“I was serious,” Caveria said, looking stern with her arms crossed. “What would your zaijensss have done yesterday?” When I didn’t respond she made a face. “You know, you’re not there anymore. You’re here. You can’t walk around with your head in a cloud and pretend you’re not really here. This isn’t a dream. You’re here. And we don’t do zaijensss here.”

I scowled at her. She was right, though. I had accepted it, on some level, but not really admitted it. Somehow, when I fell into the lake, I actually went here. Wherever here was. If anything, my old life seemed like a dream now.

“I... yeah. It’s...” I took a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s stop talking about this. I’m here. Right. And I don’t know what we would have done, because we don’t have anything like that at home.”

The magical battle yesterday had shook me, but I didn’t want to admit that. Everything else so far, I could see how the police or military could have dealt with, but that flying magical silver eel? That you couldn’t even see? Maybe some kind of AI-controlled drone swarm with high-powered sensors could have dealt with it, but I wasn’t sure. It had been so fast.

“Let’s fight,” I said and launched myself at her smug, arrogant face. That’s why we did this “hero training”, wasn’t it.

It went better than usual, probably because she was tired from yesterday. She moved gingerly but she’d brushed it off angrily when I’d asked if we should skip training today. Well, she asked for it.

It went much better, actually - I more or less held my own against her. I managed the final win as well, kicking and punching her until she finally went down and held up her hands to signal surrender.

We both ached and hurt when we walked back towards the camp.

“Good,” she allowed grumpily. “Don’t make it a habit though.” I raised my eyebrows at her. “Setting monsters on me, to make me so exhausted I end up on your level. It was a joke,” she sighed.

I nearly stumbled despite the flat ground. She’d never joked in my hearing before.

We followed the road through the valley again. It was much quieter this time. Serah explained the cave had pulled back the monsters to the other cave mouths, in case there would be further attempts to seal them up.

“Has there been such attempts?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” she said. “There’s one or two every year. I think they’ve succeeded a fair number of times as well. Then the valley is safe for many months, until they dig themselves back out.” She shook her head. “They dig right through the rock, if they have too.”

“Yeah,” Thord added from just ahead of us. “We run into them in our mines, if there’s a corrupted cave system anywhere in those mountain. They’re a nuisance.”

“Can they be killed?” I asked. That was maybe something we could have done back home, with poison perhaps, or nuclear weapons.

“Not easily,” Thord said. “They are huge, down in the rock.”

“There’s been attempts,” Serah said. “I don’t know if anyone’s succeeded. That’s where Caveria lost her parents. That was a disaster. Over two hundred battle mages died. They were betrayed.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say.

We had coffee and lunch as usual, and were entering the last stretch of the day’s journey when Tiriel stopped us.

“There’s something out there,” she said, pointing to the right. “A big pack. They haven’t noticed us, so we can just go on by, if we want.”

“Or we can kill them and make the valley safer for everyone,” Caveria muttered.

“Yes!” Tiriel laughed. “It’s not far to go, after.”

“I agree,” Arndrir said. “Are we up for a little monster-fighting?”

Caveria snorted, but I caught her glance at me. Questioning. Skeptical.

“I am,” I said, and wondered if I would regret it.

The monster pack was big, like Tiriel had said, and diverse, but didn’t have any of those giant monsters from yesterday. There were goblins, and spiky birds with beaks almost as long as my sword, and some things that looked like kangaroos, but with armored skulls and bristling with spines. They were milling about not far from the cliff.

“What are they doing here?” I whispered to Serah.

“Guarding an entrance,” Caveria answered. “There’s one nearby. The cave’s pulled them all back here. But there’s something magical here as well...” She scanned the air intently.

There was something worse, I thought. People. Who had been corrupted by the cave. Two of them, looking like a deranged cartoonist’s fever dream, at the same time swollen and bulging with muscles.

“I will take those,” Serah said.

“Are you sure?” I said. They looked ugly but dangerous, and she was just a healer.

“Yes. The Goddess frowns on corrupting humans. It’s an abomination.”

“But not the others?”

“Oh yes, but I am human, not a goblin. They need to deal with their own kind.”

The others held a whispered conference, and decided on a plan.

“Peter,” Arndrir said. “If you wish, stay close to me.” I nodded, but my belly was churning. I wanted to stay behind, but - dammit, Caveria was right. So I had to fight.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Caveria launched a volley of fireballs across the area, galvanizing the monsters into panic. Tiriel bounded up into the trees and began raining arrows over them, while the rest of us ran out in a tight formation. We split up as soon as they’d noticed us and started converging on our position.

Thord roared and ran in one direction with his axe swirling. I had time to see him enter the fight before Arndrir and I reached our first opponents. Thord was short and close to the ground, and plowed through the monster crowd with appalling effectiveness, rolling on the ground with the axe spinning all around him.

I stayed as close to Arndrir as I dared, and although he was so much better than I was, I did some good at least. Caveria had been training me in basic fighting skills, but Arndrir had kept up the sword-focused exercises. Some of it had paid off - those repetitive stances, thrusts and parries had settled at least partially into my muscle memory. I didn’t feel as if I was about to die any second this time. Not all the time, at least.

It helped that Tiriel was leaping among the trees and keeping an eye on us. More than once, when something showed up unexpectedly or two monsters ganged up on me, an arrow came flying down from above and either dropped or at least distracted my opponent. I killed a lot of them - at least twenty, by my reckoning.

The others killed more, of course. Caveria hung back, providing backup in the same way as Tiriel but with fireballs, and also scanning for those magical monsters she’d sensed.

We’d settled into a kind of rhythm, methodically killing off the monsters, when Tiriel gave off one of her horrible screams. I glanced up and saw something weird approaching. It looked like smoke, except it was glowing red, like it was burning.

“Let’s move back towards Caveria!” Arndrir called to me. “That’s a firecloud, she’ll need to deal with it. We need to be close to her, and also to protect her.”

We hacked our way back to her, and I saw Tiriel in a tree above her. Thord was on his way too, judging from the commotion in the middle of a cluster of monsters.

“Where’s Serah?” I gasped after killing one of the kangaroo monsters.

“She’s over by the tree,” Caveria answered, not taking her eyes off the firecloud. “She can deal with this.”

“Right,” I said.

The cloud sank lower above us and spread out, blocking the sky and bathing everything in an eerie red light.

“Guard me,” Caveria said. “I need to focus on the cloud.” She was glowing red again, all over. Tiriel dropped from the tree, and we all stood around Caveria.

For a moment, everything was still. Then flames shot out of the cloud, towards us. Caveria raised her hands and the flames rebounded away from us, into the monster crowd. More flames followed, and the cloud began to draw together into a twisted, strange shape. It kept shooting fire at us.

“It will... make a... tornado...” Caveria panted. She was countering the flames faster than I could see them, but she was straining to do it. She looked utterly focused. “This will get... scary.”

Caveria was holding a half-spherical space free of flames around us, by moving some kind of magical shield or block to meet the flames. They were coming faster now, at least four or five at a time.

The monsters were circling us outside, closing in. It seemed like utter suicide to try to leave the shielded space. If the flames didn’t kill you, one of the thirty or so remaining monsters surely would.

“Here it comes,” Caveria warned, as the flames outside began to spin around us, forming a near-solid wall of fire. I had to close my eyes from the brightness, but for some reason, we didn’t feel the heat.

“Now,” she grunted. “Watch out!”

The roaring flames suddenly vanished. I opened my eyes and saw a huge fireball right above us. Caveria was staring at it, her body shaking. The cloud was pouring fire into it, and it was growing larger and brighter by the second. Suddenly it flashed pure white, and shot away from us, towards the cliffs.

The cloud was gone and in the sudden darkness I couldn’t see anything, but I heard sounds of fighting. As my eyes adjusted I saw Caveria lying on the ground, shaking and breathing heavily. The others were fighting the monsters who were swarming us now the fire and Caveria’s shields were gone. I drew my sword, but the fighting was fierce. Arndrir’s blade flashed beside Thord’s axe, and Tiriel was spinning like a maniac, her long knife cutting and slashing. I had to do my part, but I wouldn’t stand a chance.

Suddenly Caveria screamed. One of the spiky birds had managed to get past Thord and was digging its claws into her back. I struck it with my sword and almost got my arm bitten off. It had a long row of sharp-looking teeth along it’s beak, and they cut deep into my arm. My left arm, luckily, so I slashed at one of its wings. It screeched and launched itself towards me in an explosion of feathers.

We battled furiously, and the bird landed another hit with one of its claws cutting a gash along my thigh. I managed to cut off one of its legs, and then, in a desperate slash, I hit its throat and cut right through it.

Blood pumped out of its neck but it kept flapping and clawing with its remaining foot, aimlessly but lethally. I dove down and pulled Caveria out from under it. She groaned and her armor was red with blood.

Thord leapt in and drove his axe into the monster bird’s chest, sending it crashing to the ground a few meters away. I grabbed my sword and jumped to my feet - only to find the fight was over.

There were no living monsters about, but a ridiculous amount lying on the ground. Arndrir and Thord were patrolling the bodies to check for any deception, while Tiriel was retrieving arrows.

Serah was striding towards us, weaving between the corpses. Her face was black with soot and she looked tired.

“Are you alright?” I called as she approached.

“Yes yes,” she said, waving it off. “Next time I will remember I need a greater safety distance when Caveria gets going. How is she?” She knelt beside Caveria and worked her hands in under her armor.

“Ouch,” Serah said. “That’s not so great. And poison, too.”

“Can you... will she be alright?”

“Yes, but it will take a while. What was it?”

“Some sort of monster bird,” I said. “It had a huge long beak.”

“A corrupted eagle,” Arndrir said, “with some influence from something else. You are hurt too, Peter.”

I glanced down at my bleeding arm and leg.

“I’ll look at you in a minute,” Serah said. “I want to do the most important for Caveria first.”

It took us an hour to be ready to continue to move. Serah healed my wounds and stabilized Caveria, and spent a long time countering the effects of the poison. We would both need several days to recover. I walked around the area together with Arndrir while Serah continued working on Caveria.

When we came up to the cliff face I stopped and stared.

“What’s that?” I pointed. There was a huge... crater, round and conical, driving into the rock.

“That’s where the fireball hit,” he replied.

“Caveria’s fireball? The one at the end?”

“Yes. I believe she gathered up all the magical energy from the firecloud and drained it. Then she sent the fireball into the cliff.”

The crater must have been twenty meters across, and at least as deep, if not deeper. I stared at it, unable to wrap my head around it. How could she handle that much energy? Arndrir didn’t know.

We returned to the others, gathered up our things, and walked slowly back to the road. Caveria was clearly very, very tired. It wasn’t just her wounds or the poison, Serah said, it was the fight as well. Apparently a firecloud held a vast amount of fire energy, which she had just channeled through herself in order to contain it.

We made our way out of the valley safely, and found a campsite as soon as we could after the road had climbed out through the narrow ravine at the end.

“There’s a village less than a day’s march from here,” Arndrir said, “but we need to rest. We will continue there tomorrow.”

A village. I realized we’d been trekking for a week or more, and sleeping rough. Maybe they had an inn in that village...

“No training today,” Arndrir said.

“Nor tomorrow,” Caveria added. She looked pale and was moving very carefully. “You’re nowhere near a hero, but maybe we can make an adventurer out of you yet.” She smiled weakly. I grinned back, in case she’d just tried to make another joke.