The rest of the day and tomorrow were basically some practice duels between the team warriors and talking to Zephyrus about runes and magical matters, he has a great deal of theoretical knowledge in these arias to my surprise, but as far as he said, he still he has some difficulties with engraving certain runes so I'm still slightly better than him in that aspect but it was a lot of fun talking to him even though it made me the target of judgmental stares from the female team members.
What is wrong with a warrior being a scholar, I never understood why some warriors are prejudiced against spending their time studying an academic subject, mages do not have a real advantage over warriors in terms of intelligence. Having mana circulating in one's core and body doesn't make one smarter, and even though most alchemists and runemasters are wizards their job is no more academic arias than a blacksmith, seamstress or jeweler which tends to be more common professions dominated by warriors.
Even when I've heard the defense saying that to forge high-level items it takes tremendous strength in various ways for mages to forge a sword even though they have weaker bodies than a warrior blacksmith. For me the looks of the three women are looks of jealousy, if it wasn't impossible, I got the truth from them I would bet all my money that the three have tried to study runes in the past only to discover that they have no talent for runes.
After lunch we finally found a new batch of missions available for the new teams to do, the examiners didn't take it easy on nearly the triple of missions available. There are even missions that can only be taken by two or three teams together, these missions must be very dangerous, but their introduction is quite vague and at the end of the fart it is written that only after the teams write the mission details will be given.
In fact, to several requests with vague descriptions these requests must have been made by nobles of the realm or even the intelligence branch of the realm. They are not tests, but real missions, this is clear by the nonsense of the points that each one of them is worth, the further or more complicated the mission point value can end up being doubled or even tripled.
A lot of new types of really interesting quests, but among those types' investigation requests are the most valuable, this makes a lot of sense as they can turn out to be a lot more complicated than the examiners and the person who posted the request expected.
The unknown is always more complicated to deal with, especially when you ask a bunch of students to investigate suspicious movements in a region and most likely an entire member or branch of a cult of an evil god hiding there, of course. in the end some unique magical beast or simply a bunch of criminals who are making a show of hiding from the realm's authorities.
As I read through the basic and vague quests descriptions, I found several quests interesting, even though many of them were execution quests which to my suppression not only reward us with points, they also have a reward in the form of gold coins or a modest amount of refusal. I found this very curious, this extra reward doesn't affect the amount of points each mission is worth, but strangely it has a strange reward I don't think this is simply a way to attract more teams to do this type of mission.
On closer study I realized that various quests can provide a kind of weird reward for students since they weren't dumb enough to ignore them. You are collecting some resources that are formed in an aria of the realm naturally, nothing prevents you from keeping a part of it or collecting another resource that forms near it that is also worth a lot of riches.
Maybe taking one of these quests is not bad, the location of this type of resource is usually very expensive information to have and many of these arias can look wild, but that's just not to affect the cycle needed for a resource to be created. But now they're giving their approximate location easily and a free permission to pick up this kind of resource, maybe going after some rare and hard to get ore with wind element affinity or other kind of rare resource level three or higher might be something very useful for our team.
I doubt that any of the team members would find it bad to get a lot of rare resources that can be used to create good quality equipment or even speed up our cultivation. I am particularly interested in taking the quest to hunt and collect the claws and eyes of a magical beast of the wind or wind and lightning element, the storm owls that live in the small forest at storm peak which is in the eastern region of the kingdom.
The mountain where the owls live is close to the town of Gracie, unfortunately there isn't even a teleport point in that town as it's not very big, but Gracie is only a one to a day and a half travel distance from the town of Valatis which it appears to be twice the size and population of Gracie and she has a teleport matrix.
This type of matrix is usually only used by high-ranking nobles and kingdom officials as it is expensive to use this type of rune matrix, it seems that they are allowing us to use them to cut down on our travel time, or for groups to be able to perform the approximate number of missions the examiners want them to do we would need the test for much longer than half a year, maybe if the test lasted around a full year or a little more the number of completed missions would reach the number that the examiners want.
I looked for some more quests in that aria of the kingdom and found two other quests that might be interesting for my team to do, one of them is to find a kind of rare healing plants that can only be born in wild arias and one of them is the same forest where we can find the storm owls. This quest was well hidden in one of the corners of the quest board.
The second interesting quest is to investigate the unusual killings that are happening in a small village that is about two days' journey from Gracie, in a week I believe we can get close to completing these three quests and get a good number of points in the first week of the test phase.
Now comes the part of talking to the rest of the team, but as neither of these missions involves an evil cultist since the vague description of the investigation request seems to be responsible for a magical beast, I doubt that besides Gloria that he should want to follow his own plan, there won't be much chance of the other team members turning down such a lucrative plan.
After spending another two hours making sure I didn't have another great opportunity to get a set of interesting quests or be able to fit a fourth quest into my original cloth. I headed to the place my team had agreed to meet for the morning.
When I checked in there, Hilda and Alice were talking in a very animated way while a little away from them Zephyrus seemed to be studying an old parchment. It looks like Gloria may still be trying to come up with a good plan for the team, the friendly competition to find the team leader seems to come down to the two of us.
Hilda supports me, Alice doesn't seem to think she could do a better job than me or Gloria, and Zephyr just doesn't seem to care so much. Looks like he doesn't have much interest in leading people.
"Hi, has anyone found any interesting missions for us to do?"
"I didn't even try." I really thought that would be Hilda's attitude.
"I thought this was her or Gloria's job." A good way of saying he has no interest in leading the team.
And Zephyrus kept his focus on the parchment, nor did he try to make up an excuse or simply say that he did nothing but study that parchment.
Although I don't want to repeat myself several times, I think I'd better explain my plan to them before Gloria arrives with hers, no I would have a good advantage in convincing them to follow my plan, but I doubt it will harm my chances.
It would also be good not to waste our time, this part of the test may not be a mad dash like the last part was as it will last basically half a year, it is another long marathon for us, but we still have to avoid wasting our time.
"Well since neither one of you has a plan, I'm going to tell you mine now, I want to take three quests at once and I want to finish them in a week or a week and a half."
Over the next twenty minutes I explained the details I know about the missions to the three of them while Gloria didn't arrive. Looks like she's taking a long time to choose a quest or a combination of quests.