Upon descent, I quickly retrieved the hood I packed in my bag and equipped it, concealing my appearance and further safekeeping my identity by pulling up my mask that reached just over my nose. Only my eyes were revealed to any individual impending or even questioning me. I slid my hands into my pockets and kept a constant stare fixated on the lit ground.
Chatter audibly whispered in my ear, unable to block out the chatter from the crowds of people moving past me. Topics not worth mentioning came about constantly, alongside one piece of information that confirmed the guards in this town were indeed from the Ertress family. My immediate thought was my priority should be minimizing contact with any of the guards or even the young lord from their house. Though I could minimise practically all of my mana and pressure I would usually exert, they were expert guards. They would be some of the strongest combatants in our nation. Maybe not in the top one hundred, but to be able to claim a spot in any of the elite guard squads would require immense ability, aptitude, strength and a multitude of other qualities. They would be able to recognise my slight mana signature and be able to track it at all times.
My footsteps continued ploughing ahead, dirt rising off the ground in a dust cloud under the thinnest of taps. I kept the the guiding pulse of mana discharging from me as faint as I could, but the images reported back to me would be problematically incomplete, causing me to stumble into the occasional object randomly spat out onto the main street.
"This is far too exhausting. I wanted to explore this towns layout a bit, but its much to hard and will take me too long to get to the library." I complained at my wishful thinking, walking into an empty alley and flipping back my jet-black hood.
I checked, looking back once more at the entrance of the alleyway and burst from the ground to the rooftop of the tavern I walked behind. "Lets speed this up."
My movements swiftly glided alongside the traversing wind to minimise the noise, before using illusion magic to bestow a translucent appearance on my figure.
I haven't really paid attention to this before, but my thought process has become much more split and unwise. I had no idea why I attempted to walk over there with the amount of obstacles in my course, but for whatever reason I had. My judgment feels like its being dragged by two opposing forces. One I recognised, the rational one, however the irrational, was completely unknown.
Two guards stood nonchalantly at the doors leading to the library. A colossus birch double door that must have been at least two meters long. The two vaguely seemed attentive, yet their constant spacing out told another story. Exhaustion seemed to have nestled around them and the spears they kept sustaining themselves on, seemed to bend under their weight. The chance to infiltrate was more golden than it would be at any other chance.
I leapt from the edge of the roof I stood on and landed on the adjacent one, being the library's. Fortunately, the roof was flat and wasn't constructed with tiles, meaning the silence was not broken and the rustling of the grass in the wind remained in solitude.
On the roof, a pane of glass seemed to lay in the centre, allowing the natural floodlights of the moon to settle on this spot. I crouched down and began scrambling my fingertips under the metal hinges keeping it in place, before kindling a cordial flame beneath its main markings of security allowing me to carefully slide it out of place, siding it on the rood gently.
The library itself, even with the Ertress guards in town, wouldn't be littered with artefacts that are designed for tracing mana signatures, but in case of the possibility, I disengaged all mana activity around me and sealed of my crux effectively.
The plunge down wasn't particularly lofty, as I hung down from the roof and swung my feet with great acrobatics onto a glass encased display. The distance wasn't large and therefore didn't inflict uproar. The hall itself, was filled with a few displays, much like the one I rested on top of, but was predominantly chock-full of bookshelves that lengthened in fantastical distance. I climbed down from the glass display and began rummaging through each section.
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
Though signs definitely marked the positioning of each genre, due to the all-encompassing sombre and my sealed off magic, I was forced to probe around a designated area, bring back one of the texts to the aperture of light and begin confirming the genre. This took me a little under fifteen minutes before I eventually encountered a similar enough topic.
"Spell craft Edition IV: Armour for mages. It seems I've finally came across the right path. This is the fourth instalment of the Spell crafts series, implying at least another three -- or more from my tracing finger that collected dust as I slid through the entirety of this one section -- that would surely bring about actual spell casting." I muttered to myself, discarding the book on the floor and hopping straight back over to the crammed shelf.
Dust floated around and cobwebs extended before ripping away from the hardcover of the books. The rubbing noise of the leather cover being dragged off the wooden furniture scraped at my ears and ate away at the silence that domineered this space apart from the occasional noise an owl would emit. My search continued and forced me to transport the book into the spot of light shimmering, asses it and then fetch it back whilst picking up a new one.
All until...
"Ah. I found it. It's this one." The whole row of books had been flipped into a disarrayed mess as I picked up the very last one that stood isolated. "Of course it would have been the last one. Why wouldn't it?"
I carefully side-stepped out of the narrow walkways, that would only have enough space for two individual that were on opposite sides to walk through, and flipped the textbook open. "Spell craft Edition I: Spell casting and the basics of Mage's."
I flipped through the rugged paper, dyed a yellowish tan, and skipped straight to to "practical theory".
"Finally, I get to read this damned book." I spoke, gently sighing and seizing contact with books pages once more. "Magical casting is very much feeling based. Obviously there is one main rule for it and that is that mana has to be procured from the surroundings and mixed with your mana in a ratio favouring that of the outsides power. The more ambient mana is used, the stronger the results will be. That is all. The rest comes with practice and feeling." I blankly stared at the page before throwing it on to the ground in a fit of rage.
"Fuck. Of course this would happen. This is probably written by some amateur who doesn't even cast magic himself. I should have skimmed the contents of his previous work to confirm his knowledge, but I guess it would end up like this." I held my head in my hands and rested in the spot until muttering found its way outside the door.
My eyes shot open and I immediately discarded the thought of mana sensors, reactivating it and jumping up to the roof past the opening I forced and sealing it again by melting the metal hinges back together. I carefully spied on the intruding figures that gradually pushed open the doors.
"Young master, there is no need for you to be here. If you take back the book you donated without even showcasing it to the public tomorrow, people will doubt our credibility. You know only fools accept words proven by nothing but only the sender of the message." A euphonious voice circulated the location. Great authority held in each articulated word that resonated in grandeur untold.
"Y-youth, think I careth." A slurred response followed, like the persons tongue laid slopped in their mouth not adopting any movement to pronounce better. Their drunken steps waddled along and beside them, the supporting figure maintaining his balance, the woman who spoke previously. Ivory hair hung past her waist groomed with nurse that it gave of an effect of flowers blossoming.
It was the young master of the Ertress family and his personal guard. Their appearance became more distinguishable the more they strode into the light.
"I shouldn't stick around for too long. After all, I didn't' get what I want, I may as well go back home." I whispered aloud to myself, yet kept it to a breath as to not let them hear me on accident. It seems they were intent on getting back their donation before revealing it and leaving. Typical spoilt royalty.
As I was about to turn around, the corner of my eye noticed a grave detail that may send me into ruin. A singular book was left in the limelight that the two now approached. The woman noticed it and immediately began glancing around the place, before her mana spread outwardly scanning the area, of course detecting me with it.
"Wait here master, it seems an intruder has wandered around here. I must secure him and execute him." She spoke in the most indifferent voice, her head leaning backwards and leering at the window.
I already began making headway, leaping from one roof to another before a loud shatter caved behind me, the glass pane that let in the light instantaneously shattered and her imposing figure emerged from the depths. I pulled my hood down without delay and sped up.
"You're not getting away, intruder." A wintry gust coalesced and hummed in a sharp inventiveness, her azure eyes leaking into a glaciered colour and a spear progressively shaped pellucidly in her firm grip, cocking her arm back and releasing it, hurling it at neck-breaking speeds directed at my back.