"Son, just what in the nine hells are you doing?"

Oliver looked up at him, grinning in spite of himself. He couldn't answer the question directly, though, wasn't safe. He didn't need another repeat of the Demus incident.

"What exactly do you do, old man?" he deflected instead, trusting in common courtesy to afford him some breathing room.

"Me? I'm retired," Timaeus rasped. "But I used to be a free lance for the Rook and Raven Company."

Oliver wasn't sure what to make of that, so he nodded. "Right, well," he said, "I'm a civil engineer."

"An... engineer?" Instead of clearing up matters, he'd apparently only confused the man further. Also, his pronunciation was way off on this word. Made him think of when Google Translate couldn't recognize a word in the translation source. It would just stick the untranslated word in the translated sentence verbatim.

Oliver might have been jumping to conclusions here, but there was clearly some kind of translation happening here, and he was willing to bet that for some reason the word "engineer" didn't make the cut. Maybe they didn't have a word close enough.

"A structural engineer, specifically," Oliver went on regardless. "It's my job to study and understand the way the world works, then use that understanding to make it better. Or it would be, if I didn't spend so much time on paperwork." He grimaced.

The old man nodded faintly. If this explanation had helped any, it wasn't clear. Then he shrugged.

"Ain't any o' my business," he said, "but you don't exactly look like one of them men o' letters folk."

"I'm an ex-soldier," Oliver admitted.

After a few moments of silence, Oliver's mind wandered back to the sheet. Then he thought of something, then flicked open his character sheet again to check.

There – right there at the top. How had he missed it?

Hitpoints: 7.

Now what exactly did that mean? Like the armor class number, it seemed like an abstraction that held little relevance to the reality of his situation. But perhaps it would be useful. He pondered.

His working theory was that like the inventory – and the log – it was a reflection of the physical reality he perceived, a value that simply mapped to what he already knew. An experiment to test this possibility came to mind. He dismissed it.

He looked over the rest of the sheet, wondering if there was anything else he'd missed. Apparently he had no proficiencies, which didn't seem right – he felt as though he ought to have something for his time in the marines. The system seemed to disagree. Then again, he didn't have a class either, and proficiencies came with classes.

There was one other interesting bit, though, a number with a label he didn't recognize:

Mana. 489.

There was no unit associated with this value, so he had no way of knowing if this were a little or a lot. But more importantly, it wasn't a number that had any relevance to classic Dungeons and Dragons.

The version of the game he'd played didn't have any concept of mana, instead providing spell slots – consumable slots that allowed you to cast spells and would regenerate over a night's rest.

This mana number was entirely different, and piqued his interest as the first explicit deviation from the D&D engine that he'd come across.

There was precious little he could figure out from the number, devoid as it was of context, but there was a chance it would be the key to understanding how the whole thing worked. He resolved to keep an eye on it over the next few days to see how it changed – and where it had come from.

Then he remembered where he'd seen mana mentioned before, and checked out his log. Yes – there it was. Beside the mention of the two soldiers he'd killed, which the system seemed to attribute to him, there was a notation.

He'd apparently received 119 mana as a reward for killing the first soldier, and 218 from the second. That was how it read at first glance, anyway. He mulled over the words. How did the system know that it was his fault the soldiers had died? How did it target them?

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He was beginning to draw up quite the list of questions. His initial resolve to choose a class had by now crumbled in the face of uncertainty. He would have to wait, just a little longer. The magisters in the capital would no doubt be able to help his situation. He wanted to avoid doing anything that could compromise their aid.

Besides that, there was little else that drew his attention on the character sheet, so he called up the book beside it – again, after the initial shock it was summonable and dismissable without the light show – and began to read through that carefully.

He now suspected that it would grant him little of value, since it seemed that the system had dredged it up from his subconscious memory of the book back home. However, Oliver felt it deserved a thorough perusal regardless, since even the smallest details – such as the concept of *mana* – could potentially make a significant difference in his ultimate survivability.

Also, he was bored and the art was pretty cool.

–

The trip wound up being fairly uneventful for the first couple of days, at least up until the harpies attacked.

After that initial ice breaker with the experiment, it became clear Timaeus was quite the chatty fellow, despite the hoarseness of his voice.

Oliver spent most of the time conversing with the old man, who turned out to have been, essentially, an adventurer. He'd been part of a large mercenary company that took on odd jobs for the local warlords, kings, and other holders of power that made up the conglomerate of countries in this part of the world.

He didn't outright say it, and Oliver didn't want to reveal his ignorance by probing too far, but he had the sense that the man also spent some significant portion of his time fighting monsters, whose existence he only mentioned in passing.

Timaeus knew something of the political situation here, it transpired, and was only too happy to share his thoughts on the matter. Apparently this area, Shadowveil, was a sort of no-man's-land between the Maran Empire to the west and a smaller kingdom to its east, Carovingia.

The two countries had been locked in a delicate political dance, each seeking to control the region without giving the other a chance – or a reason – to seize it by formally declaring annexation.

Mare, in particular, had taken the offensive in recent days, inflicting ever increasing cruelties on the land's native inhabitants in attempt to provoke a response from the Carovingians. The other powers in the area all were looking for excuses to rag on Mare and Carovingia, and all-out conflict would provoke instant retaliation on both parties, so they'd been engaging in a covert proxy war via the natives.

Additionally, the situation, which would have already been hideously complicated in terrestrial politics, was further tangled by the incredible heights of power to which individuals could climb in this world. A single anonymous vigilante could – and often did – inflict immense damage without giving up either side's involvement.

It seemed the Carovingians had finally tipped their hand with this all-out attack on the camp. The political consequences would be serious, perhaps a turning point in the conflict – but this was the third time in the last four years such a thing had happened.

Timaeus also explained that their caravan was heading back with both captured Carovingian arms and those permanently injured soldiers whose bodies or spirits were too broken to fight on.

There was the implication that quite advanced healing could be had at the mercy of the camp's magical healers, but that for some reason it didn't always take.

Altogether, Oliver had the sense that magic could be incredibly powerful, but had its limitations nonetheless. Unfortunately, the old man mainly talked around it, treating it like a given – which, in a sense it was – and often neglecting to qualify his statements on the matter.

For example, if their army had a general capable of leveling cities, why didn't he just knock the dragons out of the sky before they blew up half the camp?

Paths and Ways did make their appearances in his conversation, though, cementing Oliver's impression of their importance not only in relation to the magical System but also Maran culture in general.

But Oliver didn't dare ask more for fear of blowing his cover. His questions would have to wait until he reached a city or more densely populated area, where he could reveal his ignorance in a safer anonymity.

It was in such conversation that they whiled away the next two days, and indeed in which they were engaged when one of the soldiers shattered the peace of the chill, gray afternoon with a cry of "'Ware above! Harpies! To arms!"

The reaction was instantaneous. The call was taken up throughout the caravan, which had become strung out on the muddy road after lunch. The wagons jerked to a halt. Timaeus and the other wagon drivers were yanking on the reins and looking up into the drizzle, while the soldiers unhitched their shields from their backs and drew their swords.

At first, when he followed Timaeus' gaze, Oliver didn't see anything. But then after a moment, high in the sky above, he saw a dark shape come wheeling down through the clouds, joined moments later by two, four, a dozen more.

At first, they seemed like large birds of some kind. Then, as they descended on the caravan he saw that they were larger than he'd realized. Much larger. And their heads were... wrong.

But before he could get a firm grasp of their size or numbers, Timaeus had grabbed his shoulder and was urging him out of the wagon.

"Into the woods, Oliver, out of the open!" he cried, following his own advice as he leapt off the wagon and made for the bank at the side of the road.

Adrenaline hit hard as Oliver stood up on his seat, looking down the length of the caravan.

The wounded were struggling to get clear. He felt his pulse in his fingertips.

Even in the wagon two ahead of him, some thirty or forty feet away, some of the more able-bodied had jumped down and were already amonst the trees, but several were slower to react or move. And precious few soldiers were with them. They were sitting ducks.

He jumped off the wagon and began to sprint up the road.