Lucas decided to clear the C-rank gate by himself for the first time, without his avatars.
Only Ghost stayed with him, but he was ordered not to interfere unless absolutely necessary.
Caroline was in her new office at the Helios guild's headquarters. She was getting familiar with this world and everything contained in it.
Once she was ready, she would handle most of Lucas his paperwork since he wasn't very good at that stuff and also disliked it.
Albert was in the smithy as always. He was working on custom made armor for the combat teams. They were all engraved with the new emblem of the Helios guild.
All official combat teams would have E-rank armor with the captains having D-rank armor.
The recruits all got F-rank armor and would later get better ones, once they joined an official team when they got a class.
Aurelio and Elara were sent to take care of the 6 F-rank gates in Meilen.
Krasbert and Grishna would each take one of the two E-rank gates.
The 4 D-rank gates would be cleared by William and Arthur.
William would probably only clear one while Arthur cleared three.
***
Lucas finally entered the C-rank orc village gate.
He decided that he wanted to test out different kinds off fire magic spells this time.
'I haven't had time to train my fire magic a lot, but my experience with the fireball spells helped me gain an overall advantage over all fire magic spells and I also know them all in my head thanks to the fire magic knowledge skill.'
'I will just have to perfect them in practice.'
Lucas decided he would test the new spells on the 20 orc hunters outside the village.
He started running and as soon as he encountered an orc, he shot fireballs, fire arrows, fire lances and used incinerate on orcs when he touched them with his hand.
Fireballs were the strongest long range spell individually. Fire arrows had the biggest range and numbers and lances were less in numbers than arrows but more powerful.
Incinerate was Lucas his new favorite fire spell though. Even though he had to touch them to activate it, it was by far the most powerful.
Just by touching them and thinking of the spell's formula while gathering mana in his hand, he could kill an orc in an instant.
A single fire arrow wasn't enough to kill an orc.
A fire lance needed to be precise and it wasn't easy to control yet.
Fireballs were the most useful and powerful of long range spells. But when an orc got too close it wouldn't be of much help since he needed a couple seconds at least to activate it.
Lucas could also summon fire without the need of a spell, but it wouldn't have any real power. He could use it on his sword though and combine it with mana.
With this new discovery, Lucas could cut down orcs much smoother.
He quickly took care of all 20 orc hunters.
'I learned a lot in such a short time.'
Lucas decided not to waste time and headed for the orc village.
'All the spells so far didn't even use a fourth of my whole mana reserves. Let's try a couple more spells that work against a larger group.'
The moment Lucas reached the village's front gate, he started gathering mana in his hands and concentrated on the spell he wanted to activate.
'This is more difficult than I thought.'
After nearly half a minute he waa finally ready.
He put his hands on the ground and focused on the village in front of him.
As soon as he released all his mana with the completed magic spell, a line of intese fire started flowing towards the village and as soon as it was around 10 meters inside, a large pit of fire surged from the ground and engulfed everything in a 20 meter radius.
'Inferno!'
*BOOM*
Orcs started dying from the intense and violent powerful fire everywhere. Every orc inside of the inferno spell was quickly burning and screaming.
"ARGHH!!"
"KRSHT KATKK!"
"GAAAHHH!!"
In less than 20 seconds they were all burned to a crisp.
The inferno's fire started dying down and all orcs outside of it started running towards Lucas and were screaming with rage.
'Here they come.'
Lucas used up a lot of mana for the inferno spell even though it wasn't even at half of it's real potential of his rank A fire magic knowledge. He needed much more practice.
Lucas started firing fireball and fire arrows towards the incoming wave of orcs.
Lucas had killed over 20 orcs with the inferno spell, so now there were a little over half the orcs inside the village left.
There were over 30 orcs running towards Lucas and he shot as many fireballs and fire arrows as possible and killed over 10 orcs with them.
Once the rest got too close, he unsheathed his sword and charged towards the rest and cut them down with his A-rank sword mastery.
Once he was surrounded, he used the new firewall spell for protection and killed the ones that weren't behind the firewall.
And because he used fire on his sword, he only needed a little extra mana to amplify it instead of using his usual mana sword which took a lot of it.
He was cutting down orcs left and right in a precise and ruthless manner.
From time to time he also used incinerate on an orc that was close but outside his sword's reach.
After less than 10 minutes of fighting, Lucas finally face the orc chief and decapitated him with one clean swing of his sword.
Lucas looked around to see that he was surrounded by burned and sliced and bloodied orc corpses.
He could finally catch his breath.
"Huff.. Huff.. Huff.."
'That was exhausting. Even though a single orc is nothing to me anymore, fighting such a large number of them us more difficult and draining than I thought.'
'I used most of my mana, but I am satisfied with the result even though it was kind of messy.'
Lucas started collecting the corpses and ordered Ghost, who was watching the entire time to collect materials. Though he first received many compliments from his avatar.