“That’s not good,” Sylph agreed, squinting at the rune. “You might need to rebuild this.”

“It doesn’t work like that.” Damien shook his head. “There’s way too much power running through this and me. If I tried to mess with the runes at all, it could collapse completely. I have to wait until it gives out on its own, then redraw it.”

“Is that safe?” Sylph asked. “That’s what keeps your companion locked up, isn’t it?”

“More like it keeps his gift to me locked up,” Damien replied with a grimace. “It’s my half of Herald's soul that was starting to merge with my mind. I don’t want to know what would happen if it was completely released, but I’d imagine I’d change just as much as Henry did.”

“We can’t let that happen,” Henry said, still using a mouth on Damien’s shadow. “You’d probably try to destroy the world or something equally lame.”

“I am becoming convinced that you are the world’s biggest hypocrite,” Sylph said.

“Well, I am the best at everything I do,” Henry allowed. “And I have decided that destroying the world is very much yesterday’s thinking. Let’s just kill all the Corruption so I can keep reading.”

“Is that really possible?” Sylph asked.

“Honestly, I’m not sure,” Henry admitted. “Some of the Corruption, sure. But Second? I don’t know. We really will need to deal with them, but every passing day makes me more reluctant to take the only real steps I know that would let us do that.”

“As important as this is, could we maybe figure my chest out first?” Damien asked, prodding at the rune circle. “We can’t let Herald escape in any capacity. Best case, my personality gets irrevocably changed. Worst, Herald would be able to completely control my body if it managed to sneak anything into that half of its soul. That’s a pretty major problem.”

“What about another circle around it?” Henry suggested. “One to delay the release when the first few break, just long enough for you to redraw them.”

“That could work,” Damien said with a slow nod, mentally mapping out a possible circle in his mind. “But it would have to be pretty strong. The energy is all built up, so when it breaks, it’ll probably explode. I don’t know if I’ve got enough space on my body to do anything that powerful.”

“An artifact might help,” Sylph offered. “Something that absorbs magical energy. You could have it close, then try to use it when your rune circle breaks. Then your backup circle might be enough until you can repair the first one.”

Damien opened his mouth, then blinked. He couldn’t think of any problem’s with Sylph’s plan. After running through it a few more times, he nodded slowly. “That could be it. Good idea, Sylph. I was starting to panic a little.”

She gave him a small smile. “Let’s deal with it before we start relaxing completely. We still have to find such an artifact, and I’m not sure where we’d get it. The chances of us stumbling into one randomly probably aren’t that high.”

“I’m sure there’s one somewhere around here,” Damien muttered. “But maybe there might be one in the treasure room at Blackmist? We’ve got quite a few contribution points saved up.”

“Not safe betting everything on it being there,” Henry said. “You’re better off taking everything you can at Forsad, then sifting through it and hoping you find something. I don’t believe power draining relics should be too hard to find – many of them need Ether, they just need different amounts for different purposes. So long as you find one that chews up a lot of energy, that could work.”

Damien pulled the wooden rod that Reva had given them out of his bag and studied it again. “Do you think this thing could help?”

“No clue,” Sylph said with a shrug. “I’ve got no real training with artifacts beyond my own experience with them.”

“I’ll take a look at it tonight,” Henry said. “It won’t take me long. Don’t keep your hopes up, though. My senses are muted, but they’re still enough to recognize a weak artifact. It probably just makes you smell nice or something.”

Damien tossed it back into his bag and pursed his lips. “Tonight, then. What are the chances someone else attacks us, then? We’ve been here for a while.”

“Well, there’s a decent chance Reva told someone else about our fight,” Sylph said. “It wouldn’t technically be breaking her promise, and I doubt she’s all that determined to keep her word anyway. People might be biding their time to see what else we’ll do. We’re here for a few days, so now that we’ve fought Reva off, it might be a while before someone else makes a move.”

“You keep saying people,” Damien said, picking a rock up and tossing it from hand to hand to keep them occupied. “Isn’t it literally just Teddy? Quinlan isn’t going to fight us and everyone else is either our friends or from Blackmist.”

“Don’t count on anything,” Sylph said. “You don’t know that Goldsilk didn’t order Viv or one of the others to steal from us or get an artifact at any cost. We can trust Quinlan because of Henry, but everyone else is an unknown. You don’t know what someone might have over them.”

“Do you really think they’d betray us like that?” Damien asked, frowning.

“I don’t know, Damien,” Sylph replied. “I don’t think my viewpoint is the healthiest one, but it’s what I’ve got. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. I don’t trust easily. We’ll just have to keep our guard up a little more than normal while we’re at Forsad.”

“Not a bad idea regardless,” Henry said. He paused for a moment, then let out an annoyed sigh. “We do need to find Yui, though. I’ve got to give her the hat Damien made me make. I’ve been dragging the stupid thing around too long.”

“I’ve been the one stuck wearing it,” Damien grumbled. He glanced up at the sky. “It’s getting a little darker, I think. Maybe we should hunt around for artifacts a bit just to see if we get lucky, then head back to the house and meet Quinlan?”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Sylph said.

They headed out of the square, both keeping their Ether at the ready as they made their way through the city. Weaving through damaged buildings, the pair hunted around for anything of enough interest to catch their attention.

Damien lost count of the buildings they worked through. The drab, gray light made everything look the same, and there wasn’t a single entrance or pathway to anywhere remotely interesting. There was just endless road and rubble.

Distant sounds of battle occasionally broke the monotony, but they ended as quickly as they came. Not a single monster or student made themselves known over the next few hours, and they eventually gave up to head back and meet Quinlan.

“Well, that was disappointing beyond reason,” Damien decided. “Where is everyone? I know this place is ruined or abandoned or whatever, but I expect at least something! It’s practically a ghost town. How did we not run into a single monster?”

“It’s pretty strange,” Sylph admitted. “I did hear fighting though, but now I’m wondering if that was just other students running into each other.”

“Maybe Quinlan will know something,” Damien said as they arrived before their chosen meeting point. He sat down on the road in front of it, leaning against a stone fence post. “She seemed to know about an artifact, so maybe there’s some sort of catacomb or sewer system below the city that we just couldn’t find.”

“I’m sure there is,” Sylph agreed. “The real question is if it’s got anything in it. There has to be stuff somewhere, right?”

Damien snorted. “I just had a thought. What if the Queen pulled a fast one over Blackmist and just tricked them into giving her the artifact for the equivalent of a horrible vacation trip for a few kids?”

“Don’t even joke about that,” Sylph said with a half groan. “We’re wasting so much time right now. It’s too dangerous to train here because we don’t really know if something is lurking around, so we’ve just got to sit around.”

“You could always hunt the other students,” Henry offered. “Could be fun. A little bit of punching to brighten up the day. It’s prescribed by healers all over the globe.”

“We’ll save that for if we get really desperate,” Sylph said. “Reva clearly managed to find a few artifacts, so its not like this place is actually barren. Things are here – we’re just really, really bad at this.”

“Speak for yourself,” Henry said. “I’m great at it. I’m just enjoying watching you struggle.”

“Right,” Damien and Sylph chorused. Henry let out an affronted grunt and retreated back into Damien’s shadow while the other two settled down to wait for Quinlan.

It wasn’t much later when the sound of faint footsteps echoed down the city streets, coming from a rock strewn road that led toward the center of Forsad. Damien and Sylph both watched the street, their Ether at the ready, as they waited for whoever it was to arrive.

Quinlan stepped out from beneath an overhang, covered in small cuts. Her clothing had been badly damaged and a bandage was wrapped tightly around her left arm. It was stained a dark brown, blood slipping out between gaps in the wrapping and dripping to the ground.

“Eight Planes, what happened?” Damien asked.

“There was some serious competition for the relic I was going for,” Quinlan replied with a tight smile. “Your compatriots are a lot more powerful than I expected.”

“Aven? You went against her?” Damien asked, blinking. “I don’t really know much about her, but are you okay? That looks like a pretty bad wound.”

“I’ll live,” Quinlan replied. “I don’t have much in the way of healing abilities, but I splinted it and I’ll get it taken care of once I can find a healer. And it wasn’t Aven that did this.”

“Mark?” Damien guessed, raising an eyebrow. “I didn’t think he was that strong.”

“No, it was Cheese,” Quinlan said, scrunching her nose in annoyance. “I cannot believe I lost to someone with such a ridiculous name.”

“Wait, you lost?” Sylph asked. “You didn’t get the artifact?”

“No. He took it out from right in front of me after we fought,” Quinlan said with a sigh. Her remaining hand tightened in anger. “I’ll have to find him tomorrow, but I’m not in a shape to fight right now.”

“Oh, so you managed to wound him as well,” Damien hedged.

“…no,” Quinlan muttered. “Or rather, I don’t think anything I did actually affected him. I hit him with enough magma to cook anyone else alive, but he barely even reacted. I saw his flesh burning, but it just… stopped.”

“What kind of magic is that? Was he canceling it out or somehow stopping the heat?” Sylph asked.

“No,” Quinlan said, leaning against the wall and sliding down with a pained frown. “I could tell he wasn’t actually doing anything to my magic. I use a lot of mental energy to control my magma, and I would have felt if he messed with it. It’s more like he was just… resistant to my magic. He healed just about all the damage I did within seconds.”

“Now that’s interesting,” Henry mused, popping out of Damien’s shadow to claim the knitted hat perched on Damien’s head. “I wonder how he’s going about it. It could be very advanced healing magic, where he’s healing the damage you do before it can actually do any real harm. I’ve seen that before, but only in older human mages that are generally considered incredibly powerful. It seems strange for a student to have such a skill.”

“I didn’t feel like it was that,” Quinlan said. “I didn’t feel any magic at all, actually. It was just like my Ether didn’t do anything to him.”

“We need to find this Cheese,” Henry decided. “This is vital to my research. I also need to know if he tastes like goats.”

“He does not,” Damien said firmly. “Nor do goats taste like cheese.”

“But Cheese would taste like Cheese,” Henry pointed out. “So, logically, Cheese would taste like cheese.”

“I hate that I understood what you’re saying,” Damien replied. “And I hate the fact that you said it even more. How did you get this obsessed with cheese and goats?”

“I am not obsessed. It is purely scientific research.”

“You did knit hats for all the goats in my room at Blackmist,” Quinlan said, cracking a grin despite the pain covering her face. “I don’t think most people would do that.”

“They were practice. Purely scientific,” Henry insisted. “And since I am now being beset upon from all angles, I will retreat to pick my future battles better.”

He darted back into Damien’s shadow, vanishing. Quinlan shook her head. “I wish my companion was like that.”

“No, you really don’t,” Damien said. “Don’t get me wrong, he’s got his moments, but you don’t know what I had to do to get him.”

Quinlan nodded. “I can understand that more than you know. Do you think you can still teach me runes today?”

“Seriously?” Damien asked. “But… your arm.”

“It won’t impede my ability to learn,” Quinlan said. “It’ll just make drawing difficult. Right now, I’ll take what I can get.”

“I guess.” Damien dug around in his pack and pulled out a stick of chalk. He brushed some of the dust away from the ground before him and started to sketch a rune circle. “Henry should have given you a lot of the knowledge you need to theoretically make a containment circle that can draw power out of something, but putting it into practice is really difficult.”

He drew several runes beside the circle, then pointed to the leftmost one, a wiggly circle with several lines going through it. “This one, for example, instructs the circle to siphon power from a target on its left and pass it into the rune on its right.”

His chalk shifted to the rune beside it, which was identical aside from a single line having a slight curve to it. “And this one draws the power out of a target and sends it into the rune on its right.”

“That sounds like the same thing,” Quinlan said.

“That’s the thing. They’re very different,” Damien replied. “The first one will slowly pull energy at a steady rate. The second one will pull it all at once. I trust you can see the problem if you use the wrong one? You could end up blowing your circle up if you use the rune on the right and try to yank too much Ether at one time.”

“So I use the one on the left?”

“Depends. The stronger something is, the harder it will be to pull Ether away from it, even if its cooperating. The left rune might literally be too weak if your target is very powerful. You may have to use them in conjunction, using the right rune to yank the power and the left one to slowly trickle it into your circle. It depends on what your target and source are.”

“I see,” Quinlan said, chewing her lower lip. “I’m starting to realize why you were saying this could be hard to tailor without knowing more information. If I use that configuration and the target is too weak, it could hurt the target. If it’s too strong, it could blow the rune circle up, right?”

“Pretty much,” Damien said with a nod.

“How can I gauge the strength of the thing I’m drawing Ether from?”

“That’s what I’ll try to cover today. Henry will probably have to help me with a few things since I don’t fully understand them,” Damien said, starting to draw once more. Sylph and Quinlan both leaned in as he started to teach once more, the ever-present dim gray light illuminating their makeshift shelter as time ground onward.