Chapter 404 - The King In Disguise
Rudra paid rapt attention to the two contestants now , this was different than what he had expected. He was seeing the king and the prince compete. However judging from the crowd around him , it did not seem like the people realized this fact.
Apparently these two were in disguise , competing in a public competition to have fun and understand the difference between their forging.
The prince felt that if the competition took place inside the palace then 101 out of 100 times the king would win , as none of the subjects were foolish enough to declare the king the looser .
Hence he came up with the plan to challenge his father under disguise in a public competition.
The theme of this contest was making a trap to capture Cynthian Bear , who was known for its high intelligence and strength , making it extremely difficult to capture.
And for this both the father and son had made stellar designs . However to Rudra , the kings craftsmanship of the rope was several levels above the beat trap the prince had made , because of the intricacies in the design.
When looking carefully it appeared like a series of metal wires twisted and turned as if it was a silk fabric , meshed inside one another to provide increased structural strength. However the surprising thing was the small cuts and pockets that the design has invisible from afar , but could be seen when inspected carefully that allowed the rope to twist and turn like a thread while being made purely of metal.
It was a work of pure genius , that if made into a pressure contrapped foot-trap would make quite a formidable restraint which will be impossible to break through even by the Cynthian Bear.
Rudra had never been excited about nerdy stuff like forging but he genuinely marvelled at this piece of engineering , just like the judges who unanimously declared the king the winner.
Even the prince who inspected his father's design had to admit it was better , soo he had no qualms about loosing and took it as a lesson to improove.
Rudra was genuinely impressed by the prince's attitude ,because usually they were arrogant pricks ( cough Aman cough ) .
Thinking about this for a second Rudra wondered about the necromancers whereabouts , but after a while he let it be. It was just a fleeting thought.
However the biggest gain that Rudra had from this competition was finding out that the king and his son actually operated a Smithy under the alias of Smith Brothers , which was currently open for business.
Rudra could not understand how bored were the royalty of Dwargon to pull off stunts like this , but seeing it as an opportunity to bond with the royals as well as the impeccable skills of the king , Rudra decided to go to their shop with his new order.
It was a buy one get one kind of deal , as he would socialize with royalty as well as get what he wanted , there was no reason for Rudra to not do it.
However in life , not everything is that good and easy .... As found out by Rudra soon enough . As apparently he did not know the first rule about placing an order with Smith Brothers .... The reason why they had soo few customers , because they did not take gold or silver as payment ..... But the payment was in equivalent lives of giants!
The dwarves always had a beef with the giants , and the royalty used this cover of payment in the form of bones of giants to run their buisness to get the adventurers to give the giant race a hard time.
The bones of gaints were extremely good crafting materials in high demand in Dwargon . However Rudra did not know wether to laugh or cry as he looked at the quest he recieved to get his order done from the Smith Brothers.
QUEST ( optional ) : Get 100 Giant's Femur bones to place one request order with the Smith Brothers.
Quest completion time : none
Failure penalty : none
Rudra instantly had a headache on what to do. He did not want to travel to the land of the giants and fight against those behemouths .
He sighed as he thought about just leaving and making it with the other forgers in Dwargon , when a sudden realisation hit him like a bolt of electricity.
HE WAS RICH!
The Smith Brothers did not accept gold as payment , but someone else did . He could just buy the 100 bones !
Thinking about that Rudra had a hearty laughter as he accepted the quest. He was going to go giant bone shopping
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( Meanwhile in Purplehaze city)
The Elite academy recruits were now into the final month of their training , as they were now going on levelling sprees daily with some of the veteran Elite members in a party.
They were learning practical field work , while having a power levelling trip . Their levels shot up faster than a rocket as at level 20 or 30 they were treated to kills of level 80-90 monsters.
However this was by no means easy. As the seniors in the guild only did the bare minimum to keep them alive and give them a fighting chance , except that they had to fight , fall and learn themselves.
It was a hellish training , but after being tempered in theory for months , these batch of Elites were something different on the field.
Knowing the exact weak points of every monster from their textbooks , they knew the best strategies to employ and counter the beasts move.
When a normal adventurer took on say the mountain troll , they would not think critically like an elite recruit and at most think about how to take them down
However the way an Elite academy recruit thought was something along the lines of
Mountain troll
Level 50-60
Skills : Earthquake , crushing blow , stomp , charge
Equipment : club
Weakness : slow , clumsy
Best way to attack : Agility moves .
Hence their entire outlook of the fight differed , and it showed in the techniques they employed.
Although still green and lacking in experience . The critical thinking that Rudra embued in this batch , would make them the best players in the game upon maturity .
/// Special shoutout to Adrian_Hardin for the 1000 coin gift!
I see it has became a daily occurence over the last few days . For which I am heartily grateful.
I am glad you enjoy my work ! As These gifts keep me motivated a lot ///