What people fail to understand about magic is that it has a natural origin. Magicians adhere concepts to their souls, forming a bridge between the divine realm and the physical, allowing them to manifest the power of their souls in this place. The warlocks of the dark tides use different physical mediums to exert their will; the power is not generated from their souls but from rare items they find and covet. Hells, even the endowed rely on physical mediums to generate their sovereignty. Nothing just happens; there is a mechanical and practical cause for all astounding phenomena.

  - An excerpt from “Cassidus’ Diatribe,” banned in most countries

  Gritting my teeth is the only way I can handle the childish anger that keeps trying to rise in my chest. I work my jaw, feeling the creak of my molars as they grind against one another, trying to keep my face an unfeeling mask. I find my friends sitting in silence at their tents, gathered around a small fire. A bit of my frustration flows out at me at seeing the bone-weary faces of Jor’Mari and Jess. Jess works a cloth against the blade of her weapon, trying to rid it of accumulated monster gunk while Jor’Mari stares into the fire. Dovik is a strange compliment, humming to himself as he roasts a huge fillet of tender meat on a pan above the fire.

  Dovik looks up from his meal preparations as I plop down between Jor’Mari and Jess. “Gotta say,” he says, “I lucked out with these bugs. They have something for me.”

  “I can’t understand how you eat those things,” Jess says, not bothering to look up. “Are you okay, Charlene? You looked pale when I checked in on you earlier.”

  “You checked in?” I ask.

  “Of course we did,” Jor’Mari answers. “The healers said it was mana exhaustion. Six mages collapsed from running themselves dry. They said you would recover, and here you are.”

  “Yeah.” I blow out a long breath, watching as it stirs the fire somewhat. The meat sizzling on Dovik’s pan smells delicious, and the faint aura of pale green magic I see emanating from it is foreign to me. Not that I feel the need to snatch the meal from the man. Hundreds of pounds of cooked monster meat still lingers in my storage ring, as fresh and warm as the moment we cooked it. “Illigar still won’t let me fight tomorrow.”

  Jess stops polishing her blade for a moment, looking over. “He won’t? I can understand if it were someone else, but you…”

  “You recover quickly,” Jor’Mari finishes for her, staying somewhat vague. I think that only Dovik knows the source of my ability to recover as quickly as I do, but at this point, Jess and Jor both know that I don’t stay down for long.

  The childish anger comes back to me, a desire to complain about the unfairness of being left out of the offensive push, especially after Illigar already promised to include me in it more than a week ago. Despite how good I know it would feel to bitch and whine about it, I should be better than that. This bunch of adventurers might not be an army, but we are working together as a force to wipe out a dangerous threat to this duchy. I am just a small part of that, just some silver-rank girl that barely has any experience in an operation like this.

  I might be a competent fighter, and I might have value due to my ability to disenchant monster corpses at scale, but Illigar the Sage does not strike me as a man who would keep me around if I complained too much. My mind keeps returning to the battle, the feeling of inadequacy that grew over the hours of the morning.

  The worst part is knowing that my feelings are stupid, prideful, and just downright bad. It was watching Jess cut apart termite after termite down on the valley floor while my blasts of dragonfire did practically nothing that really stuck in my craw. She is supposed to be a guardian, someone who attracts the attention of monsters and helps allow those with more offensive abilities to deal the decisive blows. But today, she had done incredibly well, almost catching up to Dovik in terms of termites that she took down, all while keeping others safe. I recognize the burning in my gut, the heat behind my ears, as a sick sort of envy. I’m not that good of a friend, am I?

  “That is the standard for anyone that allows themselves to collapse from mana exhaustion,” I say. “It’s what I get.”

  “Well, enjoy the day off,” Jess says, hugging my shoulder.

  I squeeze her back for a moment before pulling away. I shouldn’t be jealous of Jess. I should be happy for her. The woman is amazing, and she proved that again today. There is a happiness that I feel thinking about how she handled herself today, seeing the small smile she wears as she polishes her weapon, but there is also envy.

  I smile despite the feelings and, on a whim, lean back against Jor’Mari. The man stiffens for a moment as we touch, but then he stills and finds a more comfortable spot to lean back against the rock behind him. It does a lot to get rid of the feelings churning inside. Jess spares the two of us a glance before looking back to her work, while Dovik doesn’t even bother looking up.

  Whatever is going on between Jor’Mari and me is the first time I’ve ever felt anything like it. There had been a boy once before, years ago now, but that never went anywhere past kissing behind the church. Not that Jor and I have done too much more than kissing either, but it feels different than just some attraction. He said he wanted to try for something serious. Just that want of his helps somehow. I can’t explain it, but it does.

  “Cook me something,” I say to Dovik.

  “Cook you something?” he looks between me and the meat on his pan. “I don’t cook. Jess is our cook.”

  “Busy,” Jess grunts.

  “If you don’t cook, what do you call it that you are doing with that bug meat?” Jor’Mari asks.

  “This…This is just heating it up,” Dovik says.

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  “I’m sad and hungry, Dovik. Don’t you want to help me out? Don’t you want to make your friend not sad and hungry anymore?” I complain.

  “Not particularly,” he says.

  “I have spices, though,” I say, pulling a shaker of salt from my inventory and waving it back and forth. I can’t even remember where I got it from.

  He looks over at me for a moment. “I suppose salt is a spice. Fine, you can have some.”

  I toss over the shaker and another package of meat. “Cook this up for me. It is from a strange bee; seems tasty.” The meat is actually from a battlefield in the last few weeks, but I didn't have time to cook it myself. Since I didn’t extract it with my disenchanting ability, I don’t think that it breaks the contract I made with Illigar. The strange and exotic mana inside the meat was just too much for me to resist, and my mageblade showed its true worth in allowing me to butcher the big monster without having to get my hands soaked in its sticky blood. The mana inside of it isn’t enough to grant me the affix, but every journey begins with a first step.

  “Strange humans,” Jor’Mari says, resting his arm on my shoulder as he relaxes backward.

  “You said it.”

  The night spins on. Dovik kicks my boot to wake me from my nap when he brings my food over. I have to say, he was right; it is barely cooked.

  Dovik leaves to go take a rotation of scouting with the few in the army responsible for keeping track of the enemy. Over the last few weeks, he seems to have found a real passion for information gathering. It’s a strange thing to have passion about, but everyone should have something, I guess.

  Jor’Mari retires to his bed almost as soon as Dovik leaves. The man is a terror on the battlefield, but his abilities leave him exhausted.

  I take his spot against the rock, leaning into the heat his body left on the bare stone once he is gone, listening to the methodic hiss of cloth on steel as Jess works to clean not only her weapon from Dovik’s sword. The soft scratching soothes something in me, lulling me as I lay back against the stone so much that I don’t even catch when she starts humming to herself. Cracking open an eye, I watch her for a time as she takes her pleasure in the simple act of maintaining a weapon. She is so pretty. Despite all the filth from the day of monster-slaying and the disarray of her clothing, there is something soft and sweet in her smile.

  “This reminds me of when I was little,” she says. Her eyes flick up for a moment, meeting my own, before she looks back to polishing the blade.

  “You cleaned monster guts off swords a lot when you were a little girl?”

  Her smile widens, but her eyes take on a far-off look as she runs the oiled cloth over the blade. “A few times actually. When I was good, my father would let me clean his sword. We had to sneak into his warshed; girls aren’t allowed into a man’s warshed. That isn’t what I was thinking about, though.”

  She looks up toward the rising moon, the distant look in her eyes focusing on a memory of long ago. “This reminds me of when me and Sasha would go hunting in the wood for Melon Scamps.”

  “Sasha was your brother’s daughter, right?” Jess has told me about the girl before, older than Jess by a year and her best friend since they were little. Jess carries some sadness about the girl, something she won’t tell me about, but I sense it all the same. I don’t think Sasha is around anymore.

  Jess nods. “We went often in the summer. There is a big pond behind my brother’s house, and we would camp out there for days, waiting for the Melon Scamps to come around and try to get into the garden. One time, Sasha even snuck her mother’s ax from their house, sure that we were going to find them that night.” She laughs. “We got in so much trouble for that.”

  “Did you ever find any?”

  She looks at me, the rasp of the rag on the sword dying. “My brother told me when I was ten that there are no such things as Melon Scamps. Melon walls can be a bit dangerous, and people make up stories about little monsters that scrawl up and down the vine walls to keep children away. Sasha never found out.”

  The fire crackles between us, the intermittent popping the only sound as Jess stares into her reflection in the blade. “We always said that we would hunt monsters when we got older, like our mothers did when they were young. She would have loved this, spending nights outside under the stars, exhausted from a day of pitting our bodies against the creatures out in the dark.” Jess opens her mouth to say more but sighs instead, staring down at the weapon as her hands still.

  I break the silence after a moment. “This is actually pretty nice, better than the camps we made when I adventured with my brother.”

  “You don’t talk much about that,” she says.

  “Well, I don’t feel like I helped much. I was just a bit character in my brother’s story, the little sister who tagged along on his daring adventures, there to take care of the monster bodies when he was done doing the heroic part. We never ended up having to go further than twenty miles from Westgrove, but there were plenty of nights we had to spend out beneath the stars.

  “The land there is awful for it, too wet. If you didn’t leave incense burning inside your tent at night, you would wake up covered in mosquitoes. One time, Kapin managed to set his tent on fire while he was asleep. We woke up to the smell of burning hair, the log he used as a pillow having caught light and set his hair on fire. The man was bald for weeks before a little fuzz began to grow back. My brother teased him about it mercilessly, and he wasn’t allowed incense after that.”

  “It sounds like it was a lot of fun,” Jess says.

  I find myself smiling despite everything, staring down at my hands. “It really was.”

  “You still need to show me your home,” she says. “I want to see you return to that little town as the hotshot silver-rank adventurer you are now, show off to all those people who only know you as Halford’s sister.”

  “That would be fun,” I say. “Then, you will show me your home after.”

  Jess nods, turning back to polish Dovik’s sword. “That’s a deal. It has been a long time since I’ve been home. I wonder how things have changed.”

  “Well, if it is anything like when I went home, things will be mostly the same but different at the same time.”

  “Not confusing at all,” she says. “It will be nice.”

  The night passes, the rasp of Jess’s cleaning against the steel lulling me slowly to sleep. Galea wakes me at the time I told her to, still in the dead of night. The fire burns low in front of me, and I find a blanket has been lain over me. In the dim and shifting light, the silhouettes of two of my friends slowly move to rhythmic breathing inside their tents. Dovik is still out working on helping gather information for the raid tomorrow. I slip away from the circle of light as silently as I can, heading to a wide area where I can retrieve my ship from my inventory.

  Illigar might have banned me from fighting tomorrow, but the man at least gave me another job to do when I persisted. If I am quick about it, I might finish in a day or two. There should be time to join the real raid on the hive as the army presses into the actual structure. I would hate to miss that.

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