--- Balron ---

Balron had not been idle during his tenure as professor for abjuration and security. A sudden demonic invasion in the middle of his university was in fact a scenario that he had prepared for.

Others called him paranoid for it. Sometimes even crazy, when they thought he couldn't hear them, which was often since most people were not aware just how many scrying sensors he had spread around the city. As Balron often said to his students, preparation is the key to success. It looked like now some of that preparation was going to pay off.

The test was taking place in the department for biomancy, for faster access to healing in case of emergencies. That meant that most of the professors should be able to handle themselves. But the students were another matter, and needed to be protected until Balron could activate his contingency.

"Focus on saving the students! I have a plan!" He shouted at Atrog, who was running next to him in the general direction of the loudest screams.

Then Balron took a sharp left at the next corner, towards one of the many security systems he had installed across the university.

He was annoyed but not surprised that the security systems had not been triggered, yet. He wasn't the only one who could do so, after all. He held regular emergency drills for just such situations. Unfortunately the dean had decided that these drills were not mandatory. Something about there being far too many of them. So very few people actually attended them. A waste of time, they said.

Balron had to suppress a smile at the thought that he could finally say "I told you so" at the next faculty meeting. Vindication at last.

He mentally berated himself for letting his thoughts drift. This was a serious situation and people were in danger. It was important to focus on the task at hand.

Balron soon arrived at the place he was looking for: An inconspicuous room that contained a security glyph. Now all he needed to do was activate it with the right command words. This was a demonic invasion, so a generic purge of all extraplanar influence in the area would work just fine. The glyph was plugged into the university's arcane network and could provide far more power than any wizard could generate on their own. It didn't matter what exactly was going on here, and why there were demons here in the first place. This would resolve the situation instantly.

Balron opened the door, and his face dropped.

"What the fuck! Who put all of this garbage in here?" He shouted at nobody in particular.

The room was filled with sports equipment, stacked haphazardly throughout the whole room. Some of it was magical in nature. Activating the glyph while all of this stuff was lying around on top of it could have all sorts of side effects. What moron got the bright idea to use this room for storage? The biomancers spent all day making themselves physically perfect, and they couldn't even bother to carry their sports equipment twenty meters further to the designated storage rooms.

Balron made a mental note to himself that he needed to practice idiot-proofing his security systems. The depressing part about this was that it was an uphill battle. Every time Balron produced a superior idiot-proof spell that nobody could possibly mess up, the universe produced a superior idiot to prove him wrong.

Fortunately, Balron had a lot of experience with telekinetic spells. They were highly versatile and useful as components in more elaborate security spells. With well-practiced finger motions, Balron cast a spell and the clutter started floating out of the room.

Even so, it was going to take a while. That was unfortunate, since his earlier cursing seemed to have attracted the attention of a demon.

The creature consisted almost entirely of bone and spikes, and it towered over him. To be fair, most things tower over Balron. As a dwarf, he was used to it. But this thing was slightly taller than Atrog, who was pretty big even for an orc. It spotted him immediately, and ran at him screaming bloody murder.

Balron took stock of the monstrosity charging straight at him, and decided to ignore it.

He kept his focus on cleaning the room as quickly as possible instead.

The demon crashed into Balron with a sickening crunching sound. But it was not Balron who got hurt. The creature had triggered one of his prepared spells, coded to activate when an object moved towards him too quickly. Balron never left home without it, and regularly spent both mana and money to keep it recharged. Others called it a waste of his time.

A few centimeters before its claws could reach Balron, the demon was suddenly hit by a powerful telekinetic push that threw it ten meters backwards, where it crashed against the wall with a resounding boom.

For the second time today, Balron felt vindicated. Preparation is key.

An animal would have been killed by the impact, but demons treated biology more as a suggestion than a rule, so the creature regained its bearing after only a few seconds. It charged at Balron again and swiped at his face, but each of its strikes was deflected, and sometimes even countered with enough force to hurt the demon back. It kept clawing at Balron's face, but all it had to show for it was that its own claws kept getting snapped in half.

Meanwhile, Balron was concentrating on maintaining his own telekinetic spell to clean the room, and didn't pay much attention to the demon's struggles against his force field.

The demon was not quite sure what hurt it more. The feeling of its bones being broken by the dwarf's defensive spells, or the sheer disrespect of being completely ignored by the man it was trying to murder.

"Balron! Are you ok over there!" A sweet female voice suddenly came from further down the corridor.

Balron recognized her as Selbi Fiddlestitch, an old gnomish woman, and professor for biomancy.

"What does it look like! Please help!" Balron snapped back. He was tempted to be sarcastic about it, but his experiences today had taught him not to underestimate idiocy. For all he knew, if he said he was fine she would just take his word for it and walk away. That woman was one of his prime suspects for who put all this sports equipment on his emergency glyph, after all. Balron actually thought that his defenses should be able to hold the demon at bay for more than long enough, but it was not a good idea to rely on such things when one didn't need to.

The demon glanced at Selbi. Then it looked down at the ruins of its claws that were still regenerating from its latest strikes against the dwarf, and decided on a softer target. It turned and charged directly at the gnome.

Truly, this was not the demon's day. It would be very difficult for anyone to make themselves look more harmless than professor Fiddlestitch, the gnome. But the thing about biomancers was that the more they practiced their art the more changes they tended to make to their bodies. Selbi was one of the older faculty. Anyone who spent that much time practicing biomancy on themselves was going to be physically superior to a normal person, no matter where their focus lay.

Buying the services of a biomancer to improve your own body was just not comparable to a person who could practice on themselves every minute of every day, and who had done so for decades. Part of the general-purpose exams of biomancers included physical aptitude tests that would be outright impossible for even the strongest unenhanced athletes. So Balron had no doubt in his mind that his fellow professor would be fine, even if she had no actual combat experience.

So long as she didn't just stand there like an idiot and actually threw a punch, of course. At that thought, he remembered once again that he was an outlier among academics. The typical professor was not a trained adventurer, and in fact many of them have never been in a fight at all. There was a distinct possibility that his fellow professor was about to die, because she simply did not know how to throw a punch. It was too late for him to help her now, and the next second, when the demon reached the gnome, was one of the most tense seconds in his life.

Fortunately, his fears proved unfounded. When the demon was about to hit Selbi, the little gnome shrieked and slapped it in the face on pure instinct.

The force of the blow instantly turned the demon's head into a fine red mist.

"Good job, Selbi!" Balron shouted in relief.

"And that's it. All done now." he added a few seconds later as he finished cleaning the room and activated the glyph.

A pulse of magic emanated from the glyph. The corpse of the demon Selbi had just killed had already started to dissipate, but when the pulse hit it, it immediately dissolved into nothingness. In the distance, the demonic roars abruptly cut off.

"Thank you for the help." Balron said to Selbi.

Selbi just stood there, her body almost entirely covered in blood. She was panting from post-combat adrenaline and her eyes were staring into the distance.

"First time?" Balron asked. "Oh well. Make sure to visit a psychiatrist later. I hear some people have trouble sleeping after that." Not that he ever had trouble with that himself, but everyone was different, he supposed. Some people were just not cut out for being adventurers, no matter their power. "Now let's go. The demons should be gone, but we need to know what caused all of this."

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With that Balron took off at a run.

Besides the pulse of abjuration magic, part of the glyph's function had been to assess the situation. It had scanned the area for vital signs and magical anomalies, and displayed them on a map. Balron knew where to go, and he was headed right at the source of the demonic incursion. Fortunately there had been no signs of wounded in the building. Even if there were, everyone here was being trained as a healer, so it wasn't like they needed his help for that.

Balron soon came upon the room where the demons had come from. It looked like a disaster area. Tables and chairs were thrown around the room, many of them cracked in half. Atrog and Galanys were running from the center of the room to the door when he arrived, presumably to look for more demons to fight and people to save. He motioned for them to stop.

"I just triggered the emergency banishment glyph. The demons should all be gone." Balron said by way of explanation. "What happened here?"

They looked surprised to hear that, but Atrog immediately responded: "No injuries here. The situation seems to be resolved. The demons kept spawning from a portal that floated above the summoning circle. Galanys and I held them off while Rania hunted down any who had escaped and looked for civilians to save. It seems that there were no casualties. We really had a lot of luck here.

"As for the destruction in the room, Galanys noticed that the demons had pretty weird clawed feet that are good for eviscerating, but not for walking, so she cast a grease spell on the ground under the portal that spawned them. It worked. The stupid things kept charging and flinging themselves into the classroom. It was kind of hilarious to watch, and made it very easy to dispatch them."

"Good thinking there, Galanys." Balron responded. "I have known so depressingly many wizards who would have just used fireballs or lightning bolts, without even thinking about the situation."

Galanys smiled politely at the praise. "Thank you! But I think that if everyone else is safe, then we should go check on Rania. She seems to be really broken up about something."

She gestured near the center of the room, where Rania was sitting on the ground, crying.

"What happened?" Atrog asked as he drew closer.

"It's Pebble! He is dead! That spell that killed the demons also killed Pebble!" Rania cried.

"Who is Pebble?" Asked Balron, expecting the worst. A civilian might have died, and it might be his fault.

"Oh no." Atrog deadpanned, turning to Balron. "You have killed her pet rock."

"I have killed her what now?" Balron responded.

"It was you?" Rania asked. "You were the one who cast that spell? You murderer! You killed Pebble! You, you," she took a deep breath. "You Bad Guy!"

"Rania, please don't say anything you can't take back." Galanys interrupted in a calming voice as she sat next to the clearly distraught elf. Balron noticed that Rania was cradling a rock in her hand. Presumably the eponymous "Pebble".

"He didn't mean to do it. He banished the demons, and saved us all! It's not like he could have known that you have a spirit with you." Galanys said.

Rania's face went through a variety of emotions as she decided how to respond to that. Then suddenly she lit up brightly and stared at the rock in her hands.

"Pebble!" She exclaimed. "You are back! Oh, I knew that this couldn't kill you. You are way too old and wise to die to something like that, right. Right. Haha. Yes, of course. No, we are all fine."

"Is she having a conversation with the rock?" Balron whispered to Atrog.

"She is. She is a shaman. Apparently that one random rock she found in the middle of a road is really special. Not that it has magical powers or anything. She just thinks that the spirit in it is really fun to talk to."

As if on cue, Rania suddenly started laughing. "Oh wow, that was a good one. Where do you get all these jokes from?" Rania asked the rock in her hands. "It's so sad that pun doesn't work in Common. I can't tell it to the others to show them how funny and smart you are."

"Right. If we are all done then?" Atrog interrupted Rania and drew the others' attention. "Rania, this is Balron. He is joining us on our mission."

Balron bowed to Rania in greeting. "Hello Rania. I hope we can get along despite the bad first impression I made here. I did not know that you had any spirits with you that could be harmed by abjuration surges. I will be more careful in the future."

Rania bowed back. She looked at him critically, glanced down at the rock for a few seconds, then nodded. "It's alright. You were only trying to help, and that's what matters the most!" She said with enthusiasm.

"Pebble says that he forgives you, and that I should forgive you, too. He is very wise, so that's what I will do. I hope that we can get along well, and you can avoid almost killing your teammates in the future."

"I will try my best not to." responded Balron, unsure how to react to that.

"Oh, since it's time for introductions, I mustn't forget to introduce you to the last member of our team." Rania said, before she started rummaging through the area between her cloak and her hair. "Aranea! Please come here, I want to introduce you to a new friend!"

After a few seconds, she pulled her hands out of her cloak, to reveal a tarantula spider sitting on her palms.

"Aranea, this is Balron. Balron, this is Aranea."

"Greetings Aranea!" Balron said, deciding to go with the flow. It was probably Rania's familiar, and therefore another sapient spirit. Unlike that rock. He had yet to see evidence that a rock could actually be alive, so he just filed this under "weird things shamans do" in his brain and ignored it. But familiars were well known to him. He even had one himself, but unfortunately he did not have her with him today. He had asked his rat familiar to do some work for him. She was busy scouting for secret passages in a relatively new section of the city. Just in case. Because preparation is key.

Aranea the spider suddenly raised her fangs and front legs. Balron recognized it as a threatening gesture.

"Look, she is waving at you in greeting!" Rania said.

"Well, it is nice to meet you. Unfortunately I do not speak spider. Maybe Rania can translate?" Balron asked, completely at a loss for how to proceed.

"Oh, that's ok." Rania said. "She doesn't speak spider either. Spider isn't a real language. Spiders aren't smart enough to have a language, you know?"

Balron was unsure if she was being sarcastic, or that was just the way she talked.

"I thought she was a spirit? Like Pebble." He ventured.

"What? No. Aranea is a spider. She is our team mascot."

"Your mascot? Why do you need a mascot?"

"Almost every great team of adventurers has a mascot!" Rania answered excitedly. "The heroes in 'Fight against the Living City' have a non-sapient drake. Lilian Weaver in 'Lilian's unlikely adventures' has an owl. And Draxus the Eccentric has a wolf."

"Those are all fictional characters." Balron replied flatly. "Well, except Lilian. That's supposed to be an autobiography. I met her once, and I can confirm that she is cursed. So for all I know at least some of those 'unlikely adventures' really did happen to her."

"You say that like it's a bad thing. But think about it. All the cool fictional stories have in common that the heroes have a great team mascot. Lots of boring real life adventurers do not have team mascots. Doesn't that imply that team mascots are awesome, and make things better? It's only logical."

"Correlation does not imply causation, Rania." Atrog interrupted. "We have been over this."

Rania looked unsure of what to say for a few moments, then responded "Well, I still think that Aranea is cute. So there. She is our team mascot, and even though she is not super strong like you, or smart like Galanys, or funny like Pebble, or fast and cool and wise and humble like me, she is still a valuable member of our team. And one day she will show her worth and save us all from certain doom. Just like in the books."

"I give up." Atrog said. "Rania, can we get back on topic. Namely, this." He gestured around himself at the destroyed room and the summoning circle in the middle of it.

"What happened here? This was supposed to be a simple examination. Why would they be summoning demons?"

"For practice?" Rania ventured. When she noticed that Atrog seemed unsatisfied with her answer, she went on: "Maybe we could go find the examiner and ask him. He took cover in the bathroom over there." She pointed at a nearby door. "I'm not sure how he can examine my performance properly from there though, so that was weird."

The six of them, including Pebble and Aranea, went to the bathroom, where they found that the examiner had locked himself in. The man was a human in his mid thirties, and he looked visibly worse for wear. He was clutching his clipboard to his chest like a lifeline, and it took a few minutes for him to calm down enough to speak.

"I don't know what went wrong." The man explained. "It was supposed to be a test of psychological resilience. We summon a minor demon. A minor one! Not one of those huge monsters that came out of there! We use that to see how the examinee reacts to unexpected danger. The demon is supposed to be confined to the circle. It shouldn't be able to break out. And the examinees should realize that if they aren't exceptionally stupid.”

“This is really just a small test to weed out the people who talk like they are born to fight, but who drop unconscious at the first sight of blood. That's another actual test by the way. You would not believe it, but there are people who faint when they see blood, and some of them talk themselves into thinking that it's a good idea to become an adventurer."

The man went on to ramble for a few more minutes. Maybe that was his way to deal with stress, Balron thought.

It quickly became clear that the examiner had no idea what went wrong, and why the summoning circle did what it did.

"I think we are losing sight of the bigger picture here." Rania said, drawing everyone's attention to herself.

"Namely, did I pass the exam? And do I get extra credit for saving everyone? There were no civilian casualties. None! That means I did really well, right?"

The man looked like he was at a loss for words. He silently made a few notes on his clipboard, put down a signature, and handed the sheet to Rania. She read through it, and her face lit up.

"Awesome!" She shouted, and pumped her fists in a victorious gesture. "I did it! I am officially an adventurer now! This is the happiest day of my life!"

She gave all of her teammates a hug, even Balron, then started dancing in place with Pebble and Aranea.

The others were unsure how to react to that and just stood around in confusion.

They were interrupted a few seconds later when half a dozen heavily armed and armored guardsmen burst into the room and announced themselves. "Is everyone alright in here? This is the city guard. We have healers with us. If you need assistance, shout out. If you know of other people in need of assistance, explain the situation."

Atrog responded with a crisp military salute and introduced himself. "Paladin Atrog Rarzug, with the church of Edur."

The guardsman saluted back. The church of Edur did not technically hold any authority. Oruk as a country was very keen on the separation of church and state. But Edur was the god of principles, conviction and Doing What You Think Is Right. Not just anyone could become a paladin of Edur and receive his blessing, so most officials tended to treat Atrog with respect and sometimes even deference, even though they did not need to.

"The situation is under control." He continued professionally. "All hostiles have been eliminated and the area has been searched for wounded already. There are none. The situation was caused by a spell malfunction of unclear origin. It caused demons to manifest that were significantly stronger than expected, and they wreaked havoc. Fortunately, we were able to contain them until professor Balron Irwin here managed to disrupt the portal."

"Professor Irwin?" The guardsman asked, only now noticing the man. "I know that name from somewhere. Aren't you a security consultant for the chief?"

"That's right, young man." Balron replied in a voice that seemed to bring down the temperature in the room. "After we are done giving our reports to you, I am going to have a lengthy chat with the chief. I have numerous complaints and suggestions for improvement for her."

The guardsmen looked nervous. Balron continued: "Don't worry, not about you. You did a fine job. Your arrival would have been too late to save people, but it was well within the expected timeframe given how remote this building is. The fault is with the faculty for continuously ignoring my warnings. I have a few choice words in store for them."

After that little outburst, the group's interrogation by the guards was remarkably swift. Balron got the impression that the guards wanted to get him to become somebody else's problem as quickly as possible.

There was some confusion during the interrogation when Rania mentioned that there were six of them and the guards thought that two of them had gone missing. But then she pointed out that Aranea was hiding in her hair and Pebble was in her pocket, so that cleared things up.