Chapter 23
“GOODNESS. I’M JUST HAPPY you’re here to help. For a second, I was really worried,” the captain said with a sigh of relief. This situation must really have stressed him out.
“Well, apologies for startling you,” Mira replied. “When I found myself suddenly surrounded, it threw me for a loop. I say we call it even.”
Now that the suspicions had been cleared up, the two laughed together. Still, Mira found herself curious about how this had happened; mobilizing such an armed force took a lot of work. She asked the captain why he’d thought she was working with Fuzzy Dice.
“Last night, we received reports of a giant, suspicious bird circling over the city,” the captain began.
He then explained how they’d responded. When they looked up at the sky, they saw that a giant bird was indeed soaring in circles overhead, evidently searching for something. The captain had wondered if it was performing recon on Haxthausen for Fuzzy Dice. The thief was the talk of the town right now—two days were left before his predicted arrival—and they were preparing various countermeasures against his impending heist. It made sense for the phantom thief to start recon, or so the captain thought.
Not wanting to let the chance slip, he’d summoned every available guard and pursued the bird. After a while, it landed outside the city walls. Checking the area carefully, they found that a mansion had appeared out of thin air. On top of that, two powerful-looking knights guarded it.
While surprised, the captain instinctively knew that the building must be Fuzzy Dice’s hideout. His instincts were wrong, of course, but one could hardly blame him for thinking so. A mansion’s presence implied the presence of an owner.
An arrest would be a major breakthrough, whether of Fuzzy Dice himself or a cohort. With that in mind, the captain summoned adventurers who’d undertaken the request for Fuzzy Dice’s capture, never taking his eyes off the mansion.
He’d found many takers, as Mira could tell at a glance; they now surrounded the mansion. They’d tried to question Mira’s knights and gotten no response. Finding that even more suspicious, the captain had unsheathed his sword and demanded the knights tell him whether they were with Fuzzy Dice. It was then that they counterattacked.
Remembering that moment, the captain chuckled. “Oh boy. When you get trounced and tossed around that easily, you have to laugh.”
“Uh…sorry about that,” Mira said with a dry grin.
She’d given her guards a few orders. First, they were to cut down any monsters that approached. If humans approached, they were to remain cautious. If the humans showed malice, they were to counterattack. However, they were not to use lethal force.
“No, no. You don’t need to apologize. I just jumped to conclusions. Besides, they held back.”
It really was Mira’s fault for plunking down her mansion right outside the city gate, obviously, but the captain seemed not to mind that at all. He was even grateful for the knights’ restraint.
“Thank goodness for that. Jeez,” he muttered, glancing again at the ashen knights’ blades. “Anyway… Some stronger adventurers among us challenged them, and you can tell how that ended up. Surveilling your mansion was the best we could do.”
The mob tried taking on the knights a few times, but they were quickly deterred. In the end, they gave up even trying to converse with them and just waited for someone to emerge from the mansion. That was when Mira came out.
After the captain explained this, he looked expectantly at Mira’s knights. “By the way, your guards still haven’t said a word. Are they A-rank too, perhaps?”
He sounded hopeful; perhaps the forces currently assigned to deal with the phantom thief weren’t up to it. Unfortunately, the ashen knights weren’t even human, let alone adventurers.
“No, no. Those are my summons,” Mira replied, dismissing one knight as proof. It disappeared like an illusion, its valiant and reliable figure vanishing into thin air.
There was commotion among the onlookers, but the captain was speechless. He just gazed at the place where the knight used to be.
Finally, he managed, “I thought they were quiet. Now I see. They weren’t human after all. Summoning magic, at that…” Shock still evident, he stared at the other ashen knight. After muttering that he’d never seen summoning magic of that kind, he turned to Mira and asked, “What sort of spell is it?” His eyes were again expectant.
“It’s just a weapon spirit, really,” Mira answered. “Though I did modify it a little.”
Her reply clearly confused the captain. After all, weapon spirits were elementary summoning magic, but the ashen knight had the air of an advanced evocation. A summoner’s individual level could produce differences, yes, but that knight was far removed from a simple elementary summon.
Perhaps as a result of Mira’s claim, the crowd heckled her. She was obviously exaggerating; the ashen knight was clearly advanced summoning.
“That’s…a weapon spirit?” The captain stared at the knight in disbelief.
Looking back and forth between him and the crowd, Mira chuckled to herself. They’re certainly impressed.
Her answer had been no lie. The ashen knights were indeed real weapon spirits. Through the power of synthesis, Mira had fused dark knights and holy knights, then armed them with Sanctia through the Spirit King’s blessing.
After another long look at the knight, the captain pressed Mira further. “Hmm… Is it really one of the weapon spirits I’m familiar with? I have summoner friends, and I’d remember if I saw them summon such a thing…”
Mira was more than excited to answer. “They’re real, genuine weapon spirits,” she declared before simultaneously summoning three more.
The crowd instantly exclaimed in astonishment, and the captain’s eyes widened.
“If you have summoner friends,” she continued, “you’ve surely heard that summoners can only duplicate artificial spirits like weapon spirits, right?”
Simultaneous summoning, and duplicated summoning for that matter, were unique to weapon spirits. Summoning a spirit like Eizenfald or Wasranvel produced the target themselves, and naturally, only one of each existed.
Weapon spirits were special in that regard; their existence resided within the caster. Thus, as long as the caster had mana to give the summon form, as well as summoning slots, they could conjure as many of the summon as they wanted.
Things differed somewhat for Sanctia, but Mira had found during her research that her summoning spell worked much the same. When she summoned Sanctia, she didn’t summon Sanctia the person but Sanctia the holy sword.
“Yes, I’ve heard that. So that really is a weapon spirit.” The captain knew how those spirits worked thanks to his friends, so despite his surprise, he was convinced.
Meanwhile, the adventurers’ jeering ended abruptly. Some started whispering, those who knew about summoning explaining things to those who didn’t.
After a while, the onlookers’ exchanges ended, and they cheered. Perhaps this time, they could best Fuzzy Dice. Perhaps they could get one over on him. The adventurers were reassured, and the captain gazed with great interest at Mira’s ashen knights.
***
“Ah. By the way…” Since she currently had the onlookers’ attention and goodwill, Mira judged this the perfect opportunity to dismiss the mansion for now. “This building is summoning magic too.”
The mansion behind her disappeared instantly; now, the area was meadow as far as the eye could see. As Mira expected, the crowd erupted again. They could hardly believe their eyes.
“Incredible… I wondered how you built that in the space of an evening. Yet another summon…” The captain approached the mansion’s location in disbelief. He reached out his hand and stepped inside. Confirming that nothing was there, he just repeated, “Whoa…” like a child.
That put Mira in a good mood, since she was working hard to bring summoning back into the public eye. “Of course. Isn’t it incredible?”
The others around them spoke up as well.
“You can summon houses too?!”
“And here I figured she summoned a carpenter.”
“Does that mean we won’t need to camp anymore if we bring a summoner?”
“Hell yeah. A summoner could broaden our horizons like never before!”
“This is huge!”
As she listened ecstatically, Mira remembered something she’d forgotten. Flustered, she interjected, “Listen, you must understand…”
She explained the difficulty of summoning a mansion spirit. Because of its mana cost, you either had to train hard or be blessed with naturally high mana reserves. You also needed to treasure your bond with spirits. Most importantly, you needed to find a mansion spirit first. In short, you couldn’t summon one as a matter of course.
Mira made that very clear; she didn’t want the onlookers to expect the impossible of new summoners. Still, she wanted to show aspiring summoners the field’s potential.
“I figured it had to be an incredible spell,” the captain agreed. “It is an entire building, after all.”
The others indicated that they understood too. The mansion spirit was small for a proper home, but quite large for a summon. Anyone could understand that conjuring something so big was sure to be difficult.
“Summoning a house, though… That must help a lot during your travels. Being able to spend the night in a proper house rather than camping is a charming prospect,” one adventurer remarked. Words of agreement spread through the rest of the group.
The spirit allowed for comfortable rest, even on rainy or windy days. By setting up weapon spirits as guards, like Mira had, you could sleep tight. You could even save on lodgings, if necessary, and you wouldn’t have to pitch a tent when you were tired. The adventurers practically clamored over this new potential use for summoning.
Then, Mira brought up another opportunity. “There’s more to summoning. For example, you can do this.”
She cast [Evocation: Undine] in front of the onlookers. Undine emerged from the magic circle, glanced around, and sidled closer to Mira. She was surprised by the sudden crowd.
“Sorry for startling you. Don’t worry, they’re not bad people,” Mira told her gently. Then, ready to show off both the utility of summoning and her bond with the spirit, she took a cup out of her Item Box.
“Undine, may I have some water, please?” she requested, holding out her cup.
Agreeing, Undine happily put her hands over the cup. She held them together, as if forming a bowl. Water poured from her hands into the cup, filling it in no time, and Mira chugged the water all at once.
“Mm, refreshing!” she cried. “Obtaining a mansion-spirit contract may be difficult, but water-spirit contracts aren’t. If you love, honor, and are willing to walk alongside a spirit, they’ll repay your feelings. That’s the kindness of spirits. Summoning magic turns your bond into power. With a water spirit’s power, you can drink clean water anywhere you please!”
Mira proudly advertised the power of summoning, further extolling its utility. She detailed how summoning a water spirit cost very little mana; how the water they produced was permanent, unlike that created by sorcerers; and how the mana cost was far lower than that of the equivalent Ethereal Art.
While it varied depending on the spirit’s type, it was true that summoning primordial spirits didn’t cost much mana. On the other hand, the caster expended mana every time they used the spirit’s powers. That procedural limitation was necessary to keep a single summoner from defying the natural order.
While using a spirit’s power did consume a caster’s mana, it was far more efficient; generating the same amount of water with Ethereal Arts would take twenty times the mana.
After Mira’s detailed explanation, the captain said, “Wow. Very interesting.” Although he was apparently impressed and probably thought summoning sounded convenient, he didn’t seem to think much more about it.
The adventurers around him saw much greater potential in summoning, however.
“That means we could free up the luggage space we allotted for water…”
“If it’s really that mana-efficient, we’d carry fewer mana potions too.”
“Safe water, anywhere we want… Man, that’d be something else.”
Water was an indispensable resource when exploring dungeonsand traveling. A summoner with a contracted water spirit could easily fill that need. When they learned that, the onlookers were shocked.
For summoners, however, that was common knowledge. Why wasn’t it better known?
A few adventurers muttered to themselves.
“I didn’t know you could use summoning that way.”
“They don’t just bait monsters and haul luggage, huh?”
The only summons they seemed familiar with were dark knights, which could carry much more than they looked able to, and holy knights, which drew enemy attention. The decline in both the quality and quantity of summoners was no doubt the reason knowledge of them had also declined.
However, Mira was disrupting that. Her incredible summons and knowledge of the field made an overwhelming impression on this crowd, publicizing her peers’ potential.
***
Mira’s outreach was surprisingly successful, and its effects became evident quickly.
“A whole lot of dungeons lack water, and lots go deep underground. Those ones are usually where the money’s at, so this could be real helpful.”
“Yeah. How much water you can carry directly affects how long you can stay in a dungeon, after all. If we secured an easy water source…”
The significance of accessible water, and the increased exploration time it would allow for, became the main topics of conversation.
Back in the video game, players hadn’t needed food or water, so they farmed large quantities of loot in the depths of high-value dungeons. There were fewer former players in this reality, and all their actions were more cautious, so loot from dungeons’ lower depths circulated in much lower quantities.
That wasn’t due to the difficulty of dungeons but the dungeon environment itself. No shortage of adventurers could traverse a dungeon’s deepest depths, but without potable water, it was impossible to stay there for long. After all, adventurers still had to use resources to get there.
Summoning had the potential to solve that problem entirely. Experienced adventurers especially understood how attractive that prospect was.
Mira took the opportunity to extol summoning’s allure even further. “There’s more to water than drinking it, of course. We have lots more bodily needs we struggle to meet in dungeons, especially without water,” she said pointedly, focusing on the female onlookers.
Water wasn’t just for hydration. Clothes needed to be washed; more importantly, bodies needed to be washed. She’d experienced this problem firsthand in the Ancient Underground City, so she knew it would be an effective selling point. When she explained how to do laundry and shower through summoning, the girls practically jumped for joy.
Mira’s strategy had been a success. She smiled, knowing she’d successfully brought these women to the side of summoners.
***
The adventurers’ discussions intensified. They’d witnessed incredible potential, after all. Their conversation quickly shifted from summoning’s utility to how to secure a summoner.
The first problem was, naturally, finding a summoner who could summon a water spirit. On top of that, they raised the point that summoners themselves were rare. Even if the adventurers were lucky enough to find one, would that summoner be capable of summoning a water spirit? If they couldn’t, wouldn’t they have to wait for their next chance encounter with one? If they waited all that time, who knew when the adventurers could finally take the summoner into a dungeon?
Once their discussion advanced that far, the adventurers naturally looked to Mira, all as hopeful as could be.
“Uh…erm, I’m rather busy, I’m afraid,” she said, crushing those hopes.
All the onlookers grew disheartened at once. However, perhaps because they’d expected that answer, they quickly recovered. One asked Mira a question: Mira had claimed that water spirits weren’t hard to make contracts with, but what did the process actually entail?
In the end, the adventurers decided they’d simply need to prioritize meeting a summoner, even if that summoner lacked a water-spirit contract. Then they’d just help the summoner grow until they could summon such a spirit. This crowd was forward-thinking indeed.
This is going exactly how I wanted!
Whatever their rationale, nothing made Mira happier than seeing adventurers willing to find a summoner and help them grow. If that summoner progressed well and stood out among the crowd, demand for summoners would increase, which would lead to greater supply. A positive cycle, if there ever was one.
“All right, let’s discuss water-spirit contracts, shall we?”
This was the deciding moment, Mira realized. She gave the most complete explanation of water-spirit contracts possible. Making sure to be realistic for the average adventurer, she recalled the likeliest methods and locations for obtaining a contract.
As she did so, some adventurers realized how important her lecture was and immediately whipped out pens and paper.
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