Flames raged around me as I watched without blinking. A part of me wondered what it told me about my life when an inferno that could consume a decent part of a town if left unattended didn't even earn a blink.
Did I qualify as one of those crazy scientists that movies loved to stereotype?
"You seem lost," Maria asked. "What are you thinking?"
"I'm wondering if I should work on developing a crazy laugh, or let it come to me naturally," I responded, which only earned a confused look. "It sounded better in my mind," I said. "I'm thinking about how to stabilize that damn spell to go for more than ten yards without exploding on my face."
"At least this time your eyebrows are in place," she said, and I chuckled.
To my surprise, a week after their initial attack, neither Drakka nor Asterion made a move on us. According to the news Rosie's contacts could get, they were seemingly locked in a battle of growing intensity, unwilling to commit any of their ascended forces.
I wasn't complaining. With their absence, things were slowly falling into a rhythm. The things at the Land of Steel — a new name that had caught on after my moniker of Steel King spread around enough to turn semi-official — were going well.
The new citizens adapted to the situation faster than we expected, which granted a lot of benefits; the biggest being solving our manpower issue, which had been a glaring problem no matter how much of a multiplier the System was.
To our surprise, the added variety of combat classes affected us surprisingly little, as very few of them were even able to reach Rare skills naturally, and only a few of their numbers were able to absorb Epic skill stones.
I had a feeling that any that had shown such potential had been long recruited by the cities, who were aware of the importance of the soul power. Any that slipped the web probably belonged to newly spawned noble families like Maria, or ones that slipped the web like Rosie.
Luckily for us, the same trend didn't apply to the production classes. Ignored and forgotten, neither I nor my students were the only exceptions. A worthwhile minority of them had reached Epic rank unaided, a significant majority of those with the ability to use mana.
Every class had brought some surprise variants, some improving the combat capabilities of the town while others bringing surprising conveniences to all areas, from scouting to production, but the most impactful ones had been the Blacksmiths.
Not just due to our rapidly growing town was based almost entirely on metal production and manipulation, though that played a big part, but because of my personal lessons.
I had a rather extensive experience in how to utilize and improve those skills. Combined with the material abundance, the results were impressive.
Admittedly, it didn't impact the production in terms of total tonnage, but that meant very little in a world where mana content and conceptual strength of the metal were enough to change its basic properties a hundredfold.
There was even a developing standardization of mana alloys. It was very long, including many topics like material content, mana density, conceptual additions; and even the class of skill the techniques it contained belonged to.
I was happy about that particular development. It meant, my involvement in mass production aspects had been dwindled into a minimal point. I only forged Radiant Flame-based equipment, and even that was mostly creating metal in bulk and leaving the fine manipulation to the hands of the others.
The only thing I created was the high-end, personalized weapons for our elite, where my Wisdom gave the process an edge the others couldn't replicate.
We had several Blacksmiths with Wisdom, but none of them had a class that gave more than a point every two levels.
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"Devon," Maria poked, pulling me off my daze. "I only have another twenty minutes with you before Eleanor comes and drags you away from one of your spars, and I don't intend to waste. We need to finish testing the spells I designed."
"Sorry about it," I said. "I will focus."
"You better. You promised Eleanor to help test her new sword, so there's no chance she would let us have even an extra second. Frankly, we're lucky that she's not here trying to pull you early —" Maria responded, which had been interrupted by a fake-offended gasp.
"I see that my precious lady mocks me behind my back to my king," Eleanor called even as she appeared at the end of the corridor and walked into the reinforced basement we had been using for our experiments.
Despite my determination, an indignant huff escaped my mouth. Being called referred to as the king annoyed me greatly. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the best way to make everyone in my inner circle call that. Only Harold didn't use it ironically, which was somewhat worse.
It meant that the whole argument caught across the town.
"If you expect me to let him leave early, you're dreaming," Maria warned Eleanor before turning me. "The next spell!"
"Fine," I said. I paused, and ten runes appeared in front of me one by one, carefully immobilized. Seven of them were the same runes the fire bolt used, but the other three came from a variety of other spells, implanted to control the spell. However, it wasn't just the core rune that was empowered, but the surrounding ones as well.
A preliminary result from our nascent spell archive project, to understand how the spells worked.
The spell barely flew three feet before it turned into a cone of explosion, demolishing the target … and somewhat damaging the wall behind. Sаmplе frоm Мy Virtuаl Librаry Еmpirе—rеаd mоrе оn М&VLЕМРY&R.
"Wow, amazing improvement," Eleanor said.
Maria frowned. "It was supposed to stay as tight as an arrow."
"Then, it stinks," Eleanor said. "It has been already a week. What's going on. I have seen you guys come up with far more devastating tricks on the fly."
"It's because the situation is too complicated. What we're doing is complicated. We're trying to combine two completely unrelated spell-casting methods into one. Naturally, it's taking some time."
"I don't get it," Eleanor said.
"Think of it this way," I interjected. "We're trying to figure out a way to figure out how to fight underwater with a sword, and the only thing we know is how to shoot arrows."
"Sounds needlessly complicated," Eleanor said.
"Complicated, but not needlessly," I said. "We already have some results." I raised my hand, and just four runes appeared, a core fire rune, and three surrounding ones to shape it, the simplest ones we could figure. But, different than the experimental spells, I put a concentrated weight behind the concept of flame, letting the wild, unrestricted flow of the dungeon.
I didn't just imagine a volcano, but I imagined the dragons from my dreams, pushing out a devastating flame threatening to destroy the world.
I pointed at the wall, and let it go. A cone of fire blasted, raging as hot as the flames of a volcano, enough to melt a decent part of the wall. It was far from the devastation I had seen in my dreams, but that didn't make it any less impressive in my limited capabilities.
"Isn't those walls fire resistant?" Eleanor asked after an appreciative whistle. She might not be interested in the casting process, but the same disinterest didn't apply to the impact of the spell.
"They are," Maria responded.
"Wow, that's impressive," Eleanor said. "Can you do it?"
"Not unless I use my ascended capabilities fully," Maria admitted easily. "And, I suspect it won't be true once we figure out a way to put the full might of the dungeons behind those spells. That's why we're working on it. The idea of casting spells empowered by the dungeon is too devastating."
"True. It's a very valuable strategic weapon," Eleanor said, and Maria smiled expectantly. "Too bad it's not enough for me to give up my sparring slot," she added. "You need to work harder to trick me, my lady."
"Fine," Maria grumbled, then turned to me. "We still have fifteen minutes, and I want to see if the new resonance runes we extracted from the ice spells could be useful."
I raised my hand. "I doubt they will. The application method is still too crude, even for a prototype," I explained, but that didn't prevent me from casting the spell nonetheless. After all, if I could actually model the spells correctly, I wouldn't need to brute force experimentation.
Unfortunately, it destabilized, just like the earlier attempt.
"I'm guessing that wasn't the intention?" Eleanor asked.
"Nope —" I started responding, but I was interrupted by the sound of footsteps. Quite hurried. I turned toward the corridor. There were precious few that were allowed in our experimental room, and nothing short of an emergency would make someone run that fast.
I prepared for battle, expecting to find Harold or a messenger, calling us for battle.
Only to see Spencer instead. He looked panicked, and harried, but with a manic glee on his face. "P-professor, I did it!" he gasped.
"You mean?" I asked, too afraid to ask the question.
"I just went through a class upgrade. I … I managed to get Intelligence!"
I looked at him, shocked. That … that was incredible news. More than incredible.
"Oh, man," Eleanor called from the side. "Does that mean our spar is delayed—"
"Yes!" I cut in, feeling as excited as a child.
The possibilities alone…