“I won’t help you refine your weapons and armor anymore if you do something like this again”, says the princess while pouting.

“Sorry Amina, I didn’t do it intentionally.”

I scratch the back of my head in embarrassment.

“I know, but you shouldn’t have had such a gloating expression when you looked at us.”(Amina)

“Couldn’t we just say that we are even now? You guys had a good laugh with me and I had a good laugh with you.” (Sieg)

“Hmph, fine. I will forgive you this once, but I will make you regret it if something like this happens again.”, says the princess with a frowning expression.

Let’s hope she forgets about this incident, because It would be really hard for me to find a decent weapon if the princess doesn’t help with the final refinement. You see, dragons and humans with a dragonic bloodline have a massive amount of strength. However, the problem with such massive strength is that it is difficult to find weapons that can fully display this kind of power. The most important thing is that your weapon is heavy enough. The heavier your weapon is, the more damage you can do with it. Of course the weapon also needs to have a certain size. If the weapon is too small, it will become too easy to avoid for enemies. If the weapons is too large, than the enemies will see where your weapon will land before you are even really starting to swing it.

In other words, you need a weapon from a material that has just the right density to create a somewhat large weapon with a decent amount of mass. However, swinging such massive and heavy weapons is quite the chore. You need special stances to disperse the weight of the weapon and keep it all in balance with your body. The royal family found however an alternative to these stances that doesn’t use mana but consumes the power of the dragon aura you emit. While it does take some of the pressure of the aura you emit away, it will give you a massive advantage in the long run. The royals infuse their weapons with an aura spell circle. These kind of spell circles consumes aura to function.

The spell circle the royals created is called ‘Forced Balance Gravitational Spell’. Quite the mouthful, but it aptly describes what it does. It makes it so that, in whatever position you swing your weapon, you will always be able to use your full strength without losing balance. This spell does however in no way change the weight of the weapon, it just makes it so that you can’t fall down from your own swings with the weapon. Outside forces can still knock you down because the spell is not made to compensate for something like that. It feels a bit weird to use these kinds of weapons at first, because it goes against what you would expect that will happen, but two months of non-stop training helped a lot with this problem.

The two massive swords is use do not only have a wide striking range, but also great cutting ability. While the edge is not incredibly sharp, the sheer weight of the weapon makes up for that. That is because if all the kinetic force from both your swing and the weight of the weapon gets concentrated on a single edge, than it comes as no surprise that it will cut through wood or exoskeletons of insects. Which is exactly the type of monsters you will encounter in a forest.

The princess is the only one besides me that also uses a weapon. That is because The prince and Lothea are both spellcasters and don’t really use any weapons. Melia has an ability that allows her to condense her own weapons, making a physical weapon obsolete for her. The princess however uses a massive mace to hit her enemies, which is great against metal based armor and softer targets. She also uses a spatial storage bag to store her weapon in. These special bags allow us to carry things with massive weight as if they were weightless. It allows you to store things into a different dimension, which negates the weight of what you are carrying. The only restriction that these bags have, is that they have a limited space available. The bags of me and the princess are already full with our weapons, however the others still have empty ones that we can use as storage for the materials we need to find to complete the practical exam.

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“So, which way will we go?”, asks Lothea suddenly.

“Hmm, I think we should take the Ravine of Fire Ants. They are easy to kill and our elemental affinity will help us negate their attacks. They are all between rank 1 and 2 with exception of the queen and king ant. The king is rank 3 and even though the queen is immobile, her power output rivals those of a strong rank 4 soul augmenter. The carapaces of these ants contain mythril and black iron essence. Both of these materials are worth a lot. We can refine those carapaces with our fire magic to burn away the organic material. This way, we will be able to deliver purified mythril and black iron essence. We should get halfway done with the test by just exterminating the Fire ant fortress in the ravine.”, suggests Melia in a calm and calculating tone.

“Lothea, do you have any blessings that can grant me extra resistance against fire based attacks? My affinities are still locked unlike with you guys. Fusing my soul shard with my body prevents me from using any magic outside of my body and my dragon aura is already getting used by my swords, so I can’t release any fire based mana to protect myself.” (Sieg)

“Hmm, I do have something like that. I can clad you in phoenix flames that I control. If I do this, I should be able to negate some of the incoming fire damage for you.” (Lothea)

“Will you still be able to use spells that way?”, I ask Lothea with some concern.

“It should be no problem, I can cast three different spells at the same time. One for you to keep the fire from hurting you, one to heal the injured and one for attacking the ants.” (Lothea)

“Hah, I would expect no less from the daughter of the principal. You are a real genius magician.”, says the princess while sighing. She can only use one spell at the same time.

“I can use up to three body augmentation spells, is that similar?”, I ask everyone.

Lothea looks at me in surprise and says, “Yes, that is quite similar. Even though it is easier to control mana in your body, that doesn’t make casting multiple spells that much easier. I would say that you are somewhat on my level when it comes to mana-control and spell casting. Maybe a bit less, but not by much. That is quite the feet for a human.”

“Well, I’m not really human anymore though.”, I say to Lothea.

“It’s still quite rare for any entity at rank 3 to be able to cast 3 spells at the same time. But why don’t you use three spells? You could use 3 different body augmentation spells to prevent an augmentation overload from harming your body which happens when you stack too many of the same spells on top of each other.” (Lothea)

“That is because that, even though my body is a lot stronger than it used to be, infusing 3 spells in my flesh at the same time will still harm me physically. After all three different spells working at the same time will cause the mana in my body to get entangled into an indecipherable chaos. This will also break down the three spells that I’m using at that time. My body is too small to allow three magic circles to form inside of me without them interfering with each other.”, I say with a grimace after thinking of the day when I tried doing that.

“But, enough about this. What should we do? It’s already getting late and we should set up camp for the night. We can also travel some more to reach the ravine and set up camp there, so that we can immediately enter the fire ant ravine when we wake up the next day.” (Sieg)

“I suggest we set up camp here. The chance is too big that the ants will notice us and attack us during the night if we set up camp so close to them.”, says the prince.

“I agree with Igy, it’s too dangerous to set up camp there. We should search for a river where we can get some water to wash ourselves and boil some water to make soup. The dried meat is a bit too bland to just eat it with a slice of bread.” (Amina)

“Okay, I will look for some edible plants to make soup of!”, says Melia with a smile.

“There should be a small clearing in the forest a few miles ahead of us, according to this map.”, says Igomar while pointing at a certain direction further south.

“Okay, let’s go! We should be able to get there before sunset.”, I say to everyone as we depart at the fastest speed we can muster.