Faye stepped into the centre of the dirt lane that was all that they had for the road to the city. The uneven surface felt better under her feet than the grassy bank at the side of the road. It may just be dirt, but it was wider and clear.

She put her hand on her sword and drew it with a single, smooth motion. The hand-and-a-half sword fit her gloved hand perfectly. She took it in a two-handed stance, angled down behind her in a line that followed her right leg.

Gavan, his hands already primed to throw out the spells he was able to cast, stepped up to her left.

“Don’t you want to stay behind me?” Faye asked. “Isn’t the idea that I shield you?”

“No, I can’t see anything if I’m behind you. I will tell you when I stop casting, you can go in then.”

“Sounds good,” she replied.

As the shapes came closer, Faye engaged [Mana Sense], the skill enhancing her ability to pick out the monsters swarming for them. There were only eight.

Since when did I start thinking that eight monsters running for me was ‘only’ anything?

The monsters, because now that they were closer it was clear they were not animals, came forward on four legs. Their thin, wiry bodies were covered in pale fur that looked dry and dusty. Their muzzles were long, filled with sharp canines that stuck out in worrying numbers from their slavering jaws.

“I suggest we don’t let them bite.”

Gavan did not reply, but he did move his hands.

A series of icicle shards formed quickly out of the freezing air, hanging above the charging monsters. As soon as they formed a sharp spike, they slammed into the ground with a shattering force.

The monsters screamed and dodged as best they could. Gavan’s shards exploded into sharp fragments of ice that tore through nearby monsters.

“Four killed,” he said, calmly.

The monsters were fast. They were only a dozen yards away.

“No more casting,” he announced, then stepped back.

Faye grinned, engulfed her sword in mana and ignited it so that the magical flames erupted across the surface of the masterfully crafted blade. Swinging the sword up and across her body in a horizontal slash, Faye willed [Blades of Flame] to activate.

The spell ate up a portion of mana but the arc of flames that emerged from the swing of her sword blasted out, catching one of the monsters in the face. It howled and lost its footing, tumbling to the ground in a high-speed crash that put it well behind its fellows.

Two on the right circled a little further, but the one remaining on her left came straight in for Faye. She stepped forward to meet it. Her blade rose to meet its charge, from left to right, ending high. The blade sliced through the top half of its jaw and skull easily, dispatching it. The fur and skin around the blow blackened and charred from where the fiery blade had passed through.

Congratulation! You have defeated a level ten [Plains Stalker].

Experience awarded.

Pivoting on her right foot, Faye brought her left leg around to switch the direction she faced. One of the other plains stalkers had just jumped at her from that side. She danced back and to her right, bringing the sword down in a vertical slash. This blow smashed through the plains stalker’s maw.

Gavan had drawn the attention of the other stalker that had flanked Faye, but the burst of icicles that he launched from the palm of his hand were more than enough to remove it from the equation.

That left only one more.

Faye turned; the flames of her sword close to her face but through the connection of her mana unable to burn her. The final plains stalker had recovered from its high-speed tumble and was watching her with wary eyes. It yipped and whined.

“Don’t complain,” Faye said in response. “Your pack attacked us.”

[Mana Sense] was still active, which was the only reason she received any warning at all.

A shape outlined in pale mana flew at her from her left, her open side.

The plains stalker in front of her still whined and moaned as it moved to her right and Faye tracked it with her eyes.

At the last moment, she spun and cut diagonally down. The ambushing monster had aborted its attack as soon as Faye had started moving, so her cut did not meet monster flesh.

The sound of something slamming into the ground behind her ended with a high-pitched whine. Gavan had dealt with the other plains stalker.

That left this newcomer.

Now that she was focused on it, Faye realised that it was only the outline of the mana of the monster that she could see. It was invisible to her eyes otherwise.

It was much warier of her than the plains stalkers had been. It circled and switched directions multiple times, sometimes quickly and others slowly.

Gavan threw an icicle at it from afar, but it slipped by the speeding projectile without a scratch. He gathered the mana to do so again, and this time Faye prepared her own spell.

As Gavan formed the ice shard, Faye concentrated on empowering the mana in the sword, pumping it higher than it usually was.

When the icicle whooshed through the air, the monster was once again able to nimbly dance out of its way. But, as it did so, it hung for a moment in the air.

Faye whipped her sword through one, two, three quick cuts. Each time, she cast [Blades of Flame].

Three arcs of flames blast outward from her attacks, each one angled slightly differently.

The nearly invisible monster tried twisting in the air to avoid the attacks, but it still caught half a flaming arc face on. The flames erupted into a blast of energy that somehow disrupted whatever skill, or magic, the monster was using. It suddenly dropped into visibility.

As soon as they could see it, it started running from them. It looked the same as the plains stalkers, but its fur was different; dark markings ran up and down the length of its body in patterns.

Faye moved to attack again but Gavan called out.

“Let it go!”

She pulled back her mana and just watched as the monster loped out to the fields of grass. It did not look back the entire time, too focused on leaving their sight as quickly as it could, or so it seemed.

Faye nodded, looking around at the bodies of the plains stalkers.

“Well, plains stalkers. Not so tough,” she said.

“They can roam in packs of dozens,” Gavan replied. “As many as sixty.”

She looked back over the fields of grass. “So, you’ve come across them before?”

“Fairly common, on the road east,” he said, “but that trick with the stealth… that was new.”

Faye looked all around their camp with [Mana Sense] and did not see anything else. She deactivated the skill. She had found that unlike with her previous issues with the active component of [Swordfighter’s Sense], [Mana Sense] did not give her blinding headaches if she used it too long — but she did come to forget that the mana was not a physical thing that everyone could see. She did not want to get so used to streams of mana that she reacted to their presence in ways that was out of the ordinary.

That still meant she would activate it to check their surroundings regularly. She was not suicidal.

“Well,” she said, looking down at her now-extinguished sword. “The sword performed beautifully. Eanraigh is a wonderful weaponsmith.”

Gavan nodded. “Looks like it worked as well as any sword would.”

Faye gave her friend a flat stare. “Don’t be dense.”

He grinned but did not rise to the barb. They then took out some waterskins and drank and ate some more.

“We should still aim to go a few miles further today,” Gavan said between mouthfuls. “I cannot help but think we are on a tight time limit.”

Faye nodded. “I know what you mean. The Administrator didn’t say that we only had a few weeks, but she didn’t really need to, did she?”

Gavan grimaced. “Exactly. I’m sure that we can get some basic help for them as soon as we get to the city. The difficult part will be ensuring that the town has everything it needs for the long term.”

“What are your thoughts on that?” she asked. She had her own ideas, or the seeds of them, but wanted to hear his first.

“A lot depends on the current load on the Guild,” he said, shrugging. “Obviously, there are going to be more adventurers available there than we had access to in Lóthaven — higher level for the most part, too — but it does not guarantee their willingness to help.”

Faye frowned. “They won’t be obligated to?” She chewed on a particularly tough piece of travel cake.

“Not exactly. The Guild can issue mandatory missions, but it tries not to as much as possible. If the adventurers are just commanded back and forth, then we are no longer adventurers, we are soldiers.”

“And that’s bad?”

Gavan gave her a strange look. “I did not sign up to take orders every day, Faye. Not many would.”

That sounded a little extreme, in her opinion. If you were part of an organisation, you played by their rules.

Then again, she thought, if the organisation starts doing something you don’t like you’re not supposed to be forced to continue working for it. I don’t think that the same is true for an army.

“That’s beside the point, for now,” she said, out loud. “What will we do to convince people to help?”

Gavan had popped the last bite of his food into his mouth and took a moment to formulate his reply. “As with most things with adventurers, we need to pay them.”

“And what kinds of funds do we have access to?”

Gavan shook his head. “None. The Lóthaven branch needs everything it has. The Administrator will be using their funds to ensure the town is rebuilt. Paying the townsfolk, guilders, adventurers. No, for anything here we need to come up with our own money. Fortunately, we can earn our pay the same way as other adventurers would.”

“That would take ages, though, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t see another way.”

They did not speak more on the matter, each of them deep in their own thoughts about it as they packed their belongings back into their packs. As she was putting it back on her shoulders, Faye wondered what she would do if they were attacked whilst moving. She would have to drop the pack as quickly as possible, probably, or be burdened whilst defending herself.

The road continued in a gently sloping gradient for a few miles. Stretched out before them were small hillocks, rises and depressions in the grassy quilt of land that carried on as far as she could see. It looked peaceful.

Flicking [Mana Sense] on, she could see that mana flowed here but it was sluggish and relatively inactive.

“There are way stops along the road,” Gavan said, as they walked. “They are temporary shelters that work for travellers, but the main reason they were set up was to store firewood for the caravans. We can stay at one, when we reach them.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Reaching one of the prepared way stops would take more than the single day of walking they had done so far, though. Their first night would be in the open.

As the sun began lowering in the sky behind them, throwing their long shadows out before them on the dirt road, Faye found her eyes wandering the landscape, looking for something other than a flat piece of grassy ground for them to rest at.

The days were already cold, let alone the nights, she did not want wind to be a massive problem each night. The sky was still relatively cloudless. The wisps that dotted the fading light blue of the eastern sky would be nowhere near enough insulation for the night.

Of course, the advantage was that it meant there would be no rain, either.

She pointed to an ample collection of hardy bushes, half an hour later, that were growing in a clump off to their right. Gavan agreed that they looked as good as anything he could have found, so they left the dirt of the road behind and started tramping through the long grass to reach them.

[Mana Sense] was useful in the low light, Faye found, because the additional outlines of mana that abounded tended to show her where things were. Fortunately, there were no lurking plains stalkers.

The collection of greenery was shoulder-high, almost trees that provided some shelter from the sky and any watching eyes. Between their roots were pockets of ground that dipped down a little, forming natural bedding spots. It seemed that many a passing traveller, animal or human, had had the same thought as Faye, because the depressions in the ground were already filled with collections of soft mosses and some of the evergreen leaves of the bushes.

“Cosy,” she remarked.

“Seems fine,” Gavan agreed. “But let’s forgo the fire for now. We’re too exposed.”

Faye looked at him. “It’s exposure I’m worried about.”

“Our sleeping rolls will protect us from the worst. If we’re dry, we’ll be fine. If it gets terrible, we’ll relent and burn something. Trust me, sometimes being cold is better than attracting monsters from miles around.”

Faye nodded. This was why she had wanted a guide to come with her, after all. “Alright, fine, I’ll let your experience in this take precedence. Let me just lodge a formal complaint, though.”

“I’ll tell the Administrator right away; she will put a formal reprimand in my file.”

“Who needs formal reprimands?” Faye asked, sweetly innocent, “I can just use you as fuel for my fire.”

Gavan laughed. “Let’s promise not to burn one another on our first night travelling, eh?”

“No promises.”