Chapter 104: A Familiar Man

"So now we wait," Villin said as he turned to Ruby. Even though coming early was a great thing, they didn't know how conversations usually went in this sort of event, they needed something to base themselves off of.

Ruby nodded, apparently she was thinking the same thing. After a moment though, she turned toward Villin.

"How about we discuss our own rune mastery. I noticed we both used very different techniques when enchanting our robes. There might be some things we can learn from each other."

As soon as Ruby said her bit Villin nodded. He had been thinking the exact same thing earlier, "What about we begin by showing each other some of our work, this might help in seeing the usefulness of each technique."

Since Villin's words also made sense, both of them took out an item of their own. Villin had a series of items in his backpack including his puppet, he decided to take out a disk he had made.

The disk utilized a combination of enchantments and magic arrays to store magic power in the best capacity possible. In actuality, Villin made this to store a 'web' to use in the dark art he had gotten, but one wouldn't think of that when they saw it, they would just think it is an item used to store magic power in a great capacity, the runes were extremely close together as well. It was one of the works that he planned out completely beforehand, it was a classic example of what his technique could do.

Ruby didn't have an interspacial bag, and so, she only had items the size of this disk and smaller with her. Seeing what he took out she took out an orb of around ten centimeters in diameter.

Soon after they both began explaining their works. The orb Ruby showed was capable of recording anything around it when injected with magic power. When one of the runes were shifted the orb would become a projector, showing everything it has recorded thus far, this too could then be navigated using some of the other runes.

Overall, Villin's work was like a sword technique that would fluently move around the opponent's defense before slashing the enemy accurately in the side. Ruby, on the other hand, powered her way through the enchantment finding the shortest possible path to get what she wanted, her enchanting was like using a hammer and just smash down destroying all defenses.

A regular civilian might say Villin's technique was better because of this but Villin himself disagreed. Even though the overall enchantments on Ruby's work looked more sloppy overall compared to the one from Villin, it had a number of advantages. For one, it was a lot quicker to enchant things using this technique, instead of rethinking everything when something failed you would just change small things to find a somewhat stable route.

Secondly, you might achieve completely unexpected effects when doing this, let's say you were trying to find a way to make a phone by using enchantments. If Villin noticed something was slightly off he would remake it entirely until he got to a phone. Ruby, instead would try to correct the path, this might allow her to make a radio or walkie-talkie instead.

Yet still, it also had its negatives. Using this technique you would never be able to make something as precise as the puppet for one. There was also the risk of the enchantments failing after using it a certain number of times.

They both knew the positives and negatives of their techniques and readily took in what the other person was saying. They weren't divulging anything they saw as 'secrets' yet they gained a whole bunch.

About twenty minutes after they began discussing, people slowly began arriving at the conference but the two of them were too busy to notice, they had both taken out notepads at this point and they were sitting at one of the tables.

It was only when a middle-aged man with a silver robe full of beautifully formed enchantments approached them that they noticed a number of runemasters had already arrived "How good to see the young talent exchanging viewpoints like this, it is a pleasure to meet you two."

The two of them took a few seconds to escape their previous exchange but they smiled as they looked over to the man to give him a handshake. But when Villin looked up to his right, his face froze.

He recognized the man standing next to them, he had seen him before. In his second dream, he still remembered seeing a ginormous magic array consisting of tens of thousands of runes and a crystal ball at the center.

After a bit, when the array activated, someone entered. A bald man with a beard that reached the floor and a curly mustache, it was the very same man that talked to them right now, only that he was wearing a silver runemaster's robe instead of the black one in the dream.

The man apparently didn't notice Villin's shock as Ruby had been the first to introduce herself. Meanwhile, Villin was thinking back to the documents on all of the expected guests. He had just skimmed over the majority of them, figuring his photographic memory would help him think of their names when they approached him, but because he did this, he didn't realize he had seen the person with these odd looks.

Thinking back to the paper on the man he was Granolf Mafoli. The brother of the headmaster of the Mafoli school. He had been a runemaster for thirty years and had invented a number of magic arrays that helped in finding hidden or lost objects.

Once Ruby finished her introduction, Villin finally managed to compose himself, his smile turned more natural again "My name is Villin Grey, it is a pleasure to meet you."

Granolf turned toward him with a smile that caused Villin to begin sweating profusely "Oh but dear boy, we have already met. Haven't we?"