"Leave it to you? You can't even cast an attack spell properly—how are you supposed to fight anyone? I'll do it... Blaargh!" Debbie threw up for a while, then went on, "I'll do it."
"How are you going to do anything when you're puking like that?" Ye Chui said, sweating a little.
"It's fine. Throw up enough times and you get used to it," Debbie said with great conviction. She noticed Kairui climbing furiously back to his feet in the wreckage of the carriage, so she gripped the greatsword's hilt with both hands, ready to use her trump move again.
Ye Chui hurriedly grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her behind him. "You rest a while first. I'll go. If I can't hold out, then you can step in, okay?"
"You can really handle him?" Debbie looked at Ye Chui doubtfully.
"Don't worry, I'm completely sure of myself." As he spoke, Kairui had already come storming over. A deep gash marked the chest of his black iron armor—Debbie's handiwork from a moment ago. He reached up and touched the sword scar on his chest, his eyes so wide with rage they looked about to split open.
Busca asked worriedly from beside the carriage, "Kairui, are... are you all right?"
"I'm fine, but they... they're not leaving here alive today!" Kairui's hand on his longsword was trembling with rage. This armor of his was genuine, licensed merchandise—you couldn't buy a set even if you wanted to. It was issued only when you became a City Lord's guard, and the City Lord's estate wouldn't repair it for you at all. Now one sword strike had cut it, and the crystal was showing...
Ye Chui felt the lethal threat. He gently pushed Debbie aside, one hand already buried in the bag he carried, while he looked at Kairui without a trace of fear. "Your next opponent is me!"
Mm, that pose is just too cool...
"Doesn't matter who it is. I haven't been this angry in a long time!" Kairui said savagely, advancing step by step.
Everyone around could feel the suffocating aura coming off Kairui—he was completely enraged. Instinctively the crowd broke into a sweat for Ye Chui, wondering how this young mage was going to deal with a rank-four swordsman in that state.
They looked at Ye Chui, and then saw him, perfectly calm, pull open the bag in his hand and take something out—about the size of a ballpoint pen. With a rrrip he tore it open and casually tossed it at Kairui.
Kairui only saw a dark blur fly at him. He was quick as could be himself—with a whoosh he reached out and caught the thing in his hand. He grinned. "Trying to sneak-attack me? Not so—"
"Bang!"
What Ye Chui had thrown was a flame scroll.
The flame scroll burst on the spot, becoming a ball of fire, and Kairui's sentence turned into a shriek. His armor's defensive power was high indeed—even a hit from Debbie's Great Top had only carved a single sword scar into it—but his armor didn't cover his arms...
The fire from the bursting scroll wrapped straight around his hand. Kairui hopped and danced about, flapping his hand nonstop and howling all the while, and only then finally put out the flames on his hand.
"A magic scroll!" Busca cried in alarm.
Gasps went up from the onlookers as well. Ordinary households had no use for such things at all—though some, thinking of their family's safety, would buy one and keep it hidden at home just in case. A single scroll cost fifty coppers. Nobody had imagined that Ye Chui would actually use a magic scroll to attack Kairui!
Kairui finally beat out the fire on his hand. That hand was swollen and blackened, covered in blisters, a horrifying sight, and the rage on his face defied description. He screamed hoarsely at Ye Chui, "You actually used a magic scroll!"
"Nobody said I couldn't." Seeing that his scroll could hurt Kairui, Ye Chui breathed a sigh of relief and said with a smug smile.
Time rewinds to three days earlier.
"So this is a magic scroll? Making one seems pretty simple."
At a workbench in Anthony's Magic Cottage, Ye Chui followed the scroll template in the scroll-crafting template book, carefully writing line after line of magic symbols onto a parchment roll with a quill. The ink used for these magic symbols had been specially treated and carried magic power; the inscribed symbols needed only a simple trigger to unleash a spell's power—and this kind of parchment roll was called a magic scroll.
Naturally, Ye Chui wasn't about to pin all his hopes on Debbie when Busca came storming in three days later. He had to do something himself.
After some thought, Ye Chui settled his hopes on magic scrolls.
The essence of a magic scroll was writing a magic matrix onto a scroll in magic ink, and the runes needed to craft one were far bulkier than those of a spell of equal power. When Ye Chui cast the [Lightning] spell, for instance, its magic matrix took only thirty lines of magic characters; a lightning magic scroll of similar power, however, required over a hundred lines of inscribed magic characters. The process was intricate and prone to error, and a single mistake ruined the entire parchment roll.
A finished magic scroll was only the size of a ballpoint pen. This, of course, was just the simplest rank-one scroll, not especially powerful—but the old Hammerhead had needed at least two hours to make a single one.
The parchment rolls used to make magic scrolls weren't cheap. Even at the wholesale price the Magic Cottage got them for, they still cost five coppers apiece.
That was why Old George had taught him that inscribing a magic scroll required the utmost care and total focus.
But Ye Chui quickly discovered that none of this was a problem for him. In his previous life, compiling a virus meant typing out thousands upon thousands of lines of characters; he had long since trained up that kind of focus.
Never mind his current spiritual power and magic power—just his precision in handling rows and columns of magic symbols was probably beyond comparison with even the great mages of this world.
And thanks to that talent, inscribing this one magic scroll had taken him less than twenty minutes!
"I wonder how powerful this scroll is."
Ye Chui wiped the sweat from his forehead and glanced toward the backyard adjoining the cottage. The greatsword girl, Little Debbie, was still swinging her greatsword in practice; she shouldn't notice what he was doing over here. So Ye Chui rolled the scroll shut in his hand, then tore it open again with a rrrip—the scroll's magic runes included a design like a fuse, and opening the scroll activated the runes upon it.
Then Ye Chui casually tossed the scroll onto the floor at the very center of the Magic Cottage.
It was a flame scroll.
Boom—
A ball of milky-white flame burst out of the scroll, scattering sparks in all directions. At a glance it looked quite formidable.
The Magic Cottage was of course closed for business at the moment, its doors shut tight, so there was no fear of anyone seeing.
Ye Chui nodded in satisfaction. "Looks like the power's not bad. A flame scroll that sells for fifty coppers really is useful."
Currency in this world was measured in coppers, silver coins, and gold coins: a hundred coppers to a silver coin, a hundred silver coins to a gold coin.
A magic scroll cost only seven or eight coppers to make and could sell for fifty, a handsome profit. Unfortunately, ordinary households rarely had any use for magic scrolls—only mercenaries and adventurers did—so Anthony's Magic Cottage normally kept only a small stock of them.
A magic scroll was essentially a portable spell.
"I can make a magic scroll in twenty minutes, and it doesn't drain much spiritual power. The Cottage has plenty of scroll-making materials, so in three days I should be able to make quite a few." Ye Chui nodded in satisfaction, took up a fresh parchment roll, dipped his quill in the magic ink, and began to inscribe.
Anthony's Magic Cottage sold five kinds of magic scroll: flame scrolls, dust scrolls, lightning scrolls, gale scrolls, and water scrolls. Ye Chui planned to make several dozen of each. When the real showdown with Busca's side came, he wouldn't count on killing them in one blow—if it came down to it, he would beat them to death with scrolls if that was what it took!