“Honestly speaking, I was hoping for revenge to be a little more . . . visceral,” Eleonora said to herself. “But Lord Vandal said it would be a calamity, so I’m sure that’s what he will bring.”
Vandal’s Spirit Body wings had allowed Eleonora and everyone to travel in one night a distance that would normally take a month to walk on foot. They therefore knew nothing yet of the incident involving monsters in Niakki.
“What next . . .?” Eleonora looked around. “Oh, I’ve never seen this fruit before either.”
“Lady, you a traveler? This fruit is a specialty of our domain. It only grows here! You can taste our pride in every bite!”
“Well then! How could I possibly turn that down?”
“The society you have here is excluding me. I knew it,” Vandal stated.
“D-d o y o u . . . t h i n k s o?”
“I do think so.”
“Y-y o u d o . . . t h i n k s o.” The guild master of the magicians’ guild was stuttering ghoulishly, his eyes rolled back white. Vandal may as well have been talking to himself.
Vandal’s reason for this assault on the guild leadership was because this particular master was a progenitor vampire sympathizer. Vandal and his allies had extracted that piece of information from the vampire they killed in Niakki. Upon their arrival in Neinland, their first order of business was to track the man down and attack him. The first part had been easy, thanks to the countless spirits that had approached Vandal upon their arrival, revealing the location of the Guild Master’s mansion.
Then, they attacked it.
Vandal simply created a Magic Sucking Barrier that covered the entire building, and the man promptly collapsed. He would have been a powerful foe, if allowed to use his magic. Without it, he was just an old man with a fancy title. Admittedly, covering the entire building with a barrier after a long Spirit Body flight drained Vandal’s own magic.
Braga, Zulan, and Eleonora defeated the other powerless Magicians and the mansion’s hired guard. The bigger challenge was getting the Guild Master to actually talk: the man was strong-willed and had a high level of Resist Poison, so Vandal decided to try out Spiritual Corrosion.
He increased his number of heads and looked at the man straight-on while whispering into both of his ears. Not for very long—an hour at most. That was all it had taken to break the man completely. Vandal’s original plan had been to simply kill him and move on after getting the information he needed.
“Not that I have any sympathy for you, after all the horrible things you’ve been doing in exchange for forbidden knowledge from Tehneshia,” Vandal chided the man.
“I-I a m . . . s-s o r r y . . .”
“Hmmm, this Spiritual Corrosion skill is powerful, but hard to control. I definitely need more practice.”
The issue was more with Vandal’s own personality than the skill itself, namely his inability to take it easy on anyone he saw as a threat.
“At least this got us access to your secret library.”
Vandal gained access to the restricted areas of the magicians’ guild by using Possession. This involved using Spirit Bodification on his entire body and controlling the fleshy remains of the broken Guild Master. Possession was a death attribute spell he had only created recently. He couldn’t fully control the beings he possessed—it was more like riding along—which meant he couldn’t command someone in full control of their faculties. However, if someone’s mind had been completely broken, he could puppet their remains around as he saw fit.
Thanks to this nasty new technique, he walked right into a veritable flea market of forbidden knowledge.
“Hmm, none of this knowledge looks like it will be useful right away,” Vandal commented. “Oh, here’s a way to make homunculi. But you need to make a contract with a Demon or Devil God first.”
He perused further. “A way to control the minds of others? Hm, but it’s a complex procedure, and we don’t need that with Spiritual Corrosion around. Let’s see, let’s see. This poison . . . a downgrade from what I already use, with a higher MP cost.”
In fact, while the label of “forbidden” made the library sound appealing, it didn’t have much useful stuff. Many of the skills were inferior versions of things Vandal could already do. Of course, there was no helping that; death attribute magic was itself “forbidden knowledge” of a sort, just for the entire population.
“Using magic to mutate monsters is forbidden, apparently. That sounds like what I’m doing in Talosheim could be a problem.” Vandal scratched his head. “Eh, it’s probably okay if we’re not a member of the magicians’ guild. Like we could even join anyway.” Vandal read further. “These guilds are real gatekeepers, sheesh. A shame.”
The adventurers’ guild here would be the same as in Niakki, of course. Getting into the magicians’ guild required approval from a Guild Master and a letter of recommendation from a high-ranking member or noble or graduation from the magical academy. The artisans’ guild required working experience with a master or other artisan; the merchants’ guild required a product ready to sell and the admission fee; the tamers’ guild required training by a member or a recommendation from them and being able to prove that you could actually tame monsters.
The guilds all had different names, but they all needed pretty much the same thing to get through the doors. Among them all, Vandal thought he might currently have a chance with the tamers’ guild. But the issue would be showing off his tamed monsters. If he wheeled out Eleonora, a noble vampire, it would probably tip off the agents of the progenitors that were still in the city. Meanwhile, demonstrating his zombie ninja giantling and black goblins would cause no less of a panic. Lefdia would probably get him tarnished as a freak serial killer. He could make some golems and show them off, but those would likely get labeled as alchemy.
“The best idea is still to wait for things to calm down and then register with an adventurers’ guild somewhere else,” Vandal decided. “I can think about becoming a tamer or merchant or whatever after that.” He clapped. “All right, let’s pack up and move out!” Vandal had adopted a divide-and-conquer approach for his library search—by literally dividing his body.
Now he collected up a pile of texts and cursed items and prepared them for transportation. He had already used the highest-ranking members of the establishment, also vampire sympathizers, to practice his Spiritual Corrosion. He simply used the guild master as a puppet and asked them to speak alone, one at a time. Once they were away from prying eyes, he had moved in close as though to whisper some juicy secrets in their ears, ended his Possession, and used his new elongated tongue to stick some poison in their ears. The capture was simplicity itself.
Then he subjected them to Spiritual Corrosion until their minds broke.
“I thought Magicians had a little more mental fortitude than this,” Vandal breathed.
Now, he could order them to carry all the forbidden texts and cursed items out from the restricted library for him. After all, they were the bigwigs around here.
“At least we have the location of the crypt. I’ll start digging a tunnel down there tonight.”
Gaaaaaaah!