Kevin Curry
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Chapter 7: Just business
🕑 Added 2022-03-07 13:54:18 +0000 UTCJust a note, this week is my birthday so I'm taking the next update off.
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“Come on, ducklings.” Casimir said as he walked into the guild. “We need to get you registered.” Their readiness was questionable, but Thorne was getting really annoying with wanting to begin the “exciting” parts of the club activities, and the students weren’t entirely hopeless, so he decided to get things started.
The students followed him in, lining up single file as Casimir walked them to the front desk. “I’m here with the newbies, Harriet. Nine sets of paperwork, please.”
The old woman smiled as she brought the stacks up from behind the counter. Casimir warned them the previous day, so they had plenty of time to prepare for this. First up was… Hashi the shaman.
Now, the adventuring guild and the Academy didn’t actually get along all that well. As such, there wasn’t any formalized method of inducting students. Registering properly required some kind of assurance of competence, either tested by the guild (for a fee) or by a member of at least veteran rank in good standing vouching for it. The Academy had no authority to either administer their own test, nor vouch for competence as an institution. They needed adventurers that were on staff that were willing to risk their good standing in the guild for them, which was probably the main reason the Headmaster was willing to let Casimir teach solo, to be completely honest.
Thus, the personal test that he had them go through the day before. While Thorne and Casimir had more or less divided up the groups between each other for combat training, Casimir still needed to make sure that Thorne wasn’t encouraging bad habits, like having a clear chain of command. An adventuring team was closer to a family than a military unit, with each member implicitly trusting the rest to act in the group’s best interests, and leaving decisions towards whoever was the subject matter expert. Having a clearly defined leader did help, but rigid adherence to the leader’s commands is a weakness. They seemed fine, so Casimir gave them a pass.
Registering as an adventurer was simple enough, paperwork-wise. As an Elite, Casimir could theoretically endorse the lot of them to be higher ranked, but instead he just signed a form for each one saying that they were capable enough for novice rank, and walked them through filling out their own form which listed their class, which was something of an adventurer custom that distilled their specialties and magical skills into one or two words, half bragging but there was enough convention surrounding it that you needed to be pretty weird to make something new and not get mocked. You could change it, usually when you got promoted or had to re-do your paperwork, as your registration does expire every three years, so Casimir was currently listed as an Assassin. Now that he was a teacher, perhaps he should change it? Worth thinking about.
It also had the basics for any travel papers, as an adventurer’s registration also functioned as a passport. Name, a physical description, place of origin, occupation, rank, etc. Standard stuff. Also a vitae pattern recording, which was mostly so there was a baseline to compare against if anyone accused you of being a monster in disguise.
After the ninth set of forms, Casimir collected the stack and formally handed them over to Harriet. The kids, who had sat at a set of tables as he went through each form, perked up at the sight of him turning in the paperwork.
Casimir savored the defeated looks on their faces when Harriet then passed him the forms for registering an adventuring team. “You know, I was wondering why you asked me to hold on to those until you were done.” Harriet commented, giggling at the student’s suffering. “It’s just going to be a few more minutes, dears.” She half-shouted towards the kid’s tables.
Casimir just efficiently filled out the forms with his enchanted pen. They didn’t need fancy names, so he just put them down as Thorne’s troop and Toome’s team. Right as he finished, he looked up to see the Guildmaster come through the door from the back rooms.
Guildmaster Purz was a stern Aviost, tall with feathers that were multiple shades of brown in a mottled pattern. It reminded Casimir of an owl he saw on an adventure once. Of course, that view was reinforced by Purz’s distinctly predatory beak. Casimir didn’t usually work in the plains on the mainland, so he was a little unclear on the meaning of the beak shapes, but supposedly they mattered. He walked up to Casimir, looming close enough that Casimir needed to look up to meet his gaze. “Mr. Toomes.” He rumbled, opening his beak the bare minimum to allow the air to leave. “You’re sponsoring these children?”
Casimir relaxed. If Old Purz was referring to Casimir by his name rather than butchering his title with an insult, he wasn’t too mad. “Yes sir.” He replied simply. “I’ve tested their combat readiness, and they’ll have minders for the jobs they take while in school, like any of the other Academy students.”
Purz hummed, which was more a musical trill given his beak. “You seem sane enough.” Was his eventual judgment. The usual indignation rose up, but it was easily quashed. “Harriet, give them the flower job.”
“Yes sir.” replied the receptionist, taking out a pile of papers from beneath the counter and rifling through them. After a moment, she brought out a specific bundle of pages and handed it to Casimir.
“Thanks.” Casimir said idly as he perused the job request. Pnuma flowers, huh? That’s a big order. Yeah, this looks like enough work for both groups to take. “Perfect.” Turning to the students, Casimir waved the paper as he started to walk to the exit. “We’re done here, follow me.” Now, where was Thorne?
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As expected, Peter was the one complaining the most about the job, once they arrived at the site and Casimir explained it. “I can’t believe we’re just picking flowers…”
Casimir snorted. “Novices don’t get monster hunting jobs.” He said, balancing the rolled up job notice that he had shaped a thin metal band around. “Novices get sent to areas where there might be monsters to harvest alchemical reagents, or to clear out regular animals that are being pests, stuff like that.”
Pnuma flowers were actually one of the prettier flowers to use as alchemical ingredients, in Casimir’s opinion. They were fairly large flowers, somewhat similar to roses, and their constant but imperfect absorption of all light mana around it creates an effect similar to a starry sky, an illusion of infinite depth in the darkness with one to three points of light per flower. While it was impossible to find them close enough together in nature to accomplish the effect, the great gardens of the Grand Cathedral of Helel, on the mainland, managed to create a river of constantly shifting constellations, a truly beautiful sight.
After a brief lesson on which flowers they had to pick and which ones were too immature to be useful, on top of proper harvesting instructions, Casimir went on a bit of a patrol to see what the local dangers were. One can generally get a feel as to what kind of ingredients and monster types there are around by the taste of mana in the air. Surveying mana was a subject complex enough that it had its own dedicated class, between the techniques to make sure you had a complete picture and the hundreds of hours of studying to interpret the information.
After following a faint trail of mind mana, he found his quarry: “You’ll do.” Casimir said as he spotted a flight of Swoopers resting on a tree. Normally, it was pretty difficult to curse a swarm monster like a Swooper, but while each body had its own pseudo-soul, the connections between them were purely mind magic, which meant that once you get past the inherent difficulty of cursing a monster with its greatest mana affinity, it easily propagated among the various bodies. Swoopers weren’t mana blind, so while there wasn’t much stopping them from knowing about the fact that Casimir cursed them… that was just a matter of finesse. Only the most disciplined adventurers and intelligent monsters were capable of shaking off something as harmless as a simple mana sensitivity curse, tuned to make light mana more obvious (and thus, seemingly more potent) to their senses.
Sneaking away, Casimir resisted the urge to cackle as the first of many monsters starting hunting down the Pnuma flowers, defending their “grand treasures” with their lives.
On his return, Thorne was scratching his head as he looked over the corpse of a Bolt Rabbit. “I’ve never seen any of these milk runs rustle up so many monsters.” He explained when Casimir stared in pretend-ignorance at the fine wooden bow Thorne had shaped from life mana. “They’re weak ones, sure, but it’s weird.” He gave Casimir a warning glance. “Aren’t you supposed to make sure they didn’t get bothered?”
“What? No.” Casimir said. “I was supposed to make sure nothing that they couldn’t handle came to bother them.”
Frowning, Thorne looked pointedly at the Marsh Boar, which was definitely not a monster novices would normally handle. “And that?”
“Was weakened enough for them to be able to handle it.” Casimir retorted.
The veteran soldier looked at the various monster corpses that were left in the group’s wake as half of each group assessed the flowers while the rest stayed on guard. “...Genius.” He eventually said.
“I told you I was going to curse monsters that were too strong for them until they weren’t.” Casimir said. It was weeks ago, did he already forget? Casimir put his palm on the Bolt Rabbit’s corpse, focusing the mana of the beast into the monster core. Within seconds, the flesh and fur turned dark and melted away, the Negative magic technique accelerating the natural process of decomposition. The monster sludge sublimated seconds after the core was removed from the pile.
“Yeah, for exercises.” Thorne said to excuse his forgetfulness. “This? This is as real as it gets. Also, this is the most fun I’ve had in weeks.” He shaped a force arrow and fired it at the Barbed Bear that Casimir found earlier, hitting it in one of its back knees. It roared in pain, but the kids took advantage of that injury to swiftly defeat it. “...Are you worried about them getting the wrong idea on how strong those monsters are?”
Casimir snorted incredulously. “Monsters aren’t of equal strength to others of the same kind, even if they appear to be. Assessing the strength of their opponents is a vital skill I’ll need to instill in them eventually, but for now, they still need to get used to combat in general.” In particular, the monsters of Anima are quite powerful in comparison to most in the mainland, so he was even less concerned. It was why only the small ones were able to be defeated by the kids without help. He started to extract the other monster cores, condensing the mana in the monster’s corpses to slightly improve the quality of the resulting cores, but more importantly it minimized the mess. “Honestly, leaving behind this stuff, rookie mistake.” The fertilizer merchants paid good money for monster cores, it was the best way to grow crops with a high mana content. “Then again, I suppose they’d have had time if I didn’t pull half the forest in their way.”
The group, having finished with the clearing, started to move as a group to the next one on the map that the quest form came with. Back to the grind…
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“-and the last clearing, the big one? There were four fish-apes guarding it! Naturally, I ordered them dealt with at range, and two were slain in the first volley!” Peter was telling the story with grand gravitas, exaggerating only slightly as the old guys were listening with amused expressions. The students had ordered food and were busy devouring their pay while the local church alchemist for the Helelites, Shawn, appraised the ingredients collected.
Harriet didn’t work this late in the day, so Casimir turned in the monster cores to the evening receptionist. “It should be about thirteen silver’s worth, in total.” It was a pretty standard haul, but not really enough to make the trip worthwhile on it’s own unless Casimir decided to rob the student’s shares. “If Grant goes below eleven, he’s cheating you. Shawn confirmed the value.” Granted, the only reason monster cores were worth even that much in Anima was because of the killing merchants made on exporting the bloody things to less mana-rich areas, but that doesn’t mean they can get away with paying even worse prices.
“Yeah, yeah.” Pina said flippantly, stashing the bag beneath the counter without checking the contents personally. Casimir frowned at the unprofessional behavior from the younger receptionist, but she did seal the bag, so she adhered to the letter of the rules at least. Unlike most Aviost, she had the uncannily human habit of moving her beak with each syllable, which gave her voice an even chirpier tone. “Anything else, Gaspy?”
“No.” Casimir said as he scowled at her, unsure if he was more annoyed at her referencing his title at all, or for the diminutive. At a glance, none of the students heard it, so he let it be. Returning to the alchemist, he noted that he was almost done assessing the flowers. “What’s the final tally?”
Shawn hummed, his bright yellow eyes illuminated with mana as he looked at the last flower. “Very little damage, all told. Good freshness, although a few more immature samples than the usual suspects bring back.” He put the last flower into his basket, the deep black petals much less interesting to admire after leaving the soil. “The first bonus pay, I’d say.” His eyes faded back to their normal amber color as he stopped channeling mana to the Analyze Magic spell.
Fifty silver coins for everyone? That was okay. Gathering quests could get messy when it came to pay disputes, but the local Helelites were good people, fair in their dealings, so they got a good amount of trust when it came to valuing their gathering materials. A neutral appraiser was easily accessible, given how many alchemists were around in the University, but that option was rarely exercised. Also, no one would dare to try to bullshit an academy professor on something like this. Too large of a risk for too little potential profit.
Casimir looked at the students. Should he have brought them in on this part? …Maybe next time. Killing their spirits with bureaucracy and their hopes with economics and negotiations should be done in stages.
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After the class started on the actual curses, the lectures became a lot shorter, with most of the class time dedicated to supervised practice, mostly so Casimir could give individual instruction to make sure everyone was progressing. “Today we’ll be talking in a little more detail about natural curse defenses.” Casimir said to start things off. He wrote out the mana cost equation for curses, drawing an arrow from the ‘total resistance’ variable to a new equation.
“As I explained before, souls are complex things, constantly in flux, but there’s enough underlying structure that embedding curses is possible.” There was some interesting research on the subject of souls that lack any such structure, but it’s mostly theoretical. “Most of the mana cost of a curse is spent in circumventing these defenses. The defenses correspond to the various physical defenses a person has, so they’re named as such: The skin, the meat, and the bone.”
Casimir turned over his chalkboard to point at the diagrams he had drawn out in advance. “The skin is the first defense. Some would call it the weakest, and it is for most non-mage, non-monster ensouled, but it’s also the part that can be most easily reinforced, either literally through mana cultivation, or metaphorically through the wearing of armor that’s been properly enchanted.” Casimir gestured to a few equations from the spellweaving classes, pointing out how the variable he had outlined was shared between them and the curse equations. “Unlike the other two defenses, this one also matters for calculating the effectiveness of other kinds of magic, as it’s just a matter of it being a physical barrier that also inhibits the transmission of mana.” To emphasize his next point, Casimir brought out his stiletto, twirling it on his fingers. “While it’s possible to bypass this defense by casting through an injury, a hole in the skin’s protection, that’s an advanced technique that’s only used by adventurers and surgeons.” As much as the practice disgusted him, cutting open a patient to more precisely apply healing magic to their insides was a perfectly valid way to increase the robustness of the spell matrix, allowing greater mana throughput and control.
Questions, excellent. “Jenny.” Casimir said, pointing to the blonde girl.
“Why is it called skin, meat and bone? That’s gross.” Was her question. Was the knife not clear enough?
“Because it’s literal.” Casimir said slowly. “The mana you use to curse people travels the distance between you and your opponent, through their body into their soul, then from there it affects their body. The skin is something everyone has everywhere, so it’s an important consideration. Stick your hand in a gaping wound, or channel it through a knife like this one, and the skin defense is ignored. As mentioned, channeling a curse through a weapon is an advanced technique that will not be covered in this course.”
He pointed at the word ‘meat’ on the chalkboard with his knife. “Now, meat is basically the same; the more mass and the more mana infused in that mass, the higher the resistance, but it works a little differently. Instead of blocking your mana, it instead… soaks it up. This is bad, of course, but not as bad, as a person’s body can only handle so much foreign mana, and once it’s hit that limit, the meat might as well not even be there.” He put the sub-equation of the ‘meat’ variable in the mana resistance equation below the symbol, noting the sub-variables of ‘capacity’ and ‘foreign mana total’. ”It’s why cursing the same target twice will consume less mana than cursing two separate targets, although remember the lessons on inherent resistance, if you’re going to do that, make the curses weaker. This also goes into medical magic, as ritual healing fully suffuses the patient with foreign mana beforehand to prevent this kind of interference.”
“The bone resistance is the last ditch defense of the soul. It’s basically impossible to work around, and you can’t wear it out, so it’s all or nothing.” Casimir shrugged. “It’s just the cost of casting curses.”
Casimir pointed to another student. “Faron?”
The elf stood up crisply. “Is this why casting curses is so inefficient in direct damage? Because of all the resistance, sir?”
“Exactly.” Casimir said. “If you want to hurt people, use more direct magic. I’m giving you precision tools here to help your friends and hurt your enemies, not weapons. You can still hurt people if you really want to, but it’s not the best tool for the job.”
Alright, that was all he needed to talk about. “Now, pair up, and start practicing your curses. I’ll be going around and giving tips.” Just another day on the job, really.
