Hugo let himself into his family’s home. They were either at school or work, so he had the place to himself. He made a mental note to replace all the locks in the house. He knew firsthand how easy these types of locks were to pick.

His crazy huge mana pool was probably enough to make a mithril crossbow in one go, but then he wouldn't have any mana for arrows. Instead, he wandered around the house, looking for ways to cut down on the amount of mithril he would have to create.

Then he sat down and started working. First, he selected mithril as his element. While he was in there, he selected the frequency that would let him make shields with his barrier domain, 400-700. He decided not to check into the options for lingua, he would just ask for advice tomorrow.

He ended up using a gardening tool as the stock for his crossbow, so he only had to use mithril for the crossbow leaves. Eighty points of mana later, he had a functioning crossbow. He spent another eighteen on three arrows. Sadly he didn’t have any money to buy fire runes, so he couldn’t make his exploding arrows. Hopefully it wouldn’t take long to learn how to make his own fire runes. The monster surge would be over before he killed enough monsters with just normal arrows. He might not even get a kill tonight. But it would help him rank up to four, and he could use the extra mana the rank ups would give him.

He wrapped the crossbow so it didn’t look quite so cobbled together and headed west to the walls. He walked through a few different human districts. He found it interesting that there didn’t seem to be a poor district here, even right by the walls. He wondered what down on their luck people did here in Paarl.

Once he got to the wall, he walked along it until he got to the closest tower. He passed several stairways on the way here, but he guessed that he was supposed to check in first. The tower was manned with a guard and everything so he walked up and said, “Hello, I was wondering if I could volunteer on the wall for a shift. Is there a specific application process or do I just go up?”

He turned to Hugo and grunted, “Are those apprentice robes?”

Hugo looked down and said, “Uh, yeah. I just started today.”

“You can’t work a shift without your master assigning you wall duty. Did he send you here? If so, he sent you to the wrong place. You are supposed to report to the cardinal towers,” the guard said and pointed west towards a larger tower due west.

“I can’t just go up and kill monsters? Don’t you guys accept help during the monster surge?” Hugo asked.

“There is a strict protocol with shifts on the wall, we need to have an ordered response to the monster wave. Besides, as an apprentice, all of your mana stones belong to your master. Someone at one of the cardinal towers will verify your master’s wishes regarding payments and assign you a shift.”

Hugo bowed and said, “Thank you for the information, I will head there now.”

As soon as he was out of sight, Hugo turned and walked home. Grandmaster Dandre said he didn’t want to talk to Hugo until he had his list done. He doubted that the man would assign him a shift on the wall right away. Either his new master was a jerk and would say no out of spite, or he was testing his resourcefulness and would say no.

Dinner with his family that night was tough. They wanted to hear everything about his first day, but he just wanted to ignore his problems for a bit. He gave everyone the answers they were looking for, but didn’t elaborate. Eventually his mother noticed, and distracted everyone by discussing the shop.

Hugo finally discovered what they did for work. They ran an alchemical supply store, processing raw ingredients so that alchemists could just mix them to create potions and elixirs. Apparently they were having problems with the mana array that helped their magical plants grow, so they discussed how much the repairs could cost. Hugo would have offered to look at it, but apparently arrays were the domain of ritualists, not runists.

The next day, Hugo was at the compound as the sun rose over the walls. He wasn’t the first one there, but he was close. He waited around awkwardly until Klaus arrived an hour later.

“Ah, Xhosa, good to see you here bright and early. I am glad to see you eager, but remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint. You don’t have to get here so early, but you do have to show up every day, understand?” Klaus said.

“Yes, sir,” Hugo nodded.

“Hah! Already dispensing with the typical nox bow? You really want to get on my good side, huh? Well then, I will start the day with teaching you infuse. It’s the easiest skill I know, only a little harder than activating completed runes,” Klaus said.

He got out a few small stones and said, “This is quartz, nothing special about it, the hills around here are literally made of the stuff. But it holds mana decently well and is stable enough to contain a single rune. I am going to shape a few real quick and we can get to infusing.”

Once the stones were carved to his liking, Klaus handed him one. The shape reminded him of mana stones, and it was exactly the same size as the fire runes he routinely bought.

Klaus held his out and said, “Infuse just means to push mana into something and get it to stay there. You will need to grab a bit of mana from your core and thread it up through your arms. They tell me it works best if you use all four arms at once to push mana in from all sides. Try to keep equal pressure on all four sides. It should only take you a few days of practice to get it. Let me know when you are out of mana and I will give you a few tasks while your pool refills.”

Hugo nodded. Working for Klaus for a week seemed like a reasonable payment to gain a skill, particularly since he wouldn’t be doing anything else while he waited to regain his mana. The skill seemed fairly simple, the only problem he found was getting his mana to travel through all four arms equally. If he didn’t concentrate, it defaulted to two arms. Klaus watched Hugo for a moment and then turned back to his workstation to get ready for the day.

Once Hugo had been at it for about half an hour, he checked his mana and saw he had used up twenty points. He still had more than eighty left, but he saw no reason to let Klaus know that.

“I am pretty much empty now. What do you want me to do,” Hugo said.

Klaus was working on a rune and didn’t reply until he was done. “I saw you diligently working on the skill, you will have it soon enough, don’t worry. Time for some traditional scut work. There should be a delivery of coal just inside the back door. I need you to bring it up to the forges in each of the corners. Four bundles for each forge.”

Hugo looked to the corners in surprise. Now that he said it, he could see that there was a small forge in each one. He hadn’t seen them before because there were no smoke stacks. Interesting that they manually forged things, but used magic to take care of the smoke. He guessed that a fully magical forge was too expensive, even for a runic grandmaster’s shop.

He walked through a few hallways to get to the back door. As expected, there was a stack of sixteen bundles of coal. Hugo lifted one experimentally. They were pretty heavy, about sixty pounds each. He could probably carry four of them at once, but then his robes would get dirty.

Grabbing two, Hugo walked back to the forges. As he walked back into the courtyard, he saw several of the apprentices staring at him. He heard a few groans and several of them turned away in frustration. None of them said anything, so he went back and got two more. They seemed even more frustrated with him then. When he was finished with the eighth delivery, he walked back over to Klaus.

Hugo nodded to the rest of the apprentices and said, “What was that all about?”

Klaus laughed, “You took away their fun by doing a good job. We give the coal job to all the new apprentices and they almost always get filthy. Well, they usually struggle with one bundle, let alone the two you were carrying. Anyway, when they are dirty, then we pretend that the grandmaster is coming soon for an inspection and watch the newbie panic.”

Hugo looked down at his hands covered in charcoal. His high strength stat had saved him from some hazing. He knew what he had to do. Carefully, he wiped some charcoal on his face to make it look like he had wiped sweat off his brow.

Then he walked over to the other side of the courtyard and said, “Hey, they said you might have some water. I gotta wash my hands before the inspection.”

The apprentice turned around, and Hugo could see that he was struggling not to laugh at Hugo’s ridiculous face. He scooched off to the side and said, “Ah, no. I just used mine up. Maybe try Siphesihle, her station is over there on the north side.

Hugo hurried across the courtyard and asked the same question. Sniggers followed him as apprentices caught on. He let them send him to another two workstations before he turned to the courtyard and yelled, “Doesn’t anybody have some water!”

The courtyard erupted in laughter and Klaus waived him over. Hugo couldn’t keep the smile off his face as he washed up.

“You are a sneaky one,” Klaus said, “You just want everyone to be nice to you when you are helping them out on their projects.”

Hugo just looked at him and winked.

Then he sat down for another round of practice figuring out the infuse skill. Pushing mana into something should be easy. Maybe it was just his pressure that was off, too much or too little. He tried adjusting it.

Skill Gained!

Through special actions you have unlocked the skill Infuse.

Well, that was easy. Hugo didn’t tell Klaus just yet. He didn’t want to stand out too much. After an appropriate amount of time, he walked up to him and said, “Done with practice for now, do you have anything else for me?”

“Sure thing. Most people hate this job, but you might actually like this scut work. And it isn’t a prank, I promise. Come with me,” Klaus said and led him over to another section of the courtyard. They arrived at a workstation that was filled to the brim with clay tablets.

Klaus gestured to three different baskets and said, “This is the failure pile. Whenever anyone is creating something new, the grandmaster requires that we create a tablet for his review before we put it on the doorknob or sword or whatever. The good ones get approved and stacked in their workshop for reference. The bad ones end up here. Your job is to separate them. Cracked tablets or runes in this basket, and ones that seem fine in this one. Once you fill up the broken pile, you need to take them to a forge so the metal in the runes can be melted down and re-used.

“You might like this job because the grandmaster gave you that remedy task. If you can find and fix the problems with three of these tablets, then you can cross that task off your list.”

“How am I supposed to fix problems when I don’t even know any runes yet? I don’t know how to do this the right way, let alone how to fix someone else’s work,” Hugo said.

Klaus shrugged, “This won’t be the first time you have to do this job. Maybe it will start to make sense to you in a few months. Or years. Runic work is a patient man’s game, as they say.”

Hugo had literally never heard that phrase before. He grumbled and got to work. As expected, none of the nice looking tablets made any sense to him. He didn’t know what they were trying to do, let alone why the tablet failed to work.

After a few hours of shuttling tablets to the forges and helping separate out the metals, Hugo walked back to Klaus. He sat down to pretend to practice infusing again. His heart wasn’t into it though and he got back up again.

He quietly walked over to Klaus and watched him work. He was holding something that looked like a charcoal pencil with a handle. Instead of charcoal, a thin rod of mithril stuck out of the inscribing pen. As he slowly pressed the handle, the thin rod melted into the surface of the breastplate. Hugo couldn’t see the rune until he activated his mana sight. With it active, he could see that Klaus’s inscribing skill was guiding the mithril into the center of the material and curving it into complex shapes.

Klaus sensed someone watching him and glanced back. Hugo wasn’t sure if he was allowed to watch the other apprentice at his work and distracted him by saying, “Hey Klaus. I got infuse.”

“Wow, congratulations. That’s probably the fastest I have ever seen someone gain the skill, and I have been here for ten years,” Klaus said.

Hugo thanked him and pretended that he had just gotten lucky. He realized his plan of not standing out wasn’t really working very well.

Klaus scratched his head, “Well, anything else I can help you out with? I feel bad taking a week of work from you when you probably could have figured it out on your own.”

“Your advice helped, Klaus. But as long as you are asking. I did have a few questions. First off, what’s up with lingua and what should I pick?”

“Already at rank two? Good on ya. Lingua are the runic languages you can choose from to do your work. There are eight of them that work slightly differently. Some of them are better for different situations. The first choice is always the easiest. Choose Isibhozo. It is good for beginner work and the foundation for the more complex stuff. Next year you can have a discussion with Grandmaster Dandre about what to choose for your next lingua at rank eight,” Klaus said.

“Next year? I was planning on getting to rank eight next week,” Hugo said.

“That isn’t likely. I mean if your family sends you out with the harvesters on eighthdays, you might get there in a month. But the grandmaster isn’t going to get you a spot on the wall until next year. He is very much the traditional type. He doesn’t want anyone to rush ahead. He had me create a light rune over and over again for three weeks before he let me move on.”

Hugo felt like protesting, but then he looked around the courtyard again. Runic work was very high end stuff. Their customers expected a very high standard, and the grandmaster could afford to take things slow with his apprentices. The grandmaster probably considered their precision with their work more important than how fast they learned to use their domain.

“Alright. I guess I will just have to ask my family about rank ups,” Hugo said.

The rest of the day was filled with menial tasks and conversations with his fellow apprentices. He noticed that they were all pretty laid back. No one seemed in a rush to complete anything and they were almost always up for a conversation. He was glad that he had played along for their little prank. They were starved for distractions and were happy to talk with him now.

At dinner with his family that night, Hugo brought up his leveling concerns, “I know I can get most of his list done eventually, but I don’t know what to do about ranking up.”

The family turned to Celia. As their only soulmarked member, she was their authority on everything magic. She said, “Well, going out on a harvester trip is out of the question. By the time we saved up enough to pay the escort fees, it would be next year. Now is the best time to go up on the wall, but those spots are regulated. Usually your guild or association reserves the spots for you.”

“Why is that? I thought they would take whatever help they could get to push back the monsters,” Hugo said.

“It’s all about the mana stones. It’s something we all need, but there is never enough of it.”

Hugo let the matter drop, but he kept thinking about it. He didn’t have time to wait until next year to rank up. He needed to rank up now and work with his friends to save the eight cities on the wall. There had to be a way.