In the following days, Cæ and the Headmistress amended their agreement to include their recent expansions, before Cæ got to executing her wishes regarding expanding the talent acquisition force.
With an expanded budget and greater personnel from within the Elendir Institute of Magic, Cæ could cover more districts per day than before, when he was limited to merely two districts per day. With the current expansions, they could aim for almost four districts a day, reflecting a tremendous expansion in the forces of the task force.
The best part was that the expansion in the manpower and other resources that went into the project was not accompanied by an increase in the number of students who participated in the project.
This reduced the liabilities that the Elendir Institute of Magic could suffer as a result of the operations going wrong. Squandering of resources and even the death of personnel were easier to deal with than something as severe as the death of its students. The Elendir Institute of Magic couldn't afford to take on the death of its students, something that had unfortunately become a possibility due to the fact that the executive wing was headed by the Student Council, due to the policy of forging leaders out of students.
It also hurt Headmistress Lenolia's enemies, by reducing the amount of student participation relative to the size of their operations, by increasing the latter without the former, she made it much harder for the slums to harm the reputation of these operations.
Up until now, the strategy of the Colohen Mafia and the elite families of Colohen City was to attack the task force while they were performing their testing operations and kill some students.
The death of the precious elite talents would way heavy on the Headmistress as her responsibility which the wealthy families who were on the board of directors of the Elendir Institute of Magic could use to have her fired as the Headmistress and replace her with someone who didn't want to empower the people of the slums and create political competition for the slums.
This made life harder and harder for the Colohen Mafia, who were already finding it difficult dealing with the Elendir Institute of Magic's security team due to the fact that the security teams of the Institute were just superior and were also endowed with more magicapita to empower them with more mana.
The mafia, on the other hand, operated outside of the law and thus could not be protected by it. Thus, while the Headmistress could temporarily transfer hundreds of millions of leenars to her security team for the duration of the missions, the mafia couldn't do that simply because they didn't trust their mages to play fair and return that money.
It was a flaw of the mafia and was the biggest variable that tipped the odds in favor of the security team of the Elendir Institute of Magic.
BOOM BOOM BOOM!
Cæ and the apprentice magetants of the security team slowly advanced in a clean perimeter, flying in the sky slowly as they defended against attacks from the distant enemy magetants who slowly retreated from as they fired shots at not just the magetants but also the testing teams who were conducting the magic aptitude test upon the residents of the slums.
The enemy magetants gritted their teeth as they launched bright beams of magical light against the testing teams far away in the distance, hoping to kill one of the students.
And yet, the security team had placed themselves in exactly the plane of attack between the grounded testing teams minding their own businesses, and the flying magetants of the mafia forces.
BOOM BOOM BOOM!
Cæ's eyes sharpened as powerful concussive blasts of wind flew collided against his conjured shield of the heaven element, leaving him unharmed while a single wave of his hand and several magic circles appearing before him only a split second before the magic activated at blinding speeds, causing an powerful flames to emerge from his wand at blast his enemy.
FWOOSH!
"Arrrgh!" the enemy magetant screamed in agony as his entire body was swallowed in fires before he could appropriately react.
Cæ's sheer magic activation speed was so intense that it broke some of the paradigms of magetant combat despite him holding back his pure magic with magic circles. Mages often read each other's magic through their magic circles.
The shape of the layers, whether it was a triangle, a square, or a pentagon, told them whether it was manipulation, change, or conjuration, respectively.
Then the runes in the magic circles told them about what element and what the form was going to look like, allowing them to interpret the enemy's magic, at least to the most basic extent, before the magic was even launched.
However, in Cæ's case, the magic was activated less than a second after the magic circles were conjured in front of him, leaving absolutely no time for many apprentice mages, at least, to read his magic and counter it in time.
BOOM BOOM BOOM!
"Rgh…!"
"AAARRGH!"
"HEL-!"
BOOM!
Cæ became a monster in combat as he became more disciplined about using his advantages in combat without going crazy in combat like the senior leader of the magetant group had warned him several days prior.
The result was that the apprentice magetant group was quite dominant as this simple dynamic allowed him to eliminate apprentice mages, at least the weakest ones, of the enemy quite easily, making life extremely difficult on the apprentice magetant front.
Despite the bright morning Sun cheerily shining its refreshing light upon the slums with an invigorating morning breeze brushing past all of them, the atmosphere tingled with peril.
The air shook while the magetants battled off in the distance.
More than a hundred meters behind them laterally on the ground, the testing groups of the Elendir Institute of Magic had gotten to work, having already found two elite talents across half of the entirety of the district of the slums, quickly initiating them in accordance to protocols that Cæ has set that were specifically meant to convince the distrustful people of the slums with illusion magic that was extremely real and compelling.
The people of the slums who were deeply unexposed to magic were not resistant to such means, even if people in the inner city were, making them more vulnerable and prone to it.
In this case, of course, it was for their own good as they would get the opportunity of a lifetime.
Behind the testing teams were the sales teams of Trinity Housings, who rapidly sold Haven units to the people of the slums.
Word of the product had now truly spread across much of the slums well outside of the districts that they sold or advertised to, causing their brand to gain a stunning degree of awareness in the slums.
Trinity Housings had experienced daily sales unlike anything in the past, making for stunning numbers in their balance sheets that painted a truly optimistic future for the company if these were the kind of numbers that it could expect in the future during seasons of horrid weather.
Additionally, the utility of the Havens were simply undeniable to the people of the slums. Rather than bleed to the construction gangs of the slums, which were essentially a part of the mafia, it was better to buy the Havens from the Trinity Housings for a mildly lower price and get better living quality from the box-like home, shockingly enough.
Additionally, the Mendel Administration's slums credit program had begun to seep into the people of the slums, making them wealthier than they would otherwise be, allowing them to purchase the Havens in the first place.
This was the whole point of the Trinity Housings expanding into the slums in the first place and why Cæ had even agreed to Headmistress Lenolia's offer in the first place. Without it, he would have never gone through with the plan.
And yet, despite his contributions to allowing for this prosperity of Trinity Housings to take place, most of his time was unfortunately spent partaking in the operations, overseeing them, and making sure that they were absolutely successful without any caveat to their success.
Part of this was because he was the only one who knew the slums; thus, even though he had Sorenon, who was quite intelligent, he simply could not delegate oversight of these operations to others.
The task force was still getting used to operating in the dangerous slums.
The environment was still eerie to them.
It reeked of garbage and excrement.
The task force still freaked out when they ran into dead bodies, oftentimes clearly a case of murder, but other times due to disease or substance overdose. Cæ couldn't afford to wait for the task force to get desensitized and acclimatized to the realities of the slums. He needed to take charge in these cases and move things along.
Then there was his security participation.
A self-undertaken role to strengthen his already high gift for combat.
The fluidity that came from a lifetime of fighting translated well into magic combat, allowing him to fight like someone who was most certainly not a novice apprentice who had graduated from the apprentice program just two months prior.
BOOM BOOM BOOM!
Cæ's eyes sharpened with intense concentration as he blasted out attacks at blindingly fast magic-casting speeds, leaving many apprentices, who were without passive defenses, entirely vulnerable and unable to react to his attacks in time.
"Argh!"
"AHHH!"
"Rgh!"
BOOM!
Apprentices, especially the weakest among them, fell at alarming numbers as Cæ cleanly eliminated them.
His impact on the battle was not missed by the seniors magetants who fought at even greater heights.
"You will run amok no more."
RUMBLE
The heavens shook as the powerful voice of an older man reached him from high above.
Chills crawled across his skin as his gaze shifted upwards.
He found himself staring at a meteorite.
A conjuration spell of great power, creating a boulder that was eclipsed with fiery flames, flung down at calamitous speeds in the blink of an eye.
It was power that was far beyond anything that he could deal with, even with his true magic.
And yet, it appeared that it was not in his destiny to die that day.
BOOM!
A flood of water materialized in front of Cæ just meters before the blazingly fast conjured meteorite converged upon him, not just protecting him from the damage of the meteorite but ensuring that the meteorite didn't cause any damage to the testing teams of the Elendir Institute of Magic, which was the ultimate goal of the mafia.
The Flowing Shield, the epithet of the leaders of the senior security team, had once more protected Cæ from the predation of the Colohen Mafia.
"You alright, lad?"
The elder man asked with a calm tone, never once taking his eyes off his opponent.
"Yes… Thank you… again," Cæ managed to squeeze out as he too beheld the senior magetant who had tried to kill Cæ with a bloody meteorite of all things.
Just how much magicapita did a man have to have to conjure something of such great value?
The enemy senior mage slowly approached the two of them.
He was a burly man, wielding an equally burly scepter.
His upper body was bare, covered in scars and masculine body hair, while his lower half was a traditional Merendur, an ethnic lower garment, native to Elendir, woven from a single long cloth from one's hips to one's ankles.
"You will die this time, traitor."
His masculine voice was pointed.
Cæ's eyes sharpened.
"What did you call me?"
The senior magetant snorted. "You were of the slums, but instead of joining us, you joined them."
His dark eyes sharpened.
"That is a price you will pay with your death."
RUMBLE!
The battle escalated as yet another enemy senior magetant sought to kill Cæ.