"Thank the gods you're here, Ranger Verhen. I'm sergeant Guilden, at your service." The sergeant was a middle-aged man, with grey hair and a mustache. He wore a light armor over his grey uniform, protecting his forearms, shins, chest, and shoulders.
Guilden wielded a spear in his left hand that was mainly being used as a walking stick, and carried a short sword on his hip. If not for the stripes on his sleeves, his outfit was identical to that worn by the rest of the guards.
"The other Ranger has proven to be useless so far. If it was for him, we might as well rot here until the next winter." The sergeant's words toward a superior officer were rude enough to earn him a court-martial for insubordination, but Lith noticed that despite the nice weather, the whole unit was shivering.
They suffered from sleep deprivation due to the constant fear of being attacked at night and from exhaustion for doing their job during the day. Not a single piece of their equipment was enchanted, making them lambs rather than soldiers in the case of another attack, and they knew it.
"What other Ranger?" Lith was so surprised that he interrupted the gibberish he was chanting.
"The one who reported the attack, Ranger Acala. He was patrolling the area, yet he failed to save even one of the members of the merchant caravan, to capture a vampire, and even to follow them to their base of operation." Guilden snorted.
"All he has managed to do is to cause panic. This story has shaved at least five years off our lifespan. I'm telling you, I wouldn't be surprised if the 'vampires' are nothing but thieves and Acala has made a big deal out of them to steal your spotlight."
"Yeah." A female soldier spat to the ground. "He has been our Ranger for over ten years and he has never achieved anything before retiring. He's over thirty now and has been recalled only because of those damn undead."
Lith inwardly sighed in relief at those words. The presence of another Ranger explained everything and defused every worst-case scenario his paranoia could cook up.
After a bit more gibberish, Lith activated Life Vision and a few detecting arrays. The soldiers were average humans, the caravan didn't bear any relevant magical trace, and the area of effect of his spells gave him no clues about the recent events.
'I can't find any surveillance device, Warping array, or anything that a magic user would employ during an ambush. Either the vampires use conventional means for their robberies or the sergeant is right and we're dealing with common criminals.' Solus thought.
Lith even used Invigoration on everything and everyone, to make sure that no cloaking devices were obstructing his mystical senses.
'Agreed, so far it's just a huge dud.'
"Thanks for your hard work." Lith gave them the salute. "I've got everything I need now, so you have permission to return home."
The soldiers quickly returned the salute before mounting their horses and riding back to Zantia. Lith even opened a Warp Steps for them, saving them precious daylight and getting rid of any witness.
He had no idea where to go and no desire to meet the other Ranger. A partner would only make things difficult for him. After making sure via his natural and mystical senses that no one was around, Lith Warped toward the mana geyser.
Following a trail on a rocky surface was impossible and the mountains offered countless hiding spots to any moron capable of using earth magic. Even a combe search performed by a platoon of magicians would have been a fool's errand.
"Acala is not as incompetent as sergeant Guilden thinks, otherwise he wouldn't have survived ten years in the corps. My fellow Ranger knows that in this kind of situation, the hunter pretends to be the prey, to let the enemy come to them instead of aimlessly walking around." Lith said.
"Sounds cool, but what are we doing here, then?" Solus asked.
"Be they vampires or bandits, we'll find nothing during the day. I'll use this time to get familiar with the area without exposing myself or risking to meet our colleague. You continue translating the Runesmith booklet please, I'll handle surveillance for now."
Lith sat on the stone throne located on the first floor of the tower, in the middle of the Mirror Hall. He clenched his fist, making each mirror produce a glass sphere that he spread throughout the whole area.
Being part of the tower, the spheres would still benefit of both its cloaking devices and mystical senses. Everything that reflected on their surface appeared in their respective mirror, allowing Lith to keep an eye on the road while exploring the Snake Tongue mountain range at the same time.
'I can easily understand why mage towers are legendary artifacts. The spheres can see 360° around them, can be set on auto-pilot, and can provide me a 3D real-time map of the area.' Lith thought while a detailed hologram of the robbed caravan's surroundings was taking form in front of him.
He sent two spheres along the Kusha route. One scanned the road in front of the wreck and the other the path leading to Zantia, searching for clues while the remaining spheres mapped the mountains.
'I can even use Solus's mana sense through the mirrors so that the moment they spot anything or anyone with magical powers, I can safely follow them from a distance.' After a couple of hours, the spheres had found nothing useful. Lith left the Mirror Hall and went to Solus's quarters.
"How is it going?" He asked.
"The usual. I am about halfway through the book, but it's hard to tell when I'll be finished. I keep finding obscure terms that force me to check both Faluel's vocabularies and my translation of the early chapters.
"I've rewritten the whole damn thing over thirty times already. I can't risk botching a single line, otherwise any crafting based on my work would result in failure." Solus was in her wisp form, looking like a small sun that had books for satellites instead of planets.
Even though she loved her human form, having only two eyes was crippling compared to her wisp's full spatial awareness, which allowed her to read several tomes at once while writing.
"Are you looking for something in particular?"
"Of course. We need the blueprints for a ring." Lith took the purified ingot's piece out of his pocket dimension and showed it to Solus.
"I want to give it a pseudo core to check if it stops the self-tempering process. It doesn't matter if we succeed or fail. As long as the metal is not destroyed, I can always later remove the enchantment with Origin Flames once I master them."
"Then why not just crafting a dimensional ring or something?" Solus asked.
"And waste the only bit of purified Orichalcum I got? This way we can practice Runesmithing and put our own advanced Forgemastering techniques to the test. We need to know if Necro and Blood Forge work with runes or if we just wasted our time inventing them." Lith shook his head.
The Forgemastering techniques Lith and Solus had learned at the White Griffon academy were incapable of both producing superior artifacts and harnessing the full potential of metals with their own mana flow, like Orichalcum, Adamant, or Davross
To do that, a Forgemaster had to use Runesmithing, a discipline that was only accessible to Royal Forgemasters and ancient magical bloodlines. Being neither, Lith had devised Necro and Bloom Forge to successfully tap into the Orichalcum potential without runes.
