“Careful with that Fallion enchantment! Make sure the runes are close enough together.”

“What are you doing? This isn’t even close to being the right rune.”

“Come on now, I know you guys like circles around here but at least make an attempt at making the edge of this rune sharp.”

For hours, exclamations like this came from the workshop. Even though it was exhausting to look over so many enchanters, Villin couldn’t be happier.

‘With so many enchanters working with me, I’ve pretty much secured first place amongst the runemasters, even Ruby should have no way to turn this around.’ he figured as he finished the enchantments on one of the spears.

When it came to the spearguns, Villin didn’t have to do anything other than manage the enchanters here. They would regularly go to check out some of the sections he transfigured on the wall when they forgot something but soon they found a more effective way to enchant.

At first it was just five friends that decided to work together on a speargun. Once it was dismanteled by a mechanic, they split the work between the five of them, as each took certain sections of the dismantled weapon.

Since they each only had to remember the enchantments of a fifth of the weapon, they moved a lot sooner and after a few corrections from Villin, they barely made any mistakes as well.

Soon, the enchanters all began working in groups of four to six people. This increased the pace by a lot and speargun after speargun was being finished.

While they were doing this a little more than a dozen other enchanters including Keith and Hazel, worked on the spears. They couldn’t do it all by themselves but after they finished the sections a regular enchanter could do, they passed the spears to Villin giving him plenty of work.

A week passed and in this time, a massive amount of spears were made. After seeing how well everyone worked this day and that it was getting late, it was about time to finish up. He decided to send the enchanters home for the night and go to sleep himself as well.

Once everyone left, Villin went to the main gate of the workshop, intending to close it for a while, but he met with an unpleasant surprise.

Just as Villin was about to close the gate, a man entered through the open gate, standing opposite him.

“You! You’ve been cheating! I heard what you did, taking all those enchanters for yourself, how is that a fair competition?!”

The angry man that had entered was, of course, Cornelius.

When Cornelius entered, Villin sighed deeply. He saw Cornelius as an exhausting brat that was only there to waste his time.

“Look, Cornelius, I requested for enchanters to help me and they sent me some. That’s all there is to i-”

The already exhausted Villin was about to finish his sentence when he felt something off, magical elements were gathering around him. Something that would usually only happened if he would be trying to cast a spell or if an environmental spell was being cast there.

Knowing that it could very well be the latter, Villin paused in his sentence and attempted to jump to the side, attempted being the keyword.

When Cornelius entered Villin didn’t have his guard up at all. He didn’t see the man as a threat and only found that he had a loud and annoying mouth thus far, he wasn’t prepared to bolt when the environmental spell was cast. Because of his initial hesitation, he was unable to stop the environmental spell from being cast on him.

When Villin tried to jump to the side, he found out that his feet were already bound. Looking down he saw thick black chains coiling around his feet and to the ground. 

As soon as Villin saw the chains, he took action, he put his feet on the ground and transfigured the ground around the places where the chains bound him to the ground. Thus, even though the chains didn’t disappear, the ground he was linked to were now just pebble-sized, no longer restricting his movement so heavily.

Yet, while Villin was forced to use transfiguration to get out of the magical bindings, Cornelius didn’t sit still. 

He had been preparing a spell of his and as soon as Villin escaped, Cornelius sent out a blue fireball that moved towards him rapidly.

It was at this point that Villin realized that Cornelius was here to kill, nothing less.

The fireball moved quickly so it was too late to block the spell or escape using transfiguration.

With the blue ball of fire about to hit him, Villin was only able to cast one of the simplest spells he knew, ‘Magic Shield’.

When the blue fireball hit the newly created magic shield, a massive explosion occurred.

At first, Villin was luckily only sent flying against the wall, even though he broke a couple of bones, he would be fine.

But, this wasn’t the only thing that happened.

Even though most of the enchanted spears made were already sent to various towers, there were still around fifty of them left inside of the warehouse. When the blue fireball blew up, the explosion also damaged the enchantments on one of these arrows.

With the enchantment broken, all of the magic energy within the spear made its way outward causing another explosion.

This caused for a chain reaction to happen as spear after spear blew up.

Villin, who was still relatively alright at first, got hit hard by some of the spears’ detonation and got sent through the stone walls that this warehouse was made of.

His body crashed against the ground numerous times before finally crashing into a statue-head on, stopping him in his tracks.

After slumping to the ground Villin fainted. He had taken serious internal damage.

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

“How is he?”

“He’ll make it miss. He is a lucky man, if he wasn’t wearing Blue-Mythril armor beneath his regular clothes he would’ve died.”

Worried, Ruby looked at Villin who was lying on the bed in front of her, “How did this even happen?”

The Atlantian doctor looked at her kindly before responding, “As I’ve said before miss, it seems like he made a mistake while enchanting. The product he was working on must’ve blown up and this caused a chain reaction, destroying the entire facility.”

After a moment though, the doctor decided to ask hesitantly, “The only thing I can’t explain is the scar on his face, it seems to have been created by magic but I’m not sure how that would’ve happened.”

Hearing this, Ruby sighed, “No, that one isn’t new, he’s simply been hiding it using magic.” she explained before setting her gaze on Villin again, “When will he be better? Can I take him back to The Academy for proper treatment?” she quickly asked.

Immediately, the doctor shook his head, “If he were to teleport now, it would be the death of him. It will take a while before his internal organs fully heal, before that time he cannot teleport without risking his life.”

As soon as the doctor said that he noticed Ruby turned a lot more worried so he quickly continued, “Don’t worry though, our medicine are very good, he’ll make a full recovery.”

Hearing this sentence, Ruby didn’t calm down at all, “But he won’t make a full recovery before the beast attack will he? How is he supposed to live then if he’ll barely be able to defend himself?”

Hearing Ruby mention this matter, the doctor also got grimmer, he hadn’t thought of that. After looking at the girl in front of him for a bit, he decided to be honest.

“I can assure you that he’ll be deep within the city where he’ll be safest. But, no matter what, a number of beasts are bound to reach him and at that time the boy will at most be able to walk.” the doctor’s grim expression told Ruby all she needed to know of his chances at that time, she ran out of the door before tears flowed down her eyes.

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

While this was happening, Villin had a dream.

Villin found himself floating above the ground, looking at a battlefield. He noticed he was in Atlantis, even though the barrier was mostly holding thus far, a layer of water about half a meter deep still existed all over Atlantis. He noticed spears being shot towards the creatures outside and even though they were really effective, occasionally a creature slipped through.

Villin had an especially bad feeling when he looked at a certain creature in particular. It was a rather small creature, it was green in color and moved extremely quickly through the thin layer of water.

It helped out his fellow attackers twice when they fought against Atlantian troops holding tridents. The creature was capable of sending water slashes towards people, cutting through skin.

Overall, the creature wasn’t that special but it managed to group up with some of the other creatures that attacked and after a lot of bloodshed, the little green creature was the only one left.

Villin’s bad feeling got worse as the little creature went towards one of the hospitals around. Due to its small size and the fact it was the first to get this far into the city, the guard looking over the building didn’t notice it and it managed to get inside. There, it saw two individuals. One was a doctor and another a boy full of scars, then, with a single slash, Villin saw his own head being decapitated.

Normally this was where he would wake up but he couldn’t, he tried to get out of the dream very hard but it was like he was cut off from the world.