Chapter 44:

  When Alice woke, Titus was already up and about and had breakfast ready. As she sat down in front of the plate of mostly still-warm eggs, gave him a mumbled greeting through blurry eyes.

  After some quick conversation and eating, she grumbled, "I don't like waiting. I know we can't get to the ants yet, but it feels like every day, the possibility of fixing this slips further and further away. We have no idea how long the tutorial will last. And if people come back first... well, I don't know if that'd be terrible, but..."

  Titus shrugged. "It's hard, but there's not much you can do besides wait. We're not really even waiting."

  "Really?"

  "Of course not. We're getting stronger. You're close to getting your next skill. One more level and I think we'll be a lot more prepared for the ants once we finish our deal with learning our professions."

  "Yeah, but that could take a long time. And remember what happened last time…"

  "Yeah, well, hopefully not that long. Besides this time the monsters are already there. The class I want to go to starts at nine," Titus said, producing the brochure. "What do you need?" he asked.

  "Mostly just scrap metal," she said, accepting the inscribing pen from Titus as he handed it over. She had given it to him, along with her wand, to store for the night rather than leave them on the bedside table. She tucked the wand into her pocket and the pen behind her ear.

  "Just scrap metal?" he clarified.

  "Yeah. Um, maybe I'll need to get a better pen at some point, but for now, this should work," she said.

  "Okay," he said. "I'm going to need to buy a cauldron. And possibly ingredients, too."

  Alice winced. "That's going to be a problem. Maybe... do we need to go back to the shop first?"

  Titus shook his head. "No. I picked up a cauldron while you were grabbing the wand. It's nothing special and didn't cost that much, but I'm a little concerned about what we need to get for the lesson. If ingredients aren't supplied..."

  "Well, the NPC said that was only for the small, introductory lessons that the ingredients were supplied," Alice said. "But I don't see a list of anything."

  "That's my concern exactly," Titus agreed. "Either it's all theory, or we won't know until we try to sign up. I do have a decent amount of monster corpses stored in my inventory," he said. "And it does let me take certain parts of them out as if they're special."

  Alice blinked. "I hadn't realized it."

  "Yeah. The more I work with inventory, the better it seems to get. I can see all sorts of details about the items I have stored in it. For example, that wand of sloth has five charges in it that can be recharged by feeding it mana."

  Alice looked down at the wand she pulled out of her pocket. "Interesting. I wasn't sure how that would work. It did say it wasn't a consumable item, so I figured it would just kind of work by firing off charges, maybe at a set rate or something. Or maybe by channeling my mana into some sort of design."

  "Maybe," Titus said. "Those are reasonable assumptions, but when I was grabbing it for you, I noticed that there was more information about it."

  "Okay," Alice said. "That's actually really useful to know. Thank you. But," she said, "how will we know if you have the right stuff?"

  Titus shrugged. "I guess we hope."

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  After breakfast, they headed over to the guild hall, where the same NPC lady greeted them. Titus signed up for a lecture and followed her into the back room while Alice tinkered around with some of the metal they had picked up on the way.

  Titus had used his new spear, enchanted so that it was incredibly durable and sharp to cut a signpost into small pieces for Alice to engrave on. They weren't as useful as complete blanks, but the odd shapes and holes of the steel allowed her to practice working on non-conventional objects.

  She drew lines with the pen, forming shapes with the mana paths and making it produce certain effects. She was sure there was more to engraving than just moving the mana around in certain patterns to produce a few effects. She would have to learn those patterns as she went, either by experience or through a book. But as it was, things were coming along nicely. It was a language, something that she was still working out but inherently made sense to her.

  Alice fell into a trance as she carved little lines by feeding mana into the pen and drawing on the scraps of metal. Some heated things, others produced light or sound when dropped. She combined some of them together to make some improvised flashbangs, setting aside three of them for Titus when he got back as actual useful items.

  The current one wasn't working the way she had wanted it to though. It was supposed to project a constant force downwards and levitate. Still, it kept spinning and then forcing itself down into the table harder than it should.

  She attempted to add stabilizing thrusters to the side, but something was not going right. It wasn't just that the balance was off, but the internal structure of the enchantment wasn't balanced properly. It was supposed to be done by doing calculations and sensing positions before adjusting the amount of thrust.

  Something in the operation she was doing wasn't lining up properly, and the math that was supposed to be done internally via the circuits she had wasn't quite operating as it should. She was going through it step by step, drawing her findings on the table, when finally something clicked.

  She tossed aside the piece and started over, this time not trying to draw the generalized math machine she had initially tried to cram into it, but simply only the calculations that would be necessary using rough estimation instead of exact numbers.

  It wasn't going to be perfect, but when she slowly, hesitantly released the piece of metal over the table, instead of spinning out of control or flinging across the room or anything that she might have expected, it hovered for a second and then slowly sunk down while listing to one side. Alice smiled.

  Okay. Okay, she thought to herself. As long as I don't overcomplicate it, I should be able to get something reasonable out of this.

  ***

  Titus came back a few hours later, and Alice greeted him by tossing a piece of metal at his face, which stopped and hovered six inches before his outstretched palm that he had used to catch it.

  "Huh?" he said, and she smiled. "That's pretty clever."

  "Yeah," Alice said, resisting the urge to walk him through exactly how she had done it. It was a lesson she had learned from her time in school that not everyone had the same interests as she did. "How'd your thing go?" she asked.

  He smiled and produced a pinkish potion in his hand. "Health potions this time?" Alice guessed.

  Titus wiggled his head back and forth. "Sort of. Not exactly hit point recovery, but should heal you a little bit."

  "Did you have all the ingredients?"

  Titus nodded. "Yes. It seems that if we just needed some sort of vitality energy, almost any monster part would do. But it's a good thing I had gotten my cauldron because I certainly needed it." Titus sat down next to her, plunking out several of the bottles.

  "Interesting. It was kind of odd that we'd picked up healing pills from the shop last time, but they have healing potions as well."

  "It seems that pills are mostly just a concentrated form of the potion in some ways. There are also things called elixirs," Titus explained. "The professor mentioned those are more like injectables. Different levels. Not really all alchemy or, I guess, more specialized branches of alchemy."

  "Okay," Alice asked. "Anything about the ants, though? Have we made any progress on that front?"

  Titus shook his head. "No, though I'm starting to get a few ideas. It will be something about extracting essences from monsters."

  "So we need some ant corpses?" Alice asked, and Titus produced one on the table for a second before taking it back into his inventory after Alice flinched at its sudden appearance.

  "I already got some. Do you need to take more lessons, though?" she asked.

  Titus shrugged one shoulder. "One more would probably get me there, but I don't know if I need it. It'd be a lot more testing otherwise."

  "Um, I think we can afford one more lesson," Alice said. "Especially if we just need to go out and hunt some more."

  Titus nodded. "Yeah, I think so as well. There's the lesson I want to take."

  Interrupting their conversation, Titus's phone began to ring.