Seeing Adam walk toward him, the apprentice panicked further and shouted, fierce in voice but hollow inside, "What are you doing? We're about to start fighting magical beasts, and now you want infighting? Or is it that you don't want to put in your own strength and just want to accept our protection?"
Adam was unmoved and kept walking toward the apprentice. William couldn't hold back any longer. "Adam, right now we have to pull together. Believe me, even as a Grand Knight you could never be a match for a magical beast. Only unity, only magic, can save us." As he spoke he stretched out his hand; another magic ring was activated, and a rapidly spinning wind blade took shape in the air.
No wonder William was so confident—he had other magic items as well. Sure enough, once William showed his power, the apprentices who had been sitting on the fence hardened their resolve to follow him.
William loosed the wind blade at the sea. After a great boom a towering wave came spiraling up, and against that backdrop William looked all the more dashing. He looked at Adam. "Join us. The alliance's strength can protect you until you've mastered magic and gotten you ashore alive."
Yet Adam was still unmoved, continuing toward the apprentice. Ophelia couldn't help speaking up. "Adam, join us. The magical beasts really are strong."
"Move aside. You're blocking my way," Adam said to the apprentice.
The apprentice stood frozen. He had never imagined that Adam wasn't after him at all, that he simply wanted to leave. Then he came back to himself and stared at Adam as though he were a madman. "Are you insane? Didn't you hear Mr. William? Those are magical beasts! We haven't mastered magic—how could we possibly beat them?"
In everyone else's mind Adam was already an idiot, a dead man who didn't know what was good for him. Only the handful of Northland apprentices still refused to give up persuading him; Cristel ran over anxiously, meaning to drag Adam back into the crowd.
Adam stopped and looked at them. He remembered that Sam Aiden had once lent him the ring to study, so he decided to respond.
"An alliance of the weak means nothing. Mage Blake said there are countless magical beasts in this sea; at any moment they could climb onto the deck and tear you apart. With a single magic item, do you really believe your safety is guaranteed?"
Adam had sharply laid bare the flaw in the alliance, and William's expression changed. From the very beginning he had never intended to keep everyone alive: the few with high enough talent would master magic in a short time, and those were the ones he wanted to win over. As for the rest of the trash, who cared whether they lived or died?
"I have more magic items, and I'll hand them out to everyone. We only have to hold out through the hardest first stretch, until more apprentices have mastered Fireball..."
Adam looked at him calmly, then asked Sam Aiden, "How long does that ring take to recharge?"
Sam Aiden was no fool either; he had caught on by now. "Fifteen days."
Adam turned and walked off, leaving one last sentence behind him: "Instead of wasting time on pointless things, you'd do better to hurry up and master magic."
No one tried to stop Adam again. They had to admit that Adam was right—but even so, none of them could leave this alliance. An alliance of the weak might not guarantee that one survived, but then again, one might not be the first to die. That was the thought echoing in their heads now.
"Mr. William, the Eastern apprentices and I still agree to the organization's founding," Quentin said as he walked over to William.
William stared venomously at Adam's back. Now that Adam had pointed it out, the apprentices would still join the organization, but their faith in him personally had all but vanished. "Damn it—it should have been perfect. Damn it!"
The clever ones had already begun looking out for themselves. There was no longer any way to trick others into dying on his behalf, and that undoubtedly cut his own safety down considerably.
Randy, too, came over to William with the Western apprentices to show his agreement.
Ophelia watched Adam with a complicated expression, and at last made up her mind inside. "I—I've decided to withdraw."
William narrowed his eyes. "Miss Ophelia, do you know what you're saying? You should know that in a situation like this, the organization will absolutely not hand its protective strength to outsiders. Or do you think a Grand Knight's power is enough to fight magical beasts?"
William absolutely did not want to lose Ophelia's support; at this stage, a Grand Knight's protection was crucial.
Once Ophelia had made her decision she no longer hesitated. She answered, "Thanks for your concern." Then she turned to the other four Northlanders and asked, "And you?"
Cristel answered without a moment's hesitation. "I'm with the young lady." Between the unfamiliar William and the familiar Ophelia, she had made her choice without a second thought—and besides, she had discovered that runes were not as hard as she had imagined. Could I master them that soon?
Sam Aiden and the others got along well and had always stuck together through thick and thin. Facing Ophelia's question, he hesitated, then said in a low voice, "I'm sorry, Miss Ophelia. We..."
Ophelia understood, and said no more. She went with Cristel to Adam's side. She had not made this decision on impulse: her intuition told her that with his talent, Adam had probably already mastered magic, and if she could gain his protection she would be far safer.
Ophelia had not attended the nobles' parties. She was cold by nature, and she did not think much of that pack of nobles besides, so for the past two months she had practiced as a mage alone or together with Cristel—though thanks to her talent, her progress had not been great.
She had no very good alternative. If she made a request of Adam outright she would surely be refused; it would be best if she had something Adam was interested in to trade with him, but for the moment she had nothing of the kind. After thinking it over and over, all she could do for now was follow Adam.
Once Adam had walked off to one side he paid the whole business no further attention; he was thinking about magic. The Fireball rune array had remained in his mind, but it was not engraved there—it merely lingered. In other words, the spell was single-use: after one casting, the next would require building it all over again.
Mana, that higher-order energy, could only rest upon the rune array—no, rather, it attached to it only after the caster activated the rune array. During that process the caster could observe the mana, but could not absorb it.
"If I'm not mistaken, of these three runes one serves to channel mana, one to raise the temperature, and one to trigger."
Setting mana aside, the rune array was essentially a "black box of technology": the caster could use it with relative ease, but had almost no idea what principles or knowledge were being applied inside.
Adam tried tracing one of them on its own, but nothing came of it. There had to be some piece of knowledge that linked the three runes together.
While thinking, Adam activated the spell. The Fireball looked no different from the one produced by the magic item in Sam Aiden's hand; even the temperature was about the same. The difference was that self-cast magic came very fast—fast enough to count as instant.
A blazing fireball appeared out of thin air. Unlike the one from the magic ring, Adam could control this fireball to some degree: right now, for instance, guided by his spiritual power, it bobbed up and down a meter in front of him.
"Sure enough, Adam has already mastered magic." — Ophelia.
"Adam is amazing. I'll have to work hard too." — Cristel.
"Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!" — William Alfred.
"That fast? Did we make the wrong choice?" — Sam and the other two.
At a thousand degrees Celsius, Adam's body—not yet baptized by mana—could not withstand it for long. Just then his radiating spiritual power detected a high-energy signature coming from the seawater to the southeast.
Adam sent the fireball hurtling at the coordinates while running ninety-nine percent of his threads at full power, ceaselessly constructing Fireballs.
A water arrow shot out of the sea and met the fireball in midair. Water and fire collided and threw up a vast cloud of steam; inside it the clashing mana set off a string of fine explosions, one after another. In the end the fireball came out slightly ahead, but it had no strength left to do any harm to the big fish charging up out of the sea.
"So that's a magical beast?" Adam instantly shot back toward the center of the deck. If the beasts were coming from the sea, the spot he had just been standing in was far too dangerous.
"Magical beasts! The magical beasts are here!" William blew up on the spot. Having seen these monsters with his own eyes, his confidence in the organization and in the so-called power of unity dropped to the freezing point. Even William, the founder, couldn't help shrinking toward the middle of the crowd. Hearing about them from his father was one thing; seeing them for real was another. Right now he seriously doubted how long a few magic items and a crowd of trash could hold out.
Especially when one dark shape after another rose up out of the sea.
Only then did everyone understand what Mage Blake had meant by "countless." Around the Mordo Academy, numberless magical beasts surfaced in a dense throng—mostly shaped like aquatic creatures, but far larger than their originals. The cold, indifferent eyes of cold-blooded animals were more chilling than any savage killing intent.
The one thing that comforted them was that the Mordo Academy did not slow; it still steamed toward the Mage Continent at the same speed, and any magical beast that dared block the ship's path was ruthlessly ground to fragments by some mysterious power.
Ophelia and Cristel moved closer to where Adam stood. Adam paid them no attention—where they chose to stand was their freedom, and whether he lent a hand was his own right.
William was somebody, after all. After the first panic he forced himself calm and began issuing orders in a loud voice, handing the magic items he had to spare to several of the talented. He had to invest his resources in the blue chips, that being the fastest way to see a return.
The big fish that had fired the water arrow opened its mouth and gave a soundless roar, and every beast lunged half its body out of the sea. They were ready to attack.
"Magical beasts are not mindless creatures. They possess a degree of intelligence, communicate with ultrasound, and obey orders."
"This is not good news."