Reborn With a Magic System

The next few booths were smaller guilds. If Damion was not interested in joining the Dawn Guild, these smaller guilds that had members who maxed out at B Rank had no chance to recruit him. Still, Damion took his time and browsed the information at each booth and listened to their pitches. He did not want to give away where his heart lay and risk Headmaster Sorin or one of the other noble families doing something to interfere with his choice.

When Damion reached the booth for the Explorer Guild, he was quite surprised. This was a guild he had never heard of before and he was quite intrigued by their purpose. Most guilds existed to make money by clearing dungeons or doing missions in a particular area for the Adventurer Association. The Explorer Guild, however, existed to discover new things.

Taking on tasks from the Adventurer Association and the Mage Association, such as scouting Red Zones and mapping mountains and forests, the Explorer Guild was not focused on clearing Breaches or making money. Their goal was to create an accurate map of the entirety of Nerotath.

Damion thought this goal was laudable, if out of reach. The Explorer Guild was small and from what he was able to learn from the information at their booth, not very strong. The guild leader, a mage by the name of Everitt Cromsdale, was the only A Rank member and co-leader, Tricia Cromsdale, his wife, who was manning the booth Damion was standing at, was the only B Rank member.

"Is it hard to find people to join your guild?" Damion asked as he browsed the information at the booth. From what he could tell, it seemed like the Explorer Guild only had a few dozen members.

"Sadly, yes," Mage Cromsdale answered. "My husband and I want to complete a map of our world, but since we don't focus on strength or on acquiring wealth, the only people we attract are like minded individuals, which there do not seem to be too many of."

"Perhaps you should change your approach," Damion mused.

"How so?"

"Well, mapping unknown regions can be quite the dangerous occupation and surely offers opportunities for wealth and increasing personal strength through the endeavor."

"Each member of our Guild is very important to us, and given our small numbers, we encourage our members to flee from unknown dangers and not confront them."

"Understandable. If they are in a place that surpasses their own strength, being reckless is foolish."

"Glad you agree."

"Have you considered using other guilds or the Orders to advance your mapping, or for your members to travel with them while in dangerous areas?"

"Guilds and the Orders either charge us for protection or consider our members deadweight. Since many times those guilds or Orders are seeking out the dangerous areas, it is not exactly safe for us to send our members along. And their members are not interested in cartography, so getting guilds or the Orders to help us map areas is not easy."

"They don't want to help at all?" Damion asked. Guilds he understood, but he figured at least the Orders would provide assistance.

"Not for free. And since our guild is not focused on clearing Breaches, we don't exactly have funds to pay others to do our task."

"Perhaps you could start a division of your guild that makes money, and your people rotate through exploration and dungeon clears."

Mage Cromsdale just smiled at Damion's suggestion. Quite likely they had attempted something similar in the past. It was not exactly a revolutionary idea. Still, he thought it a shame that such a guild had a hard time recruiting members.

"Perhaps you could have artifacts made that do the mapping for you," Damion suggested. He was not familiar with how the Explorer Guild was making their maps, but he doubted it was by hand. He figured they used some sort of recording device or perhaps a program on their tablets to create the maps.

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"We currently use small personal tablets, that map the area as we go. They don't have a lot of range, only a few hundred meters and the tablet has to be out and active, so guilds and the Orders don't like helping because then they have to have the tablet in their hands instead of a weapon."

"What about scout drones? I know the Adventurer Association uses them to hunt down Demonic Beasts after beast waves. Couldn't those be modified to do your mapping?"

"I appreciate your suggestions Mage Wells, but it all comes down to money. Drones have limited range and flight times and also cost quite a lot."

"Sorry, I don't know much about making maps. You've probably already thought of all my ideas before anyway."

"No need to apologize for your enthusiasm. Perhaps one day you will come up with something new and affordable for us."

Damion offered Mage Cromsdale a smile as he moved on to the next booth. As interested as he was in the Explorer Guild's mission, he needed to grow stronger. And if they ever wanted to map the Red Zones or the Black Zones, they needed to reach much higher levels of strength. With only one A Rank in a guild that wanted to routinely go into Red Zones, they were asking to get themselves wiped out.

The next few booths Damion wanted to bypass, as they were all from various crafting guilds. These guilds were all controlled by noble families and joining any one of them would be akin to joining a noble family. These 'guilds' were collections of shops held together under one banner to offer their services, but all the profits went to whichever noble house was backing them.

When Damion finally arrived at the far side of the main hall where the Crimson Order's booth was, he was feeling mentally exhausted. The gauntlet of noble controlled crafting guilds, each offering him lucrative sounding terms, had consumed a large amount of his energy.

The woman at the Crimson Order's booth, to Damion's surprise, was a B Rank knight. This surprised him because it was difficult for knights to raise their magic power high enough to reach B Rank and this tall, red-haired woman, appeared rather young. Most knights either relied on artifacts to be considered B Rank or were quite old when they finally broke through.

"The young prodigy has come to grace me with his presence," the woman mocked as Damion approached her booth.

Damion took the woman's mockery to be rooted in jealousy. The only way he could see a knight rising so high in Rank was if they were a mage with a low affinity or talent, so they followed the path of a knight instead of a mage.

"Everyone starts somewhere," Damion responded with a smile as he looked at the information at the booth.

"True. Commander Natasha Forlani," the woman said, offering her hand.

Either she had rethought being hostile to Damion, or she had just been testing him before. Whichever was the case, he shook her hand and noted her last name. Forlani was a noble family name from the Viridis White Zone, telling Damion his guess about her being a low talent mage following the knight path was probably right.

"Tell me Commander, how fast do Crimson Order recruits usually advance?"

"In Rank or within the Order?"

"Both."

"The longer your enlistment, the faster you will be eligible for promotion within the Order. After all, we don't need officers who will only stick around for a few months after their promotions.

"As for increasing magic power. That depends on the assignments you receive. If you are lucky and receive a lot of assignments to clear Breaches, then you will have more chances to grow, but it also depends a lot on your own discipline. Even if you are sitting idle in a base waiting for deployment, if you don't take time to train there is little anyone else can do to help you grow stronger."

"What about the ah… forced conscripts, what position do they hold?"

"Those sent to the Order for a period of punishment spend three weeks on patrol followed by a week off. And they hold no rank, as they are not official members of the Order, so even a fresh recruit like yourself can order them around."

"And that doesn't cause problems? Nobles being ordered around by nobodies?"

"Thinking you can take a little more revenge by ordering Richard Thorn around?"

"Didn't even cross my mind. Besides, I figured the Order would see to it that our paths would never cross."

"You've got that right. Believe it or not we do get recruits, commoners and nobles, sometimes that join up just to mess with those on a punishment tour."

"I'd rather just forget that such people exist. Once their required tour of duty is over, do they return to their families?"

"Most. Though some, their families don't want them back. Sometimes in those cases they join the Order and occasionally those folks just go off to find their own place. Seldom ever see them again."

"You don't worry about them causing problems again?"

"There is no such thing as a repeat offender. If you manage to survive your punishment tour with the Order and are ever caught in illegal activities again, the punishment is death. You only get one second chance."

"That seems quite harsh," Damion said swallowing.

Most crimes and punishments were handled by the Justiciar Order, but the most severe crimes and those crimes that make big headlines, those perpetrators were given to the Crimson Order. And now Damion understood why people did not step out of line during or after their punishment tour. If getting caught meant certain death, most people would try to be on their best behavior for the rest of their lives, or like Commander Forlani said, go off and find their own place.