Chapter Forty-Seven - The Guild of Applied Thaumaturgy

Chapter Forty-Seven - The Guild of Applied Thaumaturgy I got really excited the next day when I arrived at work and discovered that we were going to be working around a D-rank portal. It was enough that I was able to look past the slight magical ache in my body from a night spent casting and recasting the two cantrips I had to both speed the casting up and reinforce spell's paths. That wasn't all I'd done, of course. After returning for my meeting with Jane I chilled out for a few evenings, spent another practicing on the guitar, and then another brushing up on my French by watching some subtitled rom-com about a desperate normal woman trying to woo some pretty-boy B-ranker. It was slop but kind of enjoyable. Anyway, it wasn't a wasted evening. Bits of progress were progress, and learning that Squad B was going to work around a D-rank portal made my mood soar. Until I discovered that we were guarding the site. That meant standing outside the portal for the entire day. Sure, we could talk, but there was no entering the portal until after Squad A left. No magic practice, nothing. I had forgotten how mind-numbingly dull guard duty was. I was stationed on one side of the portal with Erde, who proved to not be a very talkative guy. I think he was cheating, paying attention to something on his augs instead of keeping an eye on our surroundings and I didn't even blame him. The one highlight, if I could call it that, was feeling a wave of magic wash over the space around the portal a moment before Squad A left it. They were followed by a familiar face. Louise. The air around her instantly filled with a wash of tiny, crystalline snowdrops that scattered out around her. They alighted on her skin and uniform without melting. Then she ran a hand through her hair and scanned her surroundings with piercingly blue eyes. She met mine, then glanced past as though I were nothing more than a stray who happened to be nearby. As an E-ranker, I knew that she was strong. The air being cool around her was obvious, and there was a faint... inhumanity to a C-ranker after a while, an air that followed them. Now, as a D-ranker, I guess my magical senses were far more attuned and sharp, because I could feel the radiating fear coming off of her as waves of glacial energy. It dissipated, though. I think she was loosening her grip on her magic, so the force of it lessened. And then she was gone, and we were left to help with the clean-up. It was dull, and I was happy to make it home, set a Save, then do something mindless for a few loops of the evening before I got back to practicing. I actually spent a loop looking into buying one of those magical measuring devices that Luna Corp had. The small portable ones? About $2,000, used. The bigger less mobile ones were cheaper or more expensive. I actually found one for sale for about eight hundred on a secondhand marketplace and reached out to the seller, but he felt a bit skeevy, so I Reloaded that loop and didn't bother. I'd see if Jane couldn't get me one through her contacts. I was spending money left and right, but the majority of the winnings from my little trip to the casino were still there. Worse case, I could see myself hit up another casino in disguise? It'd be risky, but with a Save set far enough back... wait, no, I'd need to repeat a long segment over and over. Ah, whatever. Money wasn't a big concern yet. Miss Ojou owed me as well, though I wasn't sure how to send her the bill, and how many zeroes to put on it. The reward for information came from the corp she worked for and was ten thousand, so that same amount? That seemed more than fair, and I was pretty sure she could afford it. Anyway, I messed around for a bit, plinked away on my guitar, remembered that I needed to buy new strings, did some French language lessons, then Reloaded for the final time where I cast spells carefully but repeatedly, then did some late-evening squats and such. Then I showered, went to bed, remembered to buy those damned strings, and crawled out of a warm bed to do it because otherwise I'd forget. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on novelhall. I slept with Mister Couchtop slumped on my stomach, and awoke the next morning to do it all again. It was weird how looping made a single random day in my life so much... more. I mean, there were days that were already important. Meeting someone, going to a concert, graduating, a funeral, a wedding. Days that kind of stuck. But looping? It made the days that felt important last a week. Suddenly I had memories of one day spent in a dungeon, but that day stretched for way longer, and... yeah, it was just a weird feeling. I was pretty sure it wasn't harmful, but maybe it was, a little bit? The relative normalcy of waking up, going to work, and coming back was nice. Of course, I planned on not being too normal today, because my first loop was skipping work altogether. Instead, I suited up at home, then left, carrying my new sword and that grimoire in my backpack. I ordered a taxi to take me to a spot in the Inner City, pretty far from home. The diver kept staring at me in the rearview until I gave him a glare. There was actually a neat trick I'd noticed. When I cast a self-buff like See Darkness, my eyes changed colours a little. See Darkness made them flicker more purple. Sooth Minor Pain pushed my eyes towards a deeper, darker blue-purple. Neat. I was pretty sure that an observant fighter might be able to guess at an opponent's intentions with that. But I was equally sure that I'd seen some people cast spells without the eye thing. Was it limited to outer-elemental spells? Or was it something else? There was more that I didn't know about magic than there was that I knew. I was scratching the surface here. I was a child on the side of a mountain, armed with a plastic sand shovel, trying to figure out what was buried in the middle of the mountain. Something something, Mount Tai. The taxi came to a stop in front of a modest little business on one of the busier streets of the Inner City. It was designed to look like one of those older brick buildings and probably cost millions because real estate here wasn't handed out so easily. The building had a sign over the door. Again, modest, discreet. Guild of Applied Thaumaturgy. I walked out of the car and into the guild building. Guilds were big deals in any fortress city. And really, across the nation. At their base, they were a sort of union for rankers. That's kind of how they started out. Some grew into businesses in their own right, though, and they could sometimes carry a lot of weight. No one wanted to get on the bad side of the Seraps and the Chatterjacks, and guilds like Echo Nine were known corporate mercs. The Guild of Applied Thaumaturgy was a smaller guild, one that focused mostly on applied magic and such. They hired D-rankers and above who had a talent for magic and didn't care too much about portal delving. People that wanted to figure out cool shit to do with magic. I respected them. Plus, a lot of members were doctors. Medical or otherwise. The guild made bank inventing and selling spells and doing joint research with different corporations. The interior was deceptively open, revealing the trick of this building. It was mostly underground. I was met at a metal detector by a pair of D-rankers. There was a man with crossed arms past the entrance who somehow smelled like freshly turned earth, even though I was halfway across the room from him. A C-ranker, then? They asked me what I was here for, checked my weapons, then finally let me through, but not without an escort. I found my way to the office of one Assessor R. Tellen. The same man who'd looked at my other portal-made weapon. "Hello," I said as I glanced around a small but relatively nice office. There was a desk, and behind him a shelf with lots of neat little tools. A black kettle sat on a cloth on his desk, small devices all around it. "Hello?" he replied. Tellen was a small, reedy man. "Can I help you?" "You can," I said with a smile. "I need two objects assessed." "Now?" he asked. "I don't do rushed orders." "Twenty thousand," I said. Tellen did do rush orders after all. ***