Azuma

A tanned young man watched John leave with interest before mending into the ground and disappearing from the mansion as well.

The people of the Konzern felt that they opened their eyes today as they watched various S-rank mages leave the mansion.

John is reading the booklet provided by the Konzern and was interested in all the materials listed in the booklet.

"What do you think, Sebastian? Where should we go first?" John asked he was already salivating from the different materials listed on the booklet.

"We should go for the one nearest to us, and it must be of certain difficulty."

John nodded and started to look through the list of materials, with the one closest to them and the one with the most dangerous place to go to is a material called - Life Jewel.

It's a byproduct of a species of tortoise magical beast called - Jewel Tortoise.

Jewel Tortoises lived in places with strong magic power concentration, they used the strong magic power to temper their bodies, and the excess flowed to a jewel on top of the shell of the tortoise.

With the tempering of magic power and the natural long lives of tortoises, it's not uncommon for them to live up to thousands of years.

And not to mention that they can use the rare healing magic that made other powerful magical beasts take care of it whenever there is one in a territory.

Because of their strong vitality, the jewels on their shells contain very strong vitality that is used to heal some strong beasts that are willing to protect them.

Yet, the longer one lives the stronger the vitality stored in the, but if the jewel is consumed it will have to grow another one from the very start.

There are reported sightings of Jewel Tortoises in the mountainous regions of the country of Minstrel, also regarded as the 'Holy Land of Dance' in the whole of Ishgar.

"Well, to Minstrel it is!" John decided while putting Fafnir back to Mage's Sanctuary as he boarded his magic ship, he then adjusted the ship to face the country of Minstrel.

But, while he was adjusting the magic ship when suddenly numerous amount of large leaves flashing with a sharp light flew up from the forest below.

Ding!

After it got close to the ship, runes suddenly lit up all over the ship as a barrier appeared around it and blocked all the leaves.

"Oh? Someone actually dared to attack this seat?" John asked while looking at the leaves that got blocked by the barrier.

He was feeling cool for saying that for a moment when he suddenly shivered in his guts to say such a cringy thing like it was natural.

John suddenly had a bad feeling as he turned around to see Sebastian holding a video lacrima, he even have the nerve to replay the scene.

"Oh? Someone actually dared to attack this seat?" John cringed when he heard his voice repeating the sentence in the video lacrima.

"Good thing I always a set of this for important moments, just like now." Sebastian smiled as he stashed away the video lacrima.

"We'll talk about this later, Sebastian, I'll see which bastard attacked me first," John said as he jumped off the ship and summoned Fafnir mid-flight, and stood on its back.

All of this was recorded by a hidden video lacrima on the ship, Sebastian smiled and bowed in John's direction before going to the place of the hidden video lacrima.

Then he disappeared into space and appeared in an area in the Mage's Sanctuary that John didn't have access to.

He then placed the video lacrima along with the earlier ones on a shelf filled with a large number of video lacrimas, in the room there were already three shelves filled with video lacrima showing happy moments of John and Sebastian.

"It's not enough." Sebastian sighed as he stayed in the room for a moment before returning to the ship and saw John directing Fanfir to dodge a giant wooden fist.

But, just as he dodge the fist, the side of the wood stretched and a man came out extending his hand to John and shouting.

"Bleve!"

Boom!

With a loud bang, John and Fafnir were engulfed in an explosion, and smoke occupied John's position.

But, with the law of anime that if smoke occurs in a battle, then the individual is definitely not injured, Fafnir rushed out of the smoke with John only having slightly messy hair.

Due to the height of their battle, the Ghost Ripper puppets are having a hard time attacking John's opponent as they were fighting hundred of meters above the ground.

Not long after though as they were clashing with John mostly dodging and having Dragapult fire beams of magic power and shooting self-exploding Dreepy puppets like they were worth nothing.

He then summoned 10 Ghost Ripper Puppets and 40 Shield totems and have the puppets use the totems as a platform in the air to attack his opponent.

Then while taking the time when he distanced himself from his opponent, he summoned 45 Night disciples as they quickly ascended to the top of the battlefield.

"Let the light of the day fade, and the veil of the night descend upon us!" John raised his hands and a domain of darkness fell on their surrounding that stretched for 2 km.

Along with the darkness, a creepy whistling floated in the air making one's hair stand straight.

The man's struggle became more and more evident with the addition of his vision being restricted to 4m around him.

Then John released 20 more Ghost Ripper puppets and coordinated them to attack the man, giving him no time to take a breather.

As the man released various amounts of roots around his body and launched explosions among the roots to fight back the puppets.

He also releases large sharp leaves around him and used his magic to manipulate roots to block the attacks of the puppets.

Yet, as the fight went on, the man became more and more exhausted at the near-perfect cooperation of the puppets.

John watched all of this with an indifferent gaze as he watched the man release more and more magic, he already knew who this man was.

"To think I would actually meet Azuma here, and he even took the initiative to attack me first, so does that mean I'm already in the eyes of Precht?" John muttered while thinking of the guild master of Grimoire Heart."

"Is he mad at me because we had the same title?" John muttered as he thought that Precht in the anime also had the title of Hades.

At this moment, Azuma was already exhausted from the siege of the puppets, he looked around but he saw no sign of John, but he knew somewhere around the darkness John was there watching him.

Like a director of a stage play, he will be watching with interest as the actors fought on the stage he carefully set.

"I know you can hear me, John Osborne! You better watch yourself when you go out in the future! Our master is very interested in you, and we won't stop until we brought you to him!" Azuma shouted with deep anger as he then merged into the trees and disappeared in the sight of John.

"Why do villains always like to mention their evil plans in front of heroes? Don't they know that's how they keep on losing?" John muttered to himself. "After all, villains who talk too much will always end up defeated."

John sighed as he knew that he won't be able to catch up with Azuma even though he want to capture the other party to conduct some research on him as he was still very interested in the characteristics of some Lost Magic.

But, they fought directly above a forest, there's no way he can find in what direction the other party went.

Azuma must have selected this place to ambush John so that he can have a safe retreat place if things went wrong.