Chapter 205: Choosing a Spell |
The Northern Society’s battle mage corps was stationed in a small house.
Zane looked at the five recommendation letters in his hands. His trembling fingers could barely hold them.
He truly had not expected that his battle mage corps would receive so many well-connected recruits in a single day.
Under normal circumstances, he would not even see one such person in an entire year. Unlike other battle mage corps, the Northern Society’s battle mage corps did not have any advancement methods.
That was also the reason most people here only worked part-time. If you could not even accommodate a mage’s desire to advance, then who would come here?
Even if having an advancement method did not necessarily mean one could successfully advance, it was still at least something to hope for.
Fran, meanwhile, looked speechlessly at Nora beside her. She had merely mentioned that she was coming to the battle mage corps, yet she had never expected Nora to follow her all the way here.
She turned and saw Nora smiling at her, and that only made her more confused.
Ever since they had met that day, Nora had kept coming to find her, saying that they should become closer.
And she had actually followed her here. Fran was not blind. Of course she knew Nora had come because of her.
She swept her gaze across the room. Aside from Dylan, whom she recognized, there were two others. One she did not know at all, while the other she had seen before in Philip’s project.
He had blond hair, a slender build, and ugly black blotches on both sides of his neck. Fran remembered that his name was Cole.
It was obvious at a glance that he was a member of the Modification School.
At that moment, Nora leaned in and said,
“Cole is a member of the Ocean Society from the Modification School. That is one of the Alliance’s top major societies.”
Fran turned her head and glanced at Nora, then looked away again.
“Why do you keep following me around?”
“We just happened to run into each other, that’s all,” Nora said with a smiling expression, not caring in the slightest about the impatience in Fran’s tone.
Fran did not believe a single word of that. Judging from what Nora had said before, she was most likely trying to get her to switch schools and join the Elemental School.
But Fran absolutely could not switch schools right now. First, she had only come to know Elise, the President of the Northern Society, because of Habos. If she switched schools, then what would happen to that connection?
Second, she had absolutely no need to join the Elemental School. Even now, she still did not feel there was anything in the Elemental School that could truly attract her. Was it not much better to stay in the Northern Society and learn magic there?
So she had no thoughts whatsoever about the Elemental School. She spoke to Nora directly.
“Stop pestering me. I’m not going to join the Elemental School. I have no intention of abandoning my own school.”
Nora froze for a moment when she heard that, then smiled and said,
“How can anyone know what will happen in the future? If you do not try, how will you know?”
Fran merely raised an eyebrow and said nothing more.
Standing in front of the group of privileged recruits, Zane finally finished reading through the letters and frowned.
There was not a single one among them that he could refuse. He swept his gaze across the mages who had entered through connections and found the situation deeply troublesome.
In the end, he had no choice but to accept all of them.
“I understand your situations now. If you run into any problems here in the future, come to me first. I can help you deal with them.”
What he really meant was that if they ran into trouble within the battle mage corps, they should come to him.
After all, the mages in the battle mage corps were rather different from mages elsewhere. The mages here were much more aggressive.
So just in case, he deliberately warned them a few times, telling them to seek him out if they ran into trouble.
Looking at the five mages before him, Zane could only hope they had truly taken his words to heart.
“Now let me explain the arrangements for you. First of all, as new battle mages, you have not yet mastered the specific combat techniques, so you will first undergo basic combat training. Come back here in three days, and we will begin then.”
“Before that, you should first go collect one spell for your studies, as well as a standard set of protective gear.”
That was all the Northern Society’s battle mage corps could provide, which was also one of the Northern Society’s characteristics—they were somewhat poor.
In a normal battle mage corps, even if not every spell was made available, at least most of the spells could be learned freely within the corps.
But things were different at the Northern Society. Elise had failed to secure the battle mage corps’ unique advancement methods, so she could only use access to other spells as an incentive to guide the mages here into doing their work.
Every mage who came here could only claim one spell, though they could also receive a set of protective gear roughly equivalent to what other battle mage corps offered.
That was not really a welfare benefit. It was simply because that kind of protective gear already had a complete production process, so the cost was not especially high. The truly expensive part came later.
Among a battle mage’s equipment, the most costly items were those linked to spells. Quite a few spells needed specialized equipment in order to display their true power. Without that equipment, they might even be inferior to an ordinary First-Tier spell.
Fran and the other mages followed behind Zane, each beginning to think about what kind of spell they should claim next.
Logically speaking, there were absolutely no combat spells from the Forge Furnace School here. After all, Habos had not established that school very long ago.
This kind of situation was actually quite common in the Alliance’s history. After all, developing combat spells took time. It was not as though a newly established school would instantly have everything.
The best, and really the only, solution in such cases was to learn spells from the school to which the founder of one’s current school had belonged before establishing the new one.
That way, the spell one learned would still have some connection to one’s own school’s magic, rather than forcing one to study a completely unfamiliar field.
Given Fran’s current situation, she should have gone in and chosen an Elemental School spell, then made do with learning that.
But Fran’s circumstances were different. She had the panel, which let her rapidly master any spell she learned. For her, the end goal was definitely to learn every spell eventually.
That made the choice of her first spell somewhat unimportant. In theory, she could pick any one at all.
Fran glanced at Nora, and Nora returned the look with a smile, as if asking whether she wanted help choosing a spell.
Even now, Nora did not know Fran’s exact school, but there was one thing she was certain of: Fran’s school had definitely been founded by a mage of the Elemental School.
That much could be seen from Fran’s spell fluctuations. Under such circumstances, choosing a spell from the Elemental School would indeed have been an excellent option.
After all, the Elemental School’s history was far too long, and the number of spells it had produced was beyond what other schools could compare to.
Fran’s own school might not even have spells as good as those of the Elemental School.
Yet, ignoring Nora’s shocked gaze, Fran chose an Alchemy School spell instead—[Forced Fusion].