As always, Amethyst was winning.

  The large purple dragon, encrusted in the very gems that Alice had named it for, was facing off against some sixteen-year-old battle prodigy from the Yamato archipelago and was giving the youth a run for his money. With a flick of her long, blonde hair, she smirked at the young mon coach as he was rapidly trying to strategize a way past the member of her team she sent out when she really wanted to test someone's mettle.

  The young man pulled out a black-and-yellow Grand Capsule and returned his mon. "I concede..." he said dejectedly. "That sandstorm ability is really something else. If I keep going, my allies will just get needlessly torn up. I don't have an answer for that...yet."

  Alice smiled, a true smile this time, at the youth. For him to get past her first mon was an achievement in and of itself, after all. "Well fought, then. Take heart—my first mon is a test in and of itself. Most monster coaches either concede in frustration or soil themselves when they fight it." As Amethyst stomped to Alice's side, she stepped down from the standard tournament dais she was on and made her way to the midpoint of the training field, extending a hand.

  The young man sighed, leapt forward from his, and ran forward. "I...I wish I could've gotten farther. But, mark my words! I will defeat you, just like I promised during last year's Circuit!"

  Alice grinned. "That's the spirit of a master monster coach, right there. Give Kongming Province a good showing this year, will you? I'm not supposed to have favorites...but someone who can fight Spooky to a standstill is someone I want standing at my side eventually."

  The young man tilted his head before putting on a cocky smirk. "Forget that. I think I want to be Guardian myself. You've been sitting on high long enough."

  Alice rolled her eyes. "Trust me, kid, the big seat isn't for everyone. I give you a week before you beg me to give it back to you. Dealing with Choson, Yamato, Mericania, and Genghisan...international politics is annoying on good days. Be glad I'm doing it, and you're not," she added with a flick of her hair and a pat on the youth's back before she turned.

  If the young man was going to say anything further, it was cut off by Alice's smartphone, which played her signature ringtone, a dramatic piece written a few centuries before, but still played any time someone wanted something that sounded elegant and sinister. With a smirk at the song that she felt embodied her public persona perfectly, she tapped the 'Answer call' button on the screen.

  "Guardian Alice." A subtly-panicked male voice on the other end was her first sign that something significant had happened. "Guardian, ma'am, there's been an incident in the Guandao Forest. We received reports of an alpha Yeziblade causing trouble and dispatched a two-man Ranger team to capture the specimen for relocation."

  Alice raised one eyebrow, her blue eyes glinting in the training field's athletic lights, as she frowned. While Yeziblade were difficult mons to train or capture, they weren't worthy of a call to the Guardian. Something else had to be in play, and Alice had a feeling she knew just what that something was.

  "Is this by any chance related to the strange surges we started seeing last week?" she asked. The information was publicly available because she hadn't been able to instruct her civilian counterparts to squelch information about surges of strange luminance that had broken through the ground and radiated off certain monsters, who had to be forcibly put down after they began to rampage. This was the part of being the Guardian that she hadn't told the youth about: giving kill orders became more routine but never got easier.

  "No ma'am. Well, if it is, it's not clear. This is something altogether different." She kept walking forward as the man, Captain Andrew Li of the Guandao City Ranger Corps, explained that a figure who seemed like some kind of cross-breed between man and monster had fought the thing to a standstill with knives, somehow changed into heavy armor, and was tranquilized by the squad along with the Yeziblade on suspicion of being a poacher. However, the man had somehow shrugged off two doses of tranquilizer intended for alpha monsters, performed healing magic on one of the Rangers' heavy hitters, and then quietly allowed himself to be captured.

  "He's now sitting in a jail cell. For the first five minutes, he was looking around at his accommodations. Then he stopped. I think we need you here sooner rather than later," the captain finished.

  Alice's eye was twitching. "Captain, what you've told me sounds like a fairy tale. I never took you or your people for the drinking types," she said, testing the waters.

  After a pause, he continued. "No, ma'am, you don't understand—I'm not making any of it up. We have footage. The only point of discontinuity is that he talked to Ranger Janine about who he is. Hell, I asked him about it, and he was able to answer, though something's weird about that too. Anyways, we reviewed the footage per procedure, and the thing is, in the footage, he's speaking in some completely different language. We tried running it through translation software, and it doesn't match any known language on file. Sending it to your phone now."

  The phone gave a musical chime, and she pulled it from her ear so she could accept the download.

  "Alright, Captain... I'll be there on Amethyst shortly. I very much want to meet this poacher and see what's going on with him. Be there in fifteen."

  "Yes, ma'am! Thank you, ma'am!" She could hear the man saluting, so she hung up. She turned to her challenger. "Anyways, kid, go train some more. Try training a second team while you're at it. I think that'll give you some insights into where you're going wrong."

  He nodded seriously. "Alright, Champion. Be seeing you." He pulled out a normal, all-red capsule and released a Leveagle and began putting a saddle on it. He probably was going to fly home, which was fine—if she recalled the kid's hometown correctly, it wouldn't intercept her flight path to Guandao City at all.

  Alice whistled sharply to Amethyst. "Hey there, my purple heart! How would you like to go for a quick flight? There's someone weird we need to go check on."

  A loud crack that sounded like it was from the sky pulled Ondun from meditation. He'd remained in his Medicus embodiment after being arrested by these odd Rangers. Now that he saw how they operated, they seemed like a slightly advanced version of the Eldifian Rangers he'd run into so long ago—they were militarized, with a clear rank and command structure, and seemed to prioritize quick, proactive response over heavy armaments and reactive tactics.

  The only difference was that this was an all-human nation; there were no Elvidan people at all. Just humans and their monster allies.

  With a sigh, Ondan continued his meditation. Something about the anima here was different, as he tried to slowly draw and condense the ambient energy to form the seed of a crystal. This was a technique Aenora was teaching him just before the Battle of Grimald Pass...and his friends falling comatose. The fact felt important, so the young adventurer filed it away in the back of his head. If he could get to Aenora, she would probably have all sorts of anima-based theories. The woman was arguably one of the greatest scholars he'd ever encountered, and her insights, when she voiced them, always seemed to turn out true. Where Ondan had started his career as literal hired help, this woman had been picked by an Archsorceress at a young age and trained relentlessly in the magical arts.

  Thinking of Aenora was always complicated. The comely scholar was practically married to her work. When he first saw her, he'd been a little smitten with a crush, but with one look she'd quashed that. As the two had been working together over the past two years, the initial lust had subsided in favor of a deep friendship. Ondan couldn't quite see her as a sister...but she was like family.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Ondan also found, as a result of all of this, that he missed the only remaining senior member of the Knowing Circle that was still awake dearly.

  Ondan noticed the guard stretching in an exaggerated way, then standing up. "Don't make any trouble," he said, then left through a metal door.

  The adventurer sighed. The man was practically begging him to make an escape attempt. With such an earnest request in mind, he thought it over. As a prisoner in an unknown land, it was highly unlikely he'd be released. No matter how...different? Advanced? ...this land seemed, Ondan simply didn't have the time to stay a prisoner. His friends' anima was weakening by the day, the odd energies about them seemingly tethering their souls remotely to their bodies.

  If the remaining members of the Knowing Circle didn't act, they would lose their friends permanently.

  So it was Ondun reached up to the Knowledge Gem that Suzumi had gifted him only a few months ago and attuned his anima to the gem. The robe and visor disappeared in a flash of light and were nearly instantly replaced with the light armor and twin shouken of a Shinobi. He then went to the cell—a lot of metal and some unusually clear and hard glass—and began trying things.

  The first conclusion Ondun came to was that the materials were a step above anything he was familiar with. In some ways, his experiments with messing with the panes of solid glass and the well-locked metal door reminded him of Allemandian technology, but somehow less advanced. Had Sid been here, he'd probably have hotwired the entire cell by now and be controlling a giant robot, or something, but Ondun, alas, lacked those technological talents.

  Ondun made some hand seals and found that his Earth jutsu seemed to be effective on the odd glass. He made some alterations to the series of hand seals and focused his anima into those seals, then slammed his hand into the large panes of glass.

  To his considerable joy, it melted away. With a grin, he took a step out of his cell, a line crossed. Normally Ondun would submit to the law; he was on good terms with multiple governments, especially in the Far East of his home, but this time Ondun was in haste. Even so, the adventurer wove a few seals in a sequence he'd come up with only days ago on the battlefield. The entire room was uniformly well lit, but the jutsu he'd cooked up made him transparent, to a certain extent. He would've preferred to stick to the shadows and exit this facility without being seen at all, but this would do at least until he couldn't hide anymore.

  When that moment came, Ondun would fight to incapacitate unless his enemies brought lethal force against him. The last few months of fighting his world's greatest empire had driven the novelty from any form of mortal combat against fellow civilized peoples from him. Even the Imperials just wanted to live, too.

  Ondun went to the door and found it unlocked. Had he been the warden, locking the door with the strange man in it would have been the first thing he'd done, just to make the man waste more time and resources on an escape attempt. Alarm bells already ringing in his head, he nervously opened the door and found similar doors over a long hallway...and no one in the halls. Cautiously, Ondun advanced, maintaining the jutsu by repeating the hand seals.

  Guardian Alice was in the security room. There were monitors connected to an array of cameras all over the building. The Ranger Corps base was no prison, but there was still a vested interest in keeping things secure. While human armies only rarely fought each other, ensuring that dangerous monsters were kept controlled and didn't fall into the hands of nefarious groups was essential. So it was that Alice watched the strange "Draconian" use magic to change from an ornate set of robes into an old-style ninja's gear, do some kind of weird ritual magic to melt the bullet-resistant glass that was keeping him contained, do more weird magic to hide from sight, and now was tracking his progress as he 'stealthily' escaped the building via infrared imaging.

  Alice caught herself smirking. It had been too long since she'd had a real challenge. With most of Monastria at peace, and only occasional grandstanding from the Mericarians and youthful, bright-eyed battlers challenging her only infrequently, she'd been getting bored. As she'd told the young man, being a stateswoman was boring work.

  "Guardian, it seems he's going for the loading docks. For someone who's never been here, he's making good time. He's avoiding some of the more useless rooms, though the men's and ladies' rooms seem to have confused him." She sighed and suppressed another giggle. The man spent a while with the bathrooms. There were no cameras in there for obvious reasons, but the idea of someone who was puzzled by a bathroom was, for some reason, overwhelmingly funny to the seasoned monster coach.

  He didn't dawdle, fortunately. The lawyers would probably make her life a living hell if he had, and someone had decided then was the ideal time to do their business.

  Captain Li was standing beside her, of course. She nodded to the man. "Alright, I'll go introduce myself to him and my team. Since he has no Mons, this should go pretty quickly. Then we can ask him some polite questions."

  The two men snickered because they understood exactly what she meant: He would be asked polite questions while restrained, having a brain scan, and also a few powerful Mons aiming their powers at him. She was only going to make him wait another thirty minutes before making a dramatic entrance. He'd proven either stupid, malicious, or desperate.

  "Give my regards to the Rangers who caught him. I expect this will make my week..." she said, as she left the room, once again gracefully flicking a long, unruly length of golden hair from her face.

  As soon as Ondun smelled fresh air, heard the sounds of unfamiliar vehicles driving on well-paved streets, and saw people going about their daily business, he knew he was almost out. The problem was, it had been too easy. First, he'd encountered no resistance, which was a sign he was expected.

  Then, there was the woman standing at the gate that led out to the rest of the city. She was wearing what seemed like a great black ballgown. Her great skirts only extended to her knees, where a pair of rugged black leather boots began, encasing her lower legs. On these boots were pouches that seemed empty but were tied with a length of black ribbon. Her upper body was covered by a shirt that seemed like a thin sweater, but this too had pouches on the outsides of the arms, with the same ribbons securing them. On her belt were familiar pouches, six of them. She blew a length of blonde hair from her face in a way that made Ondun yearn for one of Aenora's catty one-liners. What he got next was the next best thing.

  "Congratulations on your escape. You've shown me that magic is, in fact, real. I shouldn't be surprised, but that's life for you. Say, could you drop your little trick now? I just want to talk to you. By the way..." She drew one of the capsules from her belt and pressed the release on it to cause a strange white shape with what looked like a gentle face to float in the air beside her. "...I know exactly where you are."

  With a sigh, Ondun stopped channeling anima to his cloaking jutsu. "Greetings, lady." He gave a courteous bow; he was caught, so there was no point in being rude. "Do you let everyone escape from your prisons, or am I just that special?"

  Her eyes twinkled. "It was a test, and you failed. You see, had you just stayed, we could've had a nice, personable talk. We'll still have it... I just intend to have a few precautions in place now." She stepped forward. "I see you're not human. My people spoke true. I owe Captain Li drinks now, it seems. Are you going to come quietly with me...or do I need to force you?"

  Ondun chuckled. "Somehow I think you're wanting a sparring match. Leaving a prisoner unguarded, no patrols in your facility, or anyone about...this is a test, I'll grant. But it's not what you made it out to be. Unfortunately, there are people who need my help. I can't afford to stick around."

  The woman gestured, and the pale, angular man at her side moved in front of her. "Friends, eh? That's interesting. Would you happen to know anything about some anomalous energy, by any chance? Would they? It would really help me and a few other people if you did."

  Ondun tilted his head. "What? No, all my friends fell comatose last week."

  She raised an eyebrow. "Hmm...Sparkles, is he telling me the truth?"

  With a high-pitched cry of "Faerrow!", the creature's eyes glowed purple as it sent a blast of purple energy. With a quick hand seal and flicker of his anima, he teleported to one side of the odd, angular monster. "I already told you, there's no need to attack," he said more dangerously.

  She was already facing him, a smirk on her face. "Hmm, quick on your feet. But that wasn't an attack...Sparkles, Faerie Field!"

  The creature unleashed a blast of pink energy that he backflipped from, caught his foot on a chainlink fence, and leapt off and over the creature, bonking it on what passed for its head for good measure. He landed with both shouken drawn. "Do you always ask your monsters to attack people you're interrogating?" he asked.

  She tapped her lip, much like the ranger in the vehicle had. "No, not usually. But there's nothing usual about this..." she paused and then clapped her hands together. "Tell you what! Sparkles here needs to stretch her wings. If you can fight her to a standstill, we can talk over lunch."

  Ondun's pulse was racing now. He'd always been a poor hand at turning down a challenge, and this odd woman was definitely challenging him. She had every bit of his confidence—even with his display of ninjutsu, she wasn't cowed. In fact, her hand was on one of those capsules, probably a powerful monster that she could call on to easily defend her.

  There seemed to be only one way through. With a backflip, he settled on a spot across from the woman, his short blades ready to menace the odd creature. "Very well. I hate to own my nickname...but I think it's time I showed you why people back home call me the Greatest Hero."

  The woman just smirked. "Sparkles...give him our standard 'hello.'"