It was easy to dismiss Ed as stupid. Even he admitted that he’d struggled in school, and he’d been called stupid plenty by the kids who he’d gone to school with. It was a nice school, after all. Not one his dad would normally have been able to have them attend, if he hadn’t plopped his bakery down in an upper class neighborhood. And like most nice schools, the students there were all smart, driven by coming from innately more educated backgrounds and opportunities.

So they’d called him dumb, because he couldn’t focus on the lessons, forgot things a lot, had an organization system that seemingly only made sense to him, and was good at sports.

Where his brother had retreated from people, folding in and becoming a bit of a loner, Ed had accepted it. He’d leaned into the jibes and turned them into his power. He’d turned himself into the stereotypes of being dumb, nice, and built like a fridge.

Which meant it was even easier to forget that he was smart. For all that he’d struggled in school, anyone who became a full member of the Mossford Lightwatch was made to undergo a multi-year training program.

A part of that program included a two year degree in law, a half dozen courses in ethics and privacy, a full year of training in de-escalation, and more. He’d struggled in those courses, that much was true, but he had completed them. Even if he’d had to retake a few of the more complicated law courses.

People also discounted how strong Ed was.

Yes, they acknowledged that he was physically strong, but they tended to overlook his magical strength.

Even his own dad and girlfriend underestimated his strength. It was true that he wasn’t some sort of mage savant like Malachi was, able to reach third gate in just nine months with incredibly solidly built power, but he was still well above average in terms of magical strength. Early third gate he might be, having yet to push the mists over his first set of steps, but he was still strong, especially with his rebuilt first gate, a reflexive first and second gate mana meditation, and the passive parts of his legacy boosting all of his stone spells.

His combat instincts were good too. While Ikki’s might have been better, Ikki was a few hundred years old. Much like comparing his magical skills to those of his prodigal brother, comparing his combat skills to Ikki’s just wasn’t fair.

But he was good in a fight. He knew how people moved, and how they held themselves. And in a fight, that knowledge was important.

That instinctive understanding of how people moved was the only reason that when a woman walked into the bakery, he picked her out of the crowd immediately. She moved with a balance and confidence of someone who fought, and kept her mana tightly veiled, making it impossible for him to tell what exact kind of mage she was.

At first, he just thought it was interesting. There were plenty of people who fought for multiple reasons, after all – she could have been a pro fighter, or a member of one of the combat guilds in the city, or even just someone who enjoyed fighting.

It was interesting, but he would have put her out of his mind if it weren’t for Kerbos.

His large, half-dragon, half-dog, half-blender was laying down upstairs, gnawing away at the lid to a galvanized steel trash can, and the moment that the woman’s presence, veiled though it was, entered the range of Kerbos’ mana senses, Kerbos sent a warning growl through the bond that they shared.

Kerbos’ instincts didn’t inherently mean she was a bad person, but he trusted his dog-dragon enough that he kept an eye on her as he packaged someone a baked apple tart to go and handled the flow of customers.

She was short, not even five feet. Curvy and attractive, and maybe a couple of years older than he was – twenty five or so.

As she came to the head of the line, she gave him a sweet smile as she crossed her arms and held them tightly together. He was tempted to snort at it. She’d have better luck with that trick on Liz. At least Liz was able to be attracted to multiple people.

“Hey, is Mal in?” the woman asked.

The interest and observation from Kerbos and his own noticing of her shifted into a note of alarm.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m a friend of his, my name’s Emily,” she said, then frowned, putting on an almost-pout. “Did he really not mention I’d be coming in to try…”

Her eyes flickered over the display case for a second.

“One of those delicate, swan shaped cream puffs?”

“No the primes you’re not,” Ed said, stepping closer to the counter. “My brother has exactly three friends, and one of them’s my girlfriend. He definitely doesn’t have a robust enough social life to have a friend I’ve never heard of.”

The woman gave him a look that sent an actual shiver down Ed’s spine at that. It was flat, but not in the emotionless mask that some wore to hide anger. This was more like the completely impassive look of a debt collector coming to repossess a house after someone took out a bad loan.

Then it was gone and she shrugged.

“You’re weird. I just want a cream puff.”

“Totally!,” Ed agreed, giving her a big, stupid, goofy grin. He boxed it up and charged her for it. She actually paid with a smooth black creditstone, and he arched an eyebrow. She frowned and shook her head.

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“It’s my dad’s,” she laughed.

“Lucky girl,” he said with a smile, and she nodded.

As she walked away, though, Kerbos put down his chew toy and padded down the stairs, slipping out the back door to keep an eye on her. She ate the cream puff on the street and headed away, but stopped at the small corner garden, sitting there. When Kerbos relayed this to Ed, he asked his familiar to hang back, but keep an eye on her.

She was good. She shifted her position every half hour or so, making sure that she wasn’t in one place for long enough to stick out in anyone’s mind, but she always stayed in a fairly close radius to the bakery, skirting around it in a roughly three mile radius circle.

That was strange enough to Ed. While it was technically possible that she just lived around here, and he did everything he could to give her the benefit of the doubt, there were just too many suspicious things about her for him to accept it easily.

Kerbos trailed her, and despite the fact that he didn’t blend in at all, his cute appearance of an armored dog-dragon with metal horns, the fact that most people in the nearby neighborhoods had already seen him, and that he stayed back, keeping her within his scent but not his vision, not after she started to move, meant that she was mostly unaware of her tail.

Either that, or she’d become aware of Kerbos, but then continued her evasive swapping and shifting even after to further obscure her trail, but Ed hoped that wasn’t the actual reason. If it was, then she was more than just someone with a vendetta against his brother, like that werewolf girl had been.

If she was paranoid to keep shaking a trail that she’d lost hours ago, then she had been trained in this sort of thing, either by the Nightwatch, Sinners, or plain old experience.

As the evening moved on, and his dad retired to bed early, Ed kept Kerbos on her trail.

When she slowly started moving back towards the bakery, Ed came to the unfortunate conclusion that his hopes that she was just some random, innocent person were almost certainly untrue.

He headed out back and used his Stone Sculpting spell on the large brick of stone outside. Despite the name, the spell was more like a crude chisel, simply slicing stone apart wherever he fed mana into it. The harder the stone he had to crack, the more mana it took.

It was actually one of the spells that made up part of the reason he was glad that Meadow had insisted that he learn Analyze Earth. The sense for the flows of telluric energy within the stone did a lot to tell him where the natural fracture points were, and as he cut chunks from the stone to reshape into a spear with his legacy, he was left with a tool that was tougher than it would appear, with the weak spots very intentionally chosen.

When he channeled his Strengthen Stone spell into it, reinforcing it, the power he’d gained from Kerbos’ bond flowed into it.

Bands of thin purelectrum – one of the five metals Kerbos’ legacy let his spells become – forged themselves within the energetic arrays of the spear.

He wasn’t good enough to use it to form enchantments yet, but it still served to remove the worst parts of the stone, reinforcing it and transforming the spear into a high quality work.

He leaned the spear over his shoulder and stepped into the shadowed corner of the yard, where the house and block of stone would hide him, then pulled a tight veil over his spirit, using the Still as the Stone technique to blend his mana into the environment and the very stones he was hiding behind.

When he heard footsteps, he checked in with Kerbos. Sure enough, her scent was still headed this way.

The footsteps stopped, and he felt a slight shift of knowledge and abnegation mana in the air.

The perfect mana for wardbreaking.

He held on though. While all evidence suggested she would be cracking the wards Malachi and Orykson had put around the house, it could also be something else, and she was still innocent.

Suspicious as the left toe of the telluric prime.

But innocent.

Not only that, but if he stepped out now…

There was a slight warble in the spatial mana of the wards tremble, then someone hopped the fence, landing delicately into his yard. Ed stepped out of the shadow and past the stone, tensing his mana, ready to release it at any second.

“The deliberate breaking of civilian protective wards is a summary offense, you know,” Ed said smoothly. “Not a great look, especially when you lied about knowi–”

He was cut off as the woman exploded towards him, moving with some sort of variant of the haste spell that caused her body to glow green, while swirling winds wrapped around her body, accelerating her speed. A hammer appeared in her hand as she moved, and lightning blazed down its shaft and to its head.

But for all that she was faster than Ed, he’d already been pushing power at three spells, holding it in place to stop the three from forming.

Now, though, those flooded with power.

Harvest Earthen Excess wasn’t exactly staggering, but there was almost always excess earthen power, and it trickled into his mana-garden from his feet, a slow but constant source of extra mana for the fight.

Telluric magic flooded his bones and muscles alike, improving their density and strength, and when it came to an end at his skin, the power transforming the outermost layer of it to be as stone itself. The same natural effect granted by his bond with Kerbos flowed in, and purelectrum wrapped itself along his veins and muscles, appearing as swirling, half-complete spell arrays on his skin.

At the same instant, a shield appeared on his arm, Stoneshield forged, its own metal bands running through it, strengthening the already powerful defensive spell. It appeared on the arm that hadn’t been holding the spear, of course.

The same side which the woman had attacked.

Her hammer exploded against his shield, and the lightning discharged, running through the bands of metal on his shield, spear, and body…

And shunted down into the earth.

Attacking a stone mage with lightning wasn’t impossible. But it was generally considered to be a bad idea. And this woman, at the peak of third gate, wasn’t nearly strong enough for her power to make up for the natural advantage.

Ed stepped forward, even as she whipped around, the winds launching her into the air.

He threw his spear, and his newest mastered spell transformed it. Even as she smashed down on it in midair, it broke into three parts, clicking into place around her body.

With his other hand, Ed flicked his shield and overcharged his mana, fueling it into a spell that caused gravity to increase over his attacker, pulling her slowly down to the ground.

“Why is every thrice cursed member of your family a mana monster?” the woman demanded under her breath as she packed more and more magic into her flight spell, straining to pull her upwards with inverted air pressure, while Ed negated it with the increased gravity. She probably hadn’t expected Ed to hear her comment, but he seized on the opportunity.

His dad was just a baker, but there was no reason someone who clearly had a vendetta against his family needed to know that. If she thought he was really some arcanist in disguise, she’d think twice about pulling any funny business. Of course, he’d be reporting this to the Lightwatch, and getting someone to keep an eye on this neighborhood, but it couldn’t hurt to be extra careful.

“If you think we’re insane, you should see our dad when he stops veiling and lets himself cut loose,” he lied.

Then he snapped, and the gravitational magic that had been pulling her down in a contest of power against power, flipped from pulling her down…

To up.

His assailant was caught entirely off guard at that, and didn’t have the time to cut off her overcharged and frenzy fueled flight spell.

She rocketed up into the sky, moving faster than most attack spells.

Ed closed his eyes and began tracing his connection to the spells he had around her, then started running.