Alex blinked at Diana as her brother moved away. “Pipes?”

“Lots of smoke, not enough fire,” she explained. “My little brother has opinions on mages.” Shaking her head, she gave a long-suffering sigh. “Look, you have Fire Proficiency right? I’ll slow them down so you can hit them.”

Alex was the last person to comment on sibling relationships, so he simply said, “Alright.”

Just then, Alex heard a thwang before the first of Daven’s arrows flew over their heads. Cedric had not been lying when he told them the little monsters were fast. The vineling still on the trunk hopped aside quick as a fly, and the arrow struck the wood beside it with a thunk.

Alex saw nothing special in the shot, no streak of light or elemental property to the arrow, and he wondered what kind of skills an archer had. Some form of privileged sight, perhaps, and light-footedness, too, as Daven had been especially silent earlier when they first met. That was usually within the rogue skill set, but there might be some overlap there.

“Bloody dust,” Daven grunted behind them.

Cedric let out a low chuckle. “Come on. Don’t lose focus now,” he told them.

Ignoring them, Alex turned to the front most vinelings. They weren’t at all like the Wild Boars or the Killer Sloth. Instead of rushing them at once, the two vinelings skittered along the ground with no rhyme or reason. They bounced left and right as they edged closer, zig-zagging erratically among the trees, wooden legs clacking. They even skipped back a pace every once in a while. It was almost as if they expected to be targeted.

Diana had her arms raised up beside him, but there weren’t any visible signs of her using her powers, no light shining in her hands.

The vinelings crossed the tree line into the clearing, and yet she made no move. Alex pursed his lips, saw two more arrows sail toward the rearmost creature, and turned to her again.

He almost thought she had botched a spell when she spoke up.

“Get ready.”

He nodded to her and brought a fireball to life. He had been thinking of testing his power, but that could wait a minute. The vinelings were halfway to their position already, skittering along the grass. The writhing vines of their thorax had begun to unfurl and lash about like whips as they approached, like they were excited.

Then Diana called, “Now!” And with her voice something else came. The earth rumbled beneath them. A soft thing, but Alex heard it all the same—felt it as something shifted on the forest floor.

The next hop forward saw the foremost vineling’s legs suddenly sink some three inches into the ground, and just a moment later its partner made the same mistake. Alex gaped as a long strip of grass had turned into mud in front of them, so as to trap the monsters even if they had tried going around it. They made no noise, no shriek or scream, but they trashed in place, legs shaking.

He didn’t wait for them to break out. Without hesitating, he threw a hand forward and let go. The fireball zipped across the clearing, a streak of yellow cutting the air, aiming straight at one of the vinelings.

And Alex couldn’t have asked for a better combination. The small fireball exploded as soon as it made contact with the forward twig legs, shattering them on the spot, before the flames’ momentum carried it further to cover the whole of the vineling’s plant-body.

The monster burned like kindling. Even on fire the thing was quiet as a grave, though it twitched madly in its death throes. Alex watched dispassionately as it finally stopped moving, and what remained of the vineling was quick to break into black glass, leaving only the smell of bonfire behind.

Then Diana’s hands jerked on his periphery. When he turned, it was only to see a blade of air whooshing toward the remaining monster. It looked similar to the dungeon’s barrier, as visible as solid air could be, and it cut a deep gash where it hit on the vineling’s thorax. Green ichor oozed out of the wound, and the little critter was whipped into a frenzy trying to escape its fate. It trashed hard enough a few of its legs yanked out of the hardening mud.

But the mage clearly wasn’t done. Her hands moved again, slashing the air as if they were swords. Two more blades of shimmering air surged forth: one cleaving through half of the monster’s legs, the other slicing at the main vine-body again.

This time, the vineling slumped over, dead, before it broke apart like all other monsters.

“I thought you’d only be slowing them down,” Alex pointed out.

Diana gave him a little smirk. “You took too long,” she said, loud enough her brother could hear, then threw a glance at the arrows clustered near the fallen trunk. Daven had only gotten his vineling on the fifth shot, and he came back nearer the group mumbling under his breath.

Alex looked back at Diana for a second longer before shrugging. “Fair enough,” he said. “Were those your first two picks, then? Earth and Air before Arcane.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Fire and Lightning were very attractive, but at the time I picked them Daven and I needed something more… defensive, I guess.”

He nodded. In a world of monsters and dungeons, that wasn’t a surprise.

“Heads up!” Cedric called, causing the three of them to turn to him. He still had Lady by the reins, but the pony seemed less skittish now. Its head was bowed as Valerian scratched its long snout, the man watching over the clearing completely nonplussed. The crew leader pointed toward the forest, where in the distance something was coming in their direction. Something that stomped the thick underbrush as it passed through. “We’ve got a few Wild Boars approaching.”

Hearing the stampede, Daven looked to the forest for a moment, licking his lips. “Let us have these ones,” he said to their crew leader. “I’ll leave enough of them alive so we can transport them back.”

“Oh? Feeling confident, are you?” Cedric lifted an eyebrow. “After that performance against the vineling, I don’t know…”

“That was just warm up,” the archer defended.

Cedric’s lips twitched into a near smile. He glimpsed over at Valerian, who shrugged and took over Lady’s reins. “Hmm. Alright then,” he said. “I’ll give you a few minutes of fun.” Stepping up to where his spear was stuck on the ground, he leaned against the shaft and nodded ahead. “The boars should be easier for you to deal with, even if they hit harder. But I’ll be watching, just in case.”

“You won’t have to do a thing,” said Daven, a bold grin spreading over his face.

Alex watched the byplay with indifference. Whatever their reasons were, killing more monsters would always be welcomed with him.

“What’s the plan, then?” he asked. He had his own ideas on how to go about this, which mainly involved the two siblings holding the monsters down while he killed them. But they needed the boars alive for now, and he doubted they’d just play support for him while he got all the experience.

In reality, he didn’t even know how that all worked here. Was the experience shared amongst the crew or just those who attacked a mob?

How do you even define a crew when there was no party system? Alex thought in exasperation.

It was just another thing to figure out later.

Daven pulled more arrows from his quiver and flashed a challenging smile at his sister. “Whoever takes a Wild Boar to the ground first gets to sleep on the room’s bed tonight. It has to be alive too. No killing.”

Diana rolled her eyes. “Fine.”

Alex opened his mouth to chime in, then paused. He hadn’t even thought of where he would sleep tonight, or where he would go after all of this. He had no money, no identity. No direction. All he had was a power in its infancy and an empty claim to a title of Second-something he wasn’t even sure he wanted.

It’ll have to be enough for now.

Putting his mind to the task at hand, he drew on the power inside him one more time. Instead of forming the familiar fireball, Alex brought the fire out in its raw form. The air snapped around him, and flames big enough to engulf his whole hand came to life.

They had to capture a few monsters alive, so he had just the idea on what to do.

Focusing on the fire, he tried to condense it as he did before, but instead of a ball, he tried to elongate it, to turn it into a whip he could use as a lasso of sorts. At first, thin threads of fire surged up and funneled together, twisting and winding around each other, so that it looked like he had a small tornado emerging from a lake of fire in his hand.

Except… it would go no further. The threads of fire dispersed before they rose any higher than a foot up, and he couldn’t keep feeding them fast enough with the blaze in his hands. It was too wild for it, and his control too feeble.

So Alex redoubled his efforts, pressed down on the fire with all he had; but this time, almost instinctively, he knew this wasn’t a fight he could win, not at the moment.

The failure to handle his own power chafed at him, but it wasn’t that unexpected. It only highlighted the importance of what he had to do. So with lips tight with annoyance, he opened up his status screen.

[Status]

Name: Alex Hart

Level: 3

Class: Mage

HP: 60/60

MP: 73/80

[Attributes]

Strength: 6

Dexterity: 8

Vitality: 6

Power: 10

Soul Affinity: 8

Free Points: 7

[Skill Points]: 1

Fire Proficiency - 2/5

Water Proficiency

Lightning Proficiency

Air Proficiency

Earth Proficiency

Arcane Proficiency

[Locked]

[Locked]

[Locked]

…

It was high time to test how his powers worked. As it was still early in the game, he needed to know the mechanics of it all more than anything.

Quickly glancing up—the status screen turning faint to his sight—he saw that the Wild Boar sounder was near enough now that he could already hear their snorts and their hooves thumping on the ground. The high bushes immediately surrounding the clearing still covered their visage, but a cloud of dust trailed behind them about half a football field’s distance away. They were coming straight at them, as if from the opposite direction of the road their crew came from.

“How many of them are there?” Diana asked. She had positioned herself at the center of the clearing, slightly ahead of both Alex and Daven who flanked her.

Cedric hummed behind them. “Five or six would be my guess,” he said. “They usually won't group too densely in the first stage, but my advice would be to always prepare for the worst scenario. As amusing as it is to watch, don’t hold back on account of this bet of yours if it comes down to it.”

Daven clicked his tongue. “You’re no fun, Cedric.” He had two arrows nocked on his bow, though he hadn’t drawn it just yet.

Alex squinted when the sunlight glinted on a thin line between the arrows, and he realized that a long hanging cord tied just above the arrow feathers linked the two missiles. Shaking his head at the archer’s craftiness, he brought the screen to focus again and gave himself no time to hesitate.

[Skill Points]: 0

Fire Proficiency - 3/5

Water Proficiency

Lightning Proficiency

Air Proficiency

Earth Proficiency

Arcane Proficiency

...

Instantly, the flames on his hand roared, more than doubling its size. Alex’s eyes widened for a second before he clamped down on his surprise.

“What is that?” Diana gasped at the boom of the fire.

Alex tried an easy smile. “I can’t have you guys doing all the work now, can I?”

Diana frowned, blue eyes burning him with naked curiosity; but the incoming sounder of boars was a better distraction than any smile Alex could give. Just then, a gust of wind blew from the forest into the clearing, and the nauseating stench of the monsters served to hail their approach just as they finally broke through the tree line.

Cedric had been right. There were six of them, the same waist-height size and dark coloring as the ones Alex had encountered before. One ran at the lead, red eyes glinting, while the other five were clumped behind him in a tight press of bodies. Coming all at once, their blaring snorts sounded more like coarse-voiced shouts than anything.

Undaunted, Diana was the first one to act. She dropped to a knee and pushed both of her hands on the ground—no, into the ground, until even her wrists were swallowed up. Across the clearing, the earth groaned and heaved in response, and a three-foot high wall of tightly packed dirt rose from the ground in front of the boars.

The first one managed to leap cleanly over it, but the two directly behind him ran snout-first into the wall, while the other three were quick enough to turn away and scatter to both sides of their obstacle. They stumbled against each other, rolling on the ground, and Alex was then faced with two mildly disorientated Wild Boars blinking at him not fifteen yards away.

Truly, he was in his element after the day he had.

He pressed down on the fire again, shaping it like a whip. Only to reel back when instead of improving things he found he had even less command of his magic. The flames were rowdier than before, and the few threads of fire that rose up didn’t even start funneling together.

It just makes it more powerful… Alex realized in dismay, and more power means less control.

Beside the dirt wall, the Peppa clones that had stumbled to his side of the clearing had gotten back on their feet and wasted no time charging forward, their hooves churning the grass underneath.

Alex froze on the spot. No. He couldn’t move—his feet couldn’t lift themselves off the ground. Glancing down, his stomach sank when he saw that the blades of grass around his feet had slithered over his shoes and seized him by the ankles, and they tightened the more he shifted.

[Grasping Grass lvl 1]

[Grasping Grass lvl 1]

Shaken by this new strange monster, he only caught a glimpse of bared teeth and long sharp tusks jumping in front of him. Desperately, Alex threw his hand forward and flooded the fire with more mana. He didn’t try to control it or shape it, just let it blast off.

From his flung out hand, a wave of simmering heat exploded in a half-moon around him, the hot air washing over his skin as soon as he relinquished control of the flames. Snorting furiously, the boars reared in the face of the blast. They darted back, shying away from the fire as it licked at their exposed flank.

Alex fell too, covering his face from the heat with both arms. But as powerful as the fire wave had been, it had also been unfocused and short-lived. The fire dispersed before it could do much. With only minor burns and scorch marks on their fur, the Wild Boars had only been distracted, not defeated. They managed to look even angrier as they shook away the effects of his attack, their red eyes glaring balefully at him.

Then suddenly Cedric was rushing past him at the nearest boar to his left, his bronze-bladed spear glinting in front of him. The boar had barely any time to react before it was cut on the shoulder as the crew leader struck. It grunted in pain and jumped back; but Cedric was faster and his reach was longer. The glaive flashed again and again, each jab fast as a viper, though by Cedric’s easy-going smile this was just another afternoon for him.

Black blood leaked out of half a dozen small cuts all over the boar’s front, but it was the final thrust that left a deep gash on the beast’s shoulder all the way down to the center of its back. The boar wailed this time, nearly losing its footing. Cedric could have struck again at that moment, but he flipped the spear over and swung at it with the wooden end.

He wasn’t trying to kill the monster, only subdue it.

Alex heard another snort and quickly turned away, pushing himself up despite still having his feet rooted in place. There was still another Peppa left, and he could worry about capturing it alive when his own life wasn't on the line.