The NoM Militia is the foundation upon which our army is built. They are the ones who patrol on the coast and around the cities, destroying or signaling threats to other citizens. Sometimes, they are also the ones who put the spear to the heart of the threat, with or without the help of a Mage-Officer, often a Buffers or a Communication Specialists trained to increase their effectiveness in combat. These Mages are not in command of the troops, but rather incorporate with the squad. Every mage report directly to one of the three Mage Waves on the island, one for each population center.

On the other hand, Mage Flights are teams of mages, often trained from Awakening for combat, whose main work is to rebuff large-scale attacks or hunt down especially dangerous enemies. 

Colonel Raynaud “The Beacon”, Commander-Castellan of Saint-Denis, in an Orientation course for Saint-Denis’s pre-Awakening classes.

Damien was panting, running in a forest ablaze, hopelessly lost. His leather kilt was beating at his thighs, and his helmet’s crest had all but burnt away. In the blaze of his own making, he finally saw the shape of his enemy, wielding a billhook, still moving with impossible grace even as she fled from him. As he was rushing at her, he heard the cracking of wood falling behind him... brutally changing into the morning clarion of Le Port’s barracks’ waking calls.

Damien sat up with a start, short of breath and sweaty. Jean, who slept in the bed next to his, glanced at him worriedly.

“Are you alright? You were sleep-talking!”

“Long day, short night,” Damien grumbled. He took a look at the clock over the door. It was 0430. He grimaced. “Very short night. Was that necessary, Sergeant?” He asked the clarion player near the door.

“The Mage Flight that was supposed to patrol between here and Saint Louis and use the opportunity to accompany you there was re-assigned to mapping the tunnels someone blew up.” The NoM soldier explained. Damien felt a few glares stabbing his back. “You’ll have to accompany us on foot. The Colonel… The Commander-Castellan consulted with his peers and decided that twenty children should be as effective as a Mage-Officer in assisting us if we encounter something nasty. So chin up children! We have a 12-hour walking patrol along the coast to make! Don’t forget to requisition a field ration before joining us! You have half an hour to get ready.”

Three hours later, Damien was groaning. It was not that the fast pace of the walk bothered him – he expected that, since they had about 55 kilometers to cover in a day. They had set out an hour and a half before the sun rose. Thankfully, they had been allowed to use Dancing lights and other illuminating cantrips, as the Acolytes were not used to walking in the dark, even on an oft-used track. Their company was now composed of twenty-four Acolytes hailing from Saint-Louis and Saint-Denis, accompanied by two columns of twenty well-armed Militiamen.

“Normally, we would only take one column of twenty men for this patrol,” one of the Sergeants explained to Damien while his direct superior, a gruff Cadet, was looking elsewhere. “But since our Mage-officers are busy in the Undergrounds, the brass decided to double our number and have us escort you guys instead.”

“And what was the original plan?” Damien asked the junior officer.

“Well, we were supposed to go down there and clean up the dead ants you kids would have left behind, while our Mages would have used Mass Flight and nets to get you all to Saint Louis. They thought they could do it in two trips."

“That sounds like it would have been fun,” Jean intervened, mock-glaring at Damien. “A little uncomfortable though. Might be that we’re better off walking”

The Cadet finally had enough of hearing one of his junior officers chatting while on patrol duty.

“Sergeant, why don’t you take your squad and… four children and go ahead to the spawning pools on the beach after the midday pause? Check if the Mermen tried to use it again last night. The rest of us will stay inland, since there were reports of Wildland Boars proliferating that I’d like to put to rest before they begin attacking patrols. You are not to engage anything above a pair of fishmen. Have a kid send some kind of light signal or a Message if you need reinforcements.”

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After five more hours of uneventful hiking and a hearty lunch of military rations under a bush's shade, the Sergeant regrouped his men, then asked for volunteers among the children. Damien and Jean, feeling guilty for putting him in trouble with his superiors, immediately came. To their surprise, Manon and Julia followed.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

“The way by the beach is easier.” Julia simply explained. Manon had experienced both routes, and had told her so. “And the air is fresher near the sea.”

Damien nodded. The elemental influence of her Ice Element was beginning to show on Julia. She was actively fleeing heat already. At the thought of the incoming summer, Damien decided to pity her in silence. In his case, as both his elements were variations of Fire, he was becoming less averse to both heat and cold.

The squad took them to the estuary of a stream. Along the way, the Sergeant had told them that this place in particular was known to be regularly used as tentative spawning pools by lesser subspecies of fishmen as it featured the ideal environment: shallow pools of water in the sand which were kept full by the stream and were obscured from the sun all day long by rock formations..

“We could fill up the pools and destroy the rocks,” the Sergeant had explained, “it would take us a day’s work, and a Transmuter would get it done in minutes.”

“But then you wouldn’t know where the fishes are going, and you would have to look for them on the whole coast, not just here.” Damien finished the officer's sentence. He was aware of the Militia’s policy to not destroy sites that appealed to Mermen or monsters but to regularly Purge them instead. “I believe it was Manon’s father who proposed to make it the official policy of the Militia, when he was a Major in the Mage Flights, right Manon?”

The girl simply nodded. “He said he had to defend it before the Council because the Commander-Castellans all thought it was a bad idea -”

She was interrupted by a thunderous squeal in the distance.

“Sounds like the others found their target.” The lieutenant commented, smiling to his men. “And here we are. Can I trouble you to scout, Jean?” He asked as they arrived near the beach. They could see the vivid stream falling on the beach.

“Is that meltwater from the Piton des Neiges?” Julia asked, interested.

“Yes. It accumulates in a basin a few hundred meters above the Garden, then a dozen rivers and streams flow from there.” A soldier responded in a hushed tone.

Meanwhile, Lucille materialized at Jean’s command and took flight while the soldiers and children hid behind foliage.

“I see three fishmen. Some kind of parrotfish… And some dead ones too.” Jean reported, using a Link Sight to see through Lucille’s eyes. “They’re grouped, inspecting the pools.”

“Alright. Can you Alpha-strike them? We could make short work of them, but there are surprisingly few of them. Parrot fishmen usually move in the tens at least.” The Sergeant asked Julia, who nodded.

“No problem. As a precaution, I would advise that we prepare to turtle up, just in case it’s an ambush of some kind.”

The Sergeant nodded, letting Damien and Manon prepare. Julia glanced at Damien’s Circle, then glared at him. He reddened and erased the improvised glyph he had been preparing.

“Ready,” Manon affirmed. Damien nodded.

Julia advanced. “Agnar’s Freeze-Scorcher!”

A one and a half-meter wide line of icy air manifested, murderously cold, and froze all three unfortunate fishmen on their webbed feet. The group waited to see if others would appear, but nothing happened.

“Looks clear to me,” Jean reassured his comrades. He walked toward the bodies of the mermen who had already met their abyssal gods before the humans' arrival. “Looks like something was hungry. Seems like the Core is missing on all of them. What attacked them like that? They look like they were attacked from below...” He finally noticed the sand under the water shifting in a foreboding fashion. “DIMENSION DOOR.” He cast the life-saving spell in a panicked frenzy.

The second after he displaced himself, a geyser of sand, water and scales rose where he had been standing. The form of a boa, its head crowned by horns, loomed a full two meters above the water, and more of its body could now be seen coiling through the water and the sand. Damien immediately recognized it as a Crowned Boa, one of the most dangerous predators on La Réunion. It was quite similar to Cynthia’s Spirit, Srevin. Seeing that it had missed its meal, which was now hiding behind Walls of Wood, the snake hissed and charged.

Damien unsheathed his sword and used one of its charges of Sun-fire Infestation toward the sky to signal the patrol that they had met a deadly enemy. He was under no illusion that their group could defeat what seemed to be an adolescent Crowned Boa. Already, it was trying to brute-force its way through Manon’s Walls, and Damien saw that his Ember Circle, whose enervating powers had melted even the heat-resistant Fire Ants’ legs,was barely singeing the Elementally-hardened scales of the creature. At last, the militiamen began finding openings to poke it with their Lightning-charged Elemental lances, and the Sergeant even managed to hit it with a charge of Shattering Bolt from his lance, a powerful anti-armor spell aimed at massive creatures. At this point, the beast stopped its onslaught. Its crown of horns began to shine with a menacing, dull brown light. Bits of mud began to fall on the ground.

“Shit. Aim for its horns, kids! NOW!” The Sergeant ordered, horrified. The mud was flowing, forming into a brutish simian shape that towered over Julia, the largest of them all. Hunching over onto all fours, it was twice as broad as her in the shoulders. “Mud Elemental! The lances won’t put a scratch on that!”

“Manon, give me cover! Jean, Julia, take care of the Elemental! Everyone, shield your eyes in forty seconds!” Damien took a deep breath and began preparing his spell. He knew that Jean and Julia could keep the Elemental occupied by freezing the more water-rich part of his body. However - he heard a cry. One of the militiamen had been caught by the neck in the boa’s coils. It immediately clenched itself, pulling the poor soldier into a deadly embrace while lashing at the Sergeant whith its tail. Cûn Anûn manifested, shielding the officer. Finally, Damien’s spell was ready. Just as he hesitated, trying to avoid hitting the unfortunate soldier, a wet, crunching sound came from his head. His legs stopped flailing. Damien gnashed his teeth but unleashed his spell. “SUN-FIRE SPHERE!!!”

A miniature sun appeared around the snake’s head. The hiss and stench of burning meat filled Damien’s ears and nostrils. The spell’s mana requirement was well above what he could maintain, however, and his mana conduit had been mangled by the casting of a spell a full Tier above his newly-formed Conjuration Sigil. He valiantly held on for five seconds, maintaining the spell’s manifestation, before being forced to choose between willingly letting it go or falling unconscious. To his despair, however, the snake’s head wasn’t a burnt husk of a skull when the sun of his making dissipated, although it had received horrifying burns. Just as he was resigning himself to death under its vengeful fangs, he heard the most strange noises.

In the distance, he could feel and hear the tremor and the cacophony of dozens of beings approaching in a full sprint. Closer, over his head, he perceived the air violently shifting under a pair of wings, then a yowling. A black-winged form as large as his torso and covered in flames flew over his head, landed its two hind legs on the boa’s horns, and proceeded to scratch its eyes out with its flaming front paws under the group's astounded gazes. Damien’s brain then decided that the appropriate reaction to this surprise, added to the trauma to his astral body, was to shut down.