"So," Rin said, jogging up to walk by Maria's side. "Where is this place?"

"We will be arriving fairly soon," Maria replied. "It's about another hour's walk away."

Hearing that, Rin stretched her arms, making some big gestures to keep her body warmed up.

[What exactly will we be fighting?] She wondered. [Skeletons, like before? Or, are there maybe some other kind of undead out there?]

"Ugh, another hour of this crap?" Alea muttered a bit of distance behind her, and Rin heard Maria hold back a laugh.

"Maybe if you put in the work, and you get pretty rich, you can hire other adventurers to carry you to your missions," Varyn told her.

"Yeah? Are you volunteering? I'll probably make way more money than you ever will, so, just let me know."

"Wow, so confident. How come?" Varyn asked.

"Because, unlike the rest of you plebians, I actually have a plan laid out for myself," Alea declared.

"That's good!" Maria interjected, from ahead. "It's nice to have some idea of where you're going. That's very diligent thinking."

Alea didn't respond to her praise, settling for just looking away bashfully.

As Rin looked back, she noticed that Sara was lagging behind everyone, a considerable distance away.

[Hm... Is she alright?] Rin wondered, and she stopped, letting everyone else keep going ahead as she waited for Sara to catch up.

When she did, Sara looked up and noticed Rin.

"...?" She said nothing, but she was confused.

"Are you okay?" Rin asked.

"..." At that, Sara paused. "Yes. I will do what is asked of me."

Rin blinked.

[... What?]

"Uh, that's great, but, I mean, are you feeling alright?" Rin added. "I don't know, you seem a little more nervous than usual, or something."

"I am fine," Sara replied, with that same quiet, calm voice she usually had. "Do not worry."

"If you say so."

Together, they closed the distance between them and the others, and their short journey into the eastern land continued. The sky above continued to darken, and Rin wondered if it would soon begin to rain. Aside from that fact, however, everything was just as colorful and vibrant as it usually was.

At one point, when Rin and Sara passed by a pair of high trees, she looked up and saw some metallic structure trapped in the branches. Moss and vines grew around it, hanging from its body as both adventurers walked under it.

[Things from the Old World always show up at the weirdest moments,] Rin thought. [But, if you look, sometimes, it feels like they're everywhere.]

Eventually, Maria stopped as she reached a hill, and she waited for everyone to be close enough to her before she pointed ahead. As Rin reached her position, she looked toward the area she was highlighting and found what looked like an old fortress. Bigger than the kobold fort she and Cara had visited on her first mission, but smaller than the Academy.

It looked like giant blocks of stone had simply been dropped in the middle of nowhere, with no trees, grass or, really much of anything other than dirt surrounding it.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

[Are all of the enemies inside?] Rin wondered before she noticed that she was wrong. There was one thing nearby this place.

Looking closer, in the distance to the north, there was a large body of water, clear and blue.

"That's the place. Like I said before," Maria turned toward them. "I'm going to teach one of you two," she pointed at Varyn and Alea, " how to do the purification spell, and one of you is going to handle that while the others back them up. Which one of you wants to do it?"

"Hm," Varyn put a hand up to his chin. "I'd say it should probably be me. If Alea's our healer, it makes sense, just in case anything happens to the others, she can help them out. Do you agree?"

"Yeah, fine," Alea replied.

"Great," he said with a dry tone.

"In that case, here you go," Maria said, before handing over a sheet of paper to him. "On that thing is a spellsign. Take a moment to learn it before you and your team head down there."

"Alright."

Varyn walked away then, unfolding the paper to study the spellsign he'd been given. Maria put her hands behind her back and looked at everyone.

"So, how are we? Excited?" She asked with a smile.

"Kinda," Rin replied, smiling back.

"I just wanna get this over with already," Alea, who had sat down on a rock, said in a hushed voice. "I wasn't meant to be working with groups."

"Really?" Maria asked, walking closer to her.

Rin saw some nervousness appear briefly on Alea's face, hiding just under her permanent scowl. She straightened up a little, taking a subtle breath that Rin had caught from years of having to read the body language of her clients. From what she could tell, Alea was either very scared of the woman or had great respect for her. Or both.

"Well, if I may let you in on a secret," she winked, "this isn't going to be the last time you four will be working together."

"What!?"

"Yep. Therefore, it's a good thing to try to get used to these sorts of missions," Maria told her. "Outside of the Academy, team missions tend to be very lucrative. But, they can be dangerous as well. It's good to try to work on that."

"..." Alea looked away, looking a little embarrassed. "Whatever."

"And you?" Maria turned toward Sara.

"I am fine," Sara said, in almost the exact same way she'd told Rin.

"Good."

Unlike how she'd done with Alea, Maria didn't press on Sara's reaction. Maybe because she was convinced Sara was going to do well. If so, then, Rin could have a little bit of confidence too that the woman was going to carry this team.

Sometime later, Varyn walked back to the group, the paper curled up in his hand.

"I'm ready."

"Well then," Maria turned to the others. "Off you go. I will be behind you, watching over you, in case any particularly powerful creature arrives. If, however, I sense that you are capable of killing the enemy, I will not intervene until something seriously goes wrong. Understand?"

Everyone nodded.

"In that case, go on ahead."

---

"... Definitely looks bigger in person."

Rin stood in front of the stone fortress's doors, with her team next to her, and Maria just a few steps behind.

"Sara," Varyn said. "You should probably be the first to go in."

However, the raven-haired girl wasn't listening. She was just staring up at the fortress, with a glare in her eyes. Varyn raised a brow and cleared his throat.

"Sara?" He asked again.

"Hm?" She turned toward him.

"Could you be the first to go in? You're the most suited for it."

Calmly, Sara nodded and walked forward. Quickly, she put her hands on the wooden rotting doors at the front and pushed them open. It was so dark inside that, from where Rin was, she couldn't see much of anything. All she saw was a bit of dust float up into the air, as Sara walked inside.

Alea quickly drew a simple spellsign in the air, and a blue orb appeared over her head. As she walked in after Sara, it illuminated the area.

What Rin saw let her know the fighting would probably start sooner, rather than later.

Several dead bodies. Not skeletons, exactly, but rather, almost petrified-looking corpses belonging to what Rin guessed had been soldiers, once upon a time.

[Hm. How old is this place?] She wondered as she went in after Alea. She looked around for any signs of the Old World, but as she couldn't find any, she figured that either this ruin wasn't that old, or it was older than she could imagine.

One corpse was sitting at a chair to her left.

"Hm..." Curiously, Rin walked over to it. The body was crouched, wearing some sort of iron armor, rusted and heavily dented.

[Oh,] Rin thought. [This thing is wearing some sort of bracelet.]

She began to reach for it, but as soon as her hand was about to touch the item, she stopped herself.

[Maria had told me not to do this. Right. Nearly fucked up,] Rin thought, turning around and finding Maria looking at her with a pleased smile.

"Good restraint," Maria said, clapping a little. "If no one messes up in that way, you'll only...."

Then, the body in front of Rin let out a groan, and the adventurer flinched.

[What? But, I didn't...] She looked to her right and saw Alea taking an accessory off of a corpse on the ground.

"Shit."

And, just a beat later, every corpse near them let out the same sound and began to stand up.

"Oh well," Maria said. "Have fun."