Forging Legends

Chapter 21 - A Special Outing

"I'm sorry, Spirit Forger, but we can't accept your request at this time."

It was their second day in Keston, and this was the fifth church Reina visited.

To back up a bit, Reina had spent the remainder of the previous day in the Violet Storm Church. Bishop Valais—who seemed to have a lot of free time for someone of his rank—helped Reina understand the views and beliefs of the other sects in this nation. Those descriptions had his own biases laid in them, but Reina took what she could get.

Of those was also the belief of the Violet Church. To summarize, they were a church that focused more on magic. It's a bit counterintuitive, given how they don't like mages even more than other churches. If Reina had to guess, they viewed mages as more competition, in addition to other churches. Although, they preferred individual mages over those from the Wizard College, which was the opposite of the other churches.

Reina was also able to reveal a number of weapon forms, excluding the crosier of the High Priest. Some were beyond her current level, but the ones she did get seemed geared toward magic in some regard. Two of the ones she revealed gave interesting bonuses.

Lesser Violet Storm Crosier
(abilities locked) Equip Bonus: Forge "Detect Magic"

Greater Violet Storm Idol
(abilities locked) Equip Bonus: magic rating adjustment (small)

Detect Magic would allow her forged spirit to reveal the presence of magic, doing exactly as the name implied. Of course, being less than a novice in spells and magic with little practical knowledge of the subject, Reina couldn't do much with that information. Yet.

The second one gave her pause, but she was able to deduce what it meant. Some games have attacks that do damage based on the target's stats. The higher the stat, the more damage it would deal.

The fact that she got this from an implement of this church led Reina to draw a conclusion.

This church's symbol, a purple cloud, was clearly reminiscent of the violet rain clouds that occurred in this world. The bishop said as much himself. Even the statue of the Spirit Forger in the church's courtyard had the forged spirit depicted as a humanoid storm cloud. The weapon of the Spirit Forger statue was a crosier, a weapon form she noticed had a higher magic stat than the others she could switch to.

Additionally, she learned a bit more about how much violet rain affected beings here. Humans and some monsters were the most affected. Animals and less magical monsters were after that. Gromnar could walk around in it with some difficulty and shamans were close to immune. By their nature, most Gromnar can't use magic, so it would follow that they had a low magic stat.

All of that led Reina to believe that the violet rain was more like many tiny magic rating attacks. Even if the damage multiplier was small, receiving hundreds of them would quickly wear someone down. She likened the sickness that resulted from it as a sort of infection. If she received hundreds of cuts on her body, it'd be harder to keep them all clean. After all, the air around the violet rain made her sick last time she was near it and she didn't get hit by a single drop.

This also led Reina to believe Vyrdrun had some sort of high magic rating adjustment ability, despite the fact he couldn't see it in his status. It could just be a hidden skill or something like that. It wasn't like other Gromnar had something that said they couldn't form spirit contracts, after all.

She had no real proof, but that's where her train of thought had led her.

Digression aside...

During the afternoon and evening, Reina was visited by a few priests of different churches, all accompanied by their templars. Each one asked her to stay with them during her stay in Keston. Reina politely told them that Vyrdrun would need to stay with her, causing each and every one to give some half-hearted excuse as to why that would be a problem.