He squeezed one eye shut, staring down the barrel of his rifle at the monster. It was some kind of oversized insect, or maybe a rodent with plates of armor that made it look like one. The information they’d received hadn’t gone into detail on what the monsters were, just what they could do.
After a steadying breath, he pulled the trigger. A soft pop rang in the air, followed by a few seconds of frantic, pained squealing, and then silence. He stared down the barrel, unblinking, for a few seconds more, then lowered his rifle.
“Nice shot,” Cliff murmured from beside him, his own rifle leaning against a tree stump nearby. They’d spotted signs of the monster during their lunch break, and, perhaps because he didn’t want to be stuck with Loria and Nym alone, Cliff had followed after Thalos when he volunteered to hunt it down.
“Thanks,” Thalos replied, still watching the corpse of the Brush Crab. “It kind of feels bad, though.”
“How do you figure?” Cliff replied.
Thalos shrugged, pulling the strap of his rifle up onto his shoulder. “It seems kind of malicious, doesn’t it? Killing the monster when it hadn’t so much as threatened us. It just feels – I don’t know-” He waved a hand in the air absently.
“Unnecessary?” Cliff tried, scooping his own rifle up. “Maybe – but, well-” He paused, scratching a finger at his chin. “The Brush Crab’s razor sharp pincers have been known to shear through muscle and smaller bones. It is known to move silently through forest brush, and will attack unprovoked. Safest procedure is on-sight extermination.” He quoted the words almost mechanically, “That’s what our briefing said, at least.”
“I know,” Thalos replied, sparing one final look for the monster’s cooling corpse before turning away. “Come on. Loria will get antsy if we take too long.”
“Oh that’s what’ll make her antsy?” Cliff replied with a scowl. Thalos shot him a glare, and he smirked. “I know, I know – I’ll keep the peace if she will.”
“I’m holding you to that,” Thalos said, earning himself an elbow to the ribs.
They found the other two members of their team finishing off their lunch. When their stomachs had started to grumble, Nym had located a defensible little alcove sliced into a hill, perfect for rest and a meal, and they’d paused their trek to eat.
Loria eyed them as she gnawed through some of the trail rations, an expectant look on her face. “We managed to take down one Brush Crab,” Thalos reported, “and I didn’t see signs of any others.”
“Me neither,” Cliff added, sitting down roughly on a broad, flat rock and grabbing his bag.
“Nice job,” Loria said, brushing the crumbs from her hands and taking a quick sip from her canteen. “You’re both finished eating, right? We should get moving then. Nym, do you have an estimate on our timing?”
Nym had been looking over their maps for much of the lunch break, tracking their progress and planning their after-lunch route. “Yeah,” the Scout said, “If we keep up the pace we’ve been going, it should be roughly and hour and a half till we reach the pass, then another two hours to the rendezvous location. We should make it there about two hours before sundown.” Arriving after sundown would mean they failed the training exercise, so the sun’s slow movement across the sky was in the back of all their minds.
Loria nodded, dragging her fingers through her hair. “Very good. We should be moving on then, to keep the schedule.”
“A minute, please,” Cliff said, “I need to record our exposure for the last hour.” He had the little Magetool in one hand, a pen in the other as he pressed a few buttons, scribbling on a sheet of paper.
“You couldn’t have done this during lunch?” Loria said testily.
Thalos grimaced, but Cliff just glanced at her for a second. “Thirty seconds, then,” he said, looking back down at the Magetool. They all watched him for a few moments before he clicked his tongue, looking up again. “Nym, we didn’t pass out of the low-magic zone at all, did we?”
Loria’s expression sharpened. “Whats wrong?”
“No,” Nym said with a shake of her head, “not even close.”
Cliff hummed thoughtfully. “That’s strange, then,” he muttered.
“What’s strange?” Loria said, her tone gaining an edge.
He looked up at her with a frown. “Our exposure is higher than it should be.”
“What does that mean?” Thalos said calmly, preempting whatever sharp comment he knew would be coming from Loria.
Cliff looked over at him. “Well, I reckon it could be one of – ah – four possibilities.” He counted on his fingers as he listed them out. “First, my watch could be completely broken, and I could have missed my timing to record. Two problems with that, though – number one, it would have to be off by more than an hour, and I think I would have noticed that much of a mistake in the timing. And number two-” His eyes flicked to Loria. “I’d bet this year’s harvest our esteemed commander set her own timer, and that she’d be barking down my neck if I was even a minute late on the deadline.”
“Second,” he continued, before Loria had a chance to respond, “Nym could have led us in the complete wrong direction, and we actually are in an area with higher magic density. But I’ve been tracking the sun, and I know we’re going exactly the direction Nym says we are, so that’s out too.” Thalos glanced at Nym, who nodded confidently.
“Third, the machine could be malfunctioning.” He scratched his head. “Thats impossible to verify unless I crack it open, but I heard the warnings this morning, same as the rest of you, so I won’t be doing that. Either way, it’s not our fault.”
“Finally, it could be that the map is wrong, due to some natural fluctuations in the magic density, or out of design. I doubt they’d intentionally give us wrong information, so it’s probably the former. Again, that’s not our fault, and all I can do is report the number as it is displayed,” he concluded with a shrug. “For all we know, this could be part of the test, hoping to bait people into second guessing themselves and fudging the numbers. Can’t very well fake results if they aren’t what you expect them to be, now can you?”
There was a moment of quiet as they considered Cliff’s analysis – it seemed pretty sound from Thalos’s point of view, but Loria was quick to ask a few questions.
“You didn’t tamper with the machine at all?” she pressed, eyes narrowed.
Cliff glared back at her. “No,” he said simply, though Thalos could hear the tension in his voice.
“And you didn’t drop it, or anything like that? Nothing happened that would damage it, I mean.”
“If it were an egg, it wouldn’t even be cracked,” Cliff replied. They glared at each other for a long moment before Loria nodded.
“Fine,” she said, “I agree with your assessment, then. And there’s no point in worrying about something that’s out of our control. Lets get a move on.” She walked over to Nym to speak about their path, and Cliff looked at Thalos. His expression seemed to demand praise for being civil, and there was little Thalos could do besides offer a respectful nod. Cliff smirked, stuffing the paper, pen, and Magetool back into his bag, and they were moving a few moments later.
***
There was a crush of dirt and stone, and Nym let out a frustrated grunt. A moment later, a jagged spike of ice caught the Skitterbug through the thorax. The oversized beetle squirmed for a moment before Loria bisected its head with her spear. It had become a familiar pattern as they came across more and more monsters – Nym would attempt to use her Gift, rarely hitting her target, before one of the two of her and Loria incapacitated the monster for quick execution. It would be an exaggeration to say they left a trail of bodies behind them, but they had started spotting more and more as they day went on. Cliff and Thalos were limited in the amount of support they could provide – their weapons were far riskier when it came to friendly fire, and with their limited PMT functionality, they’d opted to leave most of the fighting to the other two.
As their trek through the wilderness continued, Thalos noticed that Nym seemed to be becoming increasingly frustrated. He waited for Loria to see what the problem was, but she was apparently too consumed with the task of leading their team to notice Nym’s frustration. Thalos might have expected Cliff, considerate in his own way, to approach the girl, but he, too, was caught in some web of thought.
Thalos sighed. He wasn’t normally the type to poke himself into other people’s business, but it was getting to the point that he was worried she might break out crying at any moment. After a few moments of hesitation, he finally managed to speak up. “Hey Nym,” he said, approaching her, “are you alright?”
“What?” She looked at him, and they held eye contact for a instant before he looked away.
“You seem – uh,” he started, “frustrated. Is everything okay?”
There was a silent moment, and he glanced back at her to see that she was watching him. “Hey, Thalos,” she said, “you said your grandfather researched Gifts, right?”
Thalos brushed a finger along the ring he wore, his grandfather’s final gift to him. “Yeah,” he said, “he was an expert in magical theory, and I’ve never met anyone who knows more about gifts than he does – well, did.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to ask about him,” Nym said frantically, eyes wide.
Thalos shook his head. “No, it’s just – sometimes I forget that he-” He took a deep breath. “It’s fine, Nym, really. Why’d you want to know?”
“Ah, well, you see-” she began with a deep breath.
“Heads up,” Loria snapped, “I’ve got signs of a Flash Frost Toad up ahead. Let’s stay on full alert until we’re past.” Thalos looked around. Most of the land they were crossing was lightly forested, and he could see that all around them, the leaves on the trees seemed to be frozen at the edges, like they were in the middle of winter rather than the beginning of autumn. The grass, too, started to crunch under their feet. A few more minutes of walking and the temperature in the air started rapidly dropping.
Thalos thought back to the briefing, racking his brain for any information about the monster. The Flash Frost Toad was one of the more dangerous monsters that could be found in low-magic areas. It functioned like a living heat sink, drawing in all the energy from the area around it and concentrating it into its body. Despite its name and the cold it brought with it, the most dangerous part about the monster was the intense heat of its body and the flaming liquid it spat in a fight. The poorly-named Frost Toad’s spit burned incredibly hot and clung to skin like glue. It didn’t burn for too long, but any contact with it was a near-guarantee of severe burns.
“There,” Cliff muttered, pointing at a plume of smoke billowing between the trees.
“Nym, immobilize it with your Gift – Thalos and Cliff, follow up with your rifles,” Loria instructed, “Don’t let it get close, and if it look like it’s going to spit, get out of the way.” Despite its potent attacks, the Flash Frost Toad was, thankfully, relatively fragile, and a bullet or two from their rifles should do the trick of putting it down.
“But-” Nym started to protest.
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“I can’t hit it with fire, and you can’t hit it with ice,” Loria interrupted, “use your Gift.” Internally, Thalos agreed with her assessment. The Flash Frost Toad was extremely resistant to fire attacks, which Loria favored. On top of that, due to its intense body heat, ice attacks – Nym’s favorite – would be sublimated on contact. Not only would that be ineffective, but it would also compromise visibility. It was much safer to use something made out of earth, and Nym’s Gift was the best option there.
“Fine,” Nym gumbled, and they started their slow approach of the plume of smoke. Thalos slid his rifle off his shoulder, flicking the safety off and readying the weapon, Cliff echoing the movements beside him.
A moment later the monster came into view. It looked surprisingly normal, considering its supernatural abilities. It was oversized compared to a mundane toad, but that was normal for monsters – something about the magic playing into their growth, his grandfather had once explained to him. Aside from that, it looked just like a regular old toad, with brown, pebbly skin and bulbous eyes. It was hunkered over a half-melted corpse of a Skitterbug, snapping at the giant beetle’s corpse, trying to fit it in its mouth. Thalos felt his face twist, and next to him, Cliff made a disgusted sound.
“On my count, Nym – Cliff and Thalos, take aim,” Loria whispered. Swallowing his queasiness, Thalos raised his weapon, lining the barrel up with the monster’s center of mass. “Three, two, one – now.”
There was a rush of soil and stone, and the Skitterbug’s corpse was grasped in a fist of earth. Unfortunately, that meant the Flash Frost Toad remained free, and even as Thalos and Cliff pulled their triggers, the monster was leaping away.
It let out a screech that said one of their bullets had hit, and when it landed Thalos noted that one of its legs was no longer attached to its body.
“Watch for its spit!” Loria barked as the Toad spun towards them. Thalos frantically tried to line up another shot, but as he steadied himself, the monster’s cheeks quickly inflated. “Dodge! Now!” Loria shrieked, and on instinct Thalos threw himself to the side, even as a soft pop rang out in the air, another following about a second later. The toad’s cheek suddenly ruptured, and clear, steaming liquid was thrown all around, igniting on everything it touched for a moment before it burned itself out. Thankfully, they were far enough away that they were well out of the splash range, and with the next soft pop, the monster’s head exploded in a second rain of steamy gore.
Cliff, who had not moved to dodge the spit, let out a shaky sigh, a smile coming to his face as he lowered his weapon. “Nice shooting,” Thalos said weakly from the ground, a moment before Loria stomped over to Cliff, seizing him by the collar.
“I told you to dodge,” she barked.
“What?” Cliff said, smacking her hand away, “I made it in time, didn’t I?” He flipped the safety back on his rifle, and slung it over his shoulder.
“You did,” Loria said reluctantly, “but what if you hadn’t? What if you’d missed? What if the spray from your shot had covered all of us? It was a stupid risk!”
“What if I’d tripped? What if there had been twenty toads instead of one? What if my popstick had malfunctioned and exploded?” Cliff countered, “There’s no point in raking me over the coals for what-ifs, Loria, but if you want to lecture me, could we at least do it on the move? We’re already far behind schedule of where I’d like to be, thanks to your choice of route.”
“Fine, but-” Loria said, “Wait! Hold on, listen, Cliff-” Cliff, not bothering to pretend to listen, started walking again, and Loria stomped after him, continuing her lecture.
Nym watched the pair walk off with a conflicted expression on her face. She looked as if she wanted to say something, but couldn’t decide what. “Don’t bother,” Thalos said, pushing himself to his feet, “they’ll argue themselves out soon enough – it’s just the excitement of the fight.” He looked after them, frowning at the intensity of Loria’s tirade. “Probably.”
“Ah – right,” Nym said with an uneasy chuckle. She looked at Thalos with a frown. “You asked what was bothering me – it’s that.”
“What?” he replied, brushing some dirt off his uniform and scooping his rifle off the ground. “Cliff and Loria? I really don’t think that’s worth the worry.”
Nym shook her head. “No. that.” She pointed a finger, and Thalos looked over to see where the Scuttlebug’s corpse had been crushed by her Gift.
“Ah,” he replied with a nod, “that’s why you were asking about my grandfather.” It also made sense why she seemed to get more upset each time they fought a monster.
She nodded. “Yeah – you said he’s an expert on Gifts, but – is it common for someone to have difficulties controlling their Gift?”
Thalos frowned, rubbing at the ring on his finger, shaking his head. “Common? No, probably not – Unheard of? Also no.” He looked at Nym, shrugging his free shoulder. “I’m not nearly the expert my Grandfather was, but I can tell you this much – a lot of times, the people who have trouble controlling their Gifts also have exceptionally powerful or versatile Gifts.” A few, he knew didn’t get anywhere near mastery until well into adulthood, though he doubted telling her that would encourage her.
“You think my Gift is like that?” she asked, not sounding convinced.
“Seems that way to me,” he replied, looking back at the fist of stone and dirt, clenched around the monster’s corpse, “from what I’ve seen, you can reach through any material to create any shape, and – how far can you reach?”
She looked away. “I’ve never really tested the proper limit, but my control starts to really falter after – uh – fifty paces? It’s hard to judge when it’s out of my sight line.”
Thalos nodded, impressed. “Yeah, I’d say your gift is strong.” He knew she had a high Magical Rating, but that didn’t always mean your Gift was powerful. In this case it clearly did, though.
“That doesn’t really help me now, does it?” Nym said with a sigh.
“Sorry,” he replied with a shrug, “look at it this way, though – how long does it take for a child to become coordinated enough to throw a ball? Four, five years maybe? And with any kind of accuracy? Some people are never capable of that. And that’s with their arms, something they’re moving all the time, every day. Your Gift, you use for minutes each day, at most. It’ll take some time to get coordinated, so there’s no point in fretting about it.” She didn’t seem convinced, so he continued. “Sometimes a mindset thing – I’ve heard of people getting stronger just by thinking in a different way. If you’re not making any progress, maybe it’s worth looking at how you approach your Gift.” Again, she didn’t seem to be encouraged, and Thalos felt suddenly self conscious. “But, well, I’m no expert – sorry if my advice isn’t helpful.”
She let out a little airy chuckle, shaking her head. “No, it is – and I could hardly be annoyed at your advice when I was asking for it. It’s just-” She tapped her quarterstaff on the ground a few times in an anxious motion. “I’ve been stuck at a wall, trying to barrel through it, and the best advice I’ve gotten is something like ‘did you try climbing over it instead?’” She smiled at him sadly. “I would, you know, if I could find a handhold and start the climb.”
“So for now you’re scrambling, looking for purchase, stuck in the same spot,” Thalos finished the metaphor.
“Yeah,” she said with a sigh. She looked off to the side, and Thalos realized that the sound of Loria’s lecture had almost completely faded. “Come on,” she continued, “I doubt they’ve even noticed they left us behind, and I hardly think it would be good for our grades if we got split up.” It wouldn’t be good for their grades if Loria and Cliff killed each other while they weren’t watching, either.
***
“Well that’s not good,” Cliff said, bouncing his rifle on his shoulder as they stared at the pile of rocks.
“Quiet, Cliff, I’m thinking,” Loria replied. Her eyes were blinking rapidly, and her thumbnail was wedged between two teeth.
“What do we do?” Nym asked quietly, fumbling with the map in her hands as she compared it to the scene in front of her. The pass they had been coming towards, their path past the mountains, was completely blocked by rocks. “The map says we should be able to get through.”
“There must have been a landslide or something,” Thalos said levelly. Unlike the other members of his team, he wasn’t feeling any particular way about finding their path blocked. It was pretty bad luck, there was no getting around that, but dealing with unexpected circumstances was part of the job, wasn’t it?
“Can we go over the top?” Nym asked, looking up from the map to stare at the crush of rocks and dirt.
“No,” Loria answered, at the same time Cliff said, “Bad idea.” They glared at each other, and Cliff was the first to continue. “We don’t know how recent the landslide was, how much the rocks have been able to set in – one wrong step and we could trigger another one, this time with us among the rocks.”
“Then what do we do?” Nym asked again, looking down at her map.
“We have to find another route,” Loria said, “Nym, look for the maps – I think we can afford to increase our pace up to fifty percent. Find something that will work.” She was still staring at the landslide with that frantic look on her face. Nym nodded hastily, dropping to her knees and spreading the map in front of her. Almost immediately, she was muttering to herself, sketching lines on the map with her fingers.
“I’m not gonna say I told you so, on account of the fact that I thought we should take another route, but well…” Cliff said, trailing off. His tone wasn’t quite smug, but there was the smallest hint of vindication padding the edges.
Loria whirled on him, jerking her thumb from her mouth and pointing an angry finger. “I’ve had just about enough of you for one day, Cliff, so if you don’t mind, please shut your mouth and let Nym find out how we can get through this without failing.”
“You’ve had enough of me?” Cliff replied with a bark of mirthless laughter. “I’ve been nothing but cordial the entire day, but you simply can’t help snapping at me for nothing, can you?” He looked over at Thalos. “Sorry, bud, but I don’t think I’ll be able to keep my promise – Loria needs a lesson in politeness, and lucky for her I’m a willing teacher.”
“A lesson in politeness? From you? You couldn’t teach a pig the first thing about decorum, and you want to teach me?” Loria was fully shouting now, and Thalos scrambled for something to say that would cut them off before it actually came to blows.
“Why yes, I do!” Cliff replied, “First of all, I’m not sure where you get off barking at me like a child, but I’m just as much a member of the team as anyone else here, no matter how much it pains you.”
“If you don’t want to be treated like a child, have you considered not acting like one?” Loria snarled.
“Secondly,” Cliff pushed on, ignoring her comment, “You’ve been snapping at me all day – do you think you would have given Thalos or Nym an hour-long lecture if they had been the ones to shoot the Frost Toad? Would you have accused them of mucking with the Magetool, despite the fact that they had just said they didn’t.”
“Thalos and Nym wouldn’t have done those things,” she snapped, “you did!” Thalos swallowed. Loria had a white-knuckle grip on her spear, and he was starting to worry that if she got any angrier, she might lose herself enough to use it.
“Is everything I do tainted, then? Even if it’s productive?” Cliff yelled back, “Why don’t we just wait here then, until we’ve failed the training – I’m sure you’re so perfect that you’d recover soon enough. Maybe they’ll expel me for failing a second exam, then you’d be free of the burden of my presence.”
They glared at each other for a silent moment, Cliff’s angry hyperbole dangling in the air, heavy with tension.
Loria spoke again after a moment, her voice low and severe. “Fine, if that’s what you want, we can just sit here until they come to find us. Maybe you’re right, it would be easier if you weren’t-”
A shrill, loud shriek, ringing through the air cut off the argument, and as a team, they turned to the sound. To the north-west, far in the air, a shining blue light darted through the sky, screaming loud enough that everyone within miles would be able to hear.
“Is that-” Loria started.
“A flare!” Cliff said with a frown, “A blue one, but – I wonder what happened?”
Seizing the moment of interruption, Thalos spoke up. “We need to get going if we’re going to make it by sundown. Nym, have you found a path?”
“Yeah,” she said, looking between Loria and Cliff. To her credit, she had managed to get her job done, even through the argument. There was only so much screaming you could ignore, though. “We might have to jog to make it on time, but we should make it.”
Thalos turned to Cliff and Loria. “Can you two call a truce? At least until we finish the Hands-on. We’ll have to figure this stuff out as a team at some point, but it can wait until we’re out safely.” At the last word, he glanced back to the flare. It was still hanging in the sky, suspended by magic, bright blue like a too-bright star. The sound had stopped, thankfully, but he knew it would be echoing in all of their heads, along with the flare’s meaning. It was not the red flare, thankfully, so no one’s life was in danger, but he hoped one of the teams had just gotten lost, and not something worse.
“Yeah,” Loria said, her tone strained but neutral, “I lost my head, but – well, we have bigger things to worry about.”
“Right,” Cliff said with a nod of his own, sounding, for the first time Thalos could remember, genuinely cowed. “Let’s get going.”
Thalos, nodding, silently thanked Gaeon they weren’t that immature. He turned back to Nym. “Alright, Nym, lead the way.”
***
They made it, somehow. They stumbled into the rendezvous point, out of breath and barely before the deadline. The first thing Thalos noticed was that there were far more people than he expected. There seemed to be half a dozen more instructors than there had been on their departure. The next thing to surprise him was how relieved everyone seemed to be at their arrival. Jenna was on top of them almost immediately, gripping Cliff’s shirt in shaky hands as she stumbled through a mangled explanation, worried expression on her face.
“Hold on,” Cliff said in a soothing tone, reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Slow down.”
“Ah, right,” Jenna said, “Well, it’s just that-”
“A moment, Jenna, please,” Roose said, striding up to them briskly. He had his characteristic smile on his face, but there was an underlying note of tension. “Team B,” he said, beckoning them to gather around him. “Congratulations on completing the hands-on training. You were the last team to arrive here, but, well, you made it, and that’s most important.” He nodded at them each individually before continuing. “Cliff, I’ll need your records for the day, and Nym, if you wouldn’t mind sketching your route on the map – pen is fine – we’ll start the process of heading back to the academy. As for your grades or anything else regarding the training, we’ll be covering it in our next class. Any questions?”
“Sir, what was the cause of the flare?” Loria asked. There was no doubt in Thalos’s mind that the flare, and whatever had caused it, were why things seemed to be so tense.
“That, too, will be discussed in our next class,” Roose said. His eyes flicked to Jenna, who was waiting behind Cliff. “But, well, feel free to talk to your classmates.” He paused again for any questions, but when none came, he took the record from Cliff and the map from Nym before leaving them in their little circle.
“What happened, Jenna?” Cliff said, his voice gentle.
“It was-” she started, “Penny, she-” She paused, taking a deep breath. “About an hour after we finished our lunch break – we’d taken it kind of late, hoping to make as much progress as possible in the morning to keep an easier pace in the afternoon – we were walking along when Percy spotted a monster.”
“What was it?” Loria asked.
“Shush, Loria,” Cliff said softly, “she’ll get to it. Let her talk.” They shared a look for a moment, but the truce, it seems, persisted. Either that, or they realized how stupid it was to get into a big argument over nothing. Three hours of running will make any problem seem kind of trivial, especially when you reach the end to find a friend in a panic, as Jenna seemed to be.
“It wasn’t in our briefing this morning,” Jenna said, “it basically looked like a boar, but its tusks were black, and its eyes were stark white, with no pupils or anythings.” Nym inhaled sharply, but Jenna continued. “It spotted us right when we saw it – it looked aggressive, so Deb decided to fight cautiously – we didn’t know what it was, but we figured we could handle anything in low level areas well enough, right?” She shook her head quickly. “It wasn’t a bad decision by Deb, okay?”
“Right,” Cliff said, patting her on the shoulder, “it’s not Deb’s fault – what happened?”
“Well – we had a plan for these sorts of things. Penny has her rifle, so she was in charge of attacking from a distance. She took a few shots and, well – it was there at one moment, but then it was gone the next.” Her voice became even shakier, and Cliff had to steady her on her feet to stop her from swaying. “It teleported next to Penny and gored her. She broke her arm, and the bone was poking out – then it was everywhere.” She shuddered. “It knocked Percy to the ground, slammed Deb into a tree – I managed to catch it with my saber, it was lucky, really, but then it was gone.”
Silence covered them like a blanket as they all imagined the scenario, what would have happened if this boar monster had attacked team B. Thalos swallowed, dragging his finger along his ring. They very well could have died.
A moment later, Jenna finished the story. “Percy patched everyone else up, but he didn’t want to risk healing Penny’s arm – he said if he healed the compound fracture wrong, it could ruin her arm for the rest of her life. But we couldn’t very well continue when her bone was sticking out like that.” She shuddered again. “We launched the blue flare.”
“Not the red?” Loria asked, “Couldn’t the boar have come back?”
“That’s what Roose said, too,” Jenna muttered, “but – well, we didn’t know what to do. Deb was already in hysterics apologizing to everyone, and Penny was in shock with her arm. Percy was trying to manage them, and I didn’t want us to get into any more trouble, so I thought we would use the blue one.” She seemed to shift towards Cliff, clenching his shirt in her hands. “It was terrifying waiting for help to arrive, thinking it might come back.”
Cliff patted the top of her head, adopting the lightest scolding tone. “That was silly, wasn’t it? Your safety is the most important thing.” He frowned to himself, looking at the rest of them. “Any of you ever heard of anything like the boar she described?”
“Yeah, I have,” Nym said with a confused frown, “It’s a Blink Boar, probably – but that doesn’t make any sense! Blink Boars live in areas with mid to high magical density, there’s no way they would range somewhere with a magical density this low.”
“Clearly it did, though,” Loria said rather bluntly.
Thalos frowned – he had very little experience with monsters of different strengths, but he knew that, while it wasn’t unheard of, strong monsters coming to low magic areas was extremely uncommon. He looked over at Cliff, whose expression had taken a contemplative look.
“Cliff?” Thalos said, “You think of something?”
They shared a look for a moment before Cliff shook his head. “No, it’s nothing,” he said, “not yet at least. I’ll let you know if I decide it’s something, though.” He wrapped an arm around Jenna’s shoulder, and she leaned her weight into him. “You guys go check on the others – I’ll keep Jenna company here.”
“Right,” Thalos said, leading the other two off to where Percy and Deb were hunched together, caught in some intense conversation.
“Those two are awful close,” Loria said, glancing back at Jenna and Cliff. Thalos raised an eyebrow at her – it was an open secret that something was going on between their two roommates, though he supposed Loria didn’t seem the type to notice such things.
“Worry about them later,” Thalos said, “we’ve got bigger problems to deal with, like trying to convince Deb she isn’t an incompetent commander.” The more he heard about what had happened to Team A, the more he realized Team B’s own problems were trivial by comparison. He sighed to himself. They’d made it through the hands-on training, but somehow, he didn’t feel like celebrating.