The Storm King

Following Leon’s return to the capital, he spent a week relaxing at home. He didn’t go anywhere and didn’t do anything productive. He just needed to rest as much as he could. He didn’t even train with the Thunderbird or Nestor. He just enjoyed his time at home, reading during his free time and spending nearly every other waking moment with either Elise, Maia, Valeria, or some combination of the three.

What little work he did during that time was mostly relegating to ensuring that he stayed in contact with the rest of his retinue and finishing the arrangements for Alix and Anshu to get their own accommodations. Anshu seemed grateful that he wasn’t needed for much, yet, and so spent much of his time using the money he’d been paid by Leon to replace his clothing and other accoutrements he’d lost when his ship had been sunk.

Alix seemed to have taken quite well to Marcus and Alcander, despite the wide gulf between her birth and theirs—for nobles, the latter two were welcoming towards her, and the three took to training together during that week.

Leon might’ve let his break last longer than a week—it wasn’t like he had many immediate responsibilities, after all—but seven days was about all he could stand before he started getting so antsy that Elise, Valeria, and Maia all demanded that he get back to work before he drove them up a wall.

So, to that end, Leon started taking charge of his retinue’s training. He wasn’t sure how much good he could do for them, but he was resolved to do what he could. He had them all meet at his home at least once a day for at least six hours, and he made sure they all spent their time productively training.

This benefitted him greatly, for in trying to put his directions into words, he found himself understanding the mysteries of his own magics better. Not to mention everyone had their own perspectives on how magic worked and what the best flow of training for themselves might be. It wasn’t as directly beneficial as studying enchantments, but even just supervising the training of his weaker retainers helped Leon to grow in its own way.

After a week of this, Leon found himself quite surprised to have Maia join in their training. But once she explained why she wanted to join in the training, he understood completely.

Humans had to adapt their bodies to use and generate magic power. Beings that were not human did not have to do this. This meant that much like how Anzu reached the fifth-tier just by growing up, Maia had not trained at all to reach her eighth-tier equivalent status. Her powers were intrinsic to being a Naiad, a Queen of river nymphs. This made inhuman creatures generally stronger than most humans, but humans had little standing in the way of their growth. Inhuman beings usually had to work much harder than humans to surpass their physiological limits when it came to magic power.

That in itself was one of the biggest hurdles that Leon knew ancient Ascended and Divine Beasts had to overcome with having children with humans—instead of having a child that had both their beast parent’s intrinsic strength and humanity’s growth potential, they had children that were both intrinsically weak, like their human parent, and lacked growth potential, like their beast parent.

Unfortunately, the ability for Ascended and Divine Beasts to transform into humans did not alleviate this issue, and it was only after they discovered how to awaken blood that it was finally solved, letting their powers be at least partially inherited by their descendants without crippling them with their beastly weaknesses.

In Maia’s case, she’d grown to the human equivalent of the eighth-tier and hadn’t grown much since—not that her lifestyle prior to that had required much growth. It wasn’t until the end of the civil war that Maia had started encountering beings that her power was generally insufficient to counter, and the fact that their enemies were growing stronger and increasingly better equipped all while her power remained static frightened her.

Now that Leon had reached roughly the same level as her, she reasoned that his enemies were going to continue to grow in strength, as well. Already, they were strong enough that she was having trouble or outright failing to deal with them, and so she felt that she needed to join in the training before she found herself left behind. As a river nymph, it was already going to be difficult to maintain her lead, let alone try to catch up if the enemies of her and Leon’s family started to well and truly pass them by in power.

Leon was only too happy to have her join in, and even asked her to share with him some of her knowledge of water magic. As a descendant of the Thunderbird, he had some minor affinity for the element, and he wanted to expand his skills a bit.

Anshu required much less than the others from Leon, given that he was already a fifth-tier mage—not that Leon could’ve helped him much, anyway, given that his chosen element was light. However, Leon still gave him some of the tips he’d learned from trying to form his own magic body, which Anshu was grateful for. Apparently, there weren’t there many people who were willing to talk about their own experiences ascending the tiers with anyone outside of their family and committed acolytes, and the books that recorded such information were rare and expensive, so having someone around who could give him a first-hand account of what they had experienced when going from the fifth to the sixth-tier wasn’t something he’d ever thought he’d receive.

Leon almost joked that he wanted to renegotiate Anshu’s contract now that he knew he was providing a service for the man that he couldn’t get anywhere else and that was eminently useful to him, but he decided against it. He had a second fifth-tier mage in his retinue, he wasn’t going to endanger that when he wasn’t yet familiar enough with the man to be making jokes.

Valeria, meanwhile, spent her time either reading some of the water manuals from the Raime archives that Leon lent to her, or talking to Maia about the element. Once again, there wasn’t much Leon could do to help her since she was already more powerful with her chosen ice magic than he was. He was able to share a few little tidbits from the Thunderbird, but otherwise, it was Maia who was giving her the most instruction—not that Maia gave her much at all, so Valeria largely trained on her own.

But training only accounted for six hours out of the day, and there were plenty more to be filled.

Leon once more threw himself into his enchanting studies, spending at least four hours every day within his enchanting workshop, sketching new enchantments, honing his skill and muscle memory for drawing the modern runes. Nestor gave him much instruction during these hours, and he could almost feel his skills and knowledge rising at a tremendous pace now that he had time to dedicate to the art.

However, he felt it was too soon to test his growing skills with anything more than a few small spell scrolls. His big projects—his armor and replacement flight suit—he’d decided to put on the back burner until he could figure out how exactly he wanted to handle them.

For one, he’d yet to test his theory, but he felt like with his eighth-tier power, he might now have the power to sustain flight on his own, without the aid of enchantments. For two, he wanted his armor to be of much higher quality than his original Magmic Steel and Skyflax suit had been. That suit of armor had been fantastic when he’d been facing down fourth, fifth, and sixth-tier enemies, but given that even with his enchantments, it had been rendered unusable twice in barely more than six months was his main motivation. When he got to work on something new, he wanted it to last long enough that he wouldn’t have to arrange repairs less than a year later.

Of course, he had five relatively powerful people now relying on him to pay them, and while he had an enormous amount of wealth, it wasn’t enough to sustain such great expenses for the long term.

And so, he’d gone to Elise. He’d been hoping that Emilie might also participate in the meeting, or at least someone that both ladies trusted who was good with numbers, but Elise was the first and most important person that he could think of to bring these problems up with.

She sat down with him, Maia, and Valeria, and the four went over all of their combined assets. For Maia, those were too minimal to count, and while Valeria had more, neither of them could contribute much financially to their situation.

For Leon and Elise, though, they had to make some in-depth plans regarding how to sustain their lifestyle, especially now that Emilie was in serious danger of losing her position. Elise had her own assets, of course, but once she laid them out, Leon realized that she only had about a hundred million silvers to her name. Most of her and Emilie’s wealth had been derived from their positions within Heaven’s Eye and being able to leverage the Guild’s resources, and so Elise didn’t have much—speaking very relatively—saved up in her own name.

Since she and Leon were engaged, they both decided to pool together half of their financial resources, which would be personally managed by Elise. The rest of their separate finances would be left to managers within Heaven’s Eye. Leon thought this a little risky, but Elise assured him that even if Heaven’s Eye decided to punish Emilie, that those assets would be safe from seizure.

The biggest problem, though, was how exactly to grow those assets. They could live extremely comfortable lives for hundreds of years on that money, but with their plans to move south to the Central Empires, which was a region of the plane that was far more costly to live, not only was it not going to be enough for Leon’s plans to expand his retinue, it also greatly limited their ability to make long-term investments until they actually arrived in Imperial lands.

What followed during that conversation was Elise using a lot of financial words and futures speculations that Leon was largely left blinking in confusion. When she asked him for his opinion of what to do with all of it, he had few answers other than, “I hit things with sharp metal. And sometimes I zap them with lightning.”

Elise wasn’t thrilled with his response, and when she made her displeasure known, Leon shook himself awake and got serious. He needed to have a way to help support their family and his retinue if things fell through with Heaven’s Eye.

And in that, he knew exactly what he could do.

“I’m an enchanter,” he said.

“As am I, though my skill is hardly much to brag about,” Valeria added.

And like that, Elise made the decision to purchase some bulk enchanting supplies, and Leon and Valeria got to work pumping out healing spells, which were always in need, and other more utilitarian spells that Elise could quickly sell.

It wasn’t quite indicative of how life would be without Heaven’s Eye since Elise used her connections to sell what they made, but in a trial run that lasted a week, the three collectively made about four hundred thousand silvers just on the spells. Leon also made a few of his trick weapons with some left over silver bracelets, which added another four hundred thousand to their stockpile, all for a paltry initial investment of about ten thousand silvers.

They weren’t quite ready to commit to that course of action, so after that week was over, Leon, Valeria, and Elise returned to their more normal routines. It had been a hellish week of focusing almost every available second on enchantments, but it was good to know that they all had a reliable source of income if the worst came to pass. They’d never be able to sustain such a pace, but Leon also had some ideas for other, more expensive and lucrative enchantments that would require more expensive materials.

Money still concerned Leon, but he had no more trouble sleeping wondering just how he was going to pay for a larger retinue with the wages that stronger mages would demand. Given how zealously Elise soon took to their finances, he guessed he hadn’t been the only one worrying about it.

More somberly, Leon wanted to make an expedition east. He had a mausoleum of stone giants to return, and he didn’t want to wait too awfully long before finally bringing them home. Nestor, of course, disparaged that attitude, decrying the stone giants as little more than automatons that were simply responding to loyalties built into them.

Leon honestly didn’t care why they were so loyal, and on the one occasion he’d brought it up to Nestor, he didn’t even bother to argue against the dead man’s point. Whatever their reason for joining him, he wasn’t going to just abandon them without doing them at least the smallest courtesy of returning their dead. Nestor was frustrated and judgmental, but Leon ignored him.

However, he wasn’t quite ready to leave, just yet. He’d only just returned home, and he wanted to spend some time with his family before leaving again, even if only for a week or two.

In that vein, it wasn’t long before he and Elise made their way to Emilie’s palace. Out of respect for her troubles, Leon wasn’t intending to bring up his intent to leave the Bull Kingdom for the Four Empires just yet, but when Emilie asked what his future plans were, he told her.

She was supportive, though she was also quite frank in saying that, at least for the moment, she couldn’t help Leon enter Heaven’s Eye, not until their investigation into her was over. She, at least, was more confident of her chances to beat the charges levied against her than Elise was.

Still, the next day, instead of training with the others, Leon sat down with Anshu and Elise to plan out some possible contingencies to reach the Central Empires. Due to his nautical experience, Anshu more strongly advocated for the naval route, even though that might take much longer. They had a few Heaven’s Eye maps, but for such distant lands, accuracy was not guaranteed—still, going by the strictly naval route, it didn’t look promising.

The most direct way was to sail out of the western mouth of the Gulf of Discord, then go straight south, following the coast. There were thousands of miles of coast that way, though, and Anshu claimed that much of it was largely hostile. Pirates and marauders camped along the swampy coasts of the Ilumerian Wetlands about halfway down the coast, making their home in the Bay of the Drowned. Worse, the Indra Raj held suzerainty over most of the Pepper Islands at the southwestern tip of the continent, meaning that Anshu couldn’t guarantee that he could get them through without trouble. If they did get through, though, it would be a much safer journey through the waters patrolled by the ships of the Free Cities of the Tam, the Pegasi States, and then the Imperial navies. Going east, they would eventually pass through the Veins of Vigilance and enter the Argonaut Sea, where the city of Argos stood as the gateway into the Sunlit Empire.

All told, that journey would take at least a year by Anshu’s reckoning.

Their other possible route was to go north, sailing around the northern coast of the continent toward the Talfar and Han Kingdoms. However, the main problem with that was the northern coast was dominated by the Frozen Mountains, and so there were no safe harbors to be found. The freezing conditions made it a dangerous journey, and even if they made it, they would find themselves in the middle of the contested lands between Talfar and the Han. And even if they got through there without trouble, they would still find themselves within the Sakura Archipelago, where Han fleets competed against the constantly-feuding Seven Clans of Yamato, and the silver ships of the Unconquered attacked everyone they could find, Heaven’s Eye or not.

The Sacred Golden Empire maintained a few distant outposts along the southern coast of the archipelago, though, so if they made it to one of those, it would be a straight shot right into the agricultural heartland of Imperial territory.

Leon liked neither of these options. From Anshu’s descriptions, both routes sounded like they would be quite violent journeys, and to this, Anshu agreed. If he were to travel alone, or even with just his retinue, Leon might’ve found them a little more palatable, but with Elise and whatever noncombatants she might bring, those routes were saved for plans Y and Z.

He needed something better for his plan B.

That was when Elise brought up their more land-based options.

The first was to take a ship east to the Bull’s Horns, then further up the Tyrrhenian River. Once they followed the river as far south as it went, they could organize a caravan heading further south into the Ilumerian Wetlands.

The Wetlands themselves were so sparsely populated that they lacked any large, centralized states, with many dangerous predators inhabiting the region’s interior. However, the human settlements were mostly located along the region’s innumerable waterways, so sailing through the Wetlands to reach the western reaches of the Ilian Empire was usually quite safe.

More traditional journeys north were not usually made this way since the dangerous Ilumerian Wetlands and the Screeching Desert south of the Talfar heartlands largely cut off the countries in the northwest from the rest of the continent, but unlike the Desert, enough people lived in the Wetlands to make it a viable route to take, with enough cities and towns to make it a comfortable enough journey. Only a few disparate and fiercely independent tribes called the Screeching Desert home, and they were usually hostile to outsiders—let alone the monsters and other things that lived among those searing sands.

Their other option was heading east into Talfar, skirting around the north of the Screeching Desert, hopefully passing the border into the Han Kingdom without trouble, and then heading south on a ship that sailed the Neilos River, which just about split the Sacred Golden Empire in half.

This, Elise informed Leon, was actually the more common route Heaven’s Eye took to and from this corner of the plane until tensions began to flare between the Talfar and Han Kingdoms. Now, their war made the Ilumerian Wetlands route, with all its inherent discomforts and flaws, the most-traveled route.

Leon agreed with Elise that this was probably their best route, but no matter what, their chances of safely reaching Imperial Lands would be greatly increased if they could go under the banner of Heaven’s Eye. It would take a few months for the investigators to arrive, and their investigation would likely take months on its own, so Leon made his peace with the fact that he’d be in the Bull Kingdom at least for another half a year.

Though, if he were honest with himself, he wanted at least that much time to rest, relax, and just spend time with his family and friends without worries or responsibilities. It had been more than a year since he’d been able to just relax at home with Elise without time restraints, with the civil war, his expedition north back to the Northern Vales, and the Serpentine Isles constantly interrupting him.

Now, he had the luxury to take some time to relax with those who mattered to him, and he was going to take full advantage of that privilege.