“You were NOT supposed to bring them here. Haven’t you heard the orders? The reclassification?”

The wyvern-rider sounded angry and stressed in a way I hadn’t heard from a demon before, but Mercutio shrugged her off with his usual sleazy grace.

“I’ll have you know that they are officially on loan to my division for the length of my assessment of this world. I needed assistants, and I got them.”

“Yes, you did. And how many did you start out with, again? Don’t pretend like you don’t know why we’re here!” the demoness snarled back, her words punctuated by the angry growls of her wyvern.

“Listen, woman, I don’t need you to give me orders. You cannot. All I need is a designated section of land for my troops to make camp on until this barrier falls.”

Glancing back, I saw the demoness’s whole posture go rigid with rage. I was reassured that Mercutio was, in fact, just a horrible person to be around for everyone.

Good to know it’s not just me.

“You do not have the authority to make that request,” the demoness said, her voice terrifyingly cold.

“Actually, I think you’ll see I do,” the demon declared smugly. “I am the one in charge of surveying the capital, its accrued wealth, and any materials we could potentially exploit in the long term.”

“Yes. I know. You forget whose aide I am. That authority applies only after the capital has fallen. Besides, I am fairly certain the general has not yet received a survey report from Glarind’s Spine.”

For the first time, Mercutio visibly faltered. “There was an… incident… I need to report to the general. Glarind’s Spine is no longer accessible to traditional assessment methods.”

“What do you mean, it is no longer accessible? Did it vanish?” the demoness demanded, her arm drifting towards a sword attached to her hip.

Mercutio flinched a step away. “No! No. There was, however, an altercation… A mage stationed at the spring decided to aspect it to the fire element. Violently.”

“You let a local simply aspect a mana spring? And you did what? Watched?” Amusement, disapproval, and malicious glee all mingled in the demoness’s voice.

“There was a barrier already in place.” Mercutio grit his teeth in frustration. “The mage managed to deal the first blow by overloading the barrier and causing it to explode.”

“Oh, poor logistics officer, did you have to fight a widdle backwater mage?” the woman sneered.

I very carefully did not laugh. Or snicker.

Out loud, anyway.

Mercutio’s entire head was now white, which was his version of a flush. “I just had a mana spring exploded in my face! I will not be mocked! I have the right to demand a place here at camp, woman!”

“You have the right to demand exactly nothing,” she replied coolly. “I also note that you teleported in, instead of traveling traditionally, as you were ordered. Had you stuck to the plan, you would have arrived at a conquered capital you could survey at your leisure.”

“Did you not hear me? I said that a local aspected and blew up a mana spring!” Mercutio shrieked. Then, fighting to control his volume, he hissed, “What do you think they could do to the one here? The rumors say it is much bigger. This is important intelligence, and it needed to reach the general immediately!”

“Hmm… well, I’m afraid the general is in an important meeting for another few hours. Don’t care if the world starts crumbling around us, no one is reaching him.” The demoness sounded dismissive, but she shot a contemplative look at the city as she spoke, and I knew Mercutio was gaining ground.

Then, a moment later, her expression turned sly and calculating. She refocused her attention on Mercutio.

“Say, you’re a mage, right?”

She asked the question so sweetly, it immediately put the other demon on guard, though he rallied quickly.

“Of course. As a scion of my bloodline is supposed to be, I am exceptional in the arcane arts, and —”

“Great.” She cut him off with a wave. “By order of the general, all mages have been drafted for work on the barrier. No exceptions. You will have your meeting with the general, and I am also granting your request for a designated section of land. The recruits that accompanied you here can camp on this spot, under my authority. But you’ll be coming with me.”

Her smile was feral. Mercutio’s face turned the whitest I had ever seen it.

“You can’t do this! I belong to a different division! I am logistics! And… I am weary. Exhausted. I had to keep using my spells all the way to Glarind’s Spine!”

“Yes, yes, I’m sure it was so tiring to fire off diagnostic spells every few miles while lounging in bed. I’m afraid, however, that all branches of the legion are ultimately under the general’s command. As such, you qualify for the draft.”

Without another word, the demoness closed a fist around Mercutio’s upper arm and marched him in the direction of the barrier.

My eyes were wide. My lips stretched into a brazen grin I made no effort to contain. I felt my emotions spiking and knew I was broadcasting my glee for all the legion to feel, but I didn’t care.

Mercutio was too ‘busy’ to notice, anyway.

—

Setting up camp was swift and instinctive at this point. Also, the truce we had all agreed to and sealed in magical oaths kept everyone relaxed, which made things even easier.

And Mercutio was gone. He had been put in his place and dragged off into combat.

I wasn’t sure if I would ever stop grinning.

The one blemish on my good mood was the fact that the mutated recruit was nowhere to be seen. I tried to put it out of my mind, though. There were more important things to focus on.

Like sightseeing an actual demonic war camp.

For the first time, I had my eyes on a truly massive congregation of demons. I wasn’t sure how many there were, but they outnumbered what I had seen even in the conquered and converted cities.

The sheer variety of different physiques and appearances was stunning. There were demons with four, six, or even eight arms. Demons with wings, tails, oddly aquatic features, and everything in between. Their colors ran the entire gamut of what I knew, and I even saw a few mysterious hues that made my head swim. The light headache and nosebleed I developed afterwards were mildly alarming, too.

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More curious, though, was the lack of diversity in race.

Most of the demons were at least baseline humanoids, more or less in line with what you could expect if you corrupted a human into demonic form. Sharpened ears and pointy teeth abounded everywhere I looked, but not many animal features or outright fangs. I spotted some centaur-like or otherwise fantastical individuals, but they were few and far in between.

In a way, it mirrored the situation among the trainees. Humans were far and away the most plentiful ‘mortal’ group. Elf-like individuals were not exceedingly rare, but members of other races were. The beast-folk, for example, were pitifully few in number. I was pretty sure I had only spotted that one harpy… who, on second thought, was most likely dead by now.

I found all this a little odd, but wasn’t sure what to make of it.

I couldn’t waste all my time puzzling over demonic demographics, however. As soon as my curiosity was somewhat assuaged, I vanished into my tent and took my grimoire from my hip.

Every time I rifled through it, I felt happier and happier that I had managed to snatch it away. It was uniquely invaluable to me. Without the spells and notes it contained, I wouldn’t be able to make any true use of my ongoing progress with mana.

It was only a shame I still couldn’t handle the truly valuable spells hidden away in the book. Fire Ball was a classic, but no baseline mage could hope to support the expenditure of the spell. Wind Blade, too, called to me for its versatility, along with several other spells that were just as nice.

For better or worse, though, I needed to start with the basics. So, as I had done multiple times since picking up Cleanse, I poured over the next spell on my plate: Mage Shield.

This was the spell I had popped so easily in order to kill Clarinette. It was a spell in her arsenal. But, if my memory served, the station had it listed as ‘unskilled’ under her soul’s status. Instead, she had chosen to focus on the Mana Bolt, and even managed to increase its mastery to the Greater rank before she met her end at my hand.

The reason for her choice was simple. Mana Bolt was an exceedingly efficient and ‘cheap’ spell. The greater your mastery, the more powerful you could make the projectile at a lower mana cost. You could even conjure two or three at once for what you would initially spend on a single bolt, and that was at mid-level mastery of the spell.

With her middling mana reserves, even at the basic mage rank, it was the perfect spell for Clarinette.

Mage Shield, in comparison, was a power-hungry spell. It had two modes: Cast and Forget, and Active Maintenance. Cast and Forget would anchor the shield to the mage until the invested mana ran out, with no further concentration required after casting. Active Maintenance demanded at least a portion of the mage’s concentration at all times, but it also drew on all the mage’s mana. It was much harder to cast. However, pulling it off meant that no one was getting through a mage’s shield until they exhausted the mage’s entire mana pool.

Well, unless they poked the shield with a soul armament like my blade. But I was fairly confident the locals didn’t even know about such weapons, let alone make them.

I wanted to master Active Maintenance, and badly.

But the spell was just not cooperating with me. I had the initial mana weaving down pat, but when it came to adding the runes and conjuring the shield, I faltered. Maybe I just wasn’t used to maintaining my mana outside of my body that way, but it was frustrating nonetheless.

The best I managed to do was to create three shaky runes and send them orbiting in the air around my arm. Self, shield, and harm. I also needed ‘ward’ and ‘anchor,’ but every time I tried to form the fourth rune, the other three crumbled away into motes of mana and I had to start over from the beginning.

After the fifth consecutive failure, I was about ready to throw my priceless grimoire as hard as I could into the wall of my tent.

Instead, hoping for some insight or hint that could help me, I went back and reread the basic primer on casting.

The methods of casting are as varied as the many traditions from which magecraft sprang from in our past. Some rely on runes, some on chanting, and some even choose to sing their spells into existence. Other schools of magic forego on-the-spot casting entirely, choosing to weave their spell into artifacts or similar items their mages carry on their person at all times.

Both approaches have benefits to recommend them.

The casters who prepare their spells beforehand can utilize them with greater speed and power. They can even add external mana sources to their artifacts, allowing the spells to exceed the limitations of the mage’s mana pool.

On the other hand, spontaneous casting is an art form that ensures a mage is never truly without a weapon. The versatility and security this offers to a mage cannot be understated. They have saved the lives of many.

Of course, the higher a mage’s level, the line between the two traditions tends to blur.

Certain high-ranking mages have reported that they started to develop the ability to cast simpler spells, such as Mage Shield, instantly without having to resort to tools or verbal invocations. It is theorized, though not proven, that even higher mages might be able to cast Fire Balls as easily as they cast a cantrip, but that is not what you will learn here.

Our tradition relies on the use of the runes our predecessors have discovered to direct and bring our spells into existence. Naturally, just like every other tradition, the basis of this is exquisite mana manipulation, exercises for which you can find in chapter 2, starting on page 24. Once you have mastered the basic mana weaving for a spell, you need to emit the mana outside of your body, where the formation of your control runes can begin.

I sighed, reading and rereading the words like they might eventually yield some sort of celestial wisdom. They didn’t. The instructions were as clear as day, and identical to the manner in which the Mage Shield’s guide told me to proceed.

I needed to make mana behave outside of my body.

Of course, pulling that off would have been easier with those mana manipulation exercises mentioned in the primer. The only exercises I knew all focused on internal stuff. Unfortunately, while Clarinette did copy the basic casting primer into her grimoire, she did not bother doing the same for chapter 2, and I certainly didn’t have access to page 24 of whatever book it came from.

So, I scowled and focused on making those three runes orbit my hand, like I had seen so many demons do. Come to think of it, I had watched the general prove all the theories postulated by this world’s mages. He was able to perform extremely powerful spells with no artifact, and not even a shortened chant…

I froze.

I had seen demons use magic that way. Demons, who were way beyond the level of most mortals. Had I ever seen a human mage manipulate mana outside their body in such an obvious, visible way?

I cast my mind back over the human mages I had encountered. While I distinctly remembered a glow around some of their hands, I couldn’t come up with a single instance where I saw runes actually forming in the air around them.

But then how…?

I squinted at my hands. Slowly, tentatively, I drew my mana out of my body. But instead of casting it into the air, I sent it spiraling over my skin. Immediately, it started to glow with a murky red light.

Tentatively, like one wrong move might ruin everything, I started shaping runes right on top of my skin, almost in it. Mana snapped into the correct runic shapes with remarkable ease. The next instant, I felt the Mage Shield’s protective barrier click into place.

Of course, I thought, hardly daring to breathe. I was trying to control mana like a demon, on a demon’s level.

When I leaned in closer to examine my left hand where I had drawn the runes, they were only barely visible, like faded tattoos on the verge of disappearing entirely. And that was with my new, enhanced eyesight. No wonder I couldn’t spot any runes on other human mages!

Before I could cackle in glee at my breakthrough, however, a pain pulsed through me. My brand burned, and my concentration immediately snapped. With that, my barrier winked out of existence too.

I was more than a little peeved when I rubbed my brand and found another generic message to ‘Gather.’ I knew immediately it was from Mercutio. Only that asshat favored vague, single-word instructions. It was like he was hoping we wouldn’t understand so he would have an excuse to punish us all.

As we approached his stupid turtle yet again, unease gripped me. The demon was still filthy, and he looked more tired than I had ever seen him, but he was smiling.

“I have excellent news. In line with my duties, as my troops, you will be granted access to the city the moment the barrier falls. It is currently assumed this will happen in four days. There are three caches of valuables within the city, which we have been ordered to extract. You will venture into them and retrieve the items within.”

We didn’t exactly erupt into anxious murmurs, but more than a few of us turned to look at the city with dread. When I looked back at Mercutio, I found his stormy eyes locked on mine.

“Don’t worry. I’m sure you will be able to survive the experience. You’ve all done so well thus far. Do me proud.”