The Strongest Spellblade

Getting back to the mountains had been a trek. I cut out a cave into a cliff wall. It was quick and messy. I doubted it would hold up for that long, but it should last through the night. I pushed a boulder to cover most of the doorway, leaving only a small crack so we didn’t suffocate.

“Fire Blade.”

The small room instantly heated up, and I felt better. Lanner let out a sigh of relief. Ozy also seemed to relax as our small impromptu cave became bearable.

“What if other demons show up?” Lanner asked. He was already pulling out his pack out of my spatial pouch to put on extra layers of clothing and get out his blanket.

“Then they show up. For now we are alive. That is the important thing. Its going to get cold,” I muttered.

“I know. My Cold Resistance improved the whole trek back out here,” the gnome complained. I didn’t blame him. The cold at the End of the World was absolutely miserable. “What is the plan now?”

“We make our way towards the beastkin settlement. Since the demon said the entrance has been closed off, it is probably destroyed. Scavenge up what we can and hunker down for the dark season. After that is over, make our way towards the nearest dungeon entrance,” I replied.

“How long is the dark season?” Lanner asked.

“Months,” I replied, and he let out a groan.

“Months of this,” he said.

“Yes. And I need to cut the spell skill since I am running low on Mana,” I replied. I let the spell skill drop and set my warm blade next to Ozy. I then out two blankets and a pillow. It was brutally cold.

I got the middle spot as Lanner and Ozy were on either side of me. I was the biggest person, taking up more than half the space in our tiny cave. It was going to be an uncomfortable night. No food and only some water, since there wasn’t room to properly cook in here.

“It was the right choice,” Lanner said.

“Hmm, what choice?” I asked.

“The demon. Something like that. A monster. That is the kind of things I heard about growing up. My parents would tell me stories of such monsters coming to eat…small humans,” he replied.

“A monster is a monster. Ozy is a trusted pet and weapon, but ultimately even he is still a monster,” I replied. It sounded harsh, but it was the brutal truth of our races. Demons and other living beings could not coexist in peace.

The night was cold. When I woke up, I used Fire Blade again to heat everyone up. Lanner let out a sigh of relief at that. It was still dark outside, but it would be light soon. We needed to use every moment of light to head towards the beastkin settlement.

“Get up. Time for a cold breakfast,” I said. Lanner let out a groan as he woke up. I gave him some vegetables while he stayed under his blankets, trying to hold in any warmth he could.

“I feel like my blood doesn’t want to move,” he complained.

“Once we get moving, everything will get better,” I replied. After a cold, miserable breakfast, we packed up and left the cave at the first sign of light from outside. I had put away my armor. The metal would only suck the heat out of me.

I also put on more clothes and made a blanket sling to carry Ozy in. It was awkward and I wouldn’t be able to easily fight, but the cold was the real enemy at the moment. We needed to get to some place we could hole up for several months.

Daylight only lasted for around six hours. At the end of that I had to make another impromptu cave. We spent another miserable night.

Lanner was slow. I had considered carrying him, but that wouldn’t have sped things up that much, since I would then be slowed down. I did try to pick out the easiest path and plowed through the snowdrifts so he didn’t get buried.

On the sixth day of traveling we crested a ridge and saw the ruins of the beastkin settlement. It had been clearly abandoned for some time. I took us towards Whiteclaw’s building.

There were still basic items inside. No corpses, but there were blood stains. I reclaimed my old room and we moved another bed in for Lanner. It was basically a metal rack since the blankets had been taken away.

But we had blankets of our own. It was better than sleeping on the ground. After getting the room set up I cut out a slice of stone and made a stone plate.

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I then carefully carved runes into it and put a Mana core in the center. The room’s temperature quickly skyrocketed.

“Why didn’t you do that before?” Lanner asked as I got out my cook set.

“Because it releases a lot of Mana into the air. Here in the settlement, deep inside the rock with several doors, the spread of Mana isn’t obvious. But out in those mountains, we might as well have lit a fire at night. The demons would have easily spotted us. There is also lingering Mana in the metal and this settlement, which is helping obscure things as well,” I explained.

“Sorry, not complaining. The cold is just absolutely miserable. I finally feel like I am coming back to life,” Lanner said.

“It helps when the outside isn’t one stone slab away. Since there doesn’t appear to be any beastkin or demons, we can rest here for the dark season,” I said while setting up a cutting board for vegetables.

I had checked for both with my Compass of Desire, and it clearly pointed a direction other than this settlement for the nearest one of each race.

“Lots of metal here,” Lanner said.

“They mined up the ore and smelted it here. Everything is made of metal. No wood or plants, beyond what they grew for food,” I replied.

“How is Ozy doing?” he asked.

“Cold and asleep, but he will be fine,” I said. I pushed the cut vegetables into the stew pot, added water, and then put on the lid. I would let it simmer for an hour to make the vegetables soft and the broth thick.

“We are going to explore?” he asked me.

“Yes. See if anything of value was left behind. I doubt it, but you never know. And we have the time to carefully search this entire place. Not much else to do. Also we can finally go through this spatial pouch,” I said while holding up the demon’s spatial pouch.

“Treasure?” Lanner asked with excitement.

“Maybe. The corpse, I will deal with tomorrow. But let’s see, blade. That’s garbage,” I said and set it aside.

“It is metal,” Lanner said.

“Which isn’t that valuable. This whole place is metal,” I told him and he realized he wasn’t at his gnomish settlement where metal was incredibly valuable.

“A pouch of monster cores. Mostly red ones, but some orange cores as well,” I said and set it to the side.

“Why would a demon need that?” Lanner asked.

“Snacks, food maybe?” I replied with a shrug. There were a lot more trash weapons that got put to the side with the other junk.

“Oh, an actual book. Quite old, but Eldarin script. And it has only historical value,” I said.

“What?” Lanner asked in surprise, and I handed it over to him. “This is some kind of combat journal.”

“Some adventurers keep records on what they do in the hopes of turning it into a book one day. Having their name become renowned all over the world. Or a legacy and memoir for their future descendants or inheritors. At least that is the case on the Eldarin continent,” I said.

“But it might have something useful,” Lanner said and I shook my head.

“You can read it, all yours. But at best it would sell as a curiosity from this continent back home and not very well. It isn’t from a known legend or supreme legend. The only value is its origin, but even that would only make it worth a handful of gold at best,” I said.

I pulled out four more similar journals. A quick glance at a couple of pages let me know they were all trash. I gave them over to Lanner, since he seemed interested. I suppose they could be considered his heritage since he came from this continent. Perhaps they would inspire him.

The story of Bastian was all the inspiration I needed from books like that. Unless it was by a supreme legend, it wasn’t worth my time to read them. They weren’t even proper history books. I didn’t need to know how difficult one adventurer found a fight or nonsense like that.

Then came the various pieces of junk the demon had collected. Trinkets that the beastkin it had killed probably kept. Each of them went into the pile of trash with the weapons I had pulled out.

That was when I came to metal bars. Proper iron smelted bars. Now these were slightly useful as raw materials. I set them to the side. Their quality was low, but they would be more easily shaped into metal plates by Ozy once he woke up. Not that metal was lacking with all the buildings being made of metal.

“The demon’s wand,” I pulled it out. It was quite similar to mine. A high quality wand that could use Explosion. I had tossed it inside the spatial pouch with the broken weapons. I tossed it at Lanner who caught it.

“Really?” he asked.

“I only need the one. You fight with wands, you can have that one,” I said.

“It is high quality. Thanks,” he said.

“It is a wand. You can keep the wands we find,” I joked.

There were a handful of more technical books after that, teaching various tier 1 skills. This demon had clearly prized knowledge. The books were useless. None of the skills were anything unique or valuable.

Still, the College might get some use out of them if they had a novel training method. I set them to the side. Next came clothing and armor. None of it I wanted to keep, and it went into the trash pile.

I then pulled out a fancy knife. The sheathe was made with inlaid silver and there was a trace of Mana about the blade. I carefully unsheathed it and there were several grooves in the blade.

“Huh, interesting,” I said and put the knife back into its sheathe.

“What is that?” Lanner asked.

“A ritual knife. It is used to create a blood channel when stabbing a victim, so they bleed out in a specific direction. It would be used to fill up the runes and patterns of the ritual circle,” I replied. I knew of such an item from the book the Dark Cabal had gifted me about rituals.

“Is it valuable?” Lanner asked.

“Slightly. The blade is made of a very rare metal. It repels Mana. That way the blade doesn’t interfere with Mana,” I said.

“How would that even work?” Lanner asked.

“You would need to ask a metallurgical expert. It isn’t a common metal. Often used for bindings for high value prisoners. It isn’t common, but it isn’t rare. A best it could be considered a curiosity that the right collector would pay a lot for. The hilt and the inlaid metalwork indicate that it is from the Low Vostner period. A true relic,” I replied.

“So old,” Lanner said.

“Very old. Doesn’t make it powerful or special. Again, it would be worth a handful of gold, maybe a platinum coin to the right collector,” I said. That was it unfortunately. A surprisingly disappointing haul so far.

I reached into the spatial pouch, trying to grab anything but the corpse. I pulled out another book. This one appeared to be much more haphazardly made. It was a lot cruder, but it also appeared to be newer. I flipped it open and the words were written in blood.