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As Professor Bixby reached the first table and picked up a shield that my classmate chose as a base, I noticed an incredible flaw.

“Hmm…Decent rune placement and spacing, neat and tidy tracing, but there is one major flaw. Can you tell me what it is?” Professor Bixby asked as he rotated the shield around.

The poor boy looked at the gnome holding his shield with a confused look as he tried to figure out what he did wrong.

“No? Then allow me to demonstrate.” Professor Bixby passed the enchanted shield to the boy and asked him to activate the enchanted shield.

Once the enchanted shield was activated, it glowed as the runes, glyphs, and traces lit up on the face of the shield, and if I am not wrong that is the Impact Barrier enchantment that adsorbs a large chunk of kinetic energy from anything striking at the shield before it actually touches the shield.

Professor Bixby then drew a knife and slashed at the shield. As the blade came within a few inches of the shield, the blade slowed down as if it were fighting through thick mud, losing a lot of its momentum, but nevertheless, the blade did reach the face of the shield and he dragged his blade across the traces of dried mana conductive ink, in the process of doing so, scraped metal off of the face of the shield where one of the traces were painted on, thus breaking the panted on mana traces.

Once that happened, the enchantment sputtered and died, “Now do you understand? You were enchanting a shield, shields get hit and damaged, you should have done the enchantment on the interior of the shield.”

The moment he said that I heard one or two people somewhere in the class cuss to themselves, one of those people that I noticed enchanted a breastplate… on the outside. It was at that moment, he knew he fucked up.

Soon after that, Bixby went around examining, testing, complimenting some, and roasting other people’s work, and soon it was my turn.

“Luke Ironcrest… I noticed you decided to take quite a bit of risk. Let us see if it paid off.” he said before picking up the shortsword to inspect it.

“Hmm… never seen this style of tracing before, looks clean and neat, and I can see the potential for improving on this design. Now let us see what you enchanted this sword with.” Professor Bixby said as he traced his fingers along the inlaid mana copper.

“Let's see here… you have two enchantments going on here, a sharpness and light illusion enchantment.” the gnome then poured mana into the shortsword and did a few test swings at the open air, after doing so, half a second from the first swing, what looked to be a copy of the shortsword swung at the same area but from a different angles.

Then Professor Bixby did something and the illusion shortsword struck out without the real sword being swung, he then followed up with a swing of the real sword which was followed by the illusion sword.

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He then took the pencil from my table and lightly tapped the shortsword on it, but despite the limited strength used, the top part of the pencil fell to the floor, when I looked at what remained in Professor Bixby’s hand, I knew my sharpness enchantment worked, the place where he tapped the pencil was a clean cut surface.

“Well done, besides a bit of mana leakage from your runes, This is a well-enchanted Mirage sword, and the choice of using mana copper wire was a good one, even if the sword gets a bit scratched up, the mana copper would be able to take more of a beating than mana conductive ink. The only downside is that you used mana metal enchantment on a non-mana metal base.

If you had used mana-conductive ink, it would not have been as mana-conductive as mana copper, but it would not have been as stressful on a non-mana metal base, leaving you with a somewhat serviceable weapon even as the enchantment fails. But since you used a mana metal enchantment on a non-mana metal base, the non-mana metal base would most likely be the first to degrade and crumble, leaving you with no weapon at all. But other than that, you did good work on your enchanting and I can see you are forming your own style. I will give you an A- grade. If you had taken into account the base you were enchanting on and provided a stable enchantment within the limits of the base material, I would have given you full marks. At the moment, this weapon is only good to be used as a disposable weapon.” Professor remarked and moved to the next workbench as the invigilator wrote on his clipboard.

Once Professor Bixby was done with the grading of our enchantments, we were dismissed. That was when I was approached by some of my classmates to ask what exactly I did for my enchantment, so I stuck around for a while to tell them of my work process.

Of those who approached me, there were two of them that I recognized from my blacksmithing class, and they asked if I could show them how I did the wire inlaying, and I thought ‘Why not, after the exams there is a one-month school break, so I got time.’

***

After showing those in my Enchanting class how I did my mana copper inlaying, the lunch bell rang and I politely excused myself, there was food to eat and I was a growing boy.

After going to the canteen and loading up my plate, I ran into Dave and Sam who were also about to have lunch, so we ended up sitting together.

“So, you going anywhere during this school break?” Sam asked me.

“Nah, my home is at the kingdom’s border, too far, I will most likely only go home during the end of year break. How about you guys? Going home to see your family?” I asked in return.

They shook their heads, “No, we are in kind of the same boat as you, while our home is not as far as yours, it is kind of not worth the trip. Once you minus the travel time, we will most likely just be home for a few days before we need to start heading back here.”

I nodded my head in agreement and asked, “So what are your plans?”

“We plan to earn some extra pocket money by doing some jobs from the local Adventurer's Guild during this break.” Dave said.

“Wait, when you say Adventurer's Guild, are you referring to the place that is full of people who kill things for money? Don’t they have an age restriction for that or something? We are still in school.” I asked.

Dave shook his head, “The Adventurer's Guild does a lot more than just killing stuff, they do requests posted in their hall, but for us, we can only do nearby resource gathering missions, we will only be able to get a proper Adventurer's Guild license when we are 16 years old. Until then, we are stuck with probationary licenses, or Junior licenses as it is more commonly known.”

The both of them reached into their pockets and pulled out a wooden token with the Adventurer's Guild crest on it.

Seeing the Adventurer's Guild tags, a smile crept onto my face, and I took a deep breath, it smelled like adventure.

Giving Dave and Sam my best smile, I asked “So, where is this Adventurer's Guild and how do I get myself some tags?”