Azura was thinking furiously now, so was she out here trying to learn how to increase the elves' military force? Or was she here to sabotage the humans? Either way it was a worrisome project, funny enough war was much easier to prevent when both sides knew the outcome beforehand. When the results became murky that was when war happened. In most circumstances anyway.
Not that he could blame her for wanting her home to be able to not live in fear, but he didn’t think they’d be able to reach the kind of power humans had for a long while, most elves just lacked the ambition, they weren’t racing to the finish line of extending their lives, because they had no need to. Also elven birth rates were startlingly low, Enough so that despite living for thousands of years even without any magical training, they hadn’t overpopulated the forest. Then again if there was anything the elves had in spades it was time, so she may not be looking for immediate results.
Either way if he had to be, there was something she was trying to hide, and he had almost stumbled upon it by accident before his trials. That’s probably why she went on that long mission, so she could move it somewhere more secure. Why try to get rid of him now though? Whatever it was would be long gone. Unless it was the kind of thing that left fairly obvious traces. Well only one way to find out. It looks like he had a spire to visit after this class.
With his copies back in full force he would still be able to go to every class before the day was even halfway over, even assuming he got stuck doing this other thing. That meant, there was no real reason for him not to, he had even already set time aside for the forge and the library, so why not see if he could figure what the elf was up to.
The tower was pretty much the same as when they had visited several months prior. To think it had already been almost half a year since they got here, time really did fly.
Unfortunately he didn’t really find anything out of the ordinary, even with clairvoyance, nothing especially stood out. He supposed that wasn’t too surprising, after all it had been months. Of course that didn’t necessarily mean he was out of options. A magic circle appeared in the area, a clock face like design filled the floor, as the color drained away leaving everything in shades of black and white except for him. The hands started winding backwards as the scene shifted with people he didn’t know coming through moving backwards.
He let the image continue to rewind for a while, even as speed up as he had the projection it still took awhile to show the elf girl walking backwards quickly into the room. He paused the projection. She was wearing a cloak that covered almost all of her features, but even without color, and covered up she was quite distinct. Whatever he was expecting her to be carrying though it wasn’t this.It was a plant, but it was wilting horribly. He frowned, elves were known for their amazing skill with nature magic, which was admittedly one of the reasons their forests hadn’t ever been attacked despite the huge difference in power. The question is why was one of those very same elves carrying a dead plant? And perhaps even more importantly, why was she hiding it away?
Tracing her steps would take too long, this was after all an area of effect spill, and casting it again and finding the moment she ran by in each area would take forever. If he knew her body he might be able to anchor the spell to her and follow her image, but he didn’t, so he was stuck investigating it the old fashioned way for now. Now how was he going to go about investigating something that happened over who knows how wide an area several months ago.
Well the easiest way was to get familiar enough with Elismera’s magic so he could link his past viewing spell to her. Easiest and safest weren’t exactly the same in this case though. It wouldn’t be hard to pick a fight with her at this point, but if he challenged her then she could get away with hurting him a lot more than she could if she challenged him, and he was well aware of the difference in their power. He had gotten a lot stronger over his trip, and with that new strength came a new understanding of just how strong some of the students in this school were. He would be lucky if he was in the top 30, Elismera though? She was undoubtedly in the top 3. If she and Kaiser fought he wasn’t entirely sure who would win. Probably Kaiser, but it wasn’t a guarantee, and that in of itself was impressive enough that he hesitated to be the one to start the fight.
It would be tricky baiting her into starting the fight too though. She wasn’t dumb, and had to know that her starting a fight after reporting him for a cursed item would look bad, like she had a grudge against him, which she did, but the investigators knowing that would likely doubt he had a cursed item, and not look as hard. Either outcome was fine with him, they wouldn’t find anything, but she didn’t know that. And she would only see him goading her as an attempt to weaken her position with the investigators.
In the scheme of things it didn’t really matter, her motivations for being angry at him were her own, he should honestly leave it be… He wasn’t going to do that, but he probably should. What could he say it was a good thing that it was Katy that had the cat ears, because everyone knew what curiosity tended to do to cats.
***
Azura definitely missed the forge, especially since neither of his copies had much reason to come here without any materials to use, so while he had plenty of memories of the library while he was gone the forge was definitely a blank spot. That was fine though, he was more than ready to make up for the difference. He only had enough materials to make one item on par with the dragon's request, but he had plenty more for slightly less quality items that would still sell for a lot.
He supposed the question was what kind of item to make for the dragon. The other things could just be made into whatever had the best price vs material used ratio, but with the blood pact broken he would need something the dragon would be very happy with lest the dragon try to kill him. He was confident he would survive now, but that didn’t really make him eager to have a true dragon as his enemy. His first thought was to make it very ornamental, but then he realized the dragon would already have plenty of shiny things, and even more things with powerful magic, but what it wouldn’t have was stuff that was actually built for it. He could make it attune to the dragon much the way his gear attuned to him. That was why whenever he broke apart or reformed his gear did too.
Which actually gave him another idea too. Despite dragons being made purely of magic, it wasn’t impossible to stabilize their parts so they could be used as materials and ingredients for alchemy. He hadn’t ever really went too in depth on that branch of magic, but now that he was technically a dragon himself it was perhaps a good idea for him to change that. First order of business was to forge this though. Perhaps a helm for the dragon would be a fitting start. It would have to be able to shape itself to the dragon's head, but if it was going to attune to the dragon, then that was easy enough. He began to make blueprints in his head, measuring the materials he was going to need, and what spells would be used. He used to have to consider his remaining mana as well, but he highly doubted that would become an issue anymore.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
He’d start with the easy stuff first, that way he’d have more time to plan his final item without wasting his time in the forge. Selling his stuff was unfortunately quite difficult, and he had to sell all of it for way more than he’d like too. It was already suspicious when the seller wanted to stay anonymous, if the price was too low, no one would risk it. Thankfully his codename had become quite well known for the quality of his magic items, so he had been able to start lowering prices some, which was pretty backwards, usually people used being trusted as an excuse to raise prices, but he didn’t really want to gouge people of their money, he just wanted what he felt his stuff was worth. He still had a bit to go until they were low enough that he felt it was fair, but they had gotten down enough that some of the wealthier commoners could actually get their hands on some of his pieces.
Well he’d worry about that later, he had to make the pieces first. It felt good to just fall into his rhythm again. Monster parts weren’t too different to standard materials, and involved a lot of prep to properly use. He didn’t mind, and actually rather liked the busy work. He broke down a goliath bone into powder, and mixed it in with the molten core he was using to make a base for almost everything he was going to make today. Monster cores could be melted down with the proper procedure, and when things were mixed in you could make something akin to metal, only with different properties depending on what you use.
In this case it was going to be something special, the cores themselves were from powerful monsters, meaning the items would have great mana conductivity, and would hold an impressive amount at any given time. Then came the properties he had enriched it with. The powdered bone would give it some serious durability, and along with some rocks from the stone dragon and a bit of his blood should also give the sword some solid self repairing capabilities. Which was oftentimes more valuable than simply making the material tougher.
With his base mostly prepped, and ready to use it was time to work on some of the other stuff he was going to use. For this one there was going to be quite a bit of range, he was going to have some monster leather that was fire/cold resistant, and then some stuff to neutralize wind resistance. Overall he felt he was going to have a pretty wide variety of items, but the important one was actually something he had found in Pearl’s bedroom when he had killed the man. It was an actual dragon skull that had been properly preserved. The man had wasted one of the most valuable materials on the planet as a mere trophy.
He had assumed it was fake at the time, but took it anyway, just in case. He could hardly believe it was the real deal, unfortunately, he was absolutely the kind of person who would look a gift horse in the mouth, and the fact the man had something like that concerned him a great deal. Especially considering that super powerful butler guy had never been found. Well whatever the reason the skull wasn’t cursed, so he sipped it in a 2nd much smaller pot full of molten magic. He didn’t use a core as the base of this one, because it didn’t need magic on its own, it was intended for a dragon afterall, and they had mana to burn. Instead this was set to be something that would be more powerful the stronger the thing that wore it was.
On a true dragon the helm could probably take a meteor head on without so much as a scratch. Not to say it was something he would use. Even on him it would probably be pretty tough, but it would limit his senses, and his style was more geared towards not getting hit anyway. Of course all of this was not even counting the enchantments he would put on them himself. Natural magic was a powerful thing, but when enchantments brought out the full potential, that was when things really started becoming valuable.
***
“You look satisfied.” Azura’s smile didn’t drop even as Lily called him out on it. He and his friends had decided to have lunch in the school cafeteria this time, mostly so he would have time to clean up from forging.
“That would be because I am, I couldn’t have asked for better results in the forge today. Especially considering I had to use a lot of guesswork on what properties each material would grant since I had never used most of them before. I’d say the results were well beyond what I had anticipated.” It actually hurt a little that he had to waste some of the stuff. As in not enchant it so he can sell it to the school. It was known he spent a lot of time at the forge, it would be suspicious if he never sold anything there, and he definitely couldn’t sell anything enchanted.
“Oh interesting! I’ve never really dug too far into magic crafting before, I don’t really have the abilities to go into that kind of field, but I’d love to hear some of the theory behind it.” He chuckled, even as everyone else growned. He was normally happy to go in depth with Roran, but it had been a while since they had all sat down together, or well since he had actually been there for it anyway, and he didn’t want to bore the rest of them.
“Maybe another time, right now I actually have a different scheme I want to run by you all.” Thanks to his copies, he had taken part in the Sunday challenges that had happened while he was gone. Thou unfortunately his cursed copy hadn’t wanted to participate, and his normal copy didn’t have the mana to complete them so he didn’t do as well as he would have liked, but at least 1 person in their group had been one of the winners for every challenge, and his normal copy had compiled all the information on each challenge, and the matching reward.
“So I’m fairly sure I have the challenges figured out. So I told you guys that the dessert thing was based off of the headmistress right? Well at first I thought all the challenges were, and most of them probably are, but it’s not only her, but other members of staff too. It makes sense they need something they have actually experienced to make a believable simulation.”
“That’s probably true, but I don’t see how that helps us predict what the next challenge will be. There are over 40 teachers here not even counting the headmistress and other staff.” He smiled at Luna. It was always nice when people actually listened to him about this stuff, Katy would have just told him to skip to the ‘important part.’ She just had no sense of presentation.
“Indeed there is, but ask yourself this, why are some simulations and some not then? Between all those people they should have plenty of things to use as scenarios to run us through, yet there are challenges where we have to go against each other or actual monsters, not even counting the very first one we had to deal with.” The answer seemed obvious in hindsight, but it was very big picture.
“Isn’t it most likely just that the simulations just take a lot of resources, and they can’t afford to do that every time?” He frowned. That was a point he hadn’t actually considered, and for Lily of all people to bring it to his attention took some of the wind out of his sails. Well he’d already come this far might as well give the rest of his theory anyway.
“Perhaps, but even if that is the case I think it’s pretty obvious they are training us for something specific. What does each event have in common? I’ll tell you what they don’t have in common. Some use numbers to wear us out, others put us against strong opponents, and some are more mental activities about strategy and time management, but every single one simulates lives other than ours being on the line. I think there's something the school is preparing us for. The only question is… what?” Sure it was possible he was just nuts and they were just training them normally. Lily had a point about the cost of simulations after all, but he wasn’t convinced.
“Don’t you think that’s a bit of a stretch? Wouldn’t it be more likely that they are just training us to be aware of the consequences of our actions?” He shrugged. Siara’s theory wasn’t bad, he didn’t exactly have a flaw to point to, but he had a gut feeling, and he found ignoring those tended to give him trouble.
“Perhaps, but don’t you think it’s a bit odd that every single event would teach the same lesson? It would be one thing if that was just a prominent lesson, but it’s not, the main concern of each one is how others can be affected by our actions or lack thereof, yet none of the teachers or the headmistress has said a word about it.” They were planning to put lives in their hands, he was at least pretty sure about that. He just didn’t know why.