"For most, no meeting would last forever. Farewells and goodbyes are part of any relationship you will ever forge in life, so get used to them, for they will be ever present. This applies less to those who live technically forever, though." - Saying attributed to the Silver Maiden.

Six days were left before they would have had to take a ride back to Levain since the students' vacations would have ended by then. Six days that were full of utter exhaustion and extreme exertion for the students in question, along with the fifty guards that had tagged along. The mayor left them by the night of the first day of training since he had a city to run, and the group was left to handle the training on their own.

Leila, Ognar, and Giselle would later have remembered these six days as among the hardest times in their lives, where every waking moment was filled with fatigue and pain in equal measures. Willa, the oddball that she ever was, enjoyed the brutal training wholeheartedly. The three unliving women shrugged in the end and kept her piled with more and more arduous training.

Despite the pain and fatigue, none of the students complained. They were sober enough and saw through the suffering. They noticed how their bodies were pushed over their limits over and over, and how said limit slowly but surely increased and improved with time. As the one who worked the hardest, Willa showed the most improvement as well, which made Ognar and Giselle worry that the half-therian girl might run circles around them in the future.

Some of the guards dropped out of the training by the third day, however, as they couldn't take any more punishment. By the fifth day's evening, when they declared the training finished, less than half of the fifty guards were still part of the group. Not a single guard complained that the students got "special" treatment during the training, since theirs was of the variety where they received the hardest training of all.

Everybody left cheered when Grünhildr announced that they had officially survived the gauntlet. Guards from the fort walked out and congratulated their comrades, as some rolled out barrels of beer, while another set up a spit atop a bonfire. Two whole pigs were roasted on the spit as mugs were filled with booze and everyone partied away the night.

To the side, Grünhildr and Salicia consoled those who dropped out during the gauntlet and mentioned that they can always do better the next time. That elicited both relief, and dread from the poor guards.

Relief that they had another chance to prove themselves. Dread that they had to go through the torment all over again.

They partied hard that night, and Cal turned a blind eye when some young guards brought Ognar and Willa to the fortress' barn. Those two were old enough to decide for themselves anyway, and neither orcish nor therian culture put that much emphasis on sexual relations either way. Unlike humans.

Cal's group and the fifty guards that had accompanied them rode back to Sev-Galas the next morning. An uneventful journey was had, and they reached town by noon. They separated from the guards, and bid Azar'ēl farewell properly while they had lunch with him, and chartered a fast carriage to Levain right afterwards.

On the four day journey back, no bandit was stupid enough to bar their path. The only remote bit of excitement on the road back was when a monster bear ran into Willa while she relieved herself in the woods. The poor bear proved a poor match to the young blood mage, as Willa tire its throat out with her bare hands, and dragged the corpse with her back to the camp.

That night they had fresh roasted bear for dinner, to the awestruck looks of their carriage driver.

Once in Levain, the three unliving women bid their students farewell as rhey departed back to Paradise. Cal also bid her students farewell as she would head towards the next leg of her journey. She watched their backs for a while as they separated and went to their respective abodes, before she shook her head to clear her mind. Maybe it was because they were the first time she had students, or maybe she had become a bit sentimental with age.

Once they were out of sight, Cal turned towards the northern gate of Levain, and departed the city from there. She walked at a leisurely pace as she headed north, her route plotted out long ago. Levain was located at the heart of the Union of Free Nations, and she would need at least a week of travel to leave their territory.

Her trek northwards was a straight line, as she paid little heed to areas marked as dangerous to ordinary travellers, and simply rushed her way through. She crossed the territories of half a dozen nations in that week, more often than not without the authorities' knowledge, as most of them simply had not stationed guards and checkpoints in less travelled areas.

She spent her nights in her tent or atop tree branches half the time, while other times she borrowed a room in a village that happened to be along her path. The trek was a peaceful one for the most part. The Union's member nations at least policed their respective areas quite thoroughly, and banditry was relatively uncommon overall.

Cal did run into one instance of banditry, albeit not one aimed at her. On her fifth day of travel she witnessed as a group of close to thirty bandits besieged a merchant caravan that had barely half that number in guards. The bandits were truly just misfortunate that day, as they happened to be in her way.

The twenty bandits that besieged the caravan noticed the oddity when they heard faint shouts from forest where the rest of their members hid. The sudden lack of ranged support also clued them to the fact that something had went wrong. That feeling was punctuated when Cal walked out of the forest with an injured bandit in each hand and nonchalantly threw them at the bandit group.

She threw those bandits with so much force that a couple of their bones snapped on impact, and a bunch of the bandits that untittingly cushioned their landing fell down as well. She casually walked through the group of bandits and broke the limbs of those that tried to move against her. Other, smarter bandits dropped their weapons and surrendered in fright.

As she walked by the caravan's guards, she mentioned that the bandits were all theirs to deal with, and left on her way to the gawks of the caravan guards.