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.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

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!”