The competition Villin made received a ginormous amount of attention. Each of the papers had multiple pages on the event, talking about everything that happened, a number of previously unknown enchanters were also mentioned who had performed extremely well.
Still, most of the attention fell on Athena’s Forge and its members, Villin and Rein in particular. For the following two weeks they had a section in every edition of each of the papers, talking about this and that.
As for Villin, he wasn’t impatient. In the week since the tournament, nobody had come to join them yet but he knew there would certainly be some coming to them soon, considering himself and Rein were now proven to be the two best enchanters in the grade.
Of course, there were some that went against this saying they cheated somehow but even Today’s Oddities didn’t talk with these people. They were there and thus far nobody had given a probable way Villin and Rein could’ve cheated.
Villin was glad he made the right decision inviting Today’s Oddities to the event. He had been seriously torn on whether to invite them or not but ended up inviting them since, if they weren’t invited, they would surely try to smear them seeing how they previously handled things.
In the last week, he hadn’t been sitting still though, nobody had been. Villin had been busy analyzing the pieces of enchanted equipment, writing everything he understood about them in various notebooks that were shared with Rein. Still, even though everyone only worked on these pieces for two hours each, Villin was still a few days away from analyzing all of them.
Rein was about to finish enchanting the tower, after finishing up he would be practicing some new spells. Kayley had, just today, begun visiting the guilds focused on pill-making, inviting them to Athena’s Forge.
Athena’s Forge would indeed be organizing an event, this time Villin wouldn’t be involved though. Since there were considerably fewer guilds focused on pill-making they only expected around thirty guests. Kayley would be the main organizer this time and Amelia and Rein would be helping on the day of the competition.
As for Amelia, she was spending a lot of time in the dueling grounds recently. She had been fighting dozens of people rapidly increasing her fame. The plan was to also make a fighting tournament when the time came. Preparing this would be a lot harder though and the school’s support would probably be required. Currently, the desired effect was to show Athena’s Forge wasn’t only focused on creating items, it also focused on strength.
And so, time continued passing. After finishing analyzing the equipment Villin worked on the tower itself, connecting and enhancing all the enchantments Rein had made. During this time Athena’s Forge held their second tournament, the Pill Exchange. This one, too, was a great success.
During this time, the first couple of individuals also began approaching the guild, trying to gauge if joining would be possible in case they left their current guilds. In total there were about twenty such individuals, some skilled in enchanting and others in pill-making, surprisingly they were also those scoring quite high overall.
Just as Villin expected a few of these individuals to take the leap, soon to be followed by the others, something he never expected happened.
Villin was outside of the guild tower working on the enchantments, loosely surrounded by some individuals with notebooks who were trying to learn by watching him, when he was approached by someone Villin recognized.
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It was a boy with clear blue eyes and brown hair. On his chest below the school’s crest was a crest showing a spear and a pen crossed.
“Hello sir Villin, could we talk?” the boy asked politely.
Recognizing him as the guild leader of the Runic Army, Villin didn’t hesitate to invite him inside. The Runic Army had performed the best in the runic exchange, they took the third, fifth, and seventh place, as for the guild leader himself, he was fifth.
Once they walked into the guild tower, the guild leader quickly made his intentions clear.
“Ever since the exchange I thought about your proposition. You are a much, much better enchanter than I am and you are much richer as well. I would like to discuss being annexed by Athena’s Forge.”
Hearing his words Villin was clearly surprised, he had assumed he was going to ask some questions about how to set up the next runic exchange, not something like this.
After talking with the boy for a while, Villin got even more surprised. Since the situation was like this he expected the boy would ask for a bunch of money or a high position but he did nothing of the sort. The conditions he had were very few, mostly simply asking for fair treatment and pay.
After thinking for a while, Villin obviously didn’t decline, the biggest condition he had been set was that the members would receive thirty percent of the profits if their products were being sold by the guild. Since Villin had already decided to set this on fifty percent before this point, this obviously wasn’t a problem.
And so, the following day, some huge news was announced. The Runic Army, the currently largest guild that focused mainly on enchanting, was being annexed by Athena’s Forge, a guild that previously had only four members.
In total, ‘The Runic Army’ had thirty members. Most of them split their focus between runes and combat. And then there were some that only focussed on one.
This immediately brought the third floor of the guild tower near max capacity, together with the dozen individuals that decided to join after hearing the news, Athena’s Forge instantly became a large power in the grade.
If they only had enchanters this might not be the case, the problem was that ‘The Runic Army’ was a guild that ‘competed’, this immediately caused all the combat guilds to become a bit wary.
As soon as the new members joined Athena’s Forge also began accepting missions from the mission board increasing their reputation. Some missions simply required the creation of certain objects of magic arrays while others were competitive. Competitive missions were rather diverse. The simple ones simply asked for a guild to protect a certain room for a period of time. The very first day Villin and his group arrived at the second grade they happened to clash with ‘The Shielding Lions’ who were doing such a mission.
The rooms in need of protection were the mailroom, the dormitory corridors, the storage rooms, and a couple of others. If anyone manages to do anything they’re not supposed to while you are supposed to be defending it, you would be punished and lose reputation.
On the other hand, you could also take harder missions that go against this. For example, go to the mailing crate 127 and take out the yellow pen inside. The items they were required to steal obviously weren’t other people’s true belongings but they looked no different from them.
For now, Villin told everyone to focus on the defensive missions, they were much much easier, especially when they had those that could use magic arrays to make going in stealth a lot harder.
And so, with the sudden increase of members, Villin had to do two things. First, he had to begin giving lessons to everyone, and secondly, he had to make more space.
It was possible to give the tower one more floor but that would mess up the enchantments he was working on. Luckily, now that he annexed a large guild, he was also allowed more space to work with. Since ‘The Runic Army’ had quite a bit of reputation before being annexed, the space he got was substantial.
And so began the construction of a large two-floor rectangular building that would go around the guild tower.
The guild tower would be in the very middle but Villin made it very clear the rectangular building and the tower couldn’t be truly connected, there had to be a gap in between them.
Obviously, Villin commissioned the same guild he used before since they did a great job, due to the size of the project it would take a while but Villin didn’t mind that too much, they had time.