A troll was no easy foe. They were more than a match for a single second circle mage and even for a third circle mage with no fire or acid magic, they were nearly impossible to kill. A warrior of comparable strength could never kill one without enchanted gear. Most things could be killed with a sword. I could probably make a tonic or potion or something that gave me some haste and strength given my meager supplies, and that would have been enough to let me kill something that wouldn’t regenerate. A troll, though? I was suitably fucked.

Siegfried was arranging for storage of the carriage, so I had some time to wallow in more self-pity before he came back and I had to put on the act of effortless hero mage. Come to think of it, Merlin had mentioned my credentials. Did I have some sort of storied history? It was a problem to consider once Magnus had recovered more from my presence. For now, I’d need to cobble something together to kill this troll soon.

I removed item after item from my satchel and took stock. A number of ingredients, a wand of some kind, several pouches with assortments of coins, and a dagger. I counted out the coins and was pleasantly surprised. I had a couple hundred copper coins spread between a few pouches, a pouch with a hundred silver, and a pair of pouches with 150 gold apiece. I smiled. 300 gold was nothing to scoff at, I supposed, but I also had no idea what the hell anything could cost. I wasn’t familiar with the economy! I collected the coins and moved towards the door to go to the market and browse around for some things that might be of use, browsing through my mental catalog of important information.

The market street was, luckily, only a couple streets over. It was wide, much wider than my own street, and filled with color and vibrancy. Shop owners called from doorways to get customers into their displays and stalls were set up in front of the buildings that didn’t have owners actively shooing merchants away. I breathed in the hubbub and bustle and grinned. No matter which realm I was in or how old I got, market streets never changed. I made my way down the line, ignoring the calls of merchants. “Young lord!” They called, “You look pale! Perhaps a potion of health for you?” “A fine phoenix feather quill to ignite your passionate writing?” “A magic carpet to get you places in style!” The advertisements continued, and I put on my best impression of someone that wasn’t enjoying themself. It was kind of a toss up, but I’d found that people were slightly more willing to negotiate with a difficult sale than an easy one.

I checked out the wares of a dozen stalls and shops before stopping. A crotchety old hag, not the monster but just an old woman with lots of warts, hunched over a cauldron and stirred with a gnarled staff. Laid out in front of her stall was a blanket with a dozen different pouches of dust on them. The items ranged from spices to crushed insect to crushed gems, and I inspected them thoroughly.

“Excuse me, ma’am, but how much for the ruby dust?” I asked, and she answered without looking up.

“A pinch is five silver,” She told me. I blinked.

“No, I’m sorry. I meant how much for the bag?” I clarified. She blinked.

“You want the whole bag?” She clarified. I blinked.

“Yes, I’d like to purchase the whole small bag of ruby dust. How much would that be?” This was getting tedious. She stared at me and considered it.

“Why?” She asked. I sighed.

“Does it matter?” I asked.

“You can’t recombine it into a whole ruby, you know,” She squinted at me. I shrugged. You could, actually, but I guess they didn’t know that.

“I’m aware, but I have other need for it. Would three gold do it?” I hedged. There were most certainly more than six ‘pinches’ in the bag, but I got the feeling she didn’t sell more than a few pinches per week. Three gold would be an influx of capital she likely hadn’t been expecting. Sure enough, her eyes bugged out of her head before she recovered and took on a greedy look.

“Three gold? Surely you don’t think there’s less than 6 pinches in there,” She narrowed her eyes at me. I shook my head.

“Look, lady. I’m not going to need more than a few pinches of this stuff, I’m just getting the bag to be safe. You’re not going to sell more than a few pinches of this stuff, so I’m offering you the gold now so that we can both be happy and walk away with more of what we wanted than we needed,” I spread my hands out magnanimously. Her head almost seemed to extend out further to me, like a vulture, as she considered. Seconds passed with no response.

“Three gold, five silver,” She said at last. I nodded and counted out the coins, careful to do so inside of my satchel so that she couldn’t see how loaded I was. It was pretty much a universal truth that ten gold equaled ten silver equaled ten copper. No matter when I looked down on the mortal realms or where, if there was a civilization present it was likely that they were using a ten gold system. I looked at the rest of her wares and ended up purchasing a few other kinds of dust and some plants for a dozen gold total. I thanked the crone and left to view other stalls.

I didn’t know exactly how I was going to kill a troll, but the ruby dust should help somehow. Most materials had innate properties and affinities that could be exploited. Ruby dust was naturally attuned to fire, one of a troll’s primary weaknesses. Ideas flitted around my head with what I could do as I moved from stall to stall, purchasing items and things. At a certain point, I considered if I could use a wand. It wasn’t something that had ever been of much interest to me, so I didn’t actually remember how they worked. Did I have to have mana to utilize it? Something to consider.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

I pulled the wand I had out of the satchel and inspected the inscriptions on it. After a minute or two of identifying, I was reasonably sure that it was a Wand of Threat Detection. The spell inside would send a burst of divining energy out for about a mile around and report back to the caster if there was anything that would react negatively to his presence.

It was invisible and worth a shot. I focused my intent on the wand and waved it dramatically. Nothing. I shrugged–it would have been way too easy if I could have just purchased wands to offset my lack of innate ability. Annoying, but not unexpected. As I deposited the wand back into the satchel, I made my way into an alchemy shop.

A half hour later, I exited seventy gold lighter. It was an obscene amount to spend on ingredients and other items, but this was necessary. I had to consider what resources I had available to me that others didn’t. So far, it only seemed like that was gold. I’d need exceptional preparation for everything that I encountered from here on out– that was the only way I could succeed.

The last things I’d need were a few weapons. I was the God of Magic, yes, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t well-versed in various forms of martial combat. You can only study dusty books for so long, you know? I was no Malakar or many of the other mixed gods, but I was likely one of the better warriors that existed in the mortal realms. Especially in this body. I made my way into a blacksmith’s shop and haggled for a sword and another item. It cost me 80 gold for the two items combined, far more than I had intended to spend, but I now had a plan of attack for tomorrow.

There were essentially four strategies I could undertake for tomorrow’s class: martial combat with an enchanted blade, preparation of a trap and leading the troll into it, calling down a being that I could persuade to kill the troll for me, or the option that I’d decided to go with. I didn’t think that any of the other options could be swung into a good lesson for the kids, but this one I was confident had at least a 40% chance of leaving an interesting impression. It wasn’t a good impression, per se, but it was interesting. In my experience, when I was in a precarious position, it was much better to be interesting than to be underwhelming. To that end, I had work to do tonight.

----------------------------------------

Five hours later, I was sitting with my legs crossed in a magic circle. I’d made it out of chalk, and it was lightyears ahead of anything that anyone on this realm had seen before. It was something I’d discovered several millennia ago and one of the previously mentioned successes that I’d kept. Instead of drawing mana from a caster for power, this circle could draw it from the air around me or from a deposited magic item. A drop of my blood in a controller’s circle and my will could command it. At first glance, this seemed to be a surefire solution to my problem tomorrow. The ability to command magic? Easy! The problem: if anyone saw me use this, they would first be astonished and amazed by my magical engineering, and then second they’d realize I couldn’t use normal magic. Neither of those things was acceptable at this moment.

That last fact had led me to my current project. Blood magic wasn’t really magic at all. It used Magicke, something that many people didn’t realize. There were two forms of blood magic when people referred to it, and they were always lumped together: manipulation of blood using mana, and spellcasting with blood as the catalyst rather than mana. The latter was Blood Magicke, and it was what I was using now. Blood had certain properties that affected the Laws of the universe. One such Law was that Blood connected things. By putting my blood in the magic circle, I was intricately connected to it. I could command it.

I’d let the circle charge for a couple of hours before I’d gotten started, and now I put the stored mana to use. Without my own mana to guide it, it was very difficult. Luckily, I could offset my lack of skill with mana manipulation with perfect knowledge of what I was doing–kind of. I placed a small iron ball on the floor in front of me, in what would be considered the front of my magic circle. The chalk glowed slightly as it powered up, and my blood sizzled in its slot. A magic circle was basically a regular circle, but at points along the perimeter, orbiting circles were added, called slots. The number and tiers of slots that a magic circle determined its difficulty and required power. This circle was just Tier 2, meaning that it had the one base circle and one layer of orbiting component slots. Magic circles were basically just spell formations that were too powerful to be channeled as a one-off or too impractical to cast without anchoring the spell in a physical medium.

I dumped a pinch of ruby dust into the other slot. Magicke didn’t really care about the exact proportions of the enchantment, it cared about the intent and belief of the user. I wasn’t layering an effect over an item like many enchanters did, I was fundamentally changing the item and the way it interacted with the universe. This was not breaking the Laws, it was enacting a process that the Laws allowed. It was kind of like the difference between theft and a scam. They both ended up with money in your pocket, but one had you go through certain actions so that said victim willingly handed their money over. It wasn’t a one to one analogy, but whatever.

I believed that my pinch was perfect, and so it was. If I had believed that it was a small pinch or not enough or too much or whatever else, the circle would have believed that too and I would have failed in some way. I didn’t. The circle took on a ruby hue as I enchanted the iron ball. It floated into the air as red energy swirled around me, up from the chalk. The ruby dust burned, a miniature vortex of flame and crimson energy funneling it into the air as it rapidly moved around the circle. I closed my eyes, picturing the spirit of the flame entering into the iron ball. It superheated, melting down as the flame entered it. I gritted my teeth as it did, anticipating the difficulty of using such low quality ingredients. There were Laws, yes, and I wasn’t breaking them. One of the Laws was the amount of energy that a certain material could hold. Iron was low on the list of materials when ranked by how much energy they could hold. I wasn’t breaking the Law. I wasn’t.

But I would bend it.