2 Weeks later

  Team Cookie Sandwich was not having a good day.

  Carla was seething. How was it that each and every time an adventure guild official told them that the mission would be a piece of cake, something bad happened? The mission they had been given was to kill a single evolved stag. A single one.

  Either the mission had been a lie or Carla’s eyes were tricking her. They had been prepared for a single longhorn ravager, so why were there three of them?

  The stags resembled their four legged kin in many ways. They had long antlers, a mighty snout and clopping hooves just like any old unawakened moose. The fact that they stood on two legs made things significantly harder.

  “Thank all the gods, even the abyssal ones, that these fuckers don’t have magic!” Carla yelled.

  “Language, Carla!”

  “Oh, shut the fuck up! We’re fighting beasts, not wooing noblewomen at a fancy ball!”

  “Still, we’re supposed to be pro- Ugh!”

  Rodrick was struck by one of the beasts, flying away from its hoof like a sack of wheat tossed by a farmer during the town faire. Carla flinched as the man slammed against a tree, letting out a pained grunt. The mere fact that the stag had managed to toss Rodrick through the air told of its impressive strength.

  This was not good. Not good at all. The initial plan had been to distract the longhorn ravager long enough for Carla to cast a bronze rank ice lance. That would’ve finished the beast off, and the mission would have been a resounding success. That plan had accounted for one ravager. Not three.

  There was no way for Carla to channel her magic long enough to create a big lance like they had planned. Each time she started her spell, one of the ravagers would divert from the group and charge at her. That stopped her casting, as she needed to dodge. Rodrick could maybe take a charge, but she couldn’t. She was not about to get hit by those things and survive…

  Speaking of Rodrick, the big man got up from the ground with a mighty roar. He was significantly worse for wear, several cuts and bruises all over his body, but he wasn’t out of the fight just yet. He would be waking up with a sore back—scratch that, sore everything—the following day, that was for sure.

  Their saving grace came in the form of the other adventurers in their team. Arthur was a supreme distraction, peppering the ravagers full of arrows, and kept their attention trained on himself with relative ease. They didn’t manage to hit him either, which was good for him and annoying for them. The only thing was that Arthur wouldn’t be able to finish the fight on his own. He didn’t have any strong finishers, and Carla suspected that he would run out of energy before the beasts.

  Arthur might have not been able to finish the beasts off, but Ciel could. In fact, Carla was pretty sure that the scary woman would have been able to kill one of the beasts on her own. She was fighting one of the massive beasts right now, and she was winning…

  Choosing to fight in a thick forest like the one they were in had been a good choice. That was mostly because the ravagers couldn’t move freely while most of their team wasn’t as restricted. The only one who was seriously affected was Rodrick, but he was a trained fighter and could manage. Arthur benefitted massively from the hard terrain, as he could escape the ravagers’ clutches more easily, but the one who gained the most was Ciel.

  It was a commonly known fact that dark mages were more powerful in darker environments. The shadowy forest was a near perfect battleground for a fighter like Ciel, and that showed. The pale-skinned wraith of a woman practically blinked around the forest, delivering deep slashes and stabs on the ravager she was fighting. Worst, or maybe best, of all, she was laughing all the while...

  Each time she blinks, Ciel looks more gray than pale. Maybe it’s some effect of the magic she’s using? I’m not going to ask! Regardless of Carla’s ruminations, Ciel’s fight looked enchanting. The hybrid rogue dark mage hadn’t been hit once during the fight, and she could handle her own beast. That left the rest of the group with the remaining two beasts.

  By now, Rodrick was back in the fight. He was swinging his axe and did his job as the frontline fighter of the group perfectly. Both of the ravagers’ attention was on him, and Carla finally got a chance to cast a spell.

  Winter’s Bloom was not a good choice for this fight. It was most effective in large-scale fights with many weaker opponents, and this wasn’t that. Carla wasn’t even sure if it would be effective against the ravagers, since if it hit, their hides were strong enough to not be pierced. An ice lance could maybe take out one, but that seemed like a lackluster solution. A boring one... Carla didn’t like boring.

  Would locking them down for Rodrick to decapitate them be enough? Probably…

  Carla was a water mage, but she mostly used ice magic. It had always felt more natural to her, so she had focused her studies on it. That didn’t mean that she couldn’t use water magic normally—only that she was better with ice.

  Having gathered her idea, Carla started casting her spell. She would have to use it when the ravagers were close to each other so that it would hit them both. Ciel’s opponent was too far anyways, so it wasn’t even a concern.

  As she finished her spell, Carla breathed out slowly as she uttered the spell’s name.

  “Thorn school variant 72: Constrictor.”

  She hated the naming conventions of her family’s school. Every spell became boring when ‘Thorn school variant’ was slapped in front of it. Still, she had learned the spell with the help of that school, so the name had locked itself in her mind.

  Even though its name was boring, the spell itself wasn’t. A snake of water manifested at the Ravagers’ feet and coiled around them, constricting their movements. As the two stags let out panicked bellows, Carla started casting another, much shorter, spell.

  The main benefit of the spell wasn’t the immediate effect itself. The snake was made out of water, and while it restricted movement somewhat, it wasn’t anything amazing. No, the main benefit came from the fact that it worked as a staging ground for many other spells. Some water mages continued the sequence by forcing the snake into the opponent's body, some condensed it into a spike and the rest… They froze it.

  The spell Carla was casting was predictably one that would freeze the snake of water. If the water snake was an annoyance, the frozen form was a prison even the strongest bronze rankers would have difficulty escaping. The idea was that the snake coiled against the target’s skin so freezing it would restrict their movements completely. If the snake was controlled and positioned right just before freezing it, the target couldn’t move at all.

  The spell that was used to freeze the snake was a much simpler one so Carla didn’t deign to speak its name out loud. Freeze was a boring name anyway. Boring names aside, its effects combined with Thorn school variant 72: Constrictor were hard to deny.

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  Nearly immediately after Carla cast her spell, both the ravagers stopped in their tracks. Their strength wasn’t enough to break the frozen snake coiled around their bodies, and they had become sitting ducks for Arthur and Rodrick.

  Rodrick marched up to the first ravager and raised his axe up high. Despite the clear threat to its life, the man’s target didn’t manage to break out of the prison of ice. Carla heard a silent “Sorry.” from Rodrick as the axe swung down.

  The ravager’s head dropped to the ground with a heavy thump. It did not roll like in the books Carla had read as a child. The head was too heavy for that.

  “One down, two to go,” Rodrick muttered flatly. “This just feels so… Wrong.”

  “They’re beasts, Rodrick,” Arthur commented from the side. “You know that they killed an iron rank adventurer, right? That’s why we’re here in the first place.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. They’re just so… helpless.”

  That was when the supposedly imprisoned ravager’s antler impacted Rodrick’s stomach and came out of his back. The big man screamed. Carla screamed. The ravager screamed… Mooed?

  The only ones who didn’t scream were Ciel, the remaining ravager and Arthur. Their rogue and the remaining ravager were obviously in the middle of something, but Arthur acted.

  A full-power shot from Arthur’s bow specifically designed for bronze rank strength impacted the eye of the ravager who had gored Rodrick. It was stuck in a weird position, its head lowered for the charge, which meant that Arthur had an easy shot.

  Having an arrow shot through one’s eye was a death sentence for nearly any beast in bronze rank, and the longhorn ravager wasn’t an exception to that rule. The end of the beast’s life was instant, albeit not painless. That left Ciel with her fight and Rodrick… Well, he had a horn though his stomach.

  “Sweet goddess of mercy, get it out!” Rodrick screamed. “Get that horn out before I pass out, die and come to haunt every single one of you!”

  “Yes, yes, you’re not dying this easily,” Arthur said. “Carla, would you come here and help me to remove this thing?”

  Carla just looked at the scene of gore in front of her eyes for a couple of seconds. However, when Rodrick let out another yell of pain, she snapped out of her musings and rushed to help him. She was a noblewoman, but she was an adventurer too. Adventurers didn’t balk at sights of gore, they acted.

  The thick forest was filled with Rodrick’s screams, the last ravager’s panicked snorts and Ciel’s demonic laughter. That was a soundscape Carla wouldn’t be forgetting for a long time.

  The following minutes were filled with Carla and Arthur trying to get the antler out of Rodrick’s body. As long as the man had the antler inside of his body, he couldn’t drink a healing potion. That meant that faster was better.

  The problem was that the beast was way too heavy and had fallen on top of the screaming big man. After a minute or two, he had moved on from prayers and broken the no swearing rule. The so-called floodgates were opened…

  When Carla and Arthur realized that they wouldn’t be able to move the beast off of Rodrick, they grabbed his axe. Arthur swung it dangerously close to Rodrick’s nether region, but luckily no further damage was done. Cutting the antler off the beast was hard work though, and Arthur needed more than ten swings.

  “You should learn to swing a fucking axe!” Rodrick screamed. “No, no, not that close! Ahh! Are you trying to cut my family jewels off or what?”

  “Shut up you oaf,” Arthur grumbled. “I’m trying to cut the antler off. One more swing…”

  The following five minutes were spent just like that, Rodrick screaming his lungs out all the while. Eventually, Ciel managed to finish her hunt and came to Rodrick’s aid. Mysteriously, her first swing with the axe finally cut it cleanly off the ravager’s head.

  “Holy shit you’re bad with an axe, Arthur,” The pale-skinned woman muttered. “You should do some strength training.”

  “I’m plenty strong! I just… Uhh… I prepped it for you! The antler was close to breaking already. You just finished the job!”

  “Yes, yes, continue to believe that,” Ciel laughed. “Carla, you should hand Rodrick a healing potion.”

  Carla snapped out of her internal musings. “Oh, right! Sorry, I was in my own thoughts there.”

  She handed their strongest bronze rank healing potion to Rodrick. He was still stuck under the ravager but he could drink the healing potion and lay there until he had enough strength to push the beast off. Nobody else was nearly strong enough to do that on their own, so Rodrick needed his strength to get free.

  As he drank the potion, the big man let out a sigh of relief. “Well, that was a complete tragedy of a mission. Oh what I wouldn’t pay for a good healer right now…”

  As it turned out, infirmaries didn’t pay shit to interns. Valar was discovering that firsthand.

  In the two weeks of studying after he learned the rune of life, Valar had managed to learn mend and was well over halfway done with protection. He couldn’t heal others just yet, but the academy had put him on a one week internship with one of the city’s infirmaries anyways. That meant that he worked as a receptionist, and that was boring.

  The past two weeks had been filled with training and training and training. Oh, and some more training. Must not forget training.

  Viktor had brought him bad news about the analysis of his fire for two weeks in a row now. The wind mage just wanted new samples of Valar’s fire each time, as apparently analyzing Valar’s flame was extremely hard and time consuming. The only thing that Viktor had managed to say was that his fire wasn’t normal magical fire, but that had been obvious from the onset. So no news on that front. Valar hoped that he would get better news in a few days, but that wasn’t likely. Based on Viktor’s annoyance, the analysis would take months, not weeks.

  As for his good luck amulet, that would be ready for him in two days. He would have to endure two days of internship at an infirmary, then it was the weekend. Only two days…

  The mandatory one week internship at a city infirmary had come as a surprise. Apparently the infirmaries were big sponsors of the academy’s life magic study, and their only condition was that each student would do one week of internship during their iron rank studies, and three weeks during bronze rank studies. Valar didn’t even want to know how much he would need to intern during silver rank studies… A year? Two? A gods’ damned century?

  He didn’t even really get why the infirmary had wanted him. He hadn’t learned tether yet, so he couldn’t even help with healing the patients. That meant that he was forced to work at the reception, and maybe spectate a healing or two.

  The infirmary’s probable goal was to poach him from the adventurer’s guild before he got too interested in the field. They were obviously competing with the guild for new healers, and grabbing a chance to get to know new life mages was valuable for the institution. Especially with a case like Valar, their interest was high. He was young, held potential, and was actually interested in life magic. If their internship would’ve been more interesting, they might’ve actually had a chance in poaching him!

  This, however… Valar was becoming more and more sure that he was going to become an adventurer. Being an infirmary healer was much less dangerous and would certainly have interesting work, but it was just so boring. When there weren’t critical patients, the whole job felt like a slog. Adventuring would at least be more exciting!

  I wasn’t sure about becoming an adventurer, especially after the bandit and city attacks, but now… I’d rather do something more interesting than this! Every healer at the infirmary was nice to him, sure, but he could see that even they were bored. As grim as it was, everyone was waiting for an actual challenging job. Being a healer at an infirmary actually made you want somebody to get seriously hurt. At least then your job would be interesting.

  One of the only positive aspects of the job was that he could train protection between customers arriving at the infirmary. Rhondell was a big city, so it had loads of infirmaries. That meant that generally there would be about one patient per half hour on average. All the downtime could be filled with training runes, and the staff seemed to even appreciate that.

  “You really have a strong work ethic,” a silver rank female healer named Eva commented. She seemed to be in her early 40s, and she had already told Valar that she had a husband and children at home. The silver rank healer spent long days at the infirmary as she was the primary breadwinner of their household. Her husband wasn’t a mage, so making that much money would’ve been difficult. “I’m sure you would be a wonderful healer at this infirmary!”

  “Are you sure? Honestly, I’m leaning towards adventuring work right now,” Valar mused. “The bits I’ve seen are at least way more exciting.”

  “Excitement, excitement,” Eva chuckled. “I never really got into adventuring, but I do understand the interest. Iron rankers are usually way older than you, and even they go chasing the thrill. Do remember that it’s way more risky though. We at the infirmaries don’t really like when life mages start adventuring though. Every healer can save lives, but adventuring is a dangerous job. Every healer we lose hurts people, Valar. We need more healers, not less.”

  “Are you saying that I shouldn’t start adventuring?”

  “No, do what your heart desires,” Eva’s smile didn’t reach her eyes. “Just remember that we’re always hiring when you don’t want the thrill anymore. When, not if…”

  “I’ll remember that.”