There was no time to check on anything when Mason woke up. Faynel shook him roughly and almost pulled him out of bed. He was still dressed, even to the point that he was still wearing his boots, so all he had to do was strap on his sword belt and staff sling.

Unfortunately, armed and dressed was no substitute for awake, so he was largely dead on his feet. He cast around in a daze at everyone getting ready, and even as he munched on some pressed bar that Faynel had shoved into his hands, he really didn’t understand what was happening.

“Get going,” Faynel finally cried in frustration, punching him and shoving him out the door.

“Wh-what’s happening?” the human finally mumbled, shaking himself to try and restore his senses.

“Trouble. Sentir noticed someone watching the building overnight. We also believe we got a glimpse of a danger rune above the city, but nobody was on the sentry point so we haven’t confirmed it. God you sleep heavy,” she complained.

Mason watched as she bounced from leg to leg, practically vibrating with energy. But him, sleep heavy? He felt like he’d barely slept in weeks.

Someone shouted outside, and that fired up his senses. He felt at his mana and tried to force it to flow, then activated Focus to help him get a handle on the situation. Only he and Faynel were left inside. Somehow everyone else had made it outdoors.

When he followed them, he saw that two waist high tar walls had been risen, curving around the corners of the building with a fair amount of space for movement behind them. It was a pretty impressive fortification considering he suspected it had been risen that morning.

“What are we expecting?” Mason asked as he was finally catching up to the scene.

“Corrosi.” The single word hung in the air. Mason hadn’t seen these foes yet, but he knew, and could see around him, the fear that they struck in the Darkest Night. It seemed only wise to fear them himself.

Leornal came up, bow in one hand, and put the other on Mason’s shoulder. “Play it the same way as with Valree. Draw attention to yourself if you must, but disappear as soon as you can and do not engage directly. You have no defenses against their spells, and won’t be able to take them on in physical combat either.”

“Our best bet is to keep them moving, and let our archers riddle them with holes. If there’s more than two, we’ll have to try to scatter them and take one down at a time. If there’s more than three, we try to disable any we can and then make a formation retreat. You’ll know when it’s time,” Faynel explained, her eyes locked ahead on the passing tree line.

Mason felt out of his depth. A three on seven fight was a risk even with Torysen here? All said, they had two archers, a caster, three swordsmen with spells, and whatever Mason counted as. That was a reasonable composition for any fight.

The trees moved and everyone froze. It hadn’t been the sound of one bush shifting. The entire tree line shook and trembled. A familiar chattering series of screams sounded.

“Goblins!”

The little green creatures rushed at once, and Leornal and Senkar immediately began firing arrows. Torysen jumped over the barrier and stomped, almost like a sumo wrestler, and stone vines ripped up along the holding line and began grabbing goblins left and right, twisting them, throwing them, smashing them into each other.

Sentir blasted clumps of goblins aside when they came close to the line, while Faynel and the swordsman struck out at any goblin that came close. Mason wished he had the fallen archer’s bow, as well as his skills. There wasn’t much he could do without rushing into the middle of the battle, and he was learning, slowly that there was a time for caution.

But the line was holding, even as the goblins rushed. Mason finally stood behind Torysen and began striking at any goblins that managed to get close to her, but those were few and far between. Nobody had admonished him though, so he trusted his position.

Something caught his eye off to the side- a hulking mass of purplish, yellow flesh. It was behind the tree line, but large enough that its shift was unmistakable. He was about to call it out, but it bellowed a sort of warcry, and thrust its arm out like it was throwing with a lacrosse stick.

A big, heavy glob of green goo was flung at tremendous speed, and Mason knew without question that he was the only one to see it in time to react. He could have, and should have, simply dived out of the way, trusting his companions to react properly from their experience. But Mason reacted before he could think.

Suddenly he was balancing on top of the barrier, directly in the path between the volleyball sized, radioactive-looking glob, and his mana was rapidly flowing into the shape of the rune within him. A memory, more like a wisp from a dream flashed in his mind.

It was bad to create the energy within him.

With every ounce of Mason’s considerable willpower, he imagined the energy forming outside of him, right in the path of glob. He hadn’t figured out quite what he’d do with it when it was there, but an image came to him of a hexagonal plane, a flat disc with the force sigil emblazoned on it.

The glob smashed into the glassy plane Mason had inadvertently formed in front of him, and it was as if it was bound a certain distance from him, the initial impact throwing Mason off-balance. He flailed his arms as he fell backwards off the wall, and he thrust with the plane up.

Rebounding off the barrier, the glob launched high in the sky and up over the shelter. It crashed into the cliff face and seemed to eat at the stone, large chunks of the wall crumbling and crashing down over the reinforced surface.

There were plenty of surprised thoughts in regards to this sudden maneuver from Mason, but nobody had any time for that. Torysen pointed her stone vines forward into a wall of short but sharp spears, and then left them, sprinting at the Corrosi in the woods even as Leornal fired a powershot right at the source of the attack.

The powershot splintered wood as it passed by a tree, and a wail indicated that it had met its mark. The beast had stopped to watch its attack, sure of its tactics potency, and had been caught off guard. That confidence was his undoing. Torysen was upon him in a hail of flashing attacks with her heavy blade.

Mason took her spot in the fray feeling remarkably drained. He drew his staff and began striking out at goblins as they climbed over or around the impromptu spear line, alternating between mana drain to recharge his reserves and stamina drain to empower his allies. The line continued to hold, and the human tried his best to keep his mind on the battle before him.

The battle ended as Torysen took down the Corrosi and threw its severed head into the middle of the field and made her stone roots spear it. The remaining goblins screamed, broke, and fled, and the fighters had spent enough energy defending- nobody wanted to give chase.

The head was a grotesque thing. Too wide, too cubic, covered in short patches of hair that was so thick and coarse it stood straight. And a grotesque amount of blood poured from the severed neck.

A hand on his shoulder drew Mason’s attention away from the atrocity, and Leornal grinned at him enthusiastically. The look seemed out of place on the surly archer’s face. “Well you finally did something useful without relying on that damned staff. That was some spell! The old lady teach you that?”

Faynel stepped up, “If she did, I missed it. I’ve never seen anything like that. And you cast it so quickly!”

“Most barriers require a good deal of setup. You’ll have to teach us all that skill, Mason,” Torysen said in a calm voice as she walked up to the group. Her stone vines were busy behind her throwing goblin corpses away from their shelter, but that seemed to cost her no attention.

“I have to figure out how I did it first,” Mason smiled uncomfortably.

“Source Magic,” Faynel said happily, and everyone nodded as if that explained it entirely.

To Mason, it just felt a little Deus Ex Machina. It had taken him a great deal of effort to master the force rune itself, but in the past two days he’d learned to focus the blast in a direction and even form a barrier from it.

Faynel must have seen his confusion because she nudged him in the side, “You spent two days in the presence of Lady Sorynel. She’s like a walking source. And she shared with us a lot about the source point. I wouldn’t be surprised if that isn’t the last trick up your sleeve. I know I’ve got a few brewing.”

“Enough, we can discuss this later,” Torysen snapped. “We’ve never seen the Corrosi and the goblins working so closely together. This is troubling. Moreso because both of these attacks have happened close to the city. Faynel, can you reach a vantage point and get a view of the surroundings?”

The thin girl nodded, “I can.” Without hesitation, she turned and ran up to the cliff face. She eyed it momentarily, and then jumped higher than Mason would have thought possible. She pulled herself onto a narrow ledge, then jumped again, almost as high and at an odd angle, yet she seemed to move perfectly on course. Mason could just faintly make out signs of magical effects around her arms and legs.

Was that another ability from the force rune? He was beginning to see why Sorynel was so appalled that anyone would give up the opportunity to use a Source Rune.

But another part of him remembered the backlash from failing during the fight the previous evening. It wasn’t a trade-off he could easily evaluate.

While he thought, Faynel climbed. It didn’t take her long to reach a point where she could look out over the trees toward New Marra. Once she had her view, she scrambled down quickly and wasted no time, “We need to go. The city is under attack.”

The whole group swore at once and rushed into the building to gather the last of their supplies, all but Torysen.

She stared out at the littered field of bodies before them, and then called to Mason, “What do you think? Goblins are wretched creatures. Tribal and dumb, with the barest of magical ability. You can see the effects a Corrosi can have,” she gestured to the crater on the cliff face from the redirected blast. “But they, too, tend to be highly territorial, very aggressive even amongst themselves, and too unsophisticated to work together on ambushes or a siege.”

Mason stared up at her, and saw no trace of condescension or a trick in her eyes. She hadn’t asked a real question, but what she was getting at was obvious. “It’s The Trials. We don’t know what could be even further north from them, or they could be merely starving. Either of those things could force them to work together.”

“I wanted to kill you, Mason. I did not try to hide that fact. But I trained you, and I’ve welcomed you into the band, and now I have lost a friend protecting you.” Her gaze was steely, but there was both fear and warning behind it. “I need to know, before we walk willingly into another battle, that you understand why I have put my personal feelings aside and done my best to treat fairly with you.”

Why had she done as much for him? And moreover, Sorynel, Leornal, Faynel, and even Shayjol. All people he vaguely understood as Darkest Night. “Embracing The Trials means growth. Striking down an enemy may give you a skill level, but earning an ally means one more person watching your back with their own skills.”

“If something can threaten the Corrosi, then we are in grave danger. All of us. New Marra is a joke. The city acts as if a small defense force and some patrols are enough to let everyone else carry on their lives as if this were our own world. Your speech before the council proved to me that you shared our way of seeing things.”

She smiled down at him, and it was a thin thing. Tired, and sad. Mason could almost feel Mowrytal responding in kind within him. “It is a hard thing to do, but I am working to put aside my anger. You’ve acted bravely and honorably in every trial you’ve faced.”

“Ah don’t spoil the Demon too much. He’s behaved himself so far but you never know when he’ll start jumping from the shadows to eat your soul,” Leornal teased as he walked out ahead of the rest of the group. “Torysen, I believe we should be moving. There will be time to sit around the campfire with the human once we’ve swooped in and saved the city.”

Mason shot him a dirty look, but resolved it with a grin. “You’re an asshole. But he’s right. I appreciate your sentiments, Torysen. I would be glad to talk about the future, and an alliance of our people, more when the time is appropriate.”

The captain wasn’t abashed in the least, but immediately resumed her commanding demeanor. She barked orders out about their travelling formation and set a steady but unhurried pace. It was clear she wasn’t willing to risk her own band just to get to the fighting a few moments sooner.