‘No, she can’t. With her trust issues, she would stop believing in me. Put yourself in her shoes. Friya wouldn’t know who she has really been interacting with so far and she would be afraid that you are somehow manipulating me. She too is paranoid. Telling her is a liability.’ Lith said.
Solus sighed and said nothing more. Friya’s level of craziness was dangerously similar to Lith’s. She had chosen to establish a guild, yet she treated her companions as a means to an end and changed them more often than her socks.
Unless the opportunity presented itself, she would react badly to a revelation as big as Solus’s existence was.
While waiting for Friya, Lith and Solus tried to sketch together everything she could remember about the pseudo core of the assassin’s garb.
‘Orion said that a gold alloy can’t hold more than one incantation at a time, yet that garb had three of them. Maybe it used adamant instead of silver.’ He thought.
��My thoughts exactly.’ Solus forgot about her sense of isolation the moment they started to consider how they could replicate the lost artifact. Ever since Ratpack’s words had triggered her memory, her passion for magical research had become even stronger.
The more she learned, the more she could feel her lost memories scraping at the corner of her mind, like words she had never forgotten yet she was never able to express.
‘A new armor would be the perfect recipient for all of our resources. Even if magically boosted, cloth remains cloth. Adamant is one of Mogar’s legendary metals. If we can combine the Skinwalker’s properties with those of the garb, the durability lost due to mixing it with gold would be plenty balanced by its stealth properties.
‘No one would recognize you as an Awakened anymore and by switching clothes at will you would always remain just a face in the crowd.’
‘Agreed. The problem is that while I know the Skinwalker’s pseudo core like the back of my hand, I’ve no idea how to infuse an object with Full Guard. I need to ask Orion if he’s capable of doing it and if his answer is yes, I have to convince him to share the procedure with me.
‘Something we can do as soon as the crisis is resolved, instead, is to take a second look at the fire I can produce while in my hybrid form. When it burned the layers of the assassin’s garb, I realized that it can do much more than just destroy.’ Lith thought.
‘I am eager to see what happens to an enchanted item if the flames aren’t put out. What if they can drain a pseudo core completely? They could open doors, disrupt arrays, maybe even delete the imprint left by the item’s owner.’ Lith thought.
‘It’s not so simple. I remember the Abomination who possessed the wargs calling them “Origin Flames”. I don’t remember what they are, but something tells me they are very important. We must find out their real nature.’
Solus couldn’t put her finger on it, but she felt that they shared a connection with the title ‘Ruler of the Flames’ her master Menadion mentioned in her memories.
Lith and Solus spent the time before breakfast drawing and visualizing the pseudo core of the assassin’s garb. Solus hadn’t seen it from many angles, and to make matters worse, the distance had made the mana pathways appear like a blur to her.
They only had one Forge of adamant, so their blueprint had to be perfect or everything would go to waste.
“Well, how did your hunt go?” Friya was happy seeing him in one piece, yet she knew it didn’t mean much. Phloria wasn’t the only one who back at the academy had noticed his ability to heal from deadly wounds like they were just scratches.
“One down, three more to go.” Lith sighed while following her to the Dining Hall.
“Three? Oh gods. We might need some of my men. Three versus two would already be bad against regular mages and it took four of you to take down Nalear. I don’t like our odds.”
“Don’t worry. They are weaker than Nalear was and I’m much stronger compared to four years ago. Yet I agree with you, we need a contingency plan.” Lith said.
They stopped talking the moment they saw a member of the house staff. Neither of them trusted their discretion, so they moved to a less sensitive topic.
“The Viscount was ecstatic over my discovery about the Griever.” Friya said with a smug grin.
“He has doubled my guild’s pay and fired half of his staff.” Her smile disappeared thinking about all those poor people jobless in the dead of winter.
“Why did he do that?”
“Because he removed all those who had the magical talent to cause those kinds of wounds and all those who have any affiliation with the church. Now my men have to sleep, eat, and drink with the members of Krame’s family.” Friya’s explanation made sense.
‘I have the authority of the King now. I could conscript the members of the Crystal Shield guild to compensate for the lack of manpower, but how much can I trust a mage who follows me only because he’s forced to?
‘At the same time, all of the city guards can’t put a dent in an Awakened’s body. Only a mage can defeat an Awakened mage.’ Lith thought.
The dining room walls were painted a pale blue and the floor was entirely covered by a single red and blue carpet with floral figures depicted on it. The chairs’ lining had the same pattern as the carpet while the Viscount’s coat of arms was engraved on their armrest.
The walls were decorated with several paintings depicting Krame’s ancestors, and the room’s furniture was adorned with blue porcelain vases.
The mercenaries sitting at the long rectangular table were all laughing and smiling due to the news of their pay being doubled, whereas the house staff looked gloomy as if they were attending a funeral.
Not only had their workload just doubled, they were also afraid of losing their job. The Viscount offered food and accommodation to them and their families. Getting fired meant becoming jobless and homeless in one fell swoop.
The members of the noble family weren’t much happier having lost any shred of privacy. Yet they turned their frown upside down the moment they saw Lith.
They considered Friya the strongest noble in the city, but now that the existence of an enemy capable of violating the safety of their house had been uncovered, none of them was foolish enough to refuse the help of the most powerful being for miles.
Noble or not, Lith now appeared like a savior to their eyes, and they could only hope that they had not yet compromised their relationship with the youngest Spellbreaker of their generation.
“I am very sorry for how I treated you yesterday, Regent Verhen.” The Viscount said, making all those who sat around the table choke on their food. Krame rarely apologized, even to the city Lord and when he did apologize, his tone made it clear it was just a formality.
This time it sounded like he really meant it.
