Darius sighed with defeat. It seemed magical gauntlets of any sort were above the Amateur Rank. Darius had obviously noted that his 10 CP seemed to only be able to create things within this Rank.
The only loophole he had gained was that repairing flawed journeyman manuals was within his price range, but items and the like seemed to be a whole different business.
Darius attempted to upgrade the boots and found that the cost was also around 18 CP. As such, he could only frown and hand them over to Gunner as they were, deciding to find an alternative means to empowering items on his own.
As such, he took out the 4 empty spell manuals that he took from Foldo. He had used one to make the old fox a basic Ice Lance spell, and he used the other to make his Spawn spell of the death element.
Speaking of that, Darius remembered that he had never de-summoned his skeletons. Wondering what had happened, Darius cast the Spawn spell once again.
His mana dipped ever so tinily and a black light emerged from his fingers then landed on the ground. After a bit of shaking and trembling, two boney arms broke through the surface and the earth, pulling themselves up.
Darius was stunned to see that the wretched and raggedy skeletons he had summoned the other time had grown bigger, and had better armor and weapons on their body.
Most importantly, their body glowed with an aura of blackish energy and their empty sockets had marble-sized green light in them that was stable.
Before he could Inspect them, they both went on their knees and kowtowed to Darius, speaking in English of all languages.
"O great master, we thank you for summoning us back! Running from that bloody plains all the way here was beginning to get tough with so many monsters and humans targeting us!" The skeleton on the left said in a strangely British accent.
"Quite! I rather say those blokes deserved being cut up and having their items taken by us. Not like they were going to use it anymore, anyway. Besides, why did they react so strongly whenever they saw us? Wasn't like we were doing anything bad were we?" The skeleton in the right replied his friend with an even heavier accent.
"Twas because we look like this. Undead and all that. You know how it is, they fear what they don't know and all that." Skeleton One remarked while rising to its feet.
"Mm, makes sense. I remember banging zombies on the head whenever they rose from the graves back then. Kinda seems like the cycle of karma with how people treat me now, innit?" Skeleton Two responded while doing the same.
Darius quickly interrupted the duo before they continued their banter, "What the hell are you two?"
Both of the undead seemed surprised by the question and shared an uncertain look. "Us?"
Darius nodded. "I used a Basic spell to summon you two, so how were you able to act autonomously and grow your power this much? Secondly, why didn't the spell summon a new batch of brainless undead and rather summoned the two of you? Thirdly, what were you doing all this time?"
"Mm, let me answer all that, Master. See, Joneson and I-" Skeleton Two began, but was cut off by Darius again.
"You have names?" he asked incredulously.
"Course we do, Master! We ain't like those regular undead creepers. We're some kind mutation innit Mikey?" Skeleton One… no, Joneson answered with pride.
"Shut up Joneson! I was getting to that. So basically, you see how you got that whole magical transformation thing, right? The one that makes water into gold and sand into wine and all that." Mikey began, but was cut off by Joneson.
"Naw, it's sand to gold and water to wine you idiot. Did a troll piss into your soul fire to dim your intelligence or sumn?"
Mikey growled angrily, to which Joneson backed off with an 'aye, calm down' gesture. The undead with the heavier accent then continued.
"So your ability that made the spellbook that summons us is sorta special. Since your system handles the transformation - and all your abilities I believe - it had to create the spell for us. But see, your system works through percentile-based calculation for spells and skill and all that."
"Basically, it deals with stuff like 5% sword damage or 5% spear damage and the like. Situations like ours where there are no clear percentile rules to our power cause the system to have to improvise."
"Of course, this only counts for spells made by transmutation, right that's the correct name. Spells like the one that made us coming from any spellbook already written or theorized will follow its own rules, even if it's handled by the transformation thingie." Mikey finished.
Darius parsed what they were saying quickly and roughly understood. For summoning spells or spells that do not have the percentile power factors that Darius often saw were troublesome to transmute.
As such, when he made the Spawn spell, the 500% power increase by the elitist ability's approach created a bizarre situation where instead of it saying summon 5 skeletons - assuming the base was 1 skeleton - what he got was the ability to summon two special skeletons that were stronger than the average skeleton.
This would have been a nice mechanic to abuse, but according to Mikey, it only applies to raw spells and non theorized ones. This meant that Darius could not elicit this benefit from Journeyman and above spells because they were all written by a person or theorized by them.
His Transmutation ability too could not create unique things, only things that existed in Faust, so he could not think up a spell and transmute it from nothing. Even if Darius wrote gibberish in a spell manual and tried to transmute it, he would not get this benefit as he had theorized and even written it.
As such, as far as Darius could tell, this benefit could only apply to spells of the basic tier. The Spawn spell might even be the only anomaly that this rare occurrence could work with.
