Keras scratched the back of his head. “Haven’t thought that far. I’m…not really used to teaching people my fighting style. Maybe spell striking? No, you’re probably not going to get a lot of use out of that yet. Blade splitting would probably be the next logical step. Or spell cutting. Or maybe aura extension?”
“Ooh, blade splitting. I like the sound of that.” Marissa grinned, turning toward me. “Well, Cadence? You want to try mixing this into a little sparrin’?”
I shifted into a defensive stance. “You bet. Let’s get started.”
We kept practicing, but Keras didn’t teach us any more of those interesting — if unusual — sounding techniques before it was time to get ready for our final exam.
We did, however, get considerably better at aura compression. And, in my case, I got in a more practice with recharging my shield sigil with mana threads, too.
I drowned myself with practice. It was easier to do that than to think about the possible implications of what my mother was really up to, or about the things my father had hidden from me.
We had a couple brief strategy meetings, but without the details of our mission assignment, we didn’t have much to go on.
Sera and Patrick gathered a little bit of information from other students — we weren’t strictly forbidden from discussing this test like we had been with the fake spire exams.
Unfortunately, no one knew much about it until some of the first students came back from their tests. And every group Sera talked to was given a completely different scenario.
One team was told to reinforce a fortress that was under siege. Another was given the assignment to attack that same fortress and steal a flag from it.
Another team was sent into a wilderness area and told to search for a magical item. That sounded similar to the test I’d taken with Marissa, but much larger in scale. And they’d been attacked by monsters repeatedly. Actual monsters, as far as they could tell.
That made me a little nervous. I stopped by Researcher to ask her for information — one of my new favorite “clever bordering on cheating” tactics — but apparently this test was so new that nothing had been filed on the assignments of specific groups. The teachers were making them up on a day-to-day basis.
We tried to glean what we could from the returning teams, but we didn’t learn much else. As such, we made our preparations as broad as possible.
I considered some options for enchantments I could work on in the last couple days, but I’d been spending most of my time on practicing spells and combat, rather than saving up money. I couldn’t afford many more raw materials, so I didn’t have a lot of options to work with.
I wanted to upgrade the standard shield sigils and bring them up to the same level of power as the phoenix ones, but they were standard school issue and we weren’t allowed to tamper with them.
The phoenix sigils were already close to their mana capacity, so I couldn’t safely upgrade them much further, either.
Instead, I convinced Keras to help me out a bit.
I handed him a small stack of coins.
“You want pure silver?” He asked.
“Yep. It has the best enchanting capacity per volume of anything we have on-hand. Unless you can make valden?”
He shook his head. “I can change some of the properties of a material, but I’m not sure what that would do to the enchantment capacity on it. Might make it better, might make it worse. Probably not worth the risk.”
I nodded. “Just extract the silver from the coins, then.”
“That’s easy enough. You want the results in any particular shape?”
I handed him my phoenix sigil. “You can use that as a mold.”
The coins we were using weren’t pure silver, but they had enough silver content that he could easily separate it from the rest of the metal and reshape it into what I wanted.
After that, I actually went to the Divinatory and did what I was supposed to be doing from the beginning — I had them run tests on the metal to check the enchantment capacity. I didn’t want to take the risk that Keras’ manipulations had somehow altered the metal in a way that would make it unstable.
And it was always good to know if Keras was really doing what he claimed, too. I didn’t have a lot of reason to distrust him on this subject, but I always liked to verify things in general.
The metal was perfect. It was, as Keras claimed, perfectly pure silver.
Silver had roughly twenty times the capacity of copper for an object of equivalent size. The phoenix sigils I’d made before weren’t pure copper, but they were close.
That meant these new silver phoenix sigils were going to have plenty of mana capacity to work with. More than I could possibly fill at my current skill level, which was good.
I wasn’t going to have time to make a full set before the test, but I got to work.
The first enchantment was an upgraded shield. The next level of barrier had twice the total capacity of the previous phoenix sigils, and four times that of a standard shield sigil.
Next, I added a higher tier version of the self-recharging rune, which would allow these sigils to recharge within the same period of time as the old ones.
Finally, the hardest part — a regeneration enchantment. I’d barely been practicing with life mana, but I knew how to use it now, and that meant I could make basic healing and regeneration enchantments without crystals.
Up until this point, I’d only had two regeneration items to work with — the ring being the strongest, and the bracer I’d made by transferring the mana from the healing rock. Ultimately, I wanted everyone in my group to have some form of healing. Anything else was irresponsible.
Also, it fit the phoenix theme. That was important.
The best I could manage was a higher-end Carnelian enchantment, which made the regeneration function comparable to that of the bracer, but much weaker than the ring of regeneration.
I still was concerned about wearing too many regeneration items at the same time, especially when I was working on enchanting. I hadn’t forgotten what had happened with my hand. Still, regeneration was too useful of an ability to ignore. I just had to be a little more conscious of how much I was pushing myself while I was wearing regeneration items.
I had a couple options on how I could distribute the items. Giving four out of five people a regeneration item of some kind was a good option, but keeping the ring in reserve for emergencies was another idea.
I also considered giving the ring and one of the new sigils to Marissa, since she was our front line fighter, and thus the most likely to take a lot of damage.
Ultimately, after a discussion with the rest of the group, I went with spreading the healing out as much as possible.
Marissa and I wore the newly-made silver phoenix sigils. We were the most likely to be in close-range combat, and thus we needed the strongest shields we could get.
I gave the regeneration bracer to Patrick, and the ring of regeneration to Sera.
Patrick and Sera both tended to burn through their mana quickly, so they were both good options for the mana regeneration bracer. I ended up giving it to Patrick, simply because we still weren’t comfortable with the idea of feeding more mana into Sera’s body from an outside source, even if we were confident it was pure.
We still weren’t allowed to bring the extremely dangerous magical weapons for this test, so that meant leaving Ceris, Selys-Lyann, and the Dawnbringer replica behind.
As such, I held onto the transference sword, and I handed the demi-gauntlet off to Sera. She was getting used to casting spells again, but having a weapon to use was helpful. She took an ordinary dueling cane, too, just in case.