Chapter 18 – Farewell

After some convincing and a lot of yanking with the help of Rebecca and Reyna they managed to peel the hammer off of Sahildr. Roland could barely hold this weapon, swinging it was out of the question.

“I just need it for my research, I won’t damage it, I promise!”

“All of you magic types say that before something goes wrong.”

Apparently Sahildr was still hesitant about giving him her Warhammer for inspection. He wasn’t sure what it was about and he didn’t have enough time to hear the whole story.

“Fine, you can have it, but I’m staying in the room with you!”

Roland just shrugged as he didn’t care, this was even better as he didn’t need to carry the heavy thing all the way to his inn room. The two other girls didn’t join them, finding it too boring to watch Roland play around with runes.

“I’ll go check out if there are any worthwhile escort missions on the notice board, we can meet up at the tavern later.”

Rebecca and Reyna left to go prepare for their own journey away. They had also decided to go somewhere else, this wasn’t the only town with a dungeon close to it.

The next couple of hours weren’t all that exciting. Roland had Sahildr place the hammer in his room on the floor, afraid that if he placed it on his flimsy table it would give out under the weight. He then took out a sheath of paper and got to copying. He wasn’t using his scribing skill, he just redrew the rune’s diagram with the help of the overlay that his debugging skill gave him.

He took his time as he didn’t want to mistakenly mess up this new schematic. After the first thirty minutes passed he heard a big thud behind him, it was his big muscly friend dozing off on his bed. He sniggered at her and then went back to work.

He smiled slightly after hearing the system awarding him the experience points. He even managed to upgrade his drawing skill to the next level. He used to have the ‘Basic Drawing skill’ but now it finally broke through. The progress of this skill had stopped at the L9 just like all the other basic ones.

Now further upgrading was possible this made him think that it was caused by him receiving the Runic Mana Scribe class. He figured that the diagrams were probably considered drawings by this leveling system. Previously he leveled this skill by sketching things, also painting was another skill altogether.

He also managed to recreate the diagram fully, earning another highest-graded rune. From what Roland knew the lesser runes were the worst ones on the market. After them came the common runes, then followed by greater runes, grand runes, and at the very top the legendary runes. The last ones were mostly only mentioned in fables and not much was known about them.

This wasn’t all as the runes went into even more subcategories. In sequence, they were: Lowest, Low, intermediate, high, and highest. A lesser rune with a ‘highest’ sub-grade was comparable to a common rune with the ‘lowest’ sub-grade. But this was something that Roland would figure out at a later date.

He rolled up the schematic that he just made and placed it together with the previous one he created. He now had two lesser rune schematics with no flaws.

He gave out a sigh while thinking, could he scribe these runes on scrolls and sell them to people? He didn’t think the impact rune and detonation runes worked well by themselves. They only showed their true colors when attached to weapons.

The impact rune either increased the mass of the weapon it was on or used gravity, he wasn’t sure. He had asked Sahildr about her hammer, she told him that the heavy hammer part increased in weight the moment she activated the rune. She needed to time her attacks well to make use of it but when she did she could deliver devastating blows with it.

The detonation rune created a small controlled explosion on the tip of a weapon. Unless you managed to poke someone with it, it wasn’t that useful. If he scribed it onto a scroll it would only cause a small explosion while the impact rune might make the scroll just heavier.

This kind of showed him the limitations of some of the runes. The fire orb rune was the only one he could see working as a spell scroll, he only needed to get it to target enemies. Maybe if he combined it with the detonation rune he could turn it into some kind of targeted grenade spell.

“Come to think of it, I need to make a schematic for that fire orb rune too…”

While speaking out loud he heard a strange sound.

“Hrrrrrrrr”

He turned his head towards the loud noise only to see his muscle friend snoring on his bed. She was just sprawled out with her hands and legs in an ‘X’ shape. He could hear her snoring loudly while scratching her belly, which made him squint his eyes.

‘Oh right, she was here…’

“Hey, I’m done, you can take your hammer now…”

The large Goliath female just snored some more and rolled onto the other side. There wasn’t an ounce of femininity in this tanky girl. Roland scratched his forehead before placing both his hands to his mouth as if he was going to shout.

“Hey, is that free wine over there? You can drink all you want, no way!”

He made sure to yell towards her direction and he almost instantly got a reaction. She raised her head up high, her eyes opening wide and drool running down her mouth.

“Free whuine!?”

She was still a bit drowsy so her words didn’t come out right but instead of wine, she saw her party member snorting at her while laughing.

“Heh, finally you’re up, you can take your hammer now.”

“Huh? no wine?”

It took a few seconds for Sahildr to realize that she was made a fool off. Her eyes narrowed and she moved forward with haste, putting Roland into a headlock while rubbing his head with her knuckles.

“Why you little!”

Roland didn’t have time to react and not like he was scared. He got his scalp rubbed and he pleaded for mercy, soon enough he was free to go his hair all ruffled up. Sahildr took her hammer back and examined to see if it was working right, Roland took a glance while thinking back to moments earlier.

‘Was I always this childish?’

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He contemplated, he could have just woken the girl up normally but for some reason, he had the urge to plug her nose or even splash water on her face as a prank. The cogs in his brain started to turn, he had a few theories to go with. The scariest one of them all was that he was somehow he had fused his psyche together with the boy that was once the true Roland.

He thought back to the past, he did enjoy climbing those trees at the Arden Estate though he never considered the kids there to be his peers. Before he could have a mental breakdown about himself he was brought back to reality by Sahildr.

“Hey, you okay there Roland? You look kind of pale, did I rub that big melon of yours too hard?”

He momentarily tossed his identity conundrum to the back of his head while frowning at Sahildr.

“I’m fine, I bet Rebecca is waiting for us at the adventurer’s guild, we should go.”

Roland still had some of his stuff in this room, he didn’t pack up just yet. He wanted to do it after having said his goodbyes with the silly trio. They might have not been around each other for that long but they have managed to form a bond. He couldn’t actually remember others being so nice to him even back in his old life.

“Yeah, yeah… I’ll be sure to escort you, now noble lord, let us depart to the adventurer’s guild~”

She did some misaligned bow and then opened the door in front of Roland. She stood there like a knight that was holding the way open for their noble lady.

“Please don’t call me that… people will think that it’s actually true.”

The two finally left, Roland was going to use the train he had come to this city for his getaway. It didn’t have a direct route to Edelgard but it was a lot faster than going by horse carriage.

It took them ten or so minutes to get back, Rebecca and Reyna were already sitting at the usual table with a piece of paper in hand.

“So you two lovebirds finished?”

Rebecca called out while whistling at Roland and Sahildr, the Goliath lady looked ticked off by that remark.

“What would I do with a little brat like that? He doesn’t even have hair growing down there!”

“Oh, so you’ve seen it?”

Rebecca stuck out her tongue while Sahildr got increasingly maddened.