“Rheinfrets”, Gref warned his brother, who was still finishing off the last kobold. These rheinfrets looked very different from the herd we saw earlier. These were purple-black in color and had red eyes that burned with rage. They were also much higher in level than the previous herd.

  “I will take one for a run”, Leos said, as he took off sprinting deeper into the forest – one of the rheinfrets close on his heels.

  “I’ll distract the bigger one on the left. Gref, climb up a tree. You can’t outlast all three of them”, Sera shouted, before nocking an arrow.

  I didn’t wait around for instructions, as I sent a Luminous blast at the rheinfret nearest to me. Since the beast was still not close enough, my spell didn’t find its target, but it still got the beast’s attention – and that of the rheinfret behind it.

  Gref used the small protrusions on the trunk of a tree to lift himself up to a high branch. Sera was all grace and technique earlier, but this was an exhibition of strength. I thought back to my own attempts and frowned. “A common fallacy to attribute greater significance to a trivial activity – how one climbed a tree couldn’t possibly reveal anything more about a person” , I told myself.

  Sera’s arrow found the target’s neck. She cursed. “It’s merely skin-deep. My arrows can’t cut through its hide deep enough”. With a shake of its head, the rheinfret dislodged the arrow from its neck and continued to rush towards her tree.

  “I might have something for this in the shop”, she said. Her eyes went distant and unfocused after that.

  Taking a leaf from her book, I looked at my own skill shop. The shop still didn’t show any intermediate level skills or higher. I didn’t see any point in wasting skill points on dark magic spells, so my search was restricted to spells needing a light or null primer. From my earlier window shopping, I knew there were perhaps two spells that warranted a closer look.

  The first one was a spell named Prismatic divide. It was a support spell that could be used in conjunction with other light attack spells. Prismatic divide raised a prism in the path of a light spell. The prism would split a single light spell into several chromatic spells, but there was no way to precisely direct the chromatic attacks that came out at the other end. It was a highly situational spell. It would be deadly against a large army that was closely packed together, but incredibly wasteful otherwise.

  It would even work with my luminous blast spell, creating several chromatic blasts as output of the prism. But the prismatic divide spell required active focus to keep the prism alive, while the mage called forth a second light spell to pass through the prism. Perhaps there was a tortured soul out there who had enough willpower for something like that. Certainly not me. I still didn’t have enough willpower to keep the prism active if I was attacked. Two spells at once was beyond unthinkable.

  The second option was the spell Blinding radiance. It would turn the caster into a source of blinding light. I didn’t think either of the spells would help me in my current predicament, and I decided against getting them.

  “Power shot”, I suddenly heard Sera shout, before releasing her arrow. “An improvement, but not deep enough. I was saving up for a half-primer too…aargh!”, she cursed again in frustration.

  My own solution to get past their tough hides was to let the Luminous blast spell slowly build up in intensity to reach a crescendo. So, I readied the spell for longer this time, letting the spell gather force with each passing moment – a concentrated blast of light to cut through that tough exterior. At least, that was the plan, until the entire tree shook and the spell I was building up for a while fizzled out to nothing. The rheinfrets were trying to bring down the tree.

  “Just chip away bit by bit”, Gref instructed Sera.

  That suggestion would’ve gone swimmingly if such a thing as a tree could have posed any sort of a challenge to a rheinfret. The bigger rheinfret was hell-bent on uprooting Sera’s tree, which was coming apart at its roots now – the entire tree slanted to its right. I had to get Sera out of there.

  Seeing that Sera’s tree was doing its best impression of the leaning tower, the other rheinfrets abandoned my tree and turned their focus to hers. With their attention no longer on me, I was free to patiently charge up a Luminous blast for more devastating effects. How many such attacks would it take to bring down even one of these beasts? Half a dozen? More? How much time did Sera have before her tree went down and she was up against all three of them? I had some tough decisions to make.

  I had been a human for just over two days – not nearly enough time for self discovery. I didn’t know whether I preferred coffee or tea. A night owl or an early bird? A dog lover or a cat’s servant? I didn’t have answers to any of these, but there was one thing I was certain beyond doubt – I wasn’t someone who would sacrifice a comrade for my own survival. I sent spell after spell, with little preparation time, hoping that would distract the rheinfrets.

  Attempting to shoot down arrows from a shaking tree, while trying not to fall over, was proving to be exceedingly difficult. Sera fumbled as the tree shook and she almost dropped her bow.

  “Forget about attacking them. Just hang on to the tree”, Gref shouted to Sera.

  He had all that free time up there and very little to do, while Sera and I did all the work. ‘Maybe, use that scheming brain of yours to come up with a plan to get us out of this pickle’, I muttered. And where had Leos run off to ? Taking the enemy on a sightseeing tour when we needed him?

  I had to act. I needed something to distract the rheinfrets long enough for Sera to get away from there. I had the shadow mist spell, but then I would get labelled as a demon. I turned my attention back to the skill shop and the two spells I was looking at. The choice had to be Blinding radiance. Shadow mist was good for diversion, much like the Blinding radiance spell, but once the mist dissipated, it didn’t leave any lasting effects. That was where the blinding radiance spell had an advantage – it would keep the rheinfrets blind for a while, even if the spell was dismissed. I cursed at the unforeseen expenses, much like Sera did, and paid the asking price for the spell, all the while hoping there would be no buyer’s remorse.

  I looked towards the tree Gref had claimed for himself. “I’m about to do something stupid. You better be there to shield me when the time comes”.

  But that was only the second part of my plan. The first part needed me to climb down a tree. I slowly walked closer to the trunk of the tree and then stretched my arms wide enough to hug the tree, and then, I wrapped my legs around the trunk. I was hoping for a slow descent down the tree, a leisurely slide down, though in reality, things went down a tad faster than I thought. One moment I was all wrapped around a tree, and the next moment I was lying flat on my back, staring at the blue sky.

  Getting up painfully, I cast the Blinding radiance spell, which unleashed a wave of light. My immediate vicinity was bathed in bright light – an aura of blinding light with me at its center. At the very edge of this aura , the light coalesced into streaks of color that danced around in the night sky. I didn’t think it was my magic that did that. I remembered the street lamps in Palomp doing the same – the ghostly lights that circled outside the glass encasing of a magic lamp. It was the inherent property of light born out of magic. If the spell held up long enough, the light condensed into strands of color at the periphery of the spell’s reach.

  The rheinfrets spun in place, chasing after the dancing lights overhead. The beasts were just outside the radius of my radiance spell, but still waiting around Sera’s tree. They paid no attention to her or the tree now, briefly distracted by the dancing lights. I had to get closer to them to let the blinding aura wash over them. That meant getting closer to Sera too.

  “Keep your eyes closed, Sera”, I yelled, as I approached the tree. I was hoping to blind the creatures long enough to let Sera climb down the tree unnoticed. What actually transpired exceeded my expectations – the light didn’t just blind the creatures. I suspected it mildly stung their skins to the point of annoyance, because they fled in all directions trying to escape it – crashing into the trees and shrubs as they did. Some spells had hidden secondary effects not covered in System’s descriptions? I noticed that Sera wasn’t in any such discomfort.

  Sera tried to make her way down the leaning trunk with her eyes closed. That proved difficult even for Sera, and she slid down the tree without control. I rushed to her side and offered her my hand to help her up. I linked arms with her as I tried to guide her away from there.

  But Gref wasn’t willing to leave behind the spoils of war. He rushed towards one of the kobold corpses. You were supposed to shield us!

  “It’s not worth it. I can’t keep this spell going if I am attacked or if I lose focus ”, I shouted at him in frustration. He finally saw reason and gave up the idea.

  The blinded rheinfrets struggled to find the source of the spell, one even running off in the opposite direction. Gref kept his distance from me to stay outside the range of the blinding aura. There was still no sign of Leos or the rheinfret that went after him.

  My foot suddenly got caught in the undergrowth. I briefly lost my footing and my focus along with it. My spell threatened to disappear, but then something gave me a helping hand and kept the spell going without me. Once I was over my initial shock, I immediately took back control of my spell. What was that? Did the system lend me a hand? No, that wasn’t it. There was no time to dwell on it. We had to get as far from the lake as possible – fleeing for our lives with nothing to show for our day’s efforts.

  Once we got further away, I dismissed the skill. I stopped Gref and asked, “What of Leos? Will he go look for us at the lake?”

  “He will find his way back to us”. If he was worried about his brother, he wasn’t showing it.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Just then, there was movement up ahead and the haggard figure of Leos came into view.

  “Look who's back, just when everything is finished”, Sera joked.

  Gref’s eyes glanced past the approaching figure of his brother, searching for something. Finally satisfied that there was no beast in pursuit, Gref queried his brother, “And what of the one that was enamored enough to elope with you?”

  “I managed to lose the beast”, Leos confirmed.

  “Yah, good thinking – mother wouldn’t have approved”. Gref went to hug his brother.

  “Prettier than any girl you ever brought home, brother”, Leos replied.

  Sera groaned. “Can we save this silly banter for the tavern – when we’ve put some distance between us and the herd?”

  The sound of stomping hooves and the sight of parting leaves announced the arrival of the rheinfret that had gone after Leos.

  “I thought you said you managed to lose it”, Sera complained.

  Leos shrugged. “Looks like it found us again”.

  “Quite smitten with you, that one. And has the thick skin to put up with your nonsense. I say she’s a keeper, brother”, Gref quipped.

  Gref rushed to meet the rheinfret’s charge. The rheinfret locked horns with his shield, but Gref held it there.

  “Don’t just stand around admiring”, he yelled at us, as he was slowly pushed back by the beast.

  Oh right – guilty. I began preparing my light attack spell. There wasn’t an immediate threat in the vicinity to break my concentration, so I took my sweet time charging up the spell to its fullest. Leos danced around with his blade, making shallow cuts.

  “So much for the foolproof plan”, Leos muttered.

  “Don’t blame the plan when you go running off on your own”. Gref wasn’t going to let anyone criticize the plan.

  The rheinfret separated itself from the shield and began to slowly back away. Gref tried to catch his breath, grateful for the short pause.

  “It’s trying to switch targets”, I shouted out a warning. The rheinfret tried to sidestep the shieldbearer to make a run for the archer.

  Gref roared and quickly covered the distance needed to put himself in its path. For a brief moment, it looked like he glowed. Was that his cover skill in action?

  Since the beast had a head start, Gref didn’t manage to meet it head-on, but tackled into its side with the shield. The momentum of its charge and the impact of the shield was enough to make it lose balance. It tumbled into a roll and laid flat on its back . I didn’t need further invitation to send a concentrated blast of light aimed directly at its softer underbelly. It opened up a long wound, which Leos was there to exploit at a moment’s notice. He slid the sword deep in through the cut as the beast wailed in agony. It didn’t take long after that. Sera rained down arrows on it, and I sent a couple more quick attacks of my own. The beast finally went down when Leos targeted the open wound again. Then, something strange happened – the beast disintegrated into motes of purple-black light and all that was left of it was a yellow crystal. Gref crouched down to pick it up. “Not a bad haul”, he muttered.

  “Sera, what just happened? That rheinfret –”, I paused, searching for the right words. There was no way for me to explain in words, so I went with a hand gesture that best described something exploding into thousands of purple-black bubbles of light.

  Sera sighed. “Sometimes I think that you really might be a princess. Does Seleca valley not have miasma nodes and dungeons that spawn monsters?”

  This sounded like a question that had no good answers. “Eh..no?”

  Wait, that was a rhetorical question from her, wasn't it?

  Sera’s eyes nearly popped out of her head. “What possessed you to leave such a wonderful place and come here?”

  I merely shrugged. Sera stared at me in disbelief for a few more seconds, before finally explaining, “The kobolds we fought earlier were merely corrupted by miasma. Miasma-touched, as some call it. But these rheinfrets are born out of pure, undiluted miasma. Their purple-black shade and those flaming red eyes are a dead give-away – miasma given life and shape. When such a miasma-born beast is slain, they – ”. She didn’t finish that sentence. Instead, she teased me with the same hand gesture I used for an exploding rheinfret.

  She continued, “Miasma drives all monsters mad with bloodlust and they attack anything on sight. The outlying villages are in constant danger, which is why the guild sends adventurers after monsters”.

  Once he had given the yellow crystal a good look over, Gref signaled that we should get moving again. We couldn’t relax during our entire walk back through the forest, having to constantly look over our shoulders. We breathed a collective sigh of relief when we finally saw the meadow that bordered the forest. It was unlikely the rheinfrets would chase us that far.

  Our pace was also brought down considerably by Sera, who was trying to rest her head on my shoulders for a ‘walking nap’.

  I tried to gently push her away. “Go rest on a brute. They exist for this very purpose”.

  “No, let me be. Those Powershots were quite taxing”, she protested with a pout and went back to sleep. I grumbled at being made the pack mule. Why was it always the mage?

  I focused on the blinking red dot at the corner of my vision – a system notification. I had leveled up from my earlier fight, and was halfway to the next. I was broken out of my reverie by Gref, who was barking out orders at everyone. What was going on?

  “Princess, listen up. Those are spectral slimes. They can only be killed if their cores are shattered. Aim for that red sphere buried deep inside the slime”, he explained.

  As I focused my eyes on the far side of the meadow, I saw some pale blue, shapeless creatures bouncing up and down. They were hopping happily towards us. When I looked around, I found that the others were already in their battle stance.

  An arrow whizzed through the air to hit the lead slime. It was a perfect hit and the core audibly cracked.

  Leos stuck to a much more restricted role than before. He tried to stay close to the party, in case Gref got overwhelmed by their numbers. This meant that the onus to reduce their numbers rested primarily on the ranged units. I didn’t have Sera’s aim, so my best bet was to send a concentrated attack to blast the entire slime from existence. That would mean longer spell preparation time and fewer attacks.

  A sword cut through a slime that got close, but failed to make contact with the core, and the slime continued on as if nothing had happened. I sent a Luminous blast in its direction to finish the job.

  A blood-curdling shriek echoed through the meadow that made my hair stand on end. Every instinct told me to flee. I had to get out of there – that was the only thought in my mind. The high pitched shriek was still ringing in my ears. I brought my hands to my ears to somehow make it stop. In my mind, the appearance of slimes morphed into grotesque beasts that opened their maws to devour me. I needed to run, but my legs wouldn’t move. I simply stood there, struck by abject terror, unable to take a single step. The world spun, my entire body shivered and I collapsed onto the ground. My vision went black soon after.

  I wasn’t sure how long I stayed unconscious, but when I came to, I found the party in the midst of a heated argument. My eyes didn’t adjust well to the sudden intrusion of light, so I continued to lie there with my eyes closed.

  “She is a liability, Mina”. Those were the first words I heard. It sounded like Leos was the speaker. I had a splitting headache – words weren’t making a lot of sense.

  “You saw her struggle to get up a tree. Her physical attributes are nothing to write home about, and don’t get me started on her mental defense. Those slimes were easy targets. What good is a mage if she can not withstand a basic mind attack? She is just a sheltered noblewoman, lucky to be born with a primer”, a second male voice said. Those were harsh words, Gref. This conversation was about me, wasn’t it? Don’t talk about me like I’m not in the same room – or in the same meadow, out cold. What else had he said? A basic mind attack? So, that was what it was – I was taken out by a mind attack. I recalled being terrified to the core – an attack that frightened its target then? Thinking was hard with a raging headache.

  “But we can protect her. You can shield us both. Between magic and steel, I can not conceive of a problem we won’t have answers to”, Sera replied. It looked like Sera was the only one in my corner.

  “Not if it gets the rest of us killed”. Gref, ever the pragmatist.

  Sera tried to appeal to that pragmatic side of his and tried to make him see there was value in keeping me. “She has a primer. We just need to help shore up her defenses. It’s an investment, Gref. How many parties in Palomp can say they have a mage?”

  “As if she wouldn’t leave us when a better opportunity comes. We will be taking all the risk, and someone else will reap all the rewards”, Leos countered. My party still did not notice that I was no longer unconscious.

  “She risked her life to save mine – and maybe yours too”. Poor Sera – she was still hung up on that life debt. She continued to staunchly defend me.

  Gref came up with more justifications. “Letting her go is as much for her sake, as it is for ours”.

  Sera scoffed. “Next you will try to convince me we are doing her a favor”.

  “Let’s not throw away everything we’ve built for someone we just met”, Leos tried to reason with her.

  I didn’t want to put Sera in a position where she was forced to make a choice, and it looked like that was where the conversation was going. So, I stopped pretending I was still unconscious.

  “I know when I have overstayed my welcome. I’ll be on my way then”, I said, as I groggily got up to my feet.

  “Y–you are awake…”, Sera said, unable to look into my eyes.

  “We won’t abandon you out here. We can take you back to the town”, Leos said, trying to assuage his guilt.

  “I can find my own way”, I stated coldly. It was just false bravado. If I ran into more of those spectral monsters on the way, I had no way to defend myself. But my pride wouldn’t let me take any more of their help.

  I was kicked out of the party, dumped on the first date. Now, I would say that I took the news exceedingly well, that I accepted things gracefully and amicably. As part of this amicable parting of ways, I walked up to Gref and told him exactly what I thought, “It isn’t much of a plan if the full extent of your plan is to hole up in a tree. That’s the broad brushstrokes of a plan at best”.

  Gref almost raised his hands to protest, but I wasn’t done. This time, I directed my ire towards both the brothers. “And that constant banter of yours – tone it down, will you? It’s exhausting to listen to and not even funny half the time”. From the corner of my eye, I could see Sera trying to hold back a laugh, while the two brothers stood in stunned silence.

  Yes, gracefully and amicably. Satisfied how I had handled the whole thing, I briskly walked away without turning back. I didn’t wait for their response. Why would I? I had managed to get in the last word. It was time to leave – before anyone could even think of a comeback.