Kevin Curry

Chapter 17: The bones of the past

Whatever that mysterious spellcaster was, they continued to attempt to act against Casimir as he scouted out the kobold warren.

When military and adventuring intersects, the adventurer generally has to adjust their work as appropriate. Not just in the sense that a military unit requires more… babying is accurate, although he’d never say it out loud to them. The individual soldiers, even the strongest ones, aren’t as strong as an adventurer of equal experience, due to many minor di...

Psychoprotective 2

While I've learned my lesson vis a vis restricting the voting options, I'm still sticking to my guns vis a vis this month. So Psychoprotective won, and here it is. 

Link to chapter 1: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/requiem_jeers-snippet-and-commission-thread.986104/?post=83350135#post-83350135

The first day of the camp was, as...

Chapter 16: The first rumbles of the earth

Purz pulled through on the official quest, fortunately. So Casimir had a half dozen maps of the intended tunnel system, the ones the kobolds didn’t dig themselves, and a mission to map out the new tunnels while the government assembles a group of knights and puts them through a crash course on fighting kobolds, as few of them have ever had to do so before.

Casimir hated mapping quests. Well, kobolds were generally unpleasant to deal with, as their universally metal weapons made their ...

Chapter 15: The calm before the storm

As it turned out, the coded documents weren’t as useful as Casimir had hoped. They explained John’s (which as it turns out was the thug’s name) task, and what kinds of information he was supposed to report to his boss… But the information was so thorough that none of them had any idea which parts were important or not.

“What’s the common thread?” Casimir asked himself out loud, pacing as Master Southwind snoozed on a force cushion she had set up. “Movements are obviously...

Calling in sick

My entire household took turns catching some kind of stomach flu this week, so no new chapter today. 

As before, the public chapter will release as normal, and next week the preview chapter will be posted without the public getting any.

Also, it appears that screwing with the poll options was a big mistake, given how the votes have been going. Ah well, lesson learned. 

Chapter 14: What’s going on?

Kobolds, as monsters went, were usually pretty weak. They were similar to goblins, froggols, orcs, drakkin, and others in that they aped having societies, but any attempt to treat them as people eventually led to tragedy as they reminded everyone that they were just as malicious as any other monster, just with the ability to plan and deceive. Collectively, they were known as tribal monsters.

Spawned kobolds were universally weak and stupid, but if enough gathered in one place for long e...

May Poll

This may be a controversial move, but given how close it was last time, I feel that I won't be severely disappointing everyone by doing this: I'm removing Courtly Chronicles from this month's poll. It'll be back next month, but I think it'll be better for me, long-term, if I had a bit more variety in things, and Anima Academy's taking up a lot more effort to keep up with than I thought it would, so I haven't been able to do much else.

As usual, donators of at least 10 dollars (of whic...

Chapter 13: Adventure!

Sorry for it being a little shorter, and a little late, but the this is the third time in the last five months that someone hit my car, and dealing with that's been taking time away from writing. I'm fine.

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One of the first lessons you learn in magic is that it’s fundamentally a matter of just willing things to happen. If one was willing to concentrate at something and had access to some pure mana to manipulate, you could make pretty much anything...

Courtly Chronicles 5

[Tanya Degurechaff von Goethe aka Tenya Deguchiya aka Archduchess von Goethe, circa 1925, age 11]

"What was that!?" Were the first words spoken to Tanya after they had successfully evacuated Arenne. Generals Rudersdorf, Zettour, and Volken sat in front of Tanya, in a formation reminiscent of a military tribunal. To their right, von Shugel and Archduke von Goethe sat smugly, while at their left was von Lergen. Volken was the one who spoke.

Tenya yawned and sipped their coffee. "A b...

Chapter 12: Adventure?

Stealth, as a high ranked adventurer, was always a very tricky thing. Casimir prided himself at being very good at sensing magic, to the point where even notoriously stealthy monsters were able to be detected before they could go on the attack. This allowed Casimir to stay further away than most people would need to be in order to gain useful intelligence.

The other half of the equation was the hiding part. The key to stealth was not in being completely undetected, but in being below th...

No Chapter this week

I've come down with some severe tooth pain over the last few days, and unfortunately it's made it impossible to properly focus on writing. It's only half done. The public chapter will
still be posted for this week, but next week the patreon chapter will get posted and no public one will be. 

Apologies for the inconvenience. 

Chapter 11: The Adventure begins

“You live here?” Peter said as they walked through the neighborhood. “This is the rich part of town, Elite jobs must pay a bundle!”

“They do.” Casimir confirmed. “But I didn’t buy property here, buying houses isn’t really something worthwhile for adventurers, so I live with Master Southwind.” Casimir could have rented a place for a year, and could probably have afforded a nice place, but Master insisted.

Illivere perked up at that information. “Do you mean Gi...

April Poll

I added a new snippet to the snippet thread, link below, and continuing that is now on the poll. If you think I should continue it, feel free to vote.

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/requiem_jeers-snippet-and-commission-thread.986104/

Chapter 10: Exam

There was one rather large difference between this battle with his students than the one previous, and it was something immediately apparent as the students looked at him.

Previously, he just wore what he called his ‘city gear’, which was some light armor made of padding and leather, more enchanted for comfort rather than actual protection. This was because it was polite to dress appropriately to your station, and for the notoriously paranoid adventurer profession, that meant that y...

Courtly Chronicles 4

[Tanya Degurechaff von Goethe aka Tenya Deguchiya aka Archduchess von Goethe, circa 1925, age 11]

The war was going well… if you listened to the papers. Dacia was swiftly dealt with by Major Weiss’s battalion and the 16th and 19th armies, more or less in accordance to the broad outline of a plan that Tanya had proposed, but America was still supplying the Francois with weapons and loans, and the Albish were helping the Legadonians, although it hadn’t gotten to the point of a war d...

Chapter 9: Wasting Time

“That’s a tough situation, Casimir.” Master said as she searched among the bookshelves that pretended to be a staircase. “I mean, those sounded like high quality suicide enchantements, if it burned so thoroughly, but that’s not narrowing the possibilities that much.” Not in Anima, at least. Having a society where learning to use magic at least a little bit is nigh mandatory sounds nice, but it did have its disadvantages.

“Yeah, they weren’t even strong thugs.” Casimir ...

Chapter 8: Attack

Everything had started to settle into a routine as the months passed. Teach classes, run the adventuring club through combat drills, kick their asses on the day before the weekend, run them through a job during the weekend. Occasionally, spend hours failing to say anything to Luci’s shrine.

This week’s job was a gathering quest to collect Pyre Roots. Thorne’s troop was out getting Cloud Lotuses instead, so it was just Casimir and the team. He couldn’t range out as far without an...

Commission poll

Whoops! Forgot to bring this up for this month. 

In order to make the poll a bit more competitive, I've added a few options that reflected what I expected the donor suggestions to be like, in vague categories.

Chapter 7: Just business

Just a note, this week is my birthday so I'm taking the next update off. 

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“Come on, ducklings.” Casimir said as he walked into the guild. “We need to get you registered.” Their readiness was questionable, but Thorne was getting really annoying with wanting to begin the “exciting” parts of the club activities, and the students weren’t entirely hopeless, so he decided to get things started.

The students followed him in, lining up ...

Courtly Chronicles 3

[Tanya Degurechaff von Goethe aka Tenya Deguchiya aka Archduchess von Goethe, circa 1924, age 10]

One of the more embarrassing parts of being in one’s sixties while being removed from all previous social connections is the constant habit of equating people in the present with people in the past.

Take Chief Engineer Adelheid von Schugel, for example. When Tanya first met the man, they immediately made the mental comparison to Mei, who had a similarly dismissive attitude towards e...

Chapter 6: The pains of waiting

[Faron Wavecleaver]

Faron gave his force sword a few extra practice swings, getting his blood pumping while they waited for Professor Toomes to return from his monster-finding hunt. They had approached closer to the trees, peering into them in the hopes they could find out sooner.

At first, Faron didn’t think much of the curse wizard. He seemed reasonably confident when teaching, but had a tendency to get distracted by tangents, scrambling to get back to the lesson in time for e...

Chapter 5: Even adventurers have errands

The Adventurer’s guild building in the city of Academia was on the small side, but that was true for most of Anima. There just wasn’t much adventure on the island nation, so most members quickly found themselves leaving for one of the continents in short order.

That said, there were still regions that were deliberately left clear of habitation so monsters could spawn away from civilians and the farmland, and thus there was steady, if unexciting, work for adventurers. As Casimir unde...

Chapter 4: The "joys" of teaching

Some adventurers tended to mock Casimir when he insisted on referring to beneficial curse magic as such instead of saying less accurate but more informative things like blessings, wards, or buffs. One of the reasons he did so was to remind himself of the core legends of his discipline: curses didn’t just… go away when they were well made. They could be cast but lay dormant for years until the proper trigger was provided, from a set of words, being splashed with water, or even touching som...

Chapter 3: Sorting Wizards

As it turned out, several of the new members of the adventurer’s club were students in his solo class. Four of the nine, to be precise: There was Peter, the infuriatingly earnest kid, as well as Illivere, the stoic girl with the very important father. In addition to them, the wannabe Knight, Faron, was in the group, and finally there was Professor Giltblade’s spirit-blooded ward, Hanna.

Professor Thorne took charge after the students managed to absorb enough of the training exercise...

February story poll,

First, it's telling me some of y'all still need discord access... and I'm not entirely sure why it didn't do so automatically. If you still need access and don't have it, send me a message and I'll get it worked out manually. 

In other news, 6k words for this was too ambitious, it was kind of hell getting it completed while also building 1 update of anima academy per week for a buffer, so this next one I'll commit to 4k instead. 

Courtly Chronicles 2: Crazy like a fox

For reference, the first chapter: 

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-heroic-chronicles-of-a-young-man-youjo-senki-my-hero-academia-complete.875316/post-81103798

[Tanya Degurechaff von Goethe aka Tenya Deguchiya aka Archduchess von Goethe, circa 1923, age 9]

Tanya wished that t...

Chapter 2: Adventuring club?

Stomp. Swing. Stop. Pump. Punch. Pull. Casimir went through these rote actions step by step, paying the bare minimum of attention as he reached out with his soul and gripped the vibrations of mana each motion generated, pulling it within his soul as force-aspected mana and binding it tightly within his mana heart. Tilt. Turn. Twist. Heave. Hop. Halt.

The Evoker's Dance mana binding ritual was one of the reasons Casimir was a patriot. Anima was the greatest country in the world, and part...

Announcements

First, I'm calling the previous poll officially. I've already started the winning snippet. 

All such snippets, this one and in the future, will be posted at the start of the following month if ready, and it will be made public on the 8th. If it is not ready by the 1st (because of a particularly contentious vote, for example), then patrons of the $5 tier and above will still get 7 days of seeing it before the public does as it is posted as soon as possible.

Second, using a t...

Chapter 1: Welcome to the Academy

"Welcome, class." Casimir said as he walked into one of the many classrooms of the Academy of High Magic. He felt pretty lucky, getting to use one of the original thousand classrooms for his first solo teaching job. The still-living wood grown into the shape of furniture made him remember the wonder he felt when his Master told the story of the school's founding, and the enchantments allowing natural sun and air inside though the woven branches above while protecting against inclement weather...

January Poll

Okay, given the ratio of people who should have discord invites that have actually joined the discord, it's looking like I should have the poll here rather than do it on discord.

Incidentally, if you don't have a tier, I don't know how to fix it on my end so you need to fix it on your end. It's not any different from changing your tier between months.

This is basically a free commission from all of you guys, whichever one wins the vote will get a chapter, with the target being ...