Artana and Teigra still hadn't come back, and Horus was still digging the place around. Khon and me were dragging the log around.
"I was thinking..", Khon said, starting a conversation.
"What?", I replied.
"You know how the grass weakens you right?"
"Yea?"
"Well, what would happen if you train in this grass?"
"Oh. I see your point. Want to try it out?", I said, trying to get away from hauling a whole damn tree back.
"No first the tree."
"…"
Sometime later, we were back on the grass
"So, what do we do? How to we "train"?"
"I don't maybe let's start with hunting chickens? Those are pretty strong you know. Oh. Speak of the devil, and he will appear", Khon said
"What?", I said, as I turned around.
There were a horde of chickens coming around.
Now let me tell you about the 5 uses of mana I knew of.
First was making light dagger in the air, second was making a spear of light, third was a ball of light to be thrown around, fourth was mana imbuement and lastly, circle of light (Useless). All of them except the fourth one need a magic circle in the air to be performed with.
A magic circle is just glorified instructions for the mana I control. Due to the fact that drawing a whole set of circles in the air is somewhat time consuming, it naturally, takes some time to cast.
"Running out of mana" is when you don't have the energy to control the mana around you. One more thing to note, normally when a monster dies, its body turns into mana, or dissipates. However, there is a small chance that the monster won't dissipate into mana, and leave its body behind.
Back to the "training session".
The funny chickens were approaching. I started by showering light daggers onto the chickens, then occasionally imbuing my sword and going melee, the same strategy I used for the bats at the beginning of the dungeon.
B-class monsters are hard, no what, and it took a while to chip away at it, whilst running away. Light daggers as a whole is a really versatile move in my opinion, with the minor drawback being it takes too much mana and takes too much time to cast.
It is mana sucking orange grass, the mana consumption was starting to be a real threat. And then there was my casting time. Light daggers take about 3-5 seconds to cast, which in battle is too much time.
While fighting one of them, I ran directly into a giant chicken. It hit me with its claws before I could even say tag 2 electric boogaloo. It hit really hard, and I got knocked back a good 2 metres. If Khon wasn't there as insurance, I would have been 6 feet under.
I still didn't know the exacts of Khon's power, but I knew it had a darkness attribute to it, and that he was very reluctant to use it at all, to the point where I didn't even know his power.
Since we didn't have a concept of time, we had no idea how much time we had spent here. But every time I ran out of mana, I would go back to the hobbit hole Horus was digging (he still hadn't come out), regenerate my strength, and then go back to training.
I genuinely have no idea how much time had passed. With the training sessions, I had started to become friends with Khon, and I slowly started to respect him.
We also then changed our training ground, to a place where the flying demons and axed pig would come around. To replicate the same mana draining feeling as in the orange forests, he took the grass he plucked out, and laid it out on the ground near the new mobs.
Once, while I was fighting a few demons, a pig boy hit me with its axe, twice. Khon realised that one more and I'd be dead. So, he imbued his weapon with mana and killed the pig monster.
That wasn't what troubled me, however. He instantly imbued his weapon with mana. That is what troubled me. There was nobody till date, who could have done such a feat. So, I went ahead and asked him.
"Uh.. small question."
"What?"
"How did you instantly imbue your weapon with mana?"
"Oh that?", Khon said, showing his palm to me.
That is when I noticed his palms had symbols on it. He had cut his palm and drew mana circles with his blood on them, meaning he didn't need to draw out a full circle in the air.
I thought for a while. Then did the same. Using it was a bit weird to get used to, but it was such a good quality of life improvement. With the training, and the new casting method, I had improved drastically, to the point where I could take on 10 demons at once (Never said I wouldn't get injured in the process ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).
When I went to the hobbit hole, I found it was underwhelmingly small, considering how much time Horus had put into it.
"Soo, how are you doing", I asked Horus.
"Well, I am waiting for a demon horn to really get this place dug up?"
"Demon horn?"
"Yeah. Really need a tool to excavate this place"
"And the demon horn will help how?"
"You'll see", he said as he winked.
Just then, I heard the voices of Artana and Teigra.
"Yea, we got the demon horn and the other thing you mentioned", Teigra said.
"What thing?", I asked.
"This thing.", Khon said, as he grabbed a branch from the log we hauled and fit it inside the demon horn. He made a hole just big enough for the branch he was going to fit in it with his dagger. He had made a scuffed pickaxe.
"Perfect", he said, as he grabbed the other demon horn.
He started by using the dagger I gave him to cut the point end of the horn.
All of us started to look at him in fascination, except for Horus, who went back to dig with his new tool.
He finally cut the horn's pointy part, and at that moment I thought to myself, "Look at this dumbarse. Why are you cutting the pointy end??"
Then he again took a branch, and fit it in the now weird looking cylinder of bone. Then he asked Teigra, "There was another thing the demon must have dropped. Like something that looks like black burning plastic."
"Yea I got it.", she said, handing a leather pouch.
"How did you get a leather pouch?", I asked.
"By drying the leather of a demon?", she said, looking at me like as if I had asked a really dumb question.
He went towards the log, and put the black plastic like thing on it. He made sure to put it on the edge of the log, showing us that he was going to do something destructive.
Then he took the horn stick thing, and started to hit the plastic repeatedly. Then he went to a nearby hot red liquid source and dipped his own hand with the plastic in it. Taking it out, it now had a weird orange hue to it
It was red hot, like molten iron or molten glass. He took the not glowing plastic looking piece to the log and started hammering at it. All of were fixated at the thing. The horn thing was a hammer.
He kept on hitting the thing. Then he added more black plastic to it, then he dipped it in the liquid, then repeat.
I asked him, "How don't your hands burn?"
"It's obviously a skill", he said, not looking away from the blob he was making.
Soon enough, he managed to make an anvil. He some how made a god damn anvil. Let me reiterate. An anvil. The anvil was shabby, but it was an anvil, with a steady base, and flat upper part.
The anvil was black, signifying that he had made the anvil out of the black plastics he found (Those plastics weren't plastics, they were scraps of ore or something). But the madman wasn't done.
Teigra and Artana had disappeared again, which I could only assume was for hunting more of them demons. They were significantly stronger, and so was I. Khon had, in a very literal sense, become a teacher.
He told me to evolve my training from just hunting monsters to chopping trees with just mana, to picking up stuff with a mana hand. I called this 6th move [Hand of Light]. I could now plant seeds with just mana.
Khon took all the remaining scraps and hammered away at the anvil, until finally, the horn hammer broke. He looked at his new cylinder of black with a hole in it. He fit a branch in it, and finally, in his own words, "The smithery was open!"
Horus came out of his cave and said, "We are no longer homeless."
When we entered, we found out that Horus had dug out a common area, and individual rooms, each with a bed of leaves and a small table. Khon finally didn't need to hammer outside.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, we had shelter, and things were looking up. According to Horus, we had spent approximately 2 months in this hellhole.
Khon started to go hunting for demons himself and their metal ore drops. Khon then went smithing away for another long session. When he came out, he had 3 items in his hands. All were black.
All of us started to call this metal black steel, and so will you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. So Khon brought out a whole lot of new goodies. Out of them, was a black steel bow (for Artana) which easily surpassed any bows we had and had the ability to turn the arrows it shoots bounce around with minimal amount of mana.
As for the second item, it was a set of dual welding daggers (for Teigra), which had the ability to make aftereffects illusions, fooling the enemy into thinking your blades are lagging behind where they actually are.
As for the third item, it was a long sword (for me), which had the ability to change it's weight by a factor of 5. Although this doesn't sound as good as the others, it means it can be as light as a feather while swinging, and as heavy as truck when striking.
We all looked at our new weapons, but I just looked confused, as I said, "Who the hell are you?"
Khon asked, "Me? I am just the son of a blacksmith"