One by one the mages started walking forward.
Each one of them reached out and injected their mana into the soul contract hovering in the air. Some looked nervous while others looked pretty sure about their decision.
Adrian just stood there with his arms crossed and watched. He watched as the amount of people stepping forward slowly increased and by the end of it, every single person had joined the line. The time it took, was more than a few minutes. It actually took almost an entire hour for all five hundred of them to cycle through and leave their magical signature on the soul contract.
When the final mage stepped back, Adrian looked at the scroll.
Not a single person had refused to sign the contract.
He had honestly expected at least a few of them to refuse. He thought there would be some of them to just back away and leave Oresfall. But he had severely underestimated the sheer power of peer pressure and herd mentality. Some of these guys were sons and daughters of wealthy merchants and even nobles.
When the first twenty guys signed it the rest just sort of looked at each other and nodded before falling in line. The fear of missing out on a gold coin a week was apparently a lot stronger than the fear of selling their souls to a baron. After all, a gold coin a week was a lot of money even for those nobles since they weren’t exactly in line to inherit the territories.
Adrian let the contract vanish back into his dungeon storage.
He looked at the massive crowd of newly hired mages and then called out.
"Lorcan."
The assassin appeared right beside him almost instantly.
It was honestly a little creepy. It was almost like he literally just crawled out of Adrian’s own shadow. The visual of it looked incredibly wonky to all of the mages standing nearby. They all flinched back as they saw how the dark shadow on the ground physically warped and stretched upward before forming into an actual human being.
It didn’t really look fluid at all. It looked weird and unnatural. The mages couldn’t really put their finger on what exactly made it so unsettling but the way the light seemed to bend away from Lorcan gave them the creeps.
But the user of this magic knew that he hadn’t perfectly learned how to bend light around him. At least not yet.
Lorcan fully materialized beside Adrian and looked at the crowd of mages. Then he turned his head to look at his lord.
Adrian pointed at the crowd.
"From today onwards your job is to train these guys."
Lorcan just stared at them with a poker face.
"I want you to give them the exact same level of training that you gave your assassins," Adrian continued. "But I want these guys to learn not just about assassination and counter-assassination. I want them to learn about how to fight straight wars. How to directly clash with people on an open battlefield."
He started pacing a few steps to the right.
"I want them to have the durability and the raw physical strength of a frontline soldier. But I also want them to have the stealth and agility of an expert assassin. I want them to be completely all-rounded. But I absolutely do not want them to be mediocre in everything just because they are spreading their stats around."
He stopped and looked directly at Lorcan.
"I want them to be specialists in everything. I want them to be assassins, and I want them to be heavy hitters... I want them to be a jack of all trades. Or let’s say a master of all trades."
The mages all looked at Adrian like he was completely out of his mind.
"And you will be the one responsible for bringing them to that level," Adrian said. "You can train towards that exact same direction too. I will be providing you guys with all of the resources that you need to get to that level and for your training gear and everything else."
Adrian turned his body fully toward Lorcan.
"But I want you to put in all the work. And I want you to make sure that all of these guys are trained past their breaking point. They will complain. I don’t care. This contract was signed. I am paying them a shit ton of money for this and I want them to actually work for it. Nothing in this world comes for free."
Lorcan nodded slowly.
He turned his head to look at the guys standing there shivering in the wind. Then he looked back at Adrian.
"Can I also go back to training my assassins again?"
He sounded almost a little sad. But it was barely noticable.
"I heard that almost all of them have become knights now. I knew that they had the potential in them but I am pretty surprised to see that the numbers are almost close to one hundred percent success rate. I just wanted to train them again."
Adrian turned and looked at him. He thought about it for a second.
"Sure. But both these groups should have completely different training schedules and regimens. I want you to treat these mages like they are the only option for us right now. They are supposed to be the strongest fighting force of our territory. So make sure that this happens."
He lowered his voice a little.
"Your assassins are very useful for me. They’re very valuable and I care about them. But they don’t come up in the first place when it comes to raw magical potential on a large scale. A group of five hundred magic knights can be the difference between us being able to conquer a kingdom or falling to them. Assassins on the other hand... are useful but they’ll have to give up their lives for the success of important missions and even then, they will not be able to guarantee success."