After some relaxation, gods was their cooking good, he was never going to eat anything without infusing it packed with mana again!... Anyways, the princess didn't look too dejected now, so when he suggested they go to the adventurers guild to get him registered, which was mostly a convenience considering what his future was looking to be like, she decided to fill him in on what being an adventure entailed and what he needed to do to build a reputation of minimal competence for his new identity.
Considering he had absolutely no social identification, and was technically a war prisoner changing sides and knew exactly one person, they needed to make up a story about him being raised in captivity on the human side and being unable to speak due to shock and trauma, nevermind not knowing their language since he had never even come in contact with an adult in a situation to teach him.
Despite the strange story, he could indeed prove he was able to avoid scars and pitifully look like a scared child, because he did feel like one in a world with so many supers capable of SNEEZING him dead.
Paranoia aside though, he needed to improve at least his vitality, if not his agility, so as to avoid getting killed rather easily in close combat. While intelligence did increase his capability to understand his surroundings, he could move neither his body nor his mana at the required speed to stay relevant and alive in this war, nevermind survive the waiting times between battles.
The best way to do that was, in all honesty, to focus on training to acquire skills, earn traits to inflate whatever advantage he could get and to pick up or craft equipment to compensate for any obvious weakness. After all, even if he didn't go at it with a one stat above all mentality, his investments on his physicality would always be secondary or even complementary to his magical prowess.
Which didn't mean there weren't ways to fix their deficiency, but those required specific opportunities. Opportunities he wouldn't be able to take advantage of without the correct set of skills, which of course included both specialized terrain movement and acting, both of which he had already begun to level.
Sure, he would probably learn several blink style teleportation spells and even apply memetic agents to his person, but none of that worked to full power if he went at it without proper technique.
This mindset however, seemed to surprise his new handler/boss, who seemed to think him more than strong enough already. A notion he made sure to express, in any way he could think of at the moment, was rather far from the truth, plus the fact that she was an idiot for thinking so for more than a second.
She was flustered and for whatever reason didn't know how to deal with someone berating her, but he eventually stopped so a to avoid creating true enmity.
Since he didn't want to get her shaken ass to her meeting for much the same reasons, he asked to go look for toys and oddities in the market to train his mind while traveling. Honestly, while he was getting close to asking for his next translating earing, he didn't miss books that much yet, so just having something to busy his hands with while moving would help.
They even found an enchanted toy that resembled a rubix cube, though it could only be moved with mana or it'd break.
Yet another thing he wanted to learn, enchanting. No matter what talent of his he looked at he could see their use in enchanting in any of the ways he'd ever read about, and he doubted he could directly train those without exploring ways of using them other than combat.
Be it engineering, weapon and armor crafting, whatever the local equivalent of feng shui was called, raising creatures of pure essence into sapience, soul shaping and altering, direct manipulation of causality… the macro and micro applications of true magic were a vast field, and while specialization was necessary for excellency, diversity helped with innovation and true understanding, so he had to find a balance between everything that is relevant to properly advance on his path.
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So even as they went ahead with the princess' schedule and he was left to act as a retinue follower like that guy that never let his shadow cloak fall off, he was always messing around with his spells, trying to see the enchantment on his new toy or even studying one of the sycophants and politicians to glimpse their own magical items.
He wasn't even called out on it for whatever reason. Like, he was accompanying the country's princess, sure, but did they think he was trying to show off or were they ignoring him? It was rather hard to tell when he didn't know the language.
Ultimately, Sera also didn't tell him anything about his behavior, so he decided not to mind it and keep experimenting. To little success in advancing anything, but still.
They would stay in town for a couple more days, and thanks to his 'slightly' rich patron, he had plenty of material to try and figure out his own enchanting process.
For that he needed to decide how he wanted to start his own language however, then integrate it into the dimensional weave of the space he resided in.
While he wasn't Tolkien, he could figure out a workaround easily enough. Namely, he sat down on his room and meditated on what he knew of chaos, trying to hold onto the most fulfilling description he could think of, some ten minutes later infusing said pseudo essence through his hand and carving the piece of wood in front of him so as to…
………….
He had passed out because of his method. There wasn't any other real explanation that also accounted for the weird and metallic would-be screaming butterfly that irradiated an aura of wrongness.
The fact that his hand was missing flesh and skin in several parts was actually fully expected, but success at first try was rather strange. It could all be a lot worse, but it wasn't like he had the specks to use something so primal to any real effect, so he hadn't been overly worried about it.
He wanted to go for the next character and eventually branch back to 'Order' so as to create interactions capable of causing magical phenomena able to hold together without creating new and unexpected effects, but unfortunately he had consumed all of his mana and would be unable to get into the right state of mind even if he took a mana potion, what with the burning headache he was feeling.
While he wondered what to do with the nightmare fuel he had taken out of the realm of unrealised possibility, the decision came to him quickly enough, what with Sera knocking on his door. She was not happy about anything inside his room, from the blood on the floor to her newest gift, which he had no clue as to what it might or might not do, given the way it was created and with the intent of a proof of concept making it indeed random.
When actually asked what he had been doing as his fellow retainer tried and failed to permanently destroy his gift, something he'd immediately started upon the thing entering his presence, Aki simply implied it to be complicated and part of his training. It took a bit to explain that 'the thing' had been pure happenstance and should not happen again.
The shadow guy had even threatened him with a knife after unleashing a technique that finally destroyed the chaotic byproduct, not that he could understand what he said, but his intentions were rather obvious, and right afterwards he was prohibited from experimenting with chaos.
It wasn't like he intended to make such harebrained experiments to begin with, but his idea just seemed so intelligent at the moment… Well, he was half sure he had done it because of the emotional imbalance, his fear not reacting to the overly small excitement he had had despite how momentous it should be to start the creation of his own magical language.
The whole experience WAS in fact helping with that, nevermind the three new talents he'd unlocked, none of which were basic, but this had given him something much more valuable, vision.
His returning capability to make bad jokes that only he would ever understand aside, this event revealed that he was not of perfectly sound mind. Sure, he could make reasonable deductions and ignoring social norms up to a certain point was even expected of him at this point, but as someone trying to grow strong in a fantasy world he needed to be ready to deal with the unreasonable and illogical without going on a paranoid streak.
The required level of worldly experience, emotional intelligence and luck required for that were never something he had. Rather, he was relying on imagination, wonder and fantasy knowledge to even get this far despite having a system.
…. It was about time that he finish the fort quest, but otherwise, he needed to sit and calm down before he could get to grinding.