If Tercius was honest, he was amazed how easy the exams he completed in the past two days had been. Anyone who paid at least a modicum of attention during classes could give at least a very basic answer to ninety percent of the questions. Some questions even had the answer given in the question itself, and it was these questions that confounded him the most. What game were the teachers playing, he kept asking himself during the exams. He was quite sure that he gave the right answers, but he kept returning to these kinds of questions, over and over again.

He had been sure that some game was afoot.

He still was sure of that, in fact, even as he observed Seliana talk to Mistress Dea.

Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Penelope fidgeting, the girl's face filled with barely concealed concern, as it should be. Off the top of his head, Tercius could remember the dozens of times his siblings left their children in his care, so he could easily understand the position Seliana will find herself in, should she choose to accept six kids into her home, five if he counted himself out. No matter how much he missed the little scamps, he didn't allow himself to forget all the times they broke, destroyed despite warnings, or even outright took his things. A few times his apartment had looked like an apocalyptic wasteland, so much that his siblings offered to pay for the damage without any input from him. Unclehood to a pack of kids had been exhausting…

Honestly, his new mother and father had had it easy with both Aurelia and Leo. Rona, Ciron, and Tercius himself were willing and able to take care of kids easily. Five adults per one baby seemed to be the optimum for raising children, Tercius saw now, and not the other way around. You gotta outnumber them. That’s the solution.

Anytime anyone wanted a break, someone else could step in and keep the little ones occupied for a few hours.

Seliana looked at Penelope and the girl slunk down in her seat, head bowed, her hair covering her scarlet face.

“Tercius, tell me again, why should I do this?” Seliana asked.

“I didn’t tell you that you should do it in the first place,” Tercius said.

“How persuasive,” Seliana said, dryly. “Don’t you want to go?”

Tercius glanced at the slunk Penelope and suppressed a sigh. “I do, but I won’t deceive you. To be honest, if I was in your place I wouldn’t accept something like this—”

“Tercius!” Penelope jumped from her seat. From a betrayed glare for Tercius, Penelope’s eyes turned pitiful as they gazed at Seliana. “Mother, please!”

“Don’t you “Mother, please!” me missy,” Seliana said, harshly. “And don’t interrupt. Don’t you see he isn’t finished?”

Tercius nodded in gratitude. “But I’m not in your place. If you think you can handle your daughter and five other kids—”

Seliana raised a single eyebrow. “Five? With Pen, there are seven of you,”

A chuckle came from Mistress Dea. “I believe he intentionally excluded himself,”

“Can I finish, please? Thank you,” Tercius cleared his throat. “J’ro, Lomera, Euria, Eunim, and Sonia have a reasonably smart head on their shoulders. You can expect them to follow orders and to not set your place on fire or otherwise destroy it,”

"Well that solves all of my dilemmas about this surprise," Seliana said while rolling her eyes.

“What more do you want, auntie?” Tercius asked. “Tell me and I’ll see if it’s within the realm of possibility. Worst case, they do something stupid and you return them here at an earlier date. That's possible, isn’t it, Mistress?”

Mistress Dea nodded, amused. “It is,”

“See?” Tercius said. “Besides, you will have me to help you,”

"Who will feed so many kids? Where will they sleep? What if they have an injury?" Seliana asked a lot of questions and Tercius answered all of them. They finally resolved that Penelope and Tercius would cook the meals, while Seliana would provide the raw food. Tercius offered to pay, but the woman insisted. Girls would sleep in Penelope's room and the boys in his. Chameos had a Hospital, in case of an injury. Mistress Dea assured that medical help would be provided, regardless of any circumstances. The question of security had also been put to rest by the patient Mistress. If any of the kids did something stupid— here Tercius gave Seliana the liberty to decide what counted as a stupidity, as a way to give her visible control— she would return all of them to the Academy at once. Finally satisfied, Seliana and Tercius shook hands.

“As amusing as this interaction has been, I’m rather busy. Sign at the bottom please?” Mistress Dea said, extending a stack of papers to Seliana.

In mere moments the paperwork was complete, and Seliana, Penelope, and Tercius headed out.

Waiting in front of the door were five fidgeting faces full of expectation.

Penelope jumped onto Euria and screamed. “We’re going!”

The rest of the kids joined in on the screaming and jumping as Tercius and Seliana watched from the side, a small smile on their faces.

After a moment, Tercius gave Seliana a look. “You should explain the rules clearly to them. Be firm,”

“Why would I do that?” Seliana asked. “I’m putting you in charge,”

Suddenly, the woman went and started jumping and hugging with the kids, leaving a gobsmacked Tercius behind.

***

It took them almost four hours from the Academy to Seliana’s house on the outer perimeter of Chameos. Too many people and too few mages who operated the platforms meant an hour-long wait at the Central Station.

“How long would it take from the Doorway to Chameos through the forest, on foot?” Tercius asked Seliana. He couldn’t recall the last time he went for a hike through nature. Not once in this life, he chuckled. That much I know.

“I’m not sure how safe that would be,” Seliana said as she pointed to something in the distance, to the north. “My neighbors say that a few kilometers beyond that treeline there is the Wilderness. Imagine, wild beasts everywhere and no humans anywhere in sight. Would you walk through something like that?”

Seliana’s home was built in one of the last rings of houses that encircled Chameos proper. Flat farmlands and grazelands for domestic animals extended for kilometers in every direction around the city. Rich goldens, earthy browns, and vibrant greens colored vast tracts of land as stout stone walls of about a meter and a half in height encircled and divided the communal lands. Tercius learned that the farmlands and grazelands were flipped every other year, once the domestic animals, mostly large herds of wooly cows and hairy pigs, had a chance to properly fertilize the ground.

From Seliana he learned that mages had some involvement in farming, just before planting season. At this time, Tercius had been in the bunker with the other students.

To hear Seliana say it, she awoke one morning, just as a new week had begun, to the loud beat of drums that shook her to the core and strangely spoken words that froze her spine. After she had made sure that she was indeed awake, she had left her house in a mildly panicked, yet curious state. Her neighbours had assured her that there was nothing to panic about, as this was a yearly occurrence and quite known to them.

A group of thirty men and women dressed in strange flowing clothes, colored in bright red, danced in circles, their arms waving about to the strange rhythm that the drummers and pipers gave. To Seliana, even stranger than these alien people was that around them grass lost its luster and wilted, as the land itself started churning so much that Seliana had thought it an earthquake. A gawking hour later, the dancers stood on the small central part, that was excluded from the spells, of the circular deep brown land that was at least a kilometer in diameter.

Seliana had been enchanted by what she experienced, both that day and the next few, and followed to give ample encouragement to Tercius and Penelope to learn something like that when she told them about it.

Standing in the backyard Tercius leaned his elbows onto the fence and observed the distance northward, as the kids made themselves comfortable in Seliana's home. He wasn't sure how far away to the north the Doorway was, simply because he had no way to make precise measurement and such information was not in general circulation. The tunnels weren't completely straight, nor even leveled, and the speed of the platforms depended on the skills of the one who was controlling them and he had no way to measure it. He knew that somewhere around the last third of the journey from the Central Station to Chameos there was a sharp drop downwards, and just by looking at the thick forest to the north and the cliffs some dozens of kilometers in the distance following the forest, he would put the Doorway at a hundred kilometers of distance, at the very least.

That meant that the Doorway, and therefore the Pyramid, truly were in the Wilderness.

To the average citizen of the Empire, the mere word Wilderness was a big bad wolf.

He remembered all the times his parents and grandparents had talked about how risky it was to live outside of town or city walls, even in larger communities like their village had been. To a passing top predator, even a larger village would count as a conveniently placed snack. The nervousness his family had about it, at times, had been palpable, and once he met the eagle he had finally understood it.

Only desperate people went or lived in any Wilderness, where beasts like that eagle were much more common.

“Desperate…” Tercius murmured. “And now mages…”

While Sogea was considered colonized by the Empire, from Spheros at the north to Nurium and South Fort at the extreme south, that statement was only true along the banks of Hippotion as the river acted as a lane for easy transport. But not even the Empire had enough resources to completely tame the Wilderness to the east and west along the river’s length, at least for now.

From what he saw, the Empire was content to leave Sogea alone, and focus on subjugating the tribes of Zagea and islands of Isgea. After all, it was easier for humans to fight other humans.

Not even his uncle was willing to go alone to any zones classified as Wilderness. During his late twenties, Lux had been a Commander stationed in Zagea, and a few times he and his soldiers ventured where other humans didn't live, the losses of personnel had been significant. Carnivores, insects, plants, diseases… The losses had piled up and the command came to return.

Lux had told him that it was the usual strategy to let settlers tame the land and then make a push forward. It was why Septimus had been able to get the land cheaply, the Empire was practically giving it away to anyone who wanted to take it. The plan was that sometime down the line, in a generation or three, the terms would be more favorable for a new push.

Taking a deep breath of fresh afternoon air, Tercius went into the house.

Seliana, Penelope, Lomera, and J’ro had already started peeling the vegetables for lunch and he almost joined them when he spotted the gawking trio sitting in the corner.

“How about we go to the well and grab some water?” Tercius said. “Come on, get up,”

For himself, he took two buckets while he brought one for each of the twins and Sonia.

Sonia had a home at the Pyramid, but her father was currently absent. The last few months the brown-haired girl had gotten close to Lomera and Euria, and as such things went, to the rest of the group.

“I will call over my servants to take care of these things,” the girl said as they walked down the path to the nearest well.

Tercius frowned. He wasn’t sure if she should say anything, but... “Don’t do that,”

"Why not?"

It didn’t surprise Tercius that Sonia and Euria got along so well. The girls were alike in many areas, not that they would admit to that.

"You said that you wanted to spend this time with your friends? Well, a part of that is that you need to see how they spend their day,"

"Well… I don't even know why we need to eat … what you make. No offense, but... How good could it be?" Sonia said. Euria nodded along, ready to agree, but Eunim noticed Tercius' face turn stony as Sonia spoke and halted his sister. "We could go to any of the restaurants in the city. I'll pay. We could spend this time in better ways than carrying water and peeling vegetables,"

"Oh, yea?" Tercius asked as he drew water from the well. "Like what?"

“We eat out and then go for a swim at the pools—” Sonia said.

Tercius was surprised. “There are pools here? Where?”

Even Spheros had pools, but the water had been so dirty he would have rather taken a chance at something eating him in the river.

“In the city,” Sonia waved her empty bucket south.

Tercius went on to ask her about the pools and their state, even as he thought about what kind of influence the removal from the Academy grounds would have on the group. In the Academy, all were on equal grounds, but out here… the differences in backgrounds would start to show.

"Tell me, Sonia, do you think Seliana would allow you to pay for the meals if we were to go to a restaurant?" Tercius asked, aware that even the twins could hear him.

“It’s my currency to spend, why would she have a say in it?”

“She doesn’t have a say in that, but... You are her guest. We all are. Don’t you know a thing about being someone’s guest?” Tercius said, as he hooked the second bucket on the rope and sent it plunging into the darkness of the well.

"No," The girl tilted her head. "This is my first time,"

“Give me your bucket, you can take this one. So the first thing about being a guest is that you must respect your host. That means that you can’t insult her, her home, or its inhabitants, either directly or indirectly,”

“When did I do something like that?” Sonia pointed out. “I just said that we might be better—”

“I know what you said, but … think about it. We will live in her home and will eat her food, and by the way, you didn’t even try a bite before you questioned her ability to provide passable sustenance. I’m glad this happened here, honestly, because now, instead of doing an offensive thing out of ignorance, you can choose how to proceed. By saying that the food she bought and helped prepare isn’t good enough, and then offering to pay to eat better food at some other place, even if you included her…” Tercius said and looked her straight in her eyes. “I won’t tell you why, you can figure it out by yourself, but I will tell you that that’s not the proper way to behave towards someone who was kind and allowed us the use of her home, no matter what. If I was you, I would take a good look at what J’ro and Lomera are doing and make sure to emulate them as much as I can,”

That was the last he said on the topic. He could see that all three of his well-off little friends had fallen in thought, as they carried the buckets back to the house, and he had confidence in their intelligence. Once you allow the brain to work its job, things simply become easier.

Tercius instead turned to figure out how, or rather where, he could, and question if he should at all, collect Energy from the wisp's chains. Months ago, Mistress Kalina had said that external use of Energy was something that those on the Pyramid could detect. True or false it didn't matter, because he never used Energy since that night.

His skill Quick Learner sat at level [4] right now, after two months of active use, to say nothing of other new skills, or the skills that sat on their barriers for too long. Language Acquisition, Mana Manipulation, and Mana Sight were the skills he wanted to focus on, primarily, to allow them to level again. Of course, he wanted to get Mana Metamorphosis, but that required him to solve the instability of his new skills. He was sure that he had made great strides towards gaining the skill with his daily efforts.

He didn’t want to do experiments with Energy at Seliana’s place, not again, and with Stealth, Running, and a certain cloak that right now sat in his bag, he wouldn’t have to. A few hours at night, out in the farmlands, and no one should notice a thing. He wanted to go for it, he knew that much. He didn’t count the number of times he had had dreams about that sweet, sweet Energy that was in the skill crystals. To go back and witness all of that once more…

The fine short hairs on his arms rose.

The real question was: should he go for it now?