The fires were getting out of control. They were already beyond Mel’s ability to smother with her [Hidden Mist]. It took Gwen to remind her that they had other options to snuff out the flames.

  Using her ball and chain, Gwen was able to plow great furrows in the ground to create firebreaks.

  Mel put a hand on her arm to stop her. “No,” she said. “Our camp is already compromised. There could be other people looking for us–for me. Even if they were acting alone…” Mel shook her head and motioned at the smoke billowing into the air. “Even in the moonlight, it’s obvious. We could stop the fire from spreading, but we can’t put them out entirely before people start noticing.”

  Even if they could, there was no telling who was already watching. They needed to go. The farther the better.

  Are you sure you want to leave because of the fires and not because you fear more people coming to kill you for your crimes?

  Mel shut the voice out, turning and walking back toward the camp. She used her [Hidden Mist] to smother the flames immediately around them until they reached the clearing.

  Gwen looked into the fires, then shouldered the chain. “Very well. Though, this is deeper than some competitors seeking revenge. There’s a connection to some other party. Maybe the Vile Covenant.”

  Mel looted the bodies she could find on the way, but she let the flames take the rest. It somehow felt dirty to loot all of them. There wasn’t even enough of that one guy to loot.

  You’re wrong, a dark voice whispered into her head.

  Before she could stop herself, Mel looked at a suspicious glob on her shoulder.

  Would you like to loot [Point Taker Mage (Copper Rank)]?

  Mel cringed, but now that she was at the threshold, she might as well.

  “They don’t have much good equipment on them,” Gwen pointed out, staying close. After eating that [Plateau Beast Heart], she was more like her old self. “However, they have a fair amount of coins, both rune and aspects.”

  (50) [Copper Rune Coins] have been stored in your inventory.

  (5) [Light Coins] have been stored in your inventory.

  (5) [Wind Coins] have been stored in your inventory.

  Mel’s eyebrows shot up at that. She turned around, spreading her [Hidden Mist] toward the blackened shapes around her. Maybe it was crass to loot the vengeful family and friends of the Stolst gang members she murdered, but money was money.

  You couldn’t do rituals without it, and now that she had alchemy training, she knew why her previous attempts at making potions failed.

  They cost rune coins.

  Battle Points were less of an issue now than rune coins were. Battle Points couldn’t be turned into rune coins, and vice versa.

  Even without the plateau beast strategy, Mel had more Battle Points than she had money. It was fortunate that the ratings were based on the total amount of BP earned, rather than one’s current stock, or else she would have had to essentially buy next to nothing.

  Now that she had access to proper alchemy, she had an even greater need for both. The Emporium was chocked full of reagents and materials for alchemical potions. All those items that didn’t explicitly say what they did were vastly more important than even the petrified branches.

  [Graveblooms], [Blightraven Feathers], and the like could be used in alchemy to create elixirs to improve the accrual of specific types of runes. With the correct preparation, such ingredients would prove vital to their progress.

  She could target specifically Serpent runes, Omen runes, even latent runes.

  Unfortunately, that was roughly the extent of her newfound alchemical knowledge. These things were possible, but she didn’t know how. Not without extensive experimentation.

  Which required Battle Points and rune coins.

  “That grabbed your interest, huh?” Gwen asked with a smirk, trying to lighten up a grim situation.

  “I need it,” Mel whispered fiercely.

  “What was that, Spongebob?”

  “I need it!” Mel reiterated, looting another body for its rune coins.

  With a laugh, Gwen handed her another pouch, one moderately heavy with coins. The clinking sang beautifully to Mel’s ears.

  Mel took it with both hands. “Yessssss.”

  By the time they finished looting all the bodies, Thomas was dragging a single corpse into the field in front of the cave.

  They both looked at him.

  “You looted your groups?” Thomas guessed. “I’m surprised the items traveled so far. I wonder what the limit is.”

  “I don’t think you’ll find anybody interested in finding out.” Mel motioned to the body. “What’s…uh…what’s going on there?”

  Thomas looked down and lifted an arm from the pile of limbs resting on top of the single corpse. “I figured I could haul four Humpty Dumptys, or one whole body and four limb assortments.” He put his hands on his hips and counted, then turned back to them. “Pretty sure I got one from each person that tried to kill me.”

  “Yeah, that’s still rather sus, Thomas,” Gwen remarked.

  “It makes a sick sort of sense,” Mel had to admit. She knelt down and touched an arm.

  Would you like to loot [Point Taker Mage (Copper Rank)]?

  Lines of light streaked off toward each of them as they gained the loot from the Mage’s disembodied arm.

  “Hm…” Gwen looked between them, tapping her lips thoughtfully. “Are we forgetting something?”

  Thomas looked at her. “Like what?”

  Mel wasn’t paying attention. She was tapping one body part after another, trying to loot them all. Thomas was right, he did get an assortment. Unfortunately, he got multiples of the same person.

  Ignoring the fact that these were once people, Mel finished looting the would-be assassins.

  At the end of the day, no matter what their motivations, they had come to kill her. What was she supposed to do? Let them kill her because they were mad she killed other killers?

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Deklin was right, Mel understood. Eventually, you kill so many that you can never really stop.

  It was a burden she was willing to bear. She felt bad that she might have killed somebody’s beloved aunt or brother, but at the end of the day they chose their path.

  And I chose mine.

  “Hate the game, not the player,” Mel muttered, wiping her hands on her pants.

  “What was that?” Thomas asked.

  “Nothing.” Mel turned to Gwen. “What’s up?”

  “Not sure what I’m forgetting about.” Gwen paused while Mel continued to loot, likely trying to remember. “Oh, right! That kid.”

  “Which kid?” Thomas asked, puzzled. “You want to kill him?”

  “...Nooo?”

  Mel folded her arms. “Are you two talking about Heath? Gwen, I thought you were staying to guard the cave.”

  Gwen looked toward the cave, brows drawing together in confusion. “Huh.”

  Something wasn’t quite right about her reaction.

  She covered it by stalking into the cave after Heath.

  Mel followed. “Gwen! You did make sure everybody was dead before you left, didn’t you?”

  They found Heath curled up in a deeper chamber, fast asleep, with Gwen’s cloth sack over his head. He rolled over and muttered something about fries.

  Mel pulled it off him.

  That startled him awake. He looked around, brown eyes wide with surprise. He blinked them intensely. “Ugh. My eyes are so dry.”

  “I was going to say, maybe put the bag back on,” Gwen said.

  “What bag?!”

  “Never mind,” Mel said. “We gotta go, Heath.”

  “Already? I’m not done meditating.”

  Mel exchanged a look with the others. “Sure, bud. You can pick it up later though.”

  “Oh, really? Great!” He sat up and stretched for the ceiling. “Where are we going?”

  “Somewhere else,” Mel explained, packing up the other sleeping bags. “A campsite that is a little quieter.”

  Heath nodded sagely. “I am a very light sleeper. I would awake the instant we were in trouble. With my cat-like reflexes, I would lick them!”

  Mel paused in the middle of rolling up her sleeping bag. “What? You’d lick them?”

  “Metaphorically, of course,” Heath said proudly. “Cats groom as a form of dominance. A cat grooming another is something a leader does.”

  “I don’t know what to say to that.”

  “I get that a lot.”

  I’ll bet you do.

  Gwen moved over to Thomas and said something that Mel couldn’t hear. Thomas grinned in excitement.

  The purple glow of Gravity aspect gathered in Gwen’s right arm, flowing down and solidifying into her fist. The blue glow of Winter aspect mirrored the effect on the other arm.

  She wrenched on the freezing chain rattling with tidal forces. Gravity and Winter aspect clashed together like sheet lightning.

  The [Chain of Atlas] shattered to pieces.

  The pair looked over at Gwen. Heath had disappeared into the shadows. He reappeared a moment later.

  “What was that?” he asked, impressed.

  Grinning, Gwen summoned and desummoned the [Chain of Atlas] in two whorls of moonlit ash. “Just breaking the curse imprint so I can now wield this freely. As a proper weapon. Completing a quest is a nice bonus too.”

  “But should you?” Mel asked.

  She shrugged, rubbing her freed wrist.

  “Oh, well, when you put it like that.” Mel packed up her bag and stepped out of the cave. She shut her eyes for a moment. It didn’t take any longer to find another thread toward a plateau beast.

  “This way,” Mel said, taking off in a westerly direction away from the flames and deeper into…something. Mel’s enhanced sense of the plateau beasts told her that they were arranged like a massive concentric circle around a central point.

  At first, she thought that was the starting area, but that was far to the east from here.

  Every time I move in this direction, something catches my eye or otherwise derails me, Mel thought.

  Which must mean that the Convocation’s trial had an epicenter of some kind. The closer she got to it, the stronger the concentration of mana that this place had.

  That translated to more and stronger monsters, dungeons, tombs, and all manner of magical malady. Which meant more Battle Points.

  Her blessing allowed her to sense plateau beasts–and some other creatures that were similarly powerful–when she got close enough.

  Even accounting for its increased detection radius, Mel knew she was heading in the right direction based purely on the quantity of high-level monsters.

  It was a bummer that monsters didn’t normally drop rune coins.

  Heath yawned and stretched. “I feel so well-rested.”

  Gwen gave him a sour look.

  “Because you fell asleep,” Thomas said, surveying the edge of the plateau. They would have to climb down hundreds of feet to make it to the strange plateau below them filled with rainbow-colored hot springs, geysers, and ancient ruins.

  “I did not. I was meditating.”

  Thomas shrugged. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Everybody does it from time to time.”

  “I didn’t fall asleep,” Heath insisted.

  It clearly didn’t matter to Thomas. “How are we going to get down?”

  Mel looked at him, kneeling at the edge and staring into the gray rocky landscape below. Sheer angled walls of stone, like frozen droplets of molten rock, created concentric rings heading deeper into the plateaus. The walls blocked their view, rising to a height that eclipsed their plateau.

  “You’re the Mage. Well, Warmage. Don’t you have something other than the rough ride I’d give us?” Gwen asked, crouching at the edge. “Or maybe Mel does.”

  “Nah,” Mel said. “I’ve got nothing. With my super high agility I might survive the drop. Not that I’m stupid enough to test it.”

  “I could take one person down,” Heath offered. “My cloak can turn into a glider.”

  “Even me?” Gwen asked, then glanced down. “Suppose I’m not stuck with the chain anymore.”

  Heath looked her up and down, grabbing his chin in his thumb and index thoughtfully. “Hm. Yeah, probably.”

  “That’s all well and good for one person, but there’s four of us now,” Thomas said. “I can take the rest of you.”

  Everybody turned to look at him. “How?” Mel asked.

  Thomas frowned. “It’s an aspect skill that I haven’t gotten much use out of.”

  “Which is?” Mel asked, suddenly interested in anything that made Thomas uncomfortable.

  “It’s called [Float].”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s pretty lame.”

  “You want to jump?” Thomas asked.

  Mel grabbed his arm. “Nope. Float me down to the plateau Jerry Poppins!”