Felix continued to draw in mana, acting as if he was still constructing Night Eye, and quickly used this mana to activate Night Eye. Suddenly, his right eye was able to see everything just as well as if it were the middle of the day, while his left eye could still barely make out anything in the dark. He quickly pulled out the spell manual, and started constructing the Mold Earth spell.
Why? He wanted to pretend like he was still constructing Night Eye. If he finished constructing the spell in one night, it would be obvious he was a dark mage, or at least a dark sub-class. He had to keep absorbing mana and elements from the environment to pretend he was still working on Night Eye.
Naturally, the captain of the escort unit was a middle-grade mage, so he would see through this by just observing the flow of elements passively, and he would be able to tell he had switched to absorbing the earth element. But, frankly, he didn't give a rat's ass what elements any of the recruits were, he just cared about getting them all to the fort safe and sound quickly. He figured they would probably all end up as fodder for some high-grade mage to act, so who cared if one of them was dark element? He would probably be dead in a couple of months to a demon anyway.
Everyone else in present company was either a low-grade mage, a peasant-grade mage, or not a mage at all. It wasn't that low-grade mages couldn't observe the flow of the elements, it was just that they weren't as sensitive to it as the flow of mana. They would have to actively focus on on the flow of the elements and really primarily focus on it to notice the subtleties of whether Felix was actually absorbing the earth or the darkness, but they would be able to tell pretty quickly even without focusing on it if he had stopped absorbing mana. However, actively focusing so much on another mage's activities like what focusing on his elemental intake would be would be considered pretty rude and aggressive. So it was unlikely anyone would notice. Actually, probably no one was paying attention to him in the first place, since everyone was asleep, but it was better safe than sorry.
As Felix started to absorb the elements of the earth, his diamond core began to spin slowly, resonating with the earth below. The diamond core was stronger than the darkness, and he constructed the earthen nodes in his spell space at an impressive speed. They weren't in the most dense earthen area, that would be the mountains, but the fact that it was his primary element made up for it. He was able to construct an earthen elemental node about once every 10 minutes. The Mold Earth spell had many more nodes than Night Eye, clocking in at 85 nodes in the shape of a hand cupping into the ground, but it was also much more versatile - it allowed the user to slowly bend and mold the shape of the earth around them, it was considered a staple of the earthen element, useful for everything from irrigation to building a wall to building a dike. It wasn't useful in combat however, the speed was nothing to speak of. Building a full size dike for a half-mile would probably take a peasant-grade mage a month. Still, no one doubted it's usefulness.
Felix continued to construct Mold Earth for an hour and a half or so, and then put on a show of being focused on nightwatch for the last half hour of the night in case the escort unit decided to wake up a bit early and watch him. He and Alexander woke everyone up, they cooked and ate breakfast, packed up camp, and hopped in the wagons. He and Alexander went to sleep for about 8 hours like usual.
They were traveling in the western empire now which was much nicer then the south-eastern empire. For starters, there was green grass everywhere, and trees. They passed town after town, but even when he woke up, Felix didn't care about any of that. Although it was less efficient since he wasn't connected to the earth, being in a wagon and all, he continued to construct Mold Earth almost right away after he woke up. The half of the recruits who were mages were all focusing on their magic - they were all peasants, when else in their life were they likely to have so much free time doing nothing but constructing spells?
Along the way, they occasionally ran in to armed groups headed by nobles waving banners headed in the direction of the capital. Obviously they were headed there to break the blockade around the capital. Felix knew those dark mages were seriously done for. The capital itself was insanely strong, but many nobles from around the kingdom were sending forces too to fight for glory. It was already about 8 days since they left Gurnkey. The battle - or more likely, the massacre of dark mages, would likely begin in a day or two.
This was part of the reason he was being extra cautious about not revealing his sub-element was darkness. Dark mages were already suppressed and mistrusted in the kingdom before this - after the blockade was dealt with, it would become much worse because they had dared to openly provoke the capital. Most likely, the only reason the dark mages were able to block the capital for so long was because they spent a ton of time building a massive formation that did nothing but defend inwards. Otherwise there was no way they could block all of the high-level mages in the capital for so long. However, this meant that the mages in the capital were definitely completely unharmed, and furious.
Felix thought about it some more. Most likely, the reason the dark mages did this was the demon lord had contacted them and promised them a life where dark mages were treated the same as every other element under his rule.
This was just his guess though. He didn't actually know very much about the demon lord or the Platinal Empire at all, beyond the propaganda that the kingdom spread out and the idle talk people loved to have about the overall situation of the world. If you believed the propaganda though, the Platinal Empire was a place ruled by demons who spent all day whipping and torturing humans, and feeding their babies to the dogs, and they wanted to overtake the Aurul Kingdom to turn the inhabitants into slaves.
But... Felix found this pretty unlikely. He knew one thing was true - the ruler of the Platinal Empire was in fact a demon. This world had other races besides humans, demons were one of them. Other races were rarer in the Aurul Kingdom, but not to the point of it being unusual to see one around. Gurnkey was small and very important to the largely human-supremacist military, so there were no other races there, so he had only seen one or two other races personally in his entire life as they passed through the village. However, on the journey, they definitely saw other races, there were fairies and dwarves around mostly.
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There were 8 elements that made up the world, and therefore 8 races. All of the races were composed of all of the elements, but each race had higher concentrations of one of the elements. The elements are split into 2 groups, positive and negative. The positive elements were fire, wind, wood, and light. The negative elements were water, earth, metal, and darkness. Humans were the race of metal. They had higher odds of metal mages compared to the other races, and the aspect of metal was showcased in the human affinity towards tool usage. Humans made the highest quality tools and gear, they had the most well-equipped soldiers, and their lightning magic was the most devastating.
Demons were the race of fire. Fire of course could melt metal, so it could be argued that fire suppressed metal to an extent, however a metal user could argue that philosophically, using fire on metal removed it's impurities and allowed it to be shaped into a stronger form. Most people regarded fire and metal as neutral in their interactions, however, fire was definitely more aggressive, and metal was more defensive, and this was the truth of the fight between demons and humans as well - the demons attacked and the humans defended. Could the humans counter-invade the demons using their chokepoint advantages?
Well, the unfortunate thing was, the biggest counter to fire was water, so obviously the merfolk would wreck the poor demons. However, why would the demons pick a fight with the merfolk in the first place? They had no need to conquer the ocean. Similarly, although the humans had a great relationship with the merfolk, a bunch of fishmen could hardly be brought onto the land to invade the demons. And the human's other negative elemental race ally, the earth race dwarves, were similarly defensive in nature - they mostly sat up in their mountain strongholds like turtles.
What about the darkness race, you may be wondering? Yeah, those were the undead, encompassing everything from ghosts, to zombies, to liches, dullahans, etc. They really liked humans and they were always drawn to their life force, but humans didn't like them one bit. So it was always a situation where the undead were trying to endear themselves to the humans and had offered to ally with them militarily many times, but the humans refused because they didn't like the undead one bit. Every time they tried to have negotiations or talks it would end up with the human diplomats leaving because they couldn't stand the aura of death, and humans couldn't find it in themselves to trust the dark race because of how dark mages acted in human society - even though they were kind of pigeonholed into evil acts by the nature of their element. Furthermore, think about it, even if they managed to ally militarily... would the soldiers accept it? Who wanted to camp, march, and fight next to a bunch of drooling zombies, or ghosts constantly wearing down the spirit of everything around them all the time? Or dark shamans casting evil hexes and curses on their enemies?
It would turn into a situation where the soldiers would look at their allies and then go "Wait, are we the bad guys?", and they would have no morale to fight at all, assuming they didn't just revolt!
The other 3 races were even more hopeless in terms of allying with them to fight the demons. The wind race were fairies, they loved everyone, lived everywhere, and got along great with all the races. But to be honest, they were all aloof air-heads, and outside of their one or two rare serious-minded high-grade mages, they were basically useless in combat. Even if they had the mindset to hold a sword, could you even give them a big enough one to be useful? Wouldn't that impact their ability to fly?
The wood race were elves and they hated humans to their core - they felt that humans had no respect for nature at all, and their very existence was a plague against nature that needed to be wiped out. Luckily, they couldn't fight the humans at all because metal countered wood, so the elves mostly sat in their forests simmering in rage at humanity's existence.
Finally, there was the light race, the angels, and they spent most of their time maintaining the order of the elements throughout the world, spreading light, giving warmth, and providing charity. From their point of view, metal and fire fighting each other all the time was only natural, so they saw no need to interfere unless one of the elements got severely suppressed.
So, there were effectively no outside elements that would influence the fight between humans and demons.
Why were the demons invading the humans at all? Well, they were fiery and aggressive. They had no qualms about openly stating that they were here to conquer, and if the humans got conquered, they didn't deserve to remain independent. It was that simple to them.
In Felix's opinion, if the demons won, they would most likely actually be treated quite well and just end up as normal subjects of the Platinal Empire. The demons didn't hate the humans or anything. It was just that humans were the only race that would give them an even fight. The demons respected the humans quite a bit actually. But conquering the elves would be absolutely no challenge at all since fire countered wood, the fairies didn't need to be conquered at all since they lived everywhere and loved everyone, the angels lived in the sky so they could hardly be conquered in the first place, trying to invade the ocean would be asking for a beating since water directly countered fire, and the dwarves were even more defensive than the humans! They would never leave their mountain strongholds and give them the open and direct battles the demons craved. As for the undead, they tried invading them actually, but they quickly sued for peace because the hordes of the undead were basically infinite. So, by process of elimination, the demons fought the humans.
Of course, all races had mages of all elements. Being of the metal race didn't mean humans only had metal mages. However, it was true that the element of their race impacted their attributes, patterns, mindsets, strategies, strengths, and weaknesses, and they generally ended up countering each other in the same way that their elements would. There were certainly demon wood mages who could fight the water race merfolk and be at an advantage against them. However, the overall situation would be that the merfolk would win quite handily.
While Felix was thinking about all of this while constructing Mold Earth, another day had ended. They set up camp like usual, cooked dinner, and laid down for the night. The escort unit said they expected us to reach the Fort at dusk tomorrow, arriving a bit early because conditions had been excellent the entire way, so they were making great time. Felix, like usual, was the nightwatch.