“What’s this one?” Riala asked as we were sitting at a campfire.

“It modifies the size of the water stream,” I said.

After walking all day, we stopped at another clearing when it got dark. Miles and I were currently explaining different sigils to Riala, who was eager to learn more about the scripts. Especially after Miles’ experiments this morning. The young girl had a remarkable memory and comprehension and was usually able to replicate our scripts after only having seen them once or twice. While I was a little worried about our blue stone supply, Miles was adamant that it would be good to have fresh eyes on the topic. Chaining scripts and delaying their execution was something he had just figured out by trial and error, and he figured a child might come up with entirely different ideas that we wouldn’t consider. That’s why he was encouraging her to learn.

Riala finished her first script that she had written entirely by herself and activated it. Apparently she had raised the spread considerably, because instead of a stream of water, a wall of water droplets appeared, falling down over a large area.

“I can make it rain!” she said excitedly.

“Good job!” I said with a smile.

‘Hm. That reminds me, it has never rained since I got here, has it?’

“It almost never rains in this area. And the summer is particularly dry.” I said.

‘We haven’t seen any rivers or ponds out here either...’

“Of course, you only find those in areas with a lot of rain. I’ve only read about these things.”

‘You mean you don’t have springs? What about wells?’

“Not around Alarna. I’ve read there isn’t enough water.”

‘That’s very interesting...’

I got a little nostalgic when Miles went quiet to think, while I turned back to Riala. She was just finishing up her next script and activated it. I expected another nice, little water spray. Instead, a stream of water shot a ten centimeter wide hole into a nearby tree. And the one behind it.

“Oww!”

“Ah!” I quickly checked on her. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah...” she said with a grimace.

I looked at the script she had used. It utilized too much mana, and since she had played around for a while already, she had crossed the threshold where script usage would start to be painful.

“Riala, you need to be careful with that one. I told you, remember? It uses a lot of mana.”

“I just wanted to test it. For when a beast attacks us,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, patting her head. “Let’s stop for today.”

“Wait! I want to know what this one does!” she said with pleading eyes.

I didn’t allow her to use any more scripts, but kept teaching her more theory for a while, until she eventually got tired and layed down. I wished I could’ve taken a book with me. When you’re used to falling asleep while reading, it’s very boring to just lie there, and it didn’t help that I kept thinking about our travels.

We had reached the south-west corner of the fields around Alarna in the late afternoon. From here, we could reach Cerus within three days, and since the road shouldn’t be in use, soon, we wouldn’t have to trudge through the forest anymore.

In total we had only seen two beasts today and we had been able to avoid both of them. Technically, this was great, but I was admittedly a little curious about how our scripts would do.

“An attack like Riala’s earlier should kill a beast in one hit, right?” I asked Miles.

‘Hmhm,’ he agreed, but didn’t elaborate.

“Alright, talk to me. What are you working on?”

‘Honestly, I’m not sure yet. It’s just a random idea.’

I let him think in peace and closed my eyes again, trying to fall asleep. Seconds passed, then minutes, but I just didn’t feel tired at all. “This is weird,” I mumbled. Even if today hadn’t been as exhausting as yesterday, we had walked all day. I should be spent, yet I felt fine.

Before this moment I hadn’t actually thought about it, but ever since we got mana, I didn’t get as tired anymore. That first night I’d had a brief nap in the shed and was then fine for the whole day. In the cell I was unconscious for the night, but that was after I had been drained. The last time I had slept normally before last night had been two days prior. Yet I hadn’t felt tired once in that time. Okay, I was unconscious, maybe that helped, but...

‘Can’t sleep?’

“I wonder...”

I told Miles about my suspicion. He hadn’t considered it yet himself, maybe because it was my body and I felt the difference more strongly. Since that night, my mind felt clearer and my body lighter. It was difficult to not assume a connection to my tiredlesness. Riala didn’t seem to be affected, but she also had less mana.

‘I guess it’s possible,’ Miles said. ‘Mana seems to be some kind of energy after all. Oh, and when there was no energy left... we both fell asleep.’

The theory that we were running on mana right now was interesting, but being unable to fall asleep late at night was also kind of worrying. It didn’t feel right. Since we had barely used any scripts today, I decided to test it out and drew one with a very high output onto my hand. The amount would be fine, but it was still the script with the largest effect we had tried so far.

‘You seem adventurous today, we don’t know exactly how much damage that will do,’ Miles said.

“Tell me you aren’t curious.”

‘Oh, far from it. Hit it.’

I turned south, in the opposite direction of where the town was, and aimed at a random tree. As soon as I activated the script, a large stream of water shot out and I immediately crossed the pain threshold and fell down in pain. “Ahh!!”

As I was lying on my side, I heard the unsettling sounds of wood cracking and heavy objects falling.

“Wah! What was that!?” Riala said after having been woken by the loud noises.

I opened my eyes and propped myself up just in time to notice that a large tree was slowly tilting in our direction. I got to my feet as fast as I could, grabbed Riala, and jumped out of the way, just as the tree’s trunk crashed into our campside. After cowering for a moment, we both looked back at the tree, trying to make sense of what had just happened. Then my eyes wandered to where I had fired the water at. The shot had left a trail of broken trees. The one I had aimed at was broken into two halves, and the water had kept traveling, hitting several trees behind the first one as well. The last trunk that was hit belonged to the tree that had fallen in our direction.

‘Holy shit.’

Punching holes into trees and beasts was one thing, but this blast was on another level. Even though I had put half of my mana capacity into it, neither Miles nor me had expected this kind of destructive power. According to him, with a water stream that was several meters wide, there shouldn’t have been enough force left to shoot through multiple trees.

“Are you okay?” I asked Riala, who was still staring wide-eyed at the destruction I had caused. She briefly looked at me, nodded, and then looked back at the trees again.

“This is why we have to be very careful with scripts,” I said with a sad chuckle. I noticed her head snapping in the direction of my hand, but I quickly covered the script I had used. “Oh, no! Forget it.”

Ignoring her pouting, I got up and looked at the fallen tree again. Somehow the trunk had just barely missed our campfire and luggage. “We were lucky there...”

‘It was really impressive though... and useful for our research.’

“Don’t you dare!”

‘I know, I know.’

I’m surrounded by children!

***

When I woke up the next morning, I was leaning against the fallen tree. Looking to my left, I could see the carnage I had caused in the light of the early day. It was a little disturbing that I could cause this amount of damage this easily. On the plus side, I slept like a baby.

Curiously, I didn’t have a quill in my hand, there were no new scripts on my arm, and Riala was still asleep. “Quiet night?”

‘Ah, morning. Still working on that idea.’

I admired that he could work out all of these ideas and theories just in his head, but I had to wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to actively test them instead. Apparently I was mistaken in thinking that I was the only one worried about our stone supply, however.

‘It would be easier, but I don’t want to waste all our stones on unimportant experiments. Riala needs the feeling of accomplishment, but who knows when we’ll get more of them.’

The sun was already peeking over the horizon, so I shook Riala awake. After a quick bite and some self-produced water, we were getting ready to leave, when we heard a loud roar in the distance, out of the direction we had come from.

“That didn’t sound like a beast...” I said.

‘At least not like the previous ones,’ Miles added.

We could hear it roar and rampage through the forest. “Maybe two beasts are fighting?”

I wanted to get going before they made their way over to us, so I urged Riala on and started walking away from the ruckus. That’s when we heard a woman's scream.

“Was that...?”

‘Tomar, nobody should be in these parts of the woods, right? If that’s a pursuer...’

“...” Unsure about what to do, I just stood there for a moment, until I noticed Riala’s expectant glance. “Let’s at least take a look.”

We went back the way we came. For the first few minutes we could still hear the commotion, growing louder as we got closer. Just when the forest became quiet again, we spotted the beast. It was twice the size of the ones we had seen before and much burlier, but it had the same dark fur and red eyes.

The beast was walking over to a figure in black clothes, with a hood and a mask on. She must’ve lost the fight, as she was lying on the ground, unmoving. There was nobody else in sight. “What do we do?” I said in a whisper as I looked on.

‘It looks tough... much more so than the other ones. And we don’t even know if she’s still alive.’

“We’d be leaving her behind to get eaten!”

Riala looked shocked at my words. A few more steps and the beast would be upon the woman. We can’t just leave!

“Miles, which one?”

‘Damn it... Okay, I suggest one-third, make it wide, and aim for the head while it’s distracted. You better not miss.’

“Riala, stay here!” I quickly adjusted the script from last night that was still on my hand and moved closer to the beast. When it was about to grab the woman, I started aiming. It was already too close to her, however, so I whistled, to distract it. The beast raised its head and looked in my direction, at which point I fired.

The water stream wasn’t as strong as the previous one, but it was still very powerful. It shot through the beast and into the trees behind it, creating large holes in them, but fortunately they didn’t topple over. Unlike the now headless beast, which dropped to the ground with a heavy thud.

I waved over Riala and we carefully approached the dead beast and the woman. As we got closer, I saw that half of her left leg was missing, the wound bleeding.

“What now...?” I asked Miles.

‘She’s still breathing, but she’ll bleed to death like that. Quick, raise her leg and take off her top, the hood and the mask.’

Doing as Miles instructed, I propped up her leg on our bag and took off her clothes partially. I then cut apart her top to bind a string around her leg and used a script to clean the wound superficially before pressing onto it with the remaining cloth pieces.

‘This is far from ideal, but maybe it will be enough. We’re only trying to stop the bleeding.’

The woman was still unconscious, as we watched her blood soak through the cloth layers. She was young, but a little older than me, and about the same height. I knew that these black clothes were being worn by agents of the authorities and the temple, who didn’t usually leave town. “She probably is after us...”

‘The ninja girl that we found just minutes behind us in the middle of the woods at this time of day? Yes, probably. But it’s weird that she’s alone, isn’t it?’

“Maybe she got separated from her group?”

I didn’t think that they would send a single Fighter after us. Not into the woods. As far as I knew, the town never sent out groups smaller than four, because it would be difficult to handle stronger beasts otherwise.

“Will she be okay?” Riala asked.

“I don’t know, I hope so,” I said to her.

After a few minutes the bleeding had slowed considerably, but I kept up the pressure. At the same time I regularly looked around, in case someone or something else came looking for us.

‘That looks like a bear,’ Miles said as my gaze fell on the beast. First wolves, now bears. It appeared that he recognized the beasts, but they were a little different from the variants he knew. They were larger, more eerie-looking, and more aggressive.

Suddenly, the leg that I was still pressing the cloth against started twitching. “Ugh...” the woman groaned.

“Don’t move,” I said as she tried to pull her leg away.

When she heard my voice, her eyes suddenly shot open and she looked at me for just a moment before pulling a knife from somewhere and pointing it at me. “You!”

I quickly took Riala by the hand and moved away from the woman. “We’re just trying to help you!”

Confused, she looked down at herself. She was dressed in an undershirt and half her leg was missing, with her top having been used as bandages. Then she looked at the headless beast with an unbelieving expression. She seemed to realize that what I had said was true, as she slowly lowered her knife. Her confusion on the other hand seemed to only grow. “Why?”

“We... couldn’t just do nothing.”

She wasn’t able to fight and finally laid back down. Her eyes darted around as she was thinking about something. After a few seconds, she looked back at the beast and suddenly started laughing. “What are you!?”