Jude experienced great gains going to the Allur Forest’s node site. Getting up to Rank II made it much more useful. Before, he couldn’t even filter out the mana in the air, making the skill useless. Now that he was outside of the node site, heading home, he activated it once again.

The air mana was now barely visible, like a light fog, and now he could see the rest of the world’s mana! And what a glorious sight it was. It was like everything was made of neon signs. Their actual physical structure seemed to fade into the background almost like it did with Spectral Vision, but the contrast was that everything seemed to have mana running through it. This mana was vibrant and clear containing a vast array of colors.

The plants and trees were the green of life. The ground was also made in neon lines similar to a golden brown. When Jude looked at Theodwin, he was an explosion of colors. Hundreds of neon lines, both big and small ran throughout him. It was like looking at an anatomical model to show the muscular structure, except it, wasn’t just red, but had blue, green, yellow and all sorts of colors joined together as a whole.

Jude’s body was the same way and when he activated a skill he noticed the how the neon lines fluctuated as the magic moved through him. When he looked for the source of this magic, it seemed to come from where his heart was. But trying to filter out all the different mana’s that comprised his body was too difficult with the current rank of to clearly see that source.

Besides, this type of analyzing sounded much more suited to ! Before he had only used it on his Modicuit, but now that he could see the mana construction of his body, perhaps it could be expanded to what was beyond the Modicuit.

Jude instantly decided to try it out without thinking about what he was doing. As soon as he activated the skill he felt a sharp pain on his face!

He forgot he had been walking in a forest…

“You ok there?” Theodwin asked. “I didn’t push you to hard back there at the node, did I?”

Jude responded, “No, I’m fine. I just got too excited using my skills new Rank Up that I lost track of what I was doing.”

This reminded Jude of something else he wanted to ask Theodwin, “Before you found out about me, how were you going to control the node site and world magic?”

“The ancient language of course!” Theodwin said, “However, the ancient language is quite hard to learn and because many skills and items use it to activate them, acquiring the skill relating to the ancient language is very hard. But of course, I have it!”

“Really? That’s amazing! What rank is it at?!”

“*cough* well uhh… it’s only at Rank 0. But you got to understand that the number of people who can even acquire the skill is extremely limited. Almost no one has it.”

“How did you get it?” Jude was curious.

Theodwin replied, “Many, many years of studying. I studied and analyzed the chants of many spells and magical items until I was able to deduce a few keywords. And before you ask, I can’t teach you. I’ve tried before and for some reason gaining the skill requires one to study it for themselves. It’s almost like the language itself is alive.”

“I see,” Jude thought about and decided he would have to look into this ancient language.

***

Krinn and Wen had been busy this day as well. They had spent some time gathering potential recruits and were now testing them back at the HQ. Their new mercenary company, Heroic Retribution, had gathered a lot more potential trainees than any other recruitment drive. After all, their leader was a Heroic Wizard! Jude’s name had spread far and wide and was already known outside of Longdale.

Talents who had not wanted to join an organization before, wanting to be free from their control, decided to come and see what this new group was all about. But many others also wanted to join the ranks of an organization, after all, there were only so many organizations and they could not support all the newbies.

Right now the training yard of the HQ was nearly jam packed. It would have been even more stuffed, but they still needed room to test out the ones that were already gathered.

“Alright, you Coshoe’s!” Wen said like a military sergeant, “Listen up! Just because you are in our HQ does not mean that you’ve already joined! We will be testing you out and will only be contracting those who prove themselves to be good.

“First you must form up into groups based on class. Warriors on this side! Rogues on that side! If you are not a Warrior or Rogue, you will have to wait inside for our leader to personally test you!”

No one moved as they seemed too nervous so she shouted, “Move NOW!”

At this, they all started moving. Out of the hundred youths, 60 were Warriors, less than 40 were rogues and 3 moved into the house. The small barracks on the back side of the HQ could only hold a max of 20, so they would have to reduce this number down by quite a bit.

This was a good example of how rare Healers and Wizards were. Warriors, by far, made up the majority of the combat classes with Rogues at second.

“We will now start out with some basic exercises, those who cannot last will leave!” Wen said.

From here they started doing basic military exercises as a group. Krinn took charge of the Warriors and Wen the Rogues. Warriors were a strength based class while Rogues were agility so their tests had to be slightly different.

By the time they whittled the crowd down to half they began the next set of tests. These tests were to show how good they actually were. They were broken up into pairs and had to duel each other. The winner would stay and the loser would leave. This however still left them with 24 people, but by now it was already evening and the tests would have to stop.

“The tests will stop here for today. Come back tomorrow.” Krinn said.

The youths exited with excitement in their eyes. They were tired, but they knew that the testing was almost over and they had a good chance at joining the organization of the Heroic Wizard. Only the three who were not Warriors or Rogues did not leave as they would most likely be joining regardless of testing.

Krinn and Wen entered the main building and sat down to talk to the three that they set aside earlier.

Krinn said, “Sorry to have you wait for so long, but Jude has been out on an important mission all day. He will be back soon and will evaluate you personally. In the meantime, what are your classes?”

There were two boys and a girl. They were by no means disappointed that they had waited all day, especially since they would meet the famous Jude himself!

The first boy spoke up, “Sir Krinn, I am level 3 Healer!”

The second boy, “I am a level 2 Healer!”

The girl and sharp eyes, but a pleasant demeanor, “I too am a healer, level 4.”

“Excellent!” Krinn said. He had hoped that one of them would have been a Wizard, but perhaps that was too much to ask for. Wizards were quickly picked up by organizations, a freelance Wizard was truly rare of a rare thing.

“When you join, you will have a room in the main building and you will be offered more benefits than the Warriors or the Rogues…” Krinn went on to explain the benefits to them as they waited for Jude to return.

***

Jude returned to find Krinn and Wen with three others. Upon asking, he quickly found out about their activities today. Jude wasn’t super excited about the name Heroic Retribution, but he couldn’t complain either as he had been too laid back about picking one himself. However, he had no idea that things would progress so quickly.

After entertaining and welcoming the new healers to their group he pulled Krinn off to the side. This whole time he really wanted to go off and work on his new skills, but there were important things that needed to be discussed that could not wait.

“I can’t believe you started the group so quick! I wasn’t exactly prepared for all this. And you choose the group name without me! How am I even supposed to pay for all this?!” Jude spouts off a string of complaints.

Krinn answered, “Calm down Jude. You are the leader so we will follow you, but we can’t just sit here idle all day either can we? The most expensive part of a mercenary company are the full members, officers, and whatnot. Trainees can be paid beans and Wen and I will work for free for now if you agree that we will be the first and second under you.”

“And the group name?” Jude asked.

“Look, man, you were pussy-footing choosing a name. Heroic Retribution sounded cool and you should be happy because Wen wanted Jude’s Retribution.”

“Yeah, Heroic Retribution is better.” Jude agreed.

“Good, now tomorrow morning the other recruits are going to come by for the final selection. We only have room for 20, so four will need to be cut. I would like you to be there and make this determination.” Krinn said.

“Who’s the leader again?” Jude asked.

Krinn laughed, “You are of course, but there are times you need to do things. As your first, I’m just here to remind you of them.”

“Any other responsibilities that I should know about right now?” Jude asked.

“Don’t worry about it too much. Once the selection is done, Wen and I will do most of the work. We will get them to start their training and form them up into groups. These low levels aren’t hard to get, so there is no worry there as long as they understand how to work together.

“But if you want to do raise their skill ranks, I won’t complain. If we had 20 or so at level 10 and fully Ranked Up, it would be a good start to our company.”

“I see,” Jude said. “Thanks, Krinn. For now, I’m going to do some training.”

***

Jude left the others. He could now focus on testing out his new skills in . He even had a new skill under .

Item Analyze

Rank I

Item Type: Common

Allows you to see inside of objects, into their construction and the very essence of what they are.

Create Magic

Rank I

Allows you create and manipulate skills and magic.

Unlocked:

· Skill Link

Skill Link

Rank I

X: 1

Link x number of skills and spells to cause various effects. Warning, invalid links will cause a backlash. Linking active skills can cause a backlash.

Jude was most excited about . He started off trying to link to skills that he was most familiar with and seemed compatible: and . He wanted to connect it directly to , but decided since it was a skill category he shouldn’t try doing that the first time.

Before activating any skills, he activated first. Once he did, he was instantly viewing his Modicuit and it felt like he had something new. That something new was like a silver thread tied around his finger.

He attached the silver thread to the output of and then into the input of . Once he did the thread solidified into a three-dimensional circuit on the two-dimensional plane of the Modicuit. He was pretty sure connecting it to both inputs or outputs would cause the backlash, but he wouldn’t know until he tried out his first connection.

“,” Jude said activating with just one sword. The power of his mana flowed through the circuitry, but instead of unleashing like normal, it attempted to then flow through . This was when everything went wrong!

The link worked perfectly fine, the problem was when the finished magic of tried to enter . It wasn’t that the two were incompatible, it was the method of combining the two that was in error. had no way of handling the full power of and had no way to convert it into useful input.

The result was a small explosion! Jude lost over 200 hit points and was a little smoky, but for the most part okay.

was going to require a lot more thought to get it to work.

Krinn, Wen, and the others came over because of the sound, but Jude told them it was okay and not to worry about any more explosions that they might hear.

Jude once again sat down and meditated on what he did wrong. Clearly, you couldn’t push one skill into another, but if that wouldn’t work, then how would you combine skills?

Maybe what he needed was a chain reaction. Instead of linking the output to the others input, what he needed to do was link several of the nodes from into . This way, instead of overloading the input of he could send a series of commands from one skill to the other in tandem. And if all worked correctly would ‘link’ the two skills together and combine the outcome!

He went straight to the task looking for just the right nodes inside the circuitry to link the two skills together. He quickly realized that casting this way was going to require additional input, essentially changing the way he usually casts the spell. But that didn’t matter, what mattered was finding the correct nodes and link them to the correct inputs with the correct timing.

What he really need was for to actually debug the internal structure of his links.

“…”

That was it, the very inspiration that he needed to upgrade a Rank III skill to a Rank IV! Jude grew very excited at the possibility of upgrading to Rank IV that he temporally put aside the work of .

No, that wasn’t right, the only way to upgrade was through the process of working with !

Now Jude started to connect the two skills, and , with many silver threads. No longer was he extremely cautious, but instead used his educated guesses and intuition. But rather than activating the skill like normal, he attempted to use to debug the skills combination!

At first, it didn’t go so well, but the more and more he tried to push mana through the more it seemed to want to work. But after another hour of it not working, Jude tried another strategy.

Simulated mana.

Using he imagined it creating mana and running through the Modicuit. This, of course, would be virtual mana and wouldn’t actually activate the skill. But that was what Jude was going for anyway!

At first resisted, but after Jude persisted it finally Clicked! New understanding quickly filled Jude as virtual mana started flowing through his Modicuit and the silver threads. When it came to places that would have made the connection fail, it started flashing red!

Analyze Magic

Rank IV

Unlocked:

· Internal Analyze

· Area Analyze

· Item Analyze

· Skill Analyze

Internal Analyze

Rank IV

Allows you to view and analyze a person’s internal skill circuitry now known as a Modicuit. Additionally, it allows one to send virtual mana into the Modicuit and find errors.

Skill Analyze

Rank I

The ability to analyze skills and spells that are being actively used.

When Jude got his 3rd skill past Rank IV he got a new title!

Skill Master IV

After training 3 skills to Rank IV, you have been recognized as an expert. You can now train anyone in a skill that you’ve master past Rank IV up to Rank IV.

Now it was only a matter of time before Jude would get to work.