"[Dispel]"
The screams that threatened to make me a wanted criminal for attempted murderer on members of one of the main families died down like they never existed.
The purple guy was all smiles and soon after, laughter erupted like I had just said the best joke in the world.
What the fuck?
"CROW! HOW DID YOU DO IT?"
Shit.
"I don't know, I unlocked di- [serenity], was very angry. I have been studying runes and spellcraft for ages…"
"So you wanted all of us to taste our own spells?"
There were no indicators to what the right answer should have been, but I decided that their laughter was not the maniacal kind and bet on it.
"Yes. You didn't even give me time to tell if something happened. How was I supposed to announce the skill acquisition?"
My words seemed to have some kind of effect since the purple of his hair decided to expand to his cheeks and ears.
"Well, fair enough."
This bastard.
Nevertheless he demanded an explanation to the runes I used and since I wasn't sure a basic rune for illusion existed… it was bullshit time.
"I'm not sure how I used them, but the runes I envisioned were: confusion, record, reflect…"
He wasn't convinced, but I was ready to swear on my nonexistent family if it came to that.
Regrettable that it wasn't necessary. The man decided that probably due to all the [confusion] I had made some mistake somewhere and luckily got the result I wanted.
"It's not everyday occurrence, but sometimes emotion may give inspiration to spells. You got lucky."
Yup yup, definitely not my innate rune.
I just nodded and went with it. Far be it from me to blow on his paper castle.
However the fact that nobody accused me of anything was still concerning.
"Why aren't you angry? I did basically attack you all, didn't it?"
"A counterspell from a mere Walker created in the spurr of the moment doesn't really qualify as an attack."
Mere Walker. So he's strong.
"Also, I did kinda forget to give you time to explain if anything happend, but the most important thing is: manners."
"Manners?"
How the fuck do manners concern this situation?
I was sure at that moment that everyone from the path of Disorder was a maniac. A guy pays me to be his slut, this bastard kidnapped me just for a rune, proceeded to give me alcohol and when I attack the bitch, it's manners?
"Listen Crow, in the main families, you can't really show weakness. Even if you may not be adopted by the core family, even if you take the name of a distant branch, you still need to uphold a certain standard."
"By answering to fire with fire?"
"Not exactly."
He tapped his forehead and waited for me to have some kind of epiphany, that I actually had.
The Walker from the path of disorder was the Walker of confusion and since my system asked me to join them, it must have had something with the domain of the mind, at least at the early stages…
That was also a clue to what could have awaited me if I continued to gain strength.
"I see, we turn their brains into pudding."
A smile blossomed on my face at that point. I didn't know the level of violence required by a main family, but with my illusions I was pretty sure I could have plenty of fun messing them up without real danger.
At the end of the day, illusions were just that.
Illusion, tricks of the mind, pretty jokes.
My answer was clearly the correct one since everybody started laughing again, and I took that as a clue to focus on my new skills.
[Autocorrected body: passive skill, your body has been tempered by Error mana and Poison. Gained basic resistance to all status effect.]
[Disillusioned: passive skill, your mind thrives on attacks, gained basic resistance to mental attacks. With focus, undo all illusions.]
"How many status effects are there except poisoning?"
I needed to fish for informations somehow, I didn't just get poison resistance after all.
Also, if this impromptu training told tales, what awaited me, wasn't a zen garden exactly.
"Well… it's not like you will encounter them all, but the most important are freeze, burn, paralysis, sleep, death and obviously poison."
"Death?"
"Yeah, kinda rare, falls in the domain of Moon, you know? Shadows and all that shit? Either way if you accumulate enough death status effect that's it, you die, but it's basically impossible to die because of it, you might experience extreme fatigue though."
So much for an ominous name, it seemed that to accumulate the amount of death necessary to kill me, I'd need to stay still and let them hit me for hours with spells, something that no Walker could ever be able to do either way.
You know? Not enough mana and shit.
I also discovered that status effects were not very common and, with the exception of poison, they needed undivided attention from the spellcaster.
"Even burn or freeze? I'm pretty sure those are things that are quite easy to trigger tho…"
"Uhm… how do I say it… do you drink conjured water?"
"No? Doesn't it just stop existing the moment mana is cut from the source?"
"Well, generally yes, but… never mind, that's useless to you now. That's the same law for fire and ice magic. It will hit you and it will hurt like shit, but no lasting effect once the spell has done its job."
"Unless the spell is created to do so?"
"Something like that! This I can tell you since it's the first lesson of spellcraft in every academy!"
He explained that there were 3 major schools of spellcrafting: conjuring, which was your basic everyday magic (from attacking to fanning yourself in the heat), curses, the long lasting spells that became stronger the longer they were attached to someone and usually were kept alive through the mana of the victim, and lastly countering, which was what I basically did but with extreme focus on rune analysis and destruction.
In short anti-magic magic.
"But doesn't every main family have different runes for their main elements? How can they dispel such magic without knowing the runes?"
"Oh you will have so much fun! It's not our spells you need to counter!"
"Whose then?"
"The beyond, but mostly traitors."