Oh yeah, Kalin thought, as he dodged a second punch in the narrow entryway to the tavern. I remember what Evelyn said.

Leave the fighting to the combat classes.

The man pulled a dagger, and Kalin brought his staff down hard on his knuckles. Prioress Evelyn’s speech continued to play in the background of his mind as he fought.

I know you like to fight, Kal, but…

Kalin blocked with his staff and grunted. The man hadn’t dropped the dagger.

For now, at least, you’re a [Novice]. Wait till you get your {Skills} at the very least. The Scourge will wait.

The Scourge may have waited, but the armored man currently pinning him to the wall with a fist and swinging a dagger wouldn’t. Kalin raised an arm and felt hot pain slice through his flesh as he muttered an incantation. When he finished a split moment later, a burst of force energy exploded outward from the knobby tip of his wooden staff, sending the dagger-wielding man staggering back for balance.

Kal took the opportunity to swing a two-handed blow with his staff, as wide as the tight space would allow and as heavy as his injured arm would. He focused as it connected, and another small burst of force shot out from the staff.

{Shockwave} was a minor spell, and even with a direct hit like this, it wouldn’t kill anyone with serious levels.

Which the man apparently had, because he shrugged off the blast like it was nothing, even though it had connected directly with his side. He lunged at Kal and used a skill of his own, and a {Flurry} of daggers ripped toward the novice mage, slicing and stabbing him in a dozen places.

Kal focused all of his energy on an {Energy Shield}. It operated on a similar condensing principle as {Shockwave}, and was one of the most basic skills a mage learned, in many cases the first. Like {Shockwave}, it was a staple, a building block that allowed for the development of future, far more powerful versions.

Unfortunately, Kalin was stuck with the bare-bones version. That wouldn’t have been a problem if he’d been a master [Wizard] making use of the basic spell for the sake of simplicity, or because he’d gotten it to an extremely high level. For a high enough level magic user, {Energy Shield} could keep a collapsing building off a newborn child without so much as getting dust on the baby’s face.

But Kal wasn’t even a Level 1. He didn’t even have a true Class yet. So despite his focus and the training he’d done, he got sliced to pieces. Not quite literally, but not so far from it either.

It hurt.

Bright, fiery ribbons of pain lit up across his chest and shoulders, and he felt blood began to trickle down and seep into the thick fabric of his robe. He gritted his teeth, cursing the Ceremony that had left him without a Class.

Then the man stepped forward, grinning wickedly.

Kalin raised his staff in a defensive position, holding it crosswise across his body. His force spell had caught the man off-guard the first time, but clearly hadn’t done much damage at all the second. He needed to try something else, and fast. He could already feel himself weakening as blood continued seeping into his robe in a dozen places. He ran through the spells and cantrips he knew that might be useful in combat.

A {Binding} cantrip around the man’s foot could trip him up or even immobilize him, but Kalin would never get it set up without being stabbed, and he suspected the next strike from the man would be a mortal one.

{Enchanting} an item would take too long, and anything ward related was out of the question, though Kalin found himself wishing he’d set up some kind of defensive barrier in his room that he could retreat to. Too late now.

There were the wards he’d carved into the wood of his staff over the years, but they mostly worked passively, activating to amplify the effects of his regular spells.

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{Light} could distract for a moment, but flaring it as bright as he’d need to would hurt his own vision as well.

{Force Bolt} was an option, but given {Shockwave}’s effectiveness, probably not a great one.

A burst of {Flame} to the face might startle the man, but with the entry-way blocked and stairs behind him, Kalin wasn’t sure how he could make use of the man’s distraction. Unless…

Flicking the tip of his staff forward, Kal sent a gout of flame roaring out of his staff. It took most of the energy he had left and strained his focus, but the result was a burst of flame that would make even the a bundle of soaked wood in a rainstorm tremble in fear.

The man didn’t even step backward, only raising a bracer-covered arm to shield his face as he barreled forward knife first.

Kalin took a slashing blow on his side as he thrust his staff to touch the wall, opening himself to the attack. But the searing heat of pain was worth it. With the last of his energy, Kalin placed a simple string of {Detection} from one side of the narrow passage to the other, a tiny tripwire thread that stretched nearly invisibly across the path of the charging man.

{Detection} was Kalin’s pride and joy. He’d spent months of his free evenings after combat training honing his mastery of the spell, which he had fallen in love with for its versatility and general applicability, mostly in the art of setting up practical jokes.

Kalin had been the bane of the abbey, leaving tripwire threads of {Detection} across doorways or paths and rigging them to activate wards he’d spend hours carving in hidden locations. A particular favorite of his had been to trap a random spot in the lovely meadow nearby the abbey with whatever startling or unpleasant ward he’d read about in the library that day.

He’d stopped that one after he set off one of his own by accident one day, and had nearly soiled his robes. {Alarm} wards were loud.

What could he say? It had perhaps been immature for a grown man, but Kal had had a pretty gloomy childhood after his town was destroyed and his family murdered, and at the abbey he’d finally had a chance to have some fun. Sure the other students got tired of it and started setting up their own traps and avoiding his in clever ways, but that had been part of the enjoyment of the game. And besides, he’d gotten a lot of good practice with the skill.

{Detection} as a spell could give the caster a general awareness of hidden things nearby, though it was mana intensive enough that it was rarely used. As a ward, it could help secure an area by letting the bearer of the ward-key know when someone entered. But it was the cantrip version that Kalin had fallen in love with.

As a cantrip, {Detection} made tiny, sliver-thin threads of mana that could be connected at either end. Basically, it made tripwires, which could activate anything from a physical mechanism to a certain ward.

As the dagger-wielding man charged through Kalin’s flame with a roar of defiance, Kalin set his tripwire to activate a ward carved into his staff. A special ward, one that he’d hoped fervently during the days spent carving it that he’d never have to use. Unlike the simple wards he’d carved in the tip to augment his spells, this one was a work of art, something he’d poured himself into.

The strength of a ward depended on both the precision and size of its shape as well as the energy put into it. Wards needed a certain amount of energy to activate at all, but beyond that, more could be added to either increase the lifespan of the ward or to increase its power. It took more wards to store energy like that, but Kalin had always enjoyed his ward-craft classes.

Through subtle changes he’d made to the syntax of the runes that made up the ward, Kal had been able to stretch its structure from its basic circular form, until its thin carved lines covered almost the entire upper-half of his wooden staff.

Kal had always had a steady hand, and he’d spent a few minutes each night for the past month pouring trickles of energy into this series of wards in particular. When the first ward activated near the middle of the staff, it would activate the next in the chain, setting off a chain-reaction of increasing power until the final ward was reached.

All this to say, the explosion set off when the bandit charged through the nearly invisible thread and activated the massive {Explosion} ward in Kalin’s staff blasted the stairwell and everything in it to bits.

He’d had to find some way to defend himself against higher levels if it came to it, and wards had been the perfect solution. Of course, he’d always assumed it would be a Scourge Bloodlich or Carrion Ghoul he’d be exploding, not some hopped up bandit in the stairwell of a Krinthian inn.

He felt a pang of regret as he threw his staff forward.Sure it was the standard straight, boring staff every cleric got for training, but he’d been through a lot with that hunk of wood. Then he saw the look of surprise and confusion on the charging man’s face, and it all felt worth it. He'd find a new staff.

Kalin used the last split-second before the explosion to jump on the prone form of [Retired Professor] Jeremy, who was watching the events unfold above him with a serene expression. Then he threw up as many layers of {Energy Shield} around himself and the Professor as he could before the explosion detonated.

When it did, his mind went numb as a ringing filled his ears, then slowly faded away into nothing.

He woke to a bitter taste in his mouth, overpowering the lingering taste of blood…