It turned out that Faye had to make a conscious decision to extinguish the flames from her new spell. They had tested it a little whilst it was still around, and Gavan said he felt the healing energies in it when he put his hand in.

Faye felt nothing but a pleasant warmth from them, but no healing nor pain. It was an odd spell effect. But it had managed to save their hides the night before.

Each of them spent more than a few moments worrying about the fact that they had been so close to the end of the road. They were barely out of the town.

“I gained a level from that attack,” Faye said, “but that’s not enough. We need to ensure that we’re safe the whole way there. We have weeks of travel left. More, if we keep getting delayed.”

Gavan nodded. “I know.” He looked at the [Ice Wall] hut he had made with his spell. “This isn’t enough.”

Faye noticed her fists had clenched of their own accord, so she did her best to take a few deep breaths and calm down. She opened and closed her hands a few times.

“So, I should test this more. What do you say to me hitting you with a [Fire Dart]?”

Gavan’s eyes narrowed. “You know, those times I made fun of you…”

Faye waved a hand with a grin. “I’ll pull back its power as much as possible. Let’s see if putting the modifier on it does make it heal you before we need to test it in earnest.”

Gavan considered it, then nodded. “You’re right. Best to do that now.”

Pulling her mana together, Faye focused on [Cleansing Flame]. When it activated, there was a moment’s pause before she felt it kick in. Now, she gathered the bare minimum of mana together she would need to cast [Fire Dart].

Once it was ready, she looked at Gavan and saw him nod. He held out his arm, the sleeve of his robe pulled up. “Go ahead,” he said.

Without waiting longer, she cast the modified [Fire Dart].

A ball of what looked to be white-hot fire erupted from Faye’s hand and struck Gavan’s arm. As was normal for the [Fire Dart], there was a small expulsion of force that pushed his arm away. He let out a scream and started throwing his hand up and down. White flames clung to him.

Faye immediately concentrated and forced the flames to extinguish.

The moment they had — with his arm already blistering and skin sloughing off from burns — Gavan cast his own healing spell on himself.

“Okay, shit, sorry,” Faye said. “That did not go how I imagined it.”

Gritting his teeth, Gavan nodded.

She looked through the spell description once again. There was something about it that she knew she was missing, but there was no way to know for sure. For now, however, there was no way to carry on testing it. The costs of [Cleansing Flame] was labelled as [Extreme], and her mana reserves were already down to minuscule amounts.

“I’m almost wiped out,” she told Gavan, “I’m not going to try that again for now. There’s obviously something important I’m missing.”

Gavan agreed. “Though there’s one good thing about the spell.”

“Which is?”

“You pulled the power back on the dart, I saw you do it. But it hit with the full blast of the base spell, at least. The empowering effect of the [Cleansing Flame] is potent.”

Faye thought so too. But there was a big problem with that. Normally, a power boost like that would be effective as a fight-ending spell. She would be able to defeat enemies that had already been beaten down. But if she were to fight anyone for a length of time, she would typically use mana against them. After doing so, there would be no way of activating her new second tier spell without passing out from overdrawing on mana.

She explained her thought process to Gavan, who shrugged. “Then it becomes your opening attack, rather than your finishing one.”

Faye frowned. “But, empowering a single [Fire Dart] probably isn’t enough for anything. I’m not sure how useful that would be.”

“You’ll figure something out,” Gavan said. “You will be able to use it in future.”

Faye frowned. If this had been a game like those she had played at home, the spell would have been more balanced, or given to her at a time that would have made most sense. It was deeply unsatisfying to have a new spell that sounded so great if she was unable to use it properly yet.

“Okay, let’s leave that for now,” she said, “and think about how we’re dealing with the whole journey being so dangerous.”

Gavan cast another healing spell as he thought about it. “The best thing we can do is improve as we go, but our mission to the city must take precedence over anything else we want. There will be some places between here and the city that would normally be on a team’s route, if we were heading this way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Places that have hosted monster nests in the past, for example. Known trouble spots.”

“How many?”

Gavan said he did have a map and the latest intelligence packet from the Guild. “But we have to be careful, no teams have been out this way specifically in long enough that it could be wrong. I did not want us to rely on it.”

Faye suppressed a sigh. “Why is this the first I’m hearing of it? And why is it so unreliable?”

Gavan grinned. “Welcome to the life of an adventurer. It was mostly going to be of use after we reached the city.”

“Well, come on. Let’s get moving.”

The intelligence packet was, in truth, a kind of almanac that was updated in fits and starts over years. A part of Faye appreciated that in a world without the Internet, there were problems with gathering and disseminating information. But it was hard for her to fully accept that a world with magic did not have mass-communication solved, yet.

That was a problem for another day.

As they walked, Gavan found a couple of pages in the leather-bound book that looked promising. Faye could not read it, so she had to take Gavan’s word for it. The book itself was nothing like the perfectly manufactured ones she was used to, of course. With the look of a mad scientist’s personal notebook, the leaves of paper that stuck out at odd angles, some pages that unfolded to bigger, unwieldy pages, and more than a few occasions the author had scribbled something out… Faye was starting to understand why Gavan had said they should not rely on the information.

“To be honest,” he said, after a few hours of examining the pages of the almanac, “there are not as many on the direct route to the city as I first thought.”

Faye hummed. “That makes sense. It’s a well-travelled road.”

“Your definition of ‘well-travelled’ is different from mine,” Gavan said, drolly.

“Okay, what is supposed to be the closest?”

Gavan hesitated. He flicked between two pages and kept mumbling things to himself. “I’m not sure…” he eventually let out. “The one that is on the most direct route to the city is more likely to no longer be there.”

Faye ground her teeth and tried to remember that this was not a holiday, she had been asked to do a job and getting to the city was the only way she could complete it and keep her word.

“What are the two sites?”

“One is a lair, the other an aggressive clan of beasts,” Gavan said. “The lair is closer to the road, and thus more likely to have been dealt with. The beasts, on the other hand, are further off the road — barely close enough to our route for us to still be considered moving forward — and are less likely to have been seen to.”

“What other information do we have? Also, what’s a lair?”

Gavan nodded. “Sorry, should have remembered. A lair is a site of increased mana density. What that means in practice is different for each one; but in theory it means that there will be something worth fighting, harvesting, or seeing. For example, this lair was home to some mana-infused plants, which encouraged a few groups to fight over ownership. Without going into detail… a local gang ended up in control and would violently deal with any unwelcome intruders.

“On the other hand,” he continued, “the gang went legitimate with the proceeds from the mana-plants. They turned the lair into their money maker, and that attracted other kinds of attention. That was the last we had heard, but chances are the gang-turned-group may have been ousted by now. We would not know if we were going to ensure nothing shady was happening, fighting a bunch of angry gang members, or dealing with something else entirely.”

“There’s too much we don’t know,” Faye said. “What would the benefit be of going to a now-legitimate business?”

Gavan grimaced. “I said they legitimised themselves, but honestly they were still doing a lot of their former illegal activity. They are just far enough away from Lóthaven that the Administrator did not want to waste resources on it without compensation. They are also far enough away from the city that they would not release adventuring teams to take it on with Lóthaven being closer.”

Faye shook her head. “Seems to me that if there’s a problem, it’s up to the Guild to sort it out. Why did no one do anything?”

Gavan gave her a strange look. “We still need to be paid, at the end of the day. How often did you used to work for free?”

Faye tried not to grimace. “Okay, I get your point. What about those beasts, then?”

Here, Gavan flipped to the other page of the almanac, he put a finger on a point half-way down the page and tapped it a couple of times.

“Main problem is that they’re evolved beasts.”

Faye looked at him blankly for a moment. “Let’s pretend that I am from another world, and I don’t know what those are…”

Gavan rolled his eyes. “I’m fairly sure we talked about these before. But a recap: evolved beasts are native animals that have adopted to the use of mana so much that they have changed from their original form and now use mana to improve themselves. They are not monsters, as they are less bloodthirsty, as a rule. Beasts are dangerous because, by some accounts, when a beast reaches a high enough level, they gain intelligence enough to be sapient.”

Faye blanched. “Okay, wait, what?”

Gavan nodded. “By most accounts, beasts do not gain that level of intelligence until they reach possibly level 50. However, if the actual number is known it is not common knowledge.”

Faye frowned. “So, our options are to go hit a once-criminal gang’s magic herb outfit, or go murder some dangerous, possibly-intelligent beasts?”

Gavan closed the tome and nodded. “Summed it up nicely.”

Faye scoffed and rolled her eyes. “Those are terrible options, and you should feel bad for suggesting them.”

Gavan shrugged. “Hey, you were the one that wanted effective ways to gain experience. These two are the best options.”

Faye hummed and let the matter lie. They had a day or so of travel on the road before they would need to decide to go after these leads or not, regardless. She would think on it until then.

That night, the one after being attacked in the copse of trees by the night stalkers, they happened across a small crossroads with a signpost with multiple signs pointing down each road. Faye gestured at it and asked Gavan what it said.

“Nóremest to the east, the way we’re going…”

“That’s good,” Faye interrupted, “would have been annoying to find we’ve been going the wrong way.”

Gavan tried not to grin, but she saw that he failed in that and she smiled at her victory. It was the little things.

“Ahem… to the north, there is a path to the mountains, further than the city by the way, and to the south is a path to some of the logging communities that ply their trade for the city. There’s another sign, though, that I haven’t seen before. That one says there’s a traveller’s post only a few miles south of here.”

Faye looked at the sky, overcast and gloomy, and then to her companion. Without much more than that, they both turned and took the road south.

“They might need our help,” Faye said.

“Exactly, we must check the quality of their beds.”

Faye hummed. “I was thinking more like monsters, but you’re right. What if travellers are asked to pay for awful quality beds?”

“It’s our duty.”

Grinning, they both sped up, eager to find themselves indoors for the evening.

The road south was thinner, less travelled than the road east to west, but that was hardly surprising given the lack of traffic in general. Faye was more interested in how a traveller’s post stayed open in the middle of nowhere.

It was after dusk by the time they approached the post. It was a fairly large building. It looked to Faye like it had been built in the same style as Lóthaven, but there were three floors rather than the standard two in the town. The gate into the building’s yard was marked by two lamps that swung in the night air.

The traveller’s post was quiet, but there were clear signs of habitation as they could see the warm glow of open flames through the windows — which, to Faye’s surprise, were actually large, glass, bay windows that stuck out past the level of the walls.

“Looks the part, at least,” Faye said.

Gavan nodded. “Looks impressive.”

The stables were empty, and as they approached the door to the building, Faye noted that the stables looked bare and inhospitable for any kind of animal.

Gavan did not bother to knock but opened the door and strode through. Faye followed close behind. The moment the door closed behind her, a surge of panic hit her. She whirled, grabbed Gavan by the shoulders and forced him to the side.

The loud twang of a released string vibrated in the air and the splinter of wood cracked, loudly in the room’s silent air.

“Who are ye, and why are ye here?”