The Black Iron Glory
Claude's Dilemma

Chapter 79

Claude's Dilemma

Landes was unhappy with his senior evaluation of his spell. But Tawari viewed things differently as battlemagus. 'Scholars meet soldiers', as the saying goes.

Tawari said Landes had missed the Banshee Howl point as a spell. It was a crowd control spell meant to help a magus out of a bad situation where they were outnumbered. It was intended to create an opportunity for a single magus, either to escape or take as per the situation as needed.

Landes disagreed. He did not need a crowd control spell. He needs one that can cripple a particular target and give him time to do his job. It's exactly as per his need.

Claude can understand both sides of the argument, and empathizes with Landes and Tawari. Most importantly, the spell is still psychic, which means it does not harm the body, and does not affect matter.

In modern terms, non-magic, it is an attack to the back of the head. It did not drop the target like a physical attack, but crippled it without doing any physical damage. Claude could agree to that, but he felt it was still futile to carve it into one of the triangles. He disagreed with Landes' reasons for putting it there as well. Landes carves Mental Shock into his hexagram in memory of what it represents, his first game with magic to change things to suit his needs. It was fine and everything, but it was futile to use such a precious place for it.

And, while the attack did not damage the ingredients, it was not without its side effects. While no savage beast has ever evolved, Landes' is the only one who becomes stupid the longer the experiment lasts. Clearly being exposed over and over again to his spell was ruining their minds.

Luckily for Landes, the towermaster ignored his use of Mental Shock, and instead simply thought that his choice of beasts had been domesticated by prolonged human exposure. If he knew it was all Landes did, intentional or not, Claude doubted the intern would live long enough to keep a diary of his recipe book.

Then again, his stubbornness and fear of repeatedly using the entrenched Mental Shock rooted in the savage beast he displayed showed the first real breakthrough into the domestication of a savage beast. While it might have saved Landes' life if it came to that, Claude doubted it would have done more.

Landes was overjoyed when the towermaster finally ended the research project. He did not care that the experiment in which he played a key role, and, most likely, half the reason it failed, he was just happy not to have to feed the animals, he said, which was still as ferocious as ever in his mind .

The event, and Landes recounts it in his diary, gives Claude his first dilemma on his journey into magic. He could not decide what path he should take as a magus. The Magi Rune is the weakest of all magi. They can't even fight.

While Landes is much more detailed about Tawari's spells than his, Claude learns enough to understand how much more powerful they are. Tawari has one core spell for each of his rings. Explosive Fireball as the first, Energy Barrier as the second, Blink for the third, Prison for the fourth, and Flight for the fifth. The names were terrible, but if nothing else, they at least told him what they were doing, and his mouth was watering thinking about the possibility of having it.

However it was not a problem that needed to be addressed immediately, so he put it away and closed the diary again. He put down the diary, climbed onto his bed, and began to meditate.

The hexagram floated in front of him, slowly rotating clockwise. The sixth now glows a little red. He estimated it would take about four or five more months to fully fill it.

The question continued to grip his mind despite the great effort to ignore him. Should he wait a few years and see if he could find a combat manual or something similar somewhere? Or should he give up being a battlemagus and start carving Landes spells now?

It would be easy to take the Landes road. She has her diary – read 'manual' – with all the glory. At least he could become a four-ring magus rune. The main problem was, if he did that, he would never have true combat abilities. His best weapon was a trivial Magic Missile.

It would not be a big problem when the world was rampant by the magi. He could only rely on others to do battle. But the world does not, and he has to rely entirely on himself. Then again, magus rune spells like the one Landes used could be hidden more easily and used secretly to complement his activities, the combat spells of the Tawari relatives were conspicuous and soon recognizable as magic. These two paths fit and do not fit into his current situation in different ways.

Then again, if he were to be discovered, he would be almost completely helpless as a magus rune, while he could at least defend himself in an instant as a battlemagus.

There was also the question of whether the magus rune spell would actually have a chance to be used where magic was related. He didn't know which materials were magic or not, and even if he did, he didn't know if everything had disappeared by now. Even if he could only use the battlemagus spell as a backup for a dire situation, he knew he could at least use it for a certain situation; it was completely unknown whether the magus rune spell would be useless.

Those were all difficult questions that he had to ponder for a long time before he could finally make a decision. For now, at least, he would delay his decision for a while, while he searched for combat manuals. He can wait a few years, but not too long.

Each 'ring' is actually a hexagram like the first. Once the first one is filled, the second one can be created and made, then the third one, and so on. Each one can only be created after everything that had previously been created, filled, and carved with runes. So he could not continue to delay his decision if he did not find the combat manual quickly and continued to become stronger as he waited. Every day he delayed his decision after his hexagon was filled, was the day he threw away.

However, on a different hexagram. Only one hexagram can be filled by any elemental particle. It is impossible to have two hexagrams of the same element. Thus, Claude's first, and only his first hexagram, could be filled with fire particles. And the second hexagram will eventually become the only hexagram he can fill with whatever particles he chooses to use when the time comes.

After filling the second hexagram with mana from different elements, one would become a second rank magus and could choose seven level-one spells to engrave into the second hexagram as the basic mantra. Only after that can one be considered a magus of two rings.

Claude hoped Landes would record all the basic spells he faced, and he did have a complete list behind his second diary, a sketch of their formation and everything, indeed, but they were all related to his profession as a magus rune. Other than the two combat spells he had in his first hexagram, no combat spells were recorded anywhere in his diary.