they were punished enough. "You've outdone yourselves." Casimir said as his students got used to being subject to mortal endurance limits again. As expected, all four of them were notably more muscular and tanned, even Faron lost the slight color difference he previously had between his arms and chest from the exposure to the sun. "As a reward for your tenacity, I will submit applications to promote all of you to standard rank."

Immediately, Peter cheered loudly, his teammates smiling as they allowed him to speak for them, as was typical.

"However!" Casimir warned. "It will be on you to pass whatever test old Purz deems appropriate. He's not happy with your attempts to get yourself killed, and he's bound to make it difficult." His students sobered up at that warning, but after a moment to confer with each other, nodded in firm resolve.

"But if you pass, we'll have ten more weeks until we need to return for your next semester of education." Casimir grinned at the fear in their eyes. "There just so happens to be a few places I need to go, and it would be irresponsible of me" or rather, he needs an excuse to move about to follow the leads he had Master collect for him during the training week without arousing suspicion. "-to leave you all in the cold for all that time." Posing dramatically, he declared his intent for all to hear:

"It's time to go on an adventure!"