Emily sits down next to Dante as he sets up a small fire using some dry wood from within Tom’s bag and roasts skewers of a razor-fanged wolf he killed during the night.

“Wow, you actually butchered something on your own?” Emily asks with mock surprise.

“It gave me something to do,” he grumbles back. “Sitting on watch on my own is so boring!”

“Wow, bored after a few days. Now you know how we felt after weeks,” Emily says with a snort.

Their friends slowly start joining them before the food is done cooking, drawn by the smell of sizzling meat.

“Did you even season those?” Hester asks as she sits down opposite Dante and Emily.

“Yep!” Dante says proudly. “I used the mix you made.”

Emily resists the urge to laugh at his pride over following instructions, focusing on Hester instead.

“Did you kick your brother?”

“Yeah, he should be up in a second.”

“Good, I didn’t expect waking up to be the biggest challenge on this expedition,” Emily says dryly, thinking of their twenty-minute delay yesterday because Tom refused to get up.

Juliana walks over as they chat, sporting a mischievous grin. Dante goes to hand Emily a finished skewer, but Juliana steps between them and drops down into Emily’s lap with all her weight. Emily plays along, letting out a pained grunt even though the impact barely bothers her as she wraps her arms around her girlfriend’s waist and rests her chin on her shoulder.

Juliana takes the skewer Dante was offering and starts munching on it with a self-satisfied smile. Dante gives Juliana a small, amused nod before continuing as if nothing happened. He hands finished skewers to everyone else, purposefully leaving Emily till last.

Emily rolls her eyes, unbothered, and addresses the group once they’re all eating.

“We should reach the tunnel down into The Crystal Waters by this evening. We’re probably going to run into a lot more beasts today, and I have a new spell to test, so I’m going to take over combat for now.”

Nobody has any complaints, so they finish their meal and pack up their camp quickly. An hour into the morning trek, Emily hears a faint boom ahead, slightly off their intended path.

Pop frogs?

She sends one of her birds up above the canopy into the free skies where the mist thins a little. The sight she sees makes her eyes light up as a large smile spreads across her face.

“I just found the perfect target for my test. Follow me,” Emily says, turning to the right.

“What is it?” Juliana asks, following close behind her.

“A huge flock of sominal bombers!”

“How big is huge?” Hester asks.

“About fourteen. No, wait, make that fifteen,” Emily says, watching another bird rise from the trees to join the flock. “And they seem pretty agitated, so probably whatever they’re attacking too.”

Juliana, Hester, and Enzo start chanting, preparing defensive spells, just in case, after hearing the numbers. Emily doesn’t say anything, inwardly chuckling.

They won’t get a chance to attack us.

Emily stops a hundred metres away from the flock, holding up a hand to signal for her group to halt. They react instantly, falling silent and stopping dead in their tracks.

Emily stands still, landing all of her birds and ignoring them to free up threads, two of her cores still asleep. She quickly pulls upon her magical perception, spread by a free thread as she approaches, and begins casting her new spell. She locates all of her targets: fifteen sominal bombers; twelve pop frogs in their clutches; and five razor fangs on the floor below them. She directly brands all of them with her mana, writing a few runes that don’t even qualify as a spell onto each, dividing them into two groups.

Glowing green and silver runes flow out of Emily, encasing her in a spinning matrix of letters and geometric patterns within a second. At the centre of the spell, silver mana slowly condenses into a mesmerising metal bow, the limbs twisting out from the handle like a tornado. It’s then delicately wrapped in faint green mana that condenses into shimmering winds that flow through the grooves of the limbs, bursting out from the tips to connect together in a swirling string.

Emily’s friends are mesmerised by the beautiful weapon as Emily reaches up her left hand to grasp the handle. It fits perfectly, and she smiles as she raises the bow to the sky, pointing straight at the flock of birds. Her right hand draws back the barely visible bowstring, flexing the limbs back as more mana flows from the spell to condense into a thin, straight arrow of twisted metal.

She holds it there for a second, waiting as more mana is poured into the arrow, wrapping it in a violently twisting gale.

“Scatter,” Emily declares with a wide grin, releasing the arrow.

Faster than any of her friends’ eyes can follow, her aerial targets die.

Emily is only barely able to watch the path of the arrow since she knows it in advance. It rips through the air, cutting through the few leaves and branches in its way with ease. A few metres away from the flock of birds, the spiralling metallic cylinder at the centre of the projectile bursts. Twenty-seven jagged shards of metal rocket off at different angles, already lined up due to the strange twists in the original projectile.

The winds around the arrow split, joining each shard and adding a violent rotation. They fly towards the marks Emily left on the beasts, targeting the skulls of the bombers and the hearts of the frogs. Each one hits its mark, tearing through any flesh or bone in the way.

As the first wave of corpses falls from the sky, Emily draws back another shot, waiting for the arrow to charge again. Instead of aiming up or directly towards her targets, Emily points at an odd angle slightly to the right of the five razor-fangs still ahead, aiming for the longest gap between any trees.

Emily’s friends hear a chorus of thuds as the falling bodies hit the floor, and Emily releases the next arrow the moment silence settles. It flies forward before suddenly jolting sideways, winding between the gaps in the trees towards the wolves, and then bursting into five much larger shards of arrow that all weave their way into the beast’s hearts. They don’t even get a chance to yelp before their chests are pulped and they drop dead.

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“Target’s eliminated,” Emily mutters, lowering her hand and dismissing the spell.

The bow bursts into glittering light and a final gust of wind, signalling the end of the display to her friends.

“That was incredible!” Tom shouts excitedly, receiving a smack to the back of the head from his sister.

“Idiot. Don’t shout,” she chides him.

He lowers his head sheepishly, and Emily laughs, gesturing for them to follow her as she walks towards her quarry. They walk through the trees until they come across the littered bodies, scattered through the trees, a few frogs and birds stuck in the branches above, dripping gore to the floor.

Her teammates let out surprised exclamations at the sight.

“Did you hit all of them in the head or heart?” Enzo asks, inspecting a few of the corpses.

“Yep!” Emily says with a proud grin, starting to gather the corpses together with her friends’ help. “Scattershot works by marking my targets, then the arrow splits to hit them all. I was considering having a single arrow follow a path through all of the marks, but it would have been weaker per hit after the first few because of the drastic direction changes.”

“Incredible. I’ve only seen a few third circle mages in action before and I never realised their spells could be so... precise,” Enzo says with admiration.

“Ha, thanks. Were you watching members of the Hibiscus family by any chance?” Emily asks in a teasing tone.

“Yes actually. I’ve watched a few friendly spars between some of our siblings,” Enzo confirms. “I can’t really blame the Hibiscus mages though. My siblings aren’t exactly refined.”

Enzo’s tired sigh is drowned out by Dante’s laughter at the comment.

“Your siblings are great!” he says through his laughter.

“So they use big explosions then?” Juliana asks with false innocence, smiling playfully.

Emily is caught off guard by Juliana’s tone and breaks into a fit of laughter, quickly being joined by everyone else.

They gather the corpses together, as Tom starts harvesting the valuable parts and placing them into his bag. Emily gracefully ascends a few trees to fish bodies out of them, before joining him to quickly finish stripping the bodies. It doesn’t take long with a little help from everyone, and they soon finish up and turn to continue their march.

Emily pulls out her guide pose to correct their course and, as they start walking, Tom asks her a question.

“Why do you have to use that to find the entrance? Don’t you already know where it is? Couldn’t you just plot a course on a map and use a compass?”

Emily looks over her shoulder at him with a raised brow.

“Haven’t you done any research on mana-dense regions? I would have thought it would fit into your interests since so many conflicts happened around The Glade.”

“No,” he responds, scratching his cheek embarrassedly. “I’ve only read a few things about The Glade in passing. Not many historical texts give much detail on it in the C grade section.”

“Ah,” Emily nods in understanding, not having considered his limited access to knowledge. “There are a few reasons. First and foremost, the geography of The Glade is constantly shifting: how drastically depends on a lot of factors, and not all of them are fully understood, so we can’t rely on the entrance staying in one spot or predict how it will move.”

Hester, Tom, and Juliana all react to the information, but the other three don’t, having already heard about it on their last trip.

“Secondly, and probably the larger issue,” she continues, “Is this.”

Emily reaches into a pouch at her hip and pulls out an ornate bronze compass, tossing it over her shoulder to Tom. He catches it and looks at the face.

“Woah,” he mutters, drawing Hester and Juliana in next to him to look too.

Ivor, Enzo, and Dante also try to look over his shoulder, not knowing the second reason themselves. The needle of the compass erratically jumps, pointing in several different directions. Some of its jumps happen rapidly in succession, and some give long pauses in between, creating an impossible-to-predict pattern.

“Simple compasses don’t work in mana-dense regions,” Emily explains, holding her hand out to take back her instrument.

“Why?” Hester asks, earning an approving nod from Emily.

“Do any of you understand how compasses work?”

Her friends fall silent for a few moments before Hester hesitantly says: “The needle is pulled towards the north?”

Emily sighs, raising a hand to rub the bridge of her nose.

I wonder if their lack of knowledge reflects a lack of understanding in the kingdom, or education. My knowledge of this is all given by the system.

“I’ll start with the basics then. Do you know what magnets are?”

“Metals that stick to metals!” Tom says proudly.

“Close enough. Think of magnets as objects with an aura of attraction around them, like a spell that draws in other magnets. The planet we’re on, Ulea, has one large aura that will affect all other magnets on it. So, to make a compass, we place a small magnet,” she explains, holding up the compass and pointing to the needle in the middle. “On a pivot, and it’s automatically pulled towards the top of the planet, aka, north.”

Murmured understanding spreads through the group.

“Why do mana-dense regions affect them then? Aren’t they on the planet too?” Juliana asks.

“They are. But, the dense mana here has a stronger influence than the planet’s light constant aura. So, the compass reacts to the fluctuation of mana instead of the planet’s aura.”

Though, I could probably make a compass resistant to the influence with the right alloy of magnetic and mana-resistant metals...

She puts the compass away again, returning her focus to their path as she spots a few approaching beasts, probably drawn by the noise of pop frogs going off. She signals for her friends to stop, her mouth stretching into a grin as an idea strikes her.

I’ve shown them precision, now time for overwhelming power.

“Some mudscraps and ocelax are coming. Wait a moment,” Emily says calmly, casting another third circle spell.

A crackling matrix of sky-blue runes flickers to life in front of her. The air around buzzes with energy as a giant orb, the size of Emily’s torso, of violent lightning forms.

Emily draws a rune on each of her teammates quickly, excluding them from the spell’s targeting, as the beasts rush towards them through the trees. She holds the spell, watching the beasts through one of her birds and waiting for them to step into range. The five ocelax arrive first, stopping a few metres away from Emily, cautiously watching the giant ball of sizzling mana she controls and not approaching.

Good choice, but not smart enough.

The last of the eight approaching mudscraps steps within twenty metres of her, and she raises her hands dramatically, putting on a show for her audience.

“Arc!” she announces, clapping her hands together in time with a roaring thunder as she releases her spell.

The orb of lightning that was contained by the carefully constructed spell matrix shakes, firing out searing tendrils of plasma. The thin lines of lightning stretch out, striking at the trees and beasts around them indiscriminately. Bark is burned black, leaves and bushes set alight, and the beasts howl in pain.

Each deadly limb of mana released from the orb bounces from target to target, not doing a large amount of damage per impact, but not stopping until they reach a distance of thirty metres from the orb, where they fizzle out. Power pours out of the spell, creating an electrically charged territory ruled by lightning.

All of the beasts struck writhe in pain, unable to control themselves as tendrils repeatedly strike then leap away.

All of them have been marked. Phase two.

Emily moves her arms, grasping at the air in a precise, well-planned manner, like a conductor building up their orchestra into a roaring crescendo. The magic circle around the orb morphs, runes vanishing and being replaced, shapes bending and twisting to connect different points in a dizzying, twisting motion as the entire spell seems to shrink around the orb, constricting it and holding in the striking limbs, bringing quiet to the forest again.

The orb of plasma starts to shake violently, compressing into a glistening ball the size of a fist that starts to buzz in a high-pitched hum. Emily’s movement ceases suddenly, with both her hands clasped together, her fingers interlinked, pointing straight ahead.

Her friends stand behind her in awed silence, watching the mesmerising display of mastery playing out before them. The beasts lying around in the trees quiver in place, unmoving, their skin still crackling with residual lightning even after the main assault has paused.

“Arc-bolt.” Emily’s voice flows out, mixing with the crackling hum in a chilling declaration of death.

Emily’s hands relax and part as deafening noise and light fill the forest. A powerful roar shakes her friends to the core as a single, white line is drawn between every beast in the vicinity. The beam of plasma only targets the immobilised creatures, instantly ending their lives the moment it touches them as they are struck by millions of volts and an intense, searing heat.

The beam hits all thirteen targets before vanishing, leaving nothing but stunned silence in its wake.