“You live here?” Peter said as they walked through the neighborhood. “This is the rich part of town, Elite jobs must pay a bundle!”

“They do.” Casimir confirmed. “But I didn’t buy property here, buying houses isn’t really something worthwhile for adventurers, so I live with Master Southwind.” Casimir could have rented a place for a year, and could probably have afforded a nice place, but Master insisted.

Illivere perked up at that information. “Do you mean Gisra Southwind, the Archmage?”

“Yep.” Casimir said casually. “In case you didn’t notice, skill in combat is experience based, but skill in magic needs good teachers.” Or absurd talent, but that’s rare. “She’s been wanting to meet my students anyway, so now’s a good time for that.” After all, there was a non-zero chance the brats would die, if the trail they followed was a trap and they prepared it well enough to be dangerous to an elite-ranked assassin. The number of unknowns was the big reason why he was against them participating… But he couldn’t coddle them forever. The enemies being beyond them is far from a sure thing, after all. Speaking of coddling… “Just as a precaution, a tip: Go limp.”

“Wait, what?” Faron asked.

“You’ll know.” Casimir said cryptically. “Here we are.”

Master’s house was surrounded with a solid stone wall, thoroughly enchanted to repel intruders harmlessly. Less obvious was the steel core with a second set of much less polite enchantments. However, Casimir knew everything there was to know about invoking the safeties, and was able to key his students as guests without an issue. “Master isn’t home at this time of day, she schedules all of her business meetings to take place over dinner so she doesn’t have to cook. If we hurry, we can be gone by the time she’s back.” How long she takes depends entirely on exactly who she was meeting with. Meeting with the Headmaster? In and out within thirty minutes. The potion merchant who buys her work? Midnight would be Casimir’s best guess. Casimir didn’t actually know who she was meeting with, so he was flying blind today.

“Wow, look at all of those books!” Peter said in wonder as they entered the home.

“I never imagined a private collection larger than Father’s…” Illivere whispered, the faintest hint of awe in her voice.

Faron seemed vaguely disgusted as he looked around. “Does this house have any furniture or wall that is not a bookshelf?”

Casimir chuckled at the common first reaction. “Most of the doors aren’t bookshelves yet.” He said, unhelpfully. “That table over there isn’t a shelf.” It was, in fact, a book. ‘How to properly check the health of your home’, by Koradarok Slingmaster, a druid from the Giant’s Forest. As expected for a book handwritten by a giant, it was five feet wide and seven feet long. A collector’s item, as Master had the contents transcribed into a smaller tome ages ago. She also was insistent that the title meant ‘your tree’ rather than ‘your home’, but when conjugated as a possessive, they were the exact same word in their language, so it was a semantic argument that she was just being stubborn on.

Distractions aside, Casimir set his students down, ignoring their further gawking at the surroundings and went to fetch the equipment. They were kept in the second basement, where environmental mana was controlled via a series of elaborate enchantments encapsulating the room. A necessary precaution when one was dealing with higher quality enchantments, but it was still helpful when making lesser works. By trailing a mana-coated finger along one of the shelves, the trapdoor to the first basement was revealed, unlocked, and disarmed. Once down there, Casimir double-checked if Master had added an extra trap as a test to the entrance to the second basement, but seeing nothing new he conjured five wisps of mana and traced the unlocking runes in a sequence, which activated the teleportation circle to the second basement for exactly long enough to activate under his feet and no longer.

After arriving, he waited for the space mana distortions to clear and be sucked up by the mana scrubber enchantment, only after they deactivated did he move to the desk, opening the work journal to the proper date. “Okay, what’s finished and what still needs work?” He mumbled to himself as he read his Master’s handwriting, flipping back along the last few weeks to double-check each item as completed. “Good, she finished the boots.” The kids were only getting their presents a few days early, so he expected it to be mostly finished. “The only thing that still needs to be done is… the set of rune spikes.” Do they really need those? Well, it’s damn useful when you need to disarm an enchantment without having enough oomph to budge the matrixes, or to do so while outside the blast radius, but Casimir could manage perfectly well without. Checks complete, he grabbed the wooden chest the equipment was stored in, confirmed that all the items were inside, and left through the teleportation circle.

----------------

“I can’t believe it…” Illivere said as Casimir locked the basement again. “Runes in Ink, Chisel, and Filigree, a basic primer on enchanting by Lusanna Highwind, annotated by an Archmage!”

Hana was breathing heavily in shock at her own finding: “Resurrection and why it’s terrible, by Archmagus Oathsworn… Illivere, your father wrote this? I’ve never heard of Resurrection being possible!”

Casimir decided to cut in: “That’s because it isn’t.” All four students quickly put the books they were looking at back on the shelves. “Incidentally, if you want to borrow that, Illivere, feel free. All the other books I’ve lent y’all came from here, after all.”

Peter raised his hand like he was in class. “Teach, why did the big guy write a book about it if it’s impossible?”

Casimir snorted. “All that book does is point out that when people ‘die’, there’s a small window of opportunity, roughly ten minutes, where one can still heal them from, if you used the spell matrix in that book. Problem is, it takes so much mana that you’d need to set up a big ritual to make it work, and by the time you’ve done that? Too late.” There’s been attempts over the fifteen years since that book was written to build on the Archmagus’s work, make the spell more practical, but the numerous issues with deployment have yet to be fully managed.

Faron hummed at the description. “Maybe if…”

Casimir interrupted him. “We can discuss resurrection at another time.” He dropped the chest on the book table, opening it and starting to sift through it. “If you’re coming along, you need some better gear.” That got their attention. All four crowded around Casimir, and he waved them off. “First, I’ve gotten y’all some Heartstring tunics, standard stuff. On top of that, suits of leather and padded armor, like mine.” While the Archmagus’s additional funds did go a long way, it wasn’t dragonhide money, so he got the stuff that was local, and thus cheaper: Needleboar hide. Most didn’t look at those monsters and think ‘good leather’, but the skin needed to be pretty tough to keep the needles from falling out faster than it could grow them back. “On top of that, Faron gets some better chainmail.” In the stories, mithril gets a pretty impressive reputation, but it really wasn’t that rare or special. It was light, tough, and didn’t interfere with your mana flows, but it also provided minimal magical protection for the same reason. Which was why it paired well with shaping magic, as that interference could cause critical stability faults in armor plates created with it. Like most materials, it was good for some things, not so good for others.

Peter immediately started removing his armor, grinning in anticipation, while the girls went into the washroom to change. Faron followed suit after the girls were out of sight. After a few minutes, the group was back together, well protected. “Weapons now.” Casimir continued. “For Peter, you get cast mithril axes. They have an active enchantment, so they’ll be a lot better once you’ve learned to use them.” Normally, mithril wasn’t a great material for hammers or axes you wanted to swing with in melee, but that’s what weight enchantments were for.

Peter looked at the back ends of the axes in confusion. “Um… Why is this side pointy?”

“Because picks are better at dealing with shells and carapaces.” Casimir replied. “Also plate armor.” Well, except force armor, but again, that was what weight enchantments were for. “Anyway, here’s some throwing knives. Cheap and disposable.” Casimir put some light spells in them, to make them usable as lanterns by throwing them into walls, but otherwise they were just good steel. “You three get knives too.” He brought out four more knives, these ones larger and sturdier. “Utility knives, you could kill stuff with them but they’re more for carving up monster corpses and general usage.”

“Faron, you do get one backup weapon for when you’re short on mana.” He passed the wannabe knight a third ax. “Or if Peter loses his.” It was pretty difficult to determine which weapon to give the boy as a backup, but mage-knights had to deal with significantly different weights, sizes, and weapon types as it was, so the appeal of standardization settled the matter.

“Now, I’m frankly amazed at how many weapons you’ve brought to the sessions, Illivere.” He said, somewhat annoyed at the difficulties posed by her near-effortless mastery of whatever weapon she brought. “But here’s a Heartwood bow, a set of Heartstrings, and some simply enchanted Heartwood arrows. Don’t put exploding or burning arrowheads on these, okay?”

“Of course.” Illivere said, examining the etchings in the arrow shafts. “These will be excellent baseline projectiles.”

“Glad to know you like them.” Casimir replied idly. “Now, Hanna.” The girl startled, as she tended to whenever she was directly addressed. “You don’t really use weapons much, so Master made you a spell focus instead.” He brought out something resembling a thin club. “This will store large amounts of life aspected mana, and it’s got some enchantments to make it decent at blocking and hitting people, but mostly it’s just a reusable life mana potion for you to use. Invest mana into it, pull it back out later.” It was more of a sorcerer’s weapon, but she still mostly used life magic spells, so it should last her a while.

Casimir glanced over his students, newly equipped. Peter was posing, lost in his own world as he soaked in imaginary cheering. Faron was forming plates of mana over his armor, testing the interference or lack thereof. Illivere had her etching tools out, high quality enough that Casimir didn’t bother replacing them, enchanting some of her arrowheads. At a glance with detect magic, Casimir’s best guess was she was priming it to warp into some metal snarl once it penetrated, making it difficult to remove without a lot of extra damage.

“Um…” Hanna began. “How does this work?”

“We’ll have to wait for training in the fancy bits.” Casimir said with a frown. “For now, just take these.” Casimir passed out their potion belts, loaded with inexpensive but effective potions, as well as backpacks that were, for now, just extra armor on their backs. Once they get back to doing real jobs, they’ll be their most profitable pieces of equipment. “You’ll only be needing the combat kit, so we’ll review the potions on the way and ignore all the extra stuff in there. I’ll explain it later.”

“Right. We tracked the spy to a trap door in Halin Park before breaking off pursuit.” Illivere said, already walking towards the exit. Casimir closed the chest and stacked the books the kids took out on the book-table for later shelving.

Time for action.

---------------

Halin park was a pretty typical example of city greenery, a few sparse trees in a field of grass, with one section of dense-ish trees, the whole thing enclosed with a fence enchanted to suppress monster formation. High-quality ones, of course. Random alleyways had a bigger chance of forming monsters than the park if everything was properly maintained.

Peter went straight into the trees, walking about thirty feet into it before waving his hand and moving the layer of dirt that covered the trap door that he described on the way here. Casimir tuned his senses to detect magical traps, and nodded as he found none. “This looks to be an old military maneuvering tunnel, built back when Anima was still concerned about invasion from foreign powers.” Casimir said as he carefully examined the cracks of the door for mechanical traps. “Most of them were eventually collapsed or repurposed, but this wouldn’t be the first one I’ve seen co-opted by criminals.” Assuming that they were criminals, instead of, say, inexperienced spies that the Archmagus sent to keep tabs on his daughter.

If that was what this was, this shouldn’t be dangerous, but as long as it’s a possibility, he’ll have to remain calm until it’s confirmed one way or the other. Using some mana to shape some lockpicks, Casimir quickly and efficiently opened the lock on the trap door, a very nice inset deadbolt built to foil the two most common means of magically bypassing locks. “This kind of lock was cutting edge when it was built, before I was born, but you see these mechanisms everywhere nowadays. If you can’t open one of these, don’t claim that you can pick locks.” It was somewhat interesting that they didn’t bolster the security, but security through obscurity was a thing. The real defenses would be deeper inside.

“Give me a few minutes to check for traps before following.” Casimir told his students before opening the door, once more evaluating the ladder and floor both magically and through enhancing his otherwise ordinary senses. Once more finding nothing, he dropped down and examined his new surroundings. The room was bare, but from the size and small divots in the ground… “This was a storeroom. Free-standing shelving, so probably provisions rather than weapons.” Casimir kept his senses open, but after another few heartbeats deemed the room safe. “Alright, come on down.”

With the trapdoor securely in place, unlocked but with Casimir having re-camoflauged it, anyone looking at the entrance won’t immediately suspect something amiss. “Let me set an alarm…” Casimir brought out his enchanted bell and tied a string to the trapdoor. “There. If anyone opens that, it’ll alert me.” It was a bit lazy, and more to the point obvious, to use an enchanted bell rather than something more mechanically complex to disguise the alarm sound, but he didn’t know how big this tunnel was, so he wasn’t going to risk not hearing it by being too far to hear it go off.

Casimir glanced between the two exits to the room. “The question is, which way did they go?” Okay, it was showtime. Casimir focused, establishing some short-duration mind curses to ensure that he wouldn’t be distracted and remain focused on what mattered.

Peter focused and cast a curse upon himself. “...This way.” Oh? Had he… Casimir didn’t see that coming.

Casimir hummed as his student confidently went into the left hall, looking intently at the floor. New plan. “Okay, you’ve impressed me.” He must have gotten Attune Senses to work before he followed the guy, and memorized the mana profile while he was at it.

Peter grinned smugly at the praise, unable to resist bragging. “If we lost, I was going to tell you about how I caught the guy’s mana.”

“Always have a backup plan.” Casimir said, echoing his own words. “You’ve taken them to heart. Okay, you can keep going, and I’ll follow. Hanna, keep your senses tuned to spotting traps, I’ll only intervene if I see one that’s extra dangerous.”

Emboldened, the group of kids walked with purpose, while Casimir skulked behind them. While completely escaping detection was out of the question while the kids were involved…

That doesn’t mean they won’t make fine bait. Assessments of their exact capabilities versus various projected enemies showed promise, as Casimir put even more mana into his mind curses to expand his senses and accelerate his thoughts.

This was a much better Final Exam for the semester than what the Academy has to offer anyway…