Forty minutes later, he and Tilde were standing in front of a single cab Ford Ranger, the truck already loaded with equipment for the dive. Victor had brought his pride and joy, a long, heavy walnut staff with three Artifact Tokens invested into it. Why a staff? Because he was a wizard, and wizards had staffs. Granted, he was one of maybe a dozen still rocking the classic staff look, but he was a purist, damn it. Wizards were meant to have staffs. Period.

  "Cool stick, bro," said Ryan. He was shirtless and clearly not enthused to see the girl he'd been flirting with had brought a male friend along.

  Victor shrugged. "Never too old for a good stick."

  Jed, a tall, bearded youth who couldn't have been older than twenty, laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. "Amen to that. Sorry about the truck. Woulda brought my sister's Jeep had I known there'd be four of us."

  "That's alright," said Victor, climbing into the bed with accustomed ease. He'd done this all the time back when he worked landscaping. "I could use a nap."

  He woke up under the boughs of a century-old maple tree, having somehow slept through the offroad portion of their drive. That was probably a sign that he was in no condition to be here, but it was too late now. Hopefully, Tilde had paid attention to where they were because he couldn't tell this portion of woods from any other.

  Thankfully, there wasn't a long walk to their destination. The slough, a long, narrow body of still water, had been selected for its ease of access from the trail they'd driven down. Victor had almost allowed himself to believe that would mean he'd been catastrophizing again – surely no great evil would be lurking so close to a public trail, or something like that. But that changed the moment he saw the slough.

  It didn't smell of that fetid, loamy rot that wetlands sometimes had, but it was black from the depth and algae. There were old beer cans in the reeds, which, again, should have been a relief. If the locals felt this place was safe enough to come party and drink by, then it was far less likely to hold any hidden monsters. But Victor and his damnable Investigation Skill couldn't help but notice that there was not one can there that could have been made within the past twenty years. They were all of the type and branding you'd have seen in the Seventies or Eighties, and that implied the locals had actively stopped partying here.

  "You sure you two don't want to poke your heads into the cave? Ryan and I are going in with our drysuits. We got wetsuits and spare tanks for y'all. The entrance is deep and wide enough that it's only technically a cave dive 'cause of the overhead, but you can see the light from the top the whole time, and you aren't like to accidentally enter the cave proper."

  Tilde gazed at the dark water with abject horror. "You're insane."

  Ryan laughed. "You're going to jinx us. Well, it's your loss. Keep the fire hot for us, won't you." He turned to him with a smirk. "You can get a fire going, can't you, Doc?" Victor supposed Nathaniel West had a certain presentability that belied his own shithead roots. This man couldn't possibly guess at the number of music festivals he'd snuck into in his life.

  Victor leaned on his staff. The nap had done little to relieve his weariness. "I'm going to have to insist on getting your emergency contacts before you go in."

  He scowled. "Now you really are going to jinx us. Shit, you don't look old enough to be my dad, but you sure as hell act like it."

  Jed shook his head and gave Victor an apologetic look. "Nah, you're right, Doc. Can't hurt to have someone with half a brain around. We really do appreciate you and Tilde coming out. Ryan and I are pretty safe with this shit, but it's nice to have some surface backup."

  Victor didn't think he could disagree with that risk assessment more, but he'd been a dumbass at their age as well. "Can I ask you seriously what you get out of this?" He knew he wasn't going to be able to talk them out of it, but he was intrigued. Why, on this Earth specifically, did men feel the need to do things like this?

  Ryan answered, "It's magical down there, man. Closest thing you'll get to seeing an alien world."

  Closest they'd get, maybe; there were a thousand ways for him and Tilde to see and even visit alien planets and dimensions. And, of course, Victor was literally an alien visitor to this strange and bizarre world.

  The sun was low by the time the boys got into the water, and it would be dark by the time they'd be out. They were using rebreathers instead of regulators, which they explained would allow them to recycle their air so that they could potentially dive for hours uninterrupted. Victor did end up building them a fire while they got ready, cheating a little by using Sympathetic Astronomy. He found a piece of vaguely sunburst-shaped bark, placed it underneath some kindling, and tied it to the Heavenly Sol, causing it to erupt into bright white flames before disintegrating into ash.

  Sympathetic magic involved the tying of two objects and/or people together, acting on one to affect the other. Sympathetic Astrology was much the same, except the practitioner used the cosmic bodies in place of an item. The vast and layered associations that the stars and planets held within the Collective Unconsciousness allowed a wizard to work spells that were far beyond your typical Sympathy. Drs. Serrano, an old pair of married gays, for example, tied their love for one another to the moon and were able to whisper words to the sky at night to communicate at immense distances with barely any expenditure of energy. Victor wasn't much of a romantic, but he found that quite charming.

  Sympathetic Astronomy, a newer branch of magic and his and Tilde's current focus, bore almost no resemblance to Sympathetic Astrology. Instead of tying something to the metaphorical position that the planets and stars held in the human mind, you tied them to their physical properties and movements. Most of his peers at St. Christopher's looked down at the field, viewing it as little more than telekinesis on steroids, but Victor saw the potential for subtler workings in the magic. Stars warped space-time and forged worlds; they were like Gods except without all the need for bowing and scraping. With enough time and/or Experience, he was sure he could find a way to break the magic system of this universe open calling on their power.

  Jed and Ryan were giddy with excitement when they were finally ready to get into the water. Their joy was pure and boyish, and therefore incredibly ominous for the situation. It occurred to him, watching Ryan flirtily splash Tilde's feet while waiting on Jed to double check his buoyancy, that he could have surreptitiously sabotaged their equipment to scuttle their catastrophic journey before it launched. But, he supposed that would only postpone their adventure, and he'd mentally promised his friends not to give in to his natural urge to procrastinate.

  Jed gave him a thumbs up. "Alright, Doc, Tilde, give us at least three hours before you call anyone, yeah? Don't want to worry my Mom."

  "Get some dogs on the fire 'round two and half hours, too. We'll be starving!"

  The moment their heads had disappeared into the depths, Victor started ruffling through their belongings, finding the truck keys and throwing them to Tilde, and took a large knife to keep on his person. All he had was his small pocketknife with him, and it was only really good for carving seals on wax and brandishing at Fae. "We have under three hours to prepare, and we'll be using every minute. Jog to the truck at least twice and make any markings you need to. Chances are you'll be doing it at a sprint in the dark. I'm going to scrounge up as many flat rocks as possible. After that, I want your help prepping them for linear displacement."

  "To use as projectiles? I thought we were planning to run if anything happened."

  "A wizard is only as good as he is prepared," he said sagely. Tilde looked out of her depth. Her leg was tapping nervously, and she was fumbling with the keys as though she'd never used one before. Victor thought he should probably comfort her or something, say something inspiring. "It's chill. We've got this." Eh, good enough. He'd tried. "Let me know if you see anyone or anything standing in the shadows off the trail. It's fairy season. Did you bring a knife for your belt?"

  Her face paled. "Should I have?"

  He tossed his pocketknife to her. It bounced off her chest to the ground. "Clip it to your belt loops and make sure it can be seen. They prefer soft targets. Remind me to give you the spiel later."

  Victor made a few trips back and forth from a nearby creek until he'd found as many rocks large and flat enough for him to draw sigils on as he could. He probably wouldn't be able to transcribe all of them before the sunset and he wasn't desperate enough to try by firelight, but that was fine. He could still linearly displace them without the sigil circles, he just wouldn't get to add any Dice and extra Damage to his Attacks. Also, if he was still firing off stones in a fight after he'd exhausted the ones he'd marked, then they were probably dead anyway.

  Using chalk he'd brought with him, he got to work. Like any self-respecting wizard worth his salt, Victor had invented his sigil system himself and, if he said so himself, it was very fucking cool. Each sigil began with him drawing eight different numbers and then connecting them with lines. The thickness and style of each line, curved or straight, dashed or doubled, marked with arrows, etc., represented a different mathematical function. Since the fight, if it happened, would be at night, the functions would produce descriptions of Earth's moon. Going clockwise from the center and applying each function to each of the eight numbers produced the distance between the moon's poles, and counterclockwise produced its approximate total mass to their best estimates. Once linearly displaced, the stones would move in a straight line at a fraction of the speed at which the moon moved through space. It would be devastating.

  Eventually, Victor wanted to make the sigils even more layered, with complicated interlinked functions that could describe dozens of the properties of the cosmic body he was calling on, but he was aways off from that. He would need to sink a lot more Dice into Physics and Knowledge (Astronomy) before he'd be comfortable playing around with those, and currently, he was heavily relying on Tilde for both Skills. He could always leave it to a mix of Feats, he supposed, but it felt risky to rely on his interdimensional captors for the fundamental basis of his magical arts.

  Once Tilde was back from preparing her escape route, he had her crouch by him as he worked. Her help and competence gave him an additional two Dice to prep the stones. Victor got twenty-seven done before nightfall with an average of two extra Successes on each, which, because of his newest Major Feat, would give him two base damage and Dice whenever he made his Attacks with prepared weapons.

  Between the sigils and his fancy new staff, he felt strangely at peace as the sun disappeared behind the hills of the Ozarks. All that was left to do was to place each stone and keep a vigilant eye on both the water and their surroundings. The woods around Crucifixion were never truly safe, and the amount of ambient magic he was circulating through the stones would act like a beacon for curious supernaturals. Granted, most wouldn't dare run up on a wizard openly preparing for a fight, but there were presumably morons like Ryan and Jed on both sides of the Veil.

  At the two-hour mark, just as twilight faded into night proper, he had them stop, sit, and rest. The last actual fight he'd gotten into had been at age twenty at a party he'd crashed. After, when he was throwing up and cradling his concussed skull outside, he realized that if he had been even five percent calmer at the start of the confrontation, he'd have probably been fine. Panic and dipshittery had cooked him that night. How much of that frat party brawl would or even could apply here, he didn't know, but Victor thought he might as well try to learn something from it. That was supposed to be the point of mistakes.

  "Do you want to talk about it?" asked Tilde, breaking the silence. They were seated diagonally from each other, backs to the fire so that they wouldn't be blinded to threats. Tilde watched the woods and Victor the water.

  "Hm?"

  "You…seemed upset when I found you."

  "Ah. Don't worry about it. I just thought the panini needed extra salt."

  She laughed. "Dr. West, I feel like if you found me crying over a sandwich, you wouldn't let me get away with that excuse."

  He didn't respond, not actually sure how he'd handle that. The nice thing about having all of your friends in the same group, was that you could delegate those sorts of duties to those better equipped to deal with them. If someone was having a really hard time, the sort where they needed to talk about it, then they'd be better served by hitting up Cat, Davis, or Nasim than him. And, if those three were unavailable, then there was always Alan. His alien, buglike brain might not produce the most helpful advice, but he'd drop everything to try and help, and sometimes a lunatic's perspective was what you needed to break you out of a funk. At the very least, he could keep you occupied. Alan had a way of making something completely insane sound just reasonable enough that you had to seriously think of all the reasons he was wrong.

  Tilde sighed when it became clear that he wasn't going to say anything. "You know, when the Dean offered me a scholarship to come to magic university, I never pictured it would be like this. I thought there would be classes and seminars from wandering sages."

  "More robes," he added. "I get why we don't do the pointy hats, but wizards should wear robes. We're a university. That's, like, the one place you could get away with robes. And yet, no robes. Bummer."

  "Yeah! And you're practically the only one who walks around with a staff, too."

  "Another bummer. No goddamn sense of aesthetic here. Who's everybody trying to impress?"

  Tilde laughed. There was a long pause filled by the crackling of wood and the eerie sound of a distant whip-poor-will. "You know, I think that's most I've heard you say that wasn't about directly about magic." She added quickly, "Not that I'm not grateful, sorry. I was worried when they told me all the magic stuff would be guided self-study, but you've made it painless and super natural – no pun intended. A friend of mine told me her mentor only helps when she wants to learn something they're an expert in, but you've been helping me research stuff that's already in my field of study. She was pretty jealous when she heard. Thank you for that. I probably should have told you that earlier—"

  "Tilde," he stopped her.

  "Y-yes?"

  "You're raising a lot of death flags right now. It's elevating my heart rate."

  "Oh. Sorry. Wait, was that an anime reference!? Dr. West, oh my God, you watch anime? I always imagined you, I don't know, went home and listened to the Odyssey in the original Greek on vinyl or read physical copies of newspapers or something."

  "…not sure how to take that."

  She giggled. "Sorry. It was a compliment. In my mind, you're like the Platonic Ideal of a young wizard. This is like when you're a kid and you see your teacher for the first time outside of school. Honestly, I was surprised when I learned you live in graduate housing and not a tower somewhere."

  "God, if only. How I long for a tower."

  Tilde laughed again. Buried bachelor instincts told him that he absolutely had an in here if he chose to pursue it. "One day, Dr. West, one day. I believe in you. You'll have such a cool tower."

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  "Thank you, Tilde."

  "What would you put in it? What's your ideal wizard tower look like?" Was she…flirting with him? "Could you see room for a…telescope at the top for your mentee?"

  "There will be a strict dress code."

  "Naturally. Ro—" She stopped. A mass of bubbles had disturbed the still water. "What was that? I thought rebreathers didn't make bubbles."

  Victor stood up and began channeling magic into his staff, hair starting to float as his Inner Self sent tendrils up into the cosmos above. The one flaw of Sympathetic Astronomy was that because of the immense force and power of what they called on, it was flashier than most branches of magic. Soon, his eyes would cloud over with a starry blackness reflecting unreal constellations, and his skin would start faintly emitting moonlight.

  Jed broke the water's surface with chaotic splashes, clawing at the mud as he fought to escape back onto dry land as fast as possible. Victor stepped forward and extended his staff, letting the man grab hold of it, and planted his feet. This body of his had been relatively frail up until recently, but he'd used part of what he'd got from his friends' Challenges to shore up the more min-maxed elements of his build. It was all well and good to have Strength as a dump stat when you were in a Party; it was another thing entirely when you were on your own.

  Jed came to his feet with the help of the staff and dashed a few feet away from the water, collapsing and shaking. He tore off his mask, turned to face the slough, and began scooching away on his butt, trying and failing to untangle himself from his gear. His drysuit was shredded and his ankle had been twisted in completely the wrong direction. "Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ. Fuck. Fuck!"

  Victor gestured to Tilde with his head to inspect the man's injuries. Had he the Social Skills, he'd have tried to get Jed to tell him what he'd seen down in the cave, but he doubted he'd be able to crack the hysteria. Instead, he turned back to the water and continued to ready his magic. Genre dictated that this was not the end of this scene, certainly not after he'd stalled doing any adventuring for the first week.

  He could hear Tilde trying to calm the tall redneck down. "It's okay. It's okay, Jed. We're here. You're safe. You're going to be okay."

  Victor called behind him, not turning his gaze away from the slough for a second. "What are the nature of his injuries, Tilde?"

  "What? Oh, uh, he's – uh, he's bleeding from where his ankle is broken. There's what look like scrapes—"

  "It grabbed him! Oh, Jesus, it grabbed him!"

  Tilde continued over the man's shouting. "No, not scrapes, Dr. West! I think they're chemical burns."

  He stood silently for a few eternity-spanning minutes while Tilde attempted to treat a hysterical Jed behind him. Finally, a hand wearing Ryan's dive watch breached the surface and soon something with the exact appearance of the man began struggling its way out. Victor didn't buy it – too convenient, too out of form for the genre. Maybe because his nightmare earlier had primed him to fear doppelgangers, or maybe because the man himself had been a dick, but instead of rushing to 'Ryan' to help him, Victor first rolled an Investigation.

  Seven Successes worked at the speed of thought to fill in a picture of what was happening. The first thing Victor noticed and what his mind latched onto as the central contradiction, was that there had been no bubbles to announce Ryan's arrival. This was unlikely but not inherently impossible. Both men's rebreathers seemed to be intact, and the devices didn't produce bubbles, however, Jed had in his escape likely stirred up the silt and released trapped air there. In order for Ryan to have followed, he would have had to swim through the silt cloud without further disturbing it – incredibly difficult but theoretically doable. What did make it impossible, however, was that Ryan's mouthpiece had been dangling from his neck when he crested the water. That drew his eyes back to the watch and – yes! The dive watch was being worn upside down! There could be only two explanations: either Ryan had taken his watch off and put it back on wrong underwater, or something had taken it off him and put it on itself without fully understanding its purpose.

  "Holy shit, Ryan," said Jed, disbelieving. "Oh, fuck, man. I thought you were – Jesus, I thought…" He trailed off. His mind was recalling what it had seen in the cave and failing to justify what it was seeing now.

  The thing continued to lurch its way out of the water slowly. It extended a hand out to Jed, ignoring both him and Tilde completely, and made a gurgling sound that vaguely sounded like a plea for help.

  Not a selkie, then, thought Victor. You could bargain with selkies. Unfortunately, that meant he was likely dealing with a Foreign Entity, which was just the university's term for the broad category of horrors from either the distant reaches of space or from other dimensions and planes of existence. Without knowing from where it had come, he couldn't draw any conclusions on its strengths or weaknesses.

  "Fucking hell, Doc, help him!" Jed cried. "Tilde, come on!"

  "Uh, right." He heard Tilde stand up and start approaching. He held his staff out horizontally to stop her from passing. "Dr. West?"

  "That's not Ryan."

  Victor knew, intellectually, that he should lash out and take a shot at the thing while it was still trying at this game of its, but…fuck, he couldn't do it. Not yet, not while it still had a human face; forget his lack of confidence or general cowardice, decades of human empathy simply wouldn't allow him to attack it first. The even one percent chance that he was wrong kept him at bay.

  That was fine. He remembered the plan. They weren't Interceptors; they were merely here as observers and to go get these men help should the worst happen. Now, the worst had happened, and it was time to go get help. "Get under Jed's arms, Tilde." Victor took a few steps back, keeping his eyes on the monster. "We need to help him to the truck."

  "R-right. Come on, Jed. Let's get out of—oof!"

  Jed tossed the woman aside and surged to his feet, uncaring of his shattered ankle. "The fuck is wrong with you people!"

  "Stop!" yelled Victor. But unwilling to look away from the creature, there was little he could do to keep the man back.

  It happened so fast, his first Initiative roll. Victor heard the Dice of a Wits + Agility pool clatter, his jaw clenching as the taller, larger Jed ducked under his extended staff and dove to his knees to help his 'friend'. His Wits was very good, his Agility less so.

  As soon as Jed was a few feet from the thing, it snapped forward unnaturally, pushed from below by some limbs or section of it still lingering beneath the surface. Its hands grabbed Jed's outreached arm, pulping the muscle and flesh with a splurt of blood, and instantly started to fight to drag him back under the water. The man, an extreme athlete and good-old-boy, was fast and strong, but the pain and the shock left him helpless.

  "No."

  The word of power ripped out of Victor's chest without thought. Everything that made him him, the laziness, the indecision, the fear of commitment, that all seemed to vanish in an instant. His body moved without conscious effort, leveling his staff at the creature and sending a tendril of power to a stone at the water's edge.

  Dice Christ was with him tonight. On his first-ever combat roll and just happening to pick one of the stones he'd prepped the best, Victor scored a double critical on the Attack for a total of twelve Successes. In the space between seconds, Victor directed his extra Successes towards a mix of additional Damage and to cleaving the creature's arm in half. The stone blurred with a crack as it accelerated past the speed of sound in a line that intersected with its target's limb.

  The thing screeched as its arm was shredded apart at the elbow, emitting an unspeakable high-pitched grinding sound that brought with it a momentary wave of dizziness, the system subjecting him to an Endurance + Willpower to resist. Jed fell backward, 'Ryan's' hand still embedded fingers deep in his forearm.

  Its head shot to look at Victor for the first time. The skin of its face seemed to crinkle and bend in distinctly inhuman ways, but there was a hint of fear in the alien expression. Without another sound, the creature shot back into the water, Ryan's torso appearing to be dragged under by some great force.

  Later, when sharing a glass of brandy in Rakhmanov's office, Victor would be unable to explain why he did what he did next. As a self-identified coward, it was unlike him, he would admit. Though what he'd never be able to tell Rakhmanov was that for as much as he was a feckless and unprincipled do-nothing, Victor was still a Player Character, and a PC did not simply allow a villain to flee when he felt he had the advantage.

  Nasim had described the Feat Arcane Fury when helping him build his character as, "It's sick. You take some Corruption and basically go Super Saiyan for a scene."

  He'd undersold it.

  Victor turned his gaze up to the crescent moon and raised his staff above his head. Continuing to act mostly off instinct, he used his only Corruption-fueled Feat and Called on the Tides, his body elongating and stretching as the power began to flow into his Inner Self, reflecting the change in its material form. To any human observer, he must have appeared as monstrous as his enemy. His hair turned to a shock of silver, his arms and legs grew to half again their length, and the center of his face swirled as though wet paint on the canvas of reality. The leaves of trees rattled as their branches bent to get away from the wrathful wizard, and the Earth itself moaned a haunting sound in either ecstasy or fear for what it was about to witness.

  He slammed his staff onto the ground, and the slough erupted, a continuous geyser of stagnant water shooting a hundred feet or more into the air. With it came the creature and the horrid smell of rotting death, its school bus-length body cracking through branches both as it launched up and as it fell back to the ground with a wretched splat. It writhed in pain and anger, its screeching louder and more vicious. He saw it now in its entirety. It was a worm-like thing, the 'Ryan' part an asymmetrical growth jutting out of it like the lure of an angler fish. The smell of death came from its bottom two-thirds, which was a sticky weblike external intestine that had captured the actual Ryan as well as what looked like the skeletal remains of a few of deer. At the very base of the intestine, though it was hard to tell them apart, were the fleshy, bloated corpses of a number of other humans.

  Fighting through the dizziness, Victor launched again and again and again every single one of his prepared stones. Luckily, as an ambush water-based predator and not one of particular intelligence, the thing could do little once he'd beached it. It flailed with such strength that it knocked over a fully grown oak, but it was not fighting him. On the contrary, Arcane Fury imposed on it a Willpower test against fear, and now all it wanted to do was to be away from his wrath.

  In retrospect, once he was in the safety of his small studio apartment, Victor would count all the ways that the thing could have killed him if it had the sense to actually fight him. But it did not, and so it died, senseless, writhing, and in terror.

  He returned to his own senses at the same time that medical aid arrived to stabilize Jed; one of the Rewards for saving him had removed his Temporary Willpower Damage and thus brought him back from his fugue state. It was a truly gorgeous sight to return to - all those system notifications. Tilde was there too, cradling his head in her lap and rubbing his temples, but for all her beauty, she could not compare to Quest Rewards.

  By God, over a hundred Experience, he didn't even know what to think. A solid chunk of it was a multiplier for his first combat encounter with a Lesser Evil, but still, over a hundred Experience. It was glorious, and that was just the raw Experience; he'd earned Attributes, Skills, and Feats as well, and Bonuses, too, for rescuing Jed and having Tilde with him. According to the system notifications, he'd seriously impressed his mentee, to the point that she was now an Ally. Apparently, he could earn specific Ally Quest Rewards from furthering his relationship with her, which he probably should have considered a possibility prior to now.

  What a fucking idiot he'd been to try and replace adventuring with Deep Research. This changed everything. He'd doubled his Physics Dice just from the Ally Quest alone.

  "Cool," he said, dismissing the last of the notifications.

  Tilde half-laughed, half-sobbed with relief. "Very."

  Rakhmanov's characteristically scowling face leaned over her shoulder. "You are with us once more, Dr. West. Good. It seems you have been holding out on me, yes? I think that you are wasted on research, young Magi."

  "Good God, Viktor," said a very British voice. Dean Galton poked his wizened face into view, waving the squat Belarussian away. "You are a menace, man. Let the boy breathe."

  "Bah," spat Viktor Rakhmanov. "Visit me when you are recovered, West."

  Galton shook his head as the Head Interceptor stomped off before smiling at Victor. He helped him to his feet with strange strength for a man his age and clapped him on the shoulder. "Well done, Nathaniel! Very well done! I can't say I totally disagree with Rakhmanov after having seen the damage you did to the FE. How are you feeling?"

  "Awful," he said honestly. The aftereffects of Arcane Fury were not dissimilar from taking a hammer blow to the base of the skull. His eyes were on the tarped remains of the creature he'd fought. Somewhere under there was the body of Ryan, who had died a truly, truly horrifying death tonight.

  "Yes, that'll happen." The Dean nodded. Turning to Tilde, he said, "Ms. Overgaard, I'd order your mentor to relax, but we both know that he is pathologically incapable of that. So, instead, I order you to keep him company, and should you see him doing anything that could even approximate work or research, I am additionally ordering you to punch him in the mouth!"

  "Oh, God. Okay, sir. I'll, um, try."

  "Dr. West, do not make this sweet young woman punch you in the mouth! Ms. Overgaard, I am excusing you from your mundane classes for the next week. Be on your man, young lady; he is a squirrely one."

  Victor made a face. He wasn't taking a week off. "With all due respect, Dean, a week is insane."

  "We are wizards, Nathaniel. Insanity is our bread and butter. Now, to bed with you! Life is too short to spend every night in the library."

  Tilde took his arm and grinned. "Cheer up, Dr. West. Hanging out with me for a week doesn't sound that bad, does it?"

  "Aha! Brilliant, young lady, brilliant! What do you say to that, Nathaniel?"

  He sighed and ran his hand through his hair. What had the world come to? Victor Paladino was trying to get out of doing nothing for an entire week.

  Well, maybe it wouldn't be so bad to get some rest. He had made more than twice the Experience he'd ever gotten from Deep Research in a single night, and healing from Corruption did require a fair bit of downtime.

  He turned to Tilde. His stomach was crying out for something more than a single panini. "Taco Bell? I could eat."

  She reared her head back as if slapped. "Taco Bell?"

  "Not a fan?"

  "I just never thought I'd hear you say those words in that order, let alone suggest we go, Dr. West."

  Victor chuckled. That seemed to startle Tilde further. Had he…had he never laughed in front of her? Jesus, maybe he did need some time off.

  "Call me Nathaniel, Tilde."