Others also noticed the monsters being flung to the side and big hole just appearing in the huge tree trunk.
"Imps.. Be prepared."
Thomas said and the knights changed their formation. Now instead of 10 people encircling them only 6 remained and the encirclement got a bit smaller. The other four put their swords back in their scabbards and took out some weird looking sticks with glowing stone at the end of it.
Damian realized. The four mages were keeping a watch in all four directions and the party continued. However Damian still had to achieve what he came for. The defacto leader among them was Thomas but one had to give face to the nobility. If he wanted something he had to ask the lady.
She looked back at him with a blank face.
"Damian, do you need something? Are you injured somewhere?"
Thomas also looked all over Damian and found nothing.
"Can I collect the material from the monster carcasses?"
Lucian had a blank look but it didn't seem like something bad.
"You wish to collect monster materials?"
"I'm interested in runes, so to do some experiments I need their blood."
"You do understand that it's not a path you can take right?"
Of course, Damian thought. Just as he thought, they had their own plans for their little investment.
A voice came from Damian's back.
However Thomas spoke before she could object.
"It's fine as long as he does what Lord Marcus wants, isn't it?"
Lucian glared at Thomas but he didn't flinch, in the end Lucian reluctantly nodded.
Damian nodded towards Thomas to say thanks and went on towards the fallen imp and took out various apparatus for collecting it's blood. Imps were a true magical species, their flying and spitting acid attacks were both magical in nature. Their little bodies were full of mana.
"Leave it boy, you can do it after going back."
Thomas said and walked past him to the imp and put a hand on it. A black magic circle filled with numbers and alphabets appeared on back of his hand or more specifically on his wrist where a metalic bracer was hidden beneath his long sleeves. The imp's body disappeared along with the magic circle the very next second.
A magical storage tool? They exist? Why no one ever used one in front of him? No, it's not that they didn't use it, most likely he just never noticed it. Without his Truthseeker's eyes even he couldn't see it.
That confirms it. Magic circles are not something that everyone can see. The lack of everyone's reaction towards the glowing circles had already made him suspicious and this just confirms it.
Damian had activated his Truthseeker's eyes a while back just to see if he could notice anything unusual about the monsters and it paid off, in a very different way but useful indeed. All the headaches were totally worth it.
If he knew what attack his opponent was doing then half his battles were already won. It is impossible that no one knows about this cheat like skill but it was not mentioned in any of the books he read. Not even in any historical figure did something similar was mentioned.
Yes, there were many types of eyes skills and actually there was one basic skill for high level warriors called The mana eyes which was prerequisite for becoming a warrior class, it was needed for reading their opponent's movements.
But it only showed the movements of mana, not magic circles or the runes or what type of spell the opponent was going to use. One could only tell that a spell was coming.
The party continued and the two little combatants kept getting experience and level up. Not that Damian cared much for it even if he leveled up to 25 he still needed to level all his skills upto their limits which was level 9. Even if he just slowly leveled all his skills he would naturally level up too.
So this was mostly useless exercise, it was indeed a good feeling to watch his stats go up though. And runic experiment resources were a huge plus for him; so he continued.
They entered this forest once every week after that day and with each level up he could feel new energy filling his body making him stronger, faster and more sturdy. However the biggest change was in his INT. With each level up he could keep up the Truthseeker's eyes for longer periods before experiencing a headache.
The Runic experiments were also producing results just as he expected. He just copied the runes as he saw them hovering in the air on the paper and it worked. The first time he saw fire coming out just a few centimetres above the rune after saying "activate" he almost fell back on his butt.
The excitement of being able to generate magic with his own hands was exhilarating for Damian, and so he tried every rune and smiled like an idiot when they produced results.
He also tried to draw it in different shapes and sizes but it only activated when it was in a similar structure as the hovering circle.
He did realize that size didn't really matter but it was directly linked to the duration of spell, after all the bigger the circle; more magical blood it required which in turn attracted and transformed more mana particles, converting the mana into fire for a longer period. However the intensity and shape of fire was same as the first fire rune he drew.
Which confimed his theory of the one variable that he figured out on the first day he learned about the runes.
A variable with numbers that controls the intensity of a rune, and so he drew the same fire rune but this time with a different number. For safety maseaures he was doing all this outside the palace, he had made a temporary lab/camp near the big rock place back of the villa.
Damian went as far as he could, from the parchment he drew the fire rune on before loosing his voice activation effect. Hiding behind the rock and just looking with his neck stretched out he activated the rune and just as he expected the flames reached a bigger height than all his previous experiments.
However it also got burnt quite quickly, obviously the material it was etched on and the structure based on an unranked magic creature's blood could not handle the increased power.
Damian continued with his research on runes and days turned to weeks and weeks turned to months.
After several months he at least figured out some basic rules of runic language. The five different sections of fire rune that somehow worked together to generate fire, were now a bit less mysterious. One section was responsible for the intensity of the runes which could be raise or lowered depending on the material it was drawn on and material used for the drawing.
The second section with alphabets and numbers was responsible for the size of the effect, it controlled how thick or thin the flames would be which can also be controlled.
Third was the real mind teaser, but after months and months Damian realised that the variables and numbers did not represent any controlling effect and yet even a single character or number drawn wrong would not activate the rune. The third variable, was no variable at all it was his unique ID.
When first he copied the rune, he just drew exactly what the hovering rune looked like yet after activating the rune, this one section would always change with his initials and a unique number that was associated with his name.
For some reason he was 'D.S.20.11.11' in the eyes of this world.
The fourth variable was also uncontrollable, it was somehow responsible for gathering the mana from the atmosphere.
That's all he could figure out about the runes, the last variable which was unique to the fire rune alone was still a mystery to him, however he had strong unexplainable feeling that this one and all the other runes that had this kind of one unique, specific variable that was somehow responsible for converting the mana energy into fire.
It was obviously, way above his limit to understand it though, he could also be totally wrong about this one.
The best thing about this whole experiment was actually his levels. Whenever he made any breakthroughs all three of his skills would level up at the same time : [Truthseeker] [Scholar] and [The Runic serf]
It was definitely way more efficient than killing monsters; so he continued with this lifestyle and kept growing stronger and stronger with each mystery solved and each level gained.
Soon the months turned to years.