Others had also noticed the monsters being hurled to the side and the large hole that had suddenly appeared in the massive tree trunk.
"Imps… Be prepared!"
Thomas ordered and immediately, the knights adjusted their formation. Instead of ten men forming a circle around them, only six remained, tightening the encirclement. The other four sheathed their swords back and pulled out some strange-looking sticks with glowing stones at one of their ends.
They were Mages, Damian realized.
The four mages stood vigilant, scanning in all four directions as the group continued. However, Damian still had to accomplish the task he had come for. Though Thomas was the de facto leader among them, one had to give face to the nobility. So, if he wanted something, Damian simply had to ask the lady.
"Uhm… Lady Lucian?" he called.
She looked back at him with a blank expression. "What?"
"Damian, do you need something? Are you injured somewhere?"
Thomas asked, looking all over Damian, but found nothing amiss.
"Can I collect material from the monster carcasses?" Damian asked.
Lucian's expression remained blank, but it didn't seem like she was displeased.
"You wish to collect monster materials?"
"Yes," Damian confirmed.
"Why?"
"I'm interested in runes, so to do some experiments I need their blood."
"You do realize that's not a path you can take, right?"
Of course, Damian had expected that. And just as he thought, they had their own plans for their little investment.
"Let him…" came a voice from Damian's back.
"But, Thomas…" Lucian began, but before she could continue, Thomas interjected.
"It's fine as long as he does what Lord Marcus expects, isn't it?"
Lucian glared at Thomas, but he didn't flinch. In the end, she could only reluctantly nod.
Damian nodded gratefully towards Thomas and approached the fallen imp before taking out various tools for collecting its blood which he had swiped from here and there in the Baron's villa.
Imps were a true magical species, their flight and acid-spitting abilities were both magical in nature and their small bodies were brimming with mana.
"Leave it, boy. You can do that when we return," Thomas said as he walked past Damian and placed a hand on the imp. A black magic circle filled with numbers and alphabets appeared on the back of his hand, more specifically on his wrist, where a metal bracer was concealed beneath his long sleeves. In an instant, the imp's body disappeared along with the magic circle.
'A magical storage tool? They exist? Why has no one ever used one in front of me before? No, it's not that they didn't use it, most likely I just never noticed it.' Without his Truthseeker's Eyes, even he couldn't see it.
This confirmed it—magic circles filled with runes weren't something that everyone could see. The lack of everyone's reaction towards the glowing circles had already made him suspicious of this and this just made it clear.
Damian had activated his Truthseeker's eyes earlier, hoping to see if he could notice anything unusual about the monsters and it seemed like his efforts had paid off, albeit in a very different way than he had expected. All the headaches he had to suffer while using the ability had been totally worth it.
If he could anticipate what moves his opponent would use, half of his battle was already won. Surely, it was impossible that no one knew about this cheat-like skill, but it wasn't mentioned in any of the books he had read so far.
In fact, no historical figure had ever been credited with doing anything similar either. True, there were several types of eye-based skills. Actually, there was one basic skill for high-level warriors called The Mana Eyes, which was a prerequisite for becoming a warrior class, and was needed for reading one's opponent's movements.
But it would only show the movements of mana and not the magic circles or the runes or what type of spell the opponent was going to cast. All one could tell was that a spell was on its way at them.
The party continued, and the two young combatants steadily gained experience and leveled up. Not that Damian cared much for it. Even if he leveled up to 25, he still needed to max out all of his skills to their limits, which was level 9. Even if he just slowly leveled up all his skills, he would naturally level up overall too. So this was a mostly useless exercise, making him feel that the process was more like a formality than a challenge. Still, it was satisfying to watch his stats rise. Plus, the resources for the runic experiments were a huge bonus for him; so he kept at it.
From that day on, they entered the forest once every week. With each level up, he could feel new energy filling his body—making him stronger, faster and sturdier. The most significant change, however, was in his INT.
With every level up, he could keep up the Truthseeker's Eyes for longer without experiencing a headache like before.
His runic experiments were also bearing fruit, just as he had expected. He just copied the runes he saw hovering in the air onto the paper and it worked. The first time he saw fire emerge a few centimeters above the rune after saying "activate," made him almost fall back on his butt.
The thrill of being able to create magic with his own hands exhilarated Damian, and so, he tried every rune he could, grinning like an idiot when they produced results.
He also experimented with drawing the runes in different shapes and sizes, but they only activated when arranged in a structure similar to the hovering circle. He soon realized that although the size didn't really matter, it was still directly linked to the spell's duration; after all, the larger the circle, the more magical blood it required, which in turn attracted and transformed more mana particles, converting them into fire for a longer period. However, the intensity and form of fire remained consistent with his first rune.
This confirmed his early theory: there was one variable he had figured out on the first day he learned about the runes.
It was a numerical variable that controlled the rune's intensity. To test this, he drew the same fire rune but this time, with a different number. For safety measures, he conducted all these experiments outside the palace in a makeshift lab/camp behind the large rock placed at the back of the villa.
Standing at a safe distance from the parchment he had drawn the fire rune on, Damian activated it with his voice.
He was hiding behind the rock and just looking with his neck stretched out as he activated the rune, and just as he had expected, the flames shot higher than all his previous experiments. However, the parchment also got burnt quickly. Obviously, the material it was etched on and the blood from an unranked magic creature couldn't handle the increased power.
Damian continued with his rune research. Days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months.
After several months of work, he had finally managed to at least decipher 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 and made more sense. One section was responsible for controlling the intensity of the runes which could be adjusted depending on the material it was drawn on and what it was drawn with.
The second section, containing alphabets and numbers, determined the size of the effect, controlling how thick or thin the area of generating flames would be, which could also be controlled. The third section was the real mind teaser, but after spending months, Damian eventually realized that the variables and numbers didn't represent any controlling effect and yet even a single character or number drawn wrong wouldn't activate the rune. The third variable was actually no variable at all; it was a unique ID.
When he copied the rune the first time, he had drawn it exactly as the hovering rune he had seen, but after activating the rune, this one section would always change with his initials and a unique number that was associated with his name.
And for some reason, he was 'D.S.20.11.11' in the eyes of this world.
The fourth variable was also uncontrollable, it somehow appeared to be responsible for gathering the mana from the atmosphere.
That was as much as Damian could figure out about the runes. The final variable, unique to the fire rune alone, remained a mystery to him. However, he had a strong unexplainable feeling that this one and all the other runes that had this kind of unique, specific variable were somehow responsible for converting the mana energy into fire. It was obviously way above his limit to understand it for now, besides, he could also be totally wrong about this one.
The best thing about all these experiments was actually how they had boosted his levels. Whenever he made a breakthrough, all three of his skills would level up simultaneously: [Truthseeker] [Scholar] and [The Runic Serf]
This was definitely far more efficient than killing monsters; so Damian continued with this method and kept growing stronger and stronger and gained level with each mystery he unraveled.
And soon, the months turned into years.