Alex hesitated for only a second before saying it. “Alex,” he said. “My name is Alex.”

Daven nodded, then lifted a hand up in the air and called out, “All good here.”

On his signal, others came from farther back, emerging from behind the trees. Alex took comfort that he could at least hear their footsteps crunching on the ground. There were three of them, two men and a woman, dressed much like Daven in muted colors and light leather armor, only without the cloak.

The only one wearing something distinct was the biggest among them, as tall as the red-head but broad instead of lanky, dark where Daven was pale. He had a breastplate over the leathers, a cold gray thing with no adornments and clear signs of worn, and a large tower shield was strapped to his back. His black hair was cropped short, his face all hard lines and neatly shaven. His eyes, black as chips of coal, watched Alex with such a casual sense of awareness that it bordered on apathy.

“Was that all true, Daven?” the third fellow asked in a smooth voice. This one had a spear with him, or rather, a glaive, its long, single-edged bronze blade the same color as the curls atop his head, which languidly fell over his brow in ringlets.

He was of height with Alex, though a bit older, somewhere in his early to mid-twenties, with olive skin and a hawkish nose that managed to be imperious instead of obtrusive.

Daven nodded back at him, a crooked grin stamped on his face. “Aye, the tracks check out. Those piggies gave him the run around for sure.”

The spearman sighed. “I guess we’ll have to find something else to bring back, then.” He leaned on the haft of the spear despondently for a moment before he bounced back. “Well, no use moping about it. Alex, was it?” He offered a hand that Alex cautiously took, an all-white smile that wouldn’t be amiss on the cover of a teenage magazine plastered on his face. Alex didn’t trust that smile on principle alone. “I am Cedric of Versal,” he said it as if it was a big deal, “professional chaser, occasional bounty hunter, and leader of this humble crew. These are Valerian and Diana, and you met Daven already.”

Alex didn’t know what half of that meant, so he forced a smile. “Nice to meet all of you,” he said. He got nods from the two who’d been silent so far, though nothing more.

“Seems we had the same idea going after the pigs, eh?” Daven walked up and slapped him across the shoulder as if they were old buddies. “Had to run over when we heard the boom though. Big, that was.”

Hiding a grimace at the closeness, Alex shrugged. “Got into a bit of a tight spot there at the end and had to improvise,” he said. Let them figure out what that means. They seemed a friendly enough bunch, but he had no reason to spill out his guts to them.

“Tight spot?” Daven laughed. “Sovereign’s balls, man, don’t let me catch you when you’re truly desperate. We saw the light all the way over on the other side of the hill. Maybe you could teach the big bad mage there a few of your light tricks.” He hooked a thumb back at the woman—Diana, who Alex now realized looked a lot like Daven, only half a foot shorter and without the facial scars. Siblings, maybe?

Diana scoffed from where she stood but didn’t rise to Daven’s bait. She had campfire red hair the same color as his, kept in a thick braid that went all the way down to the small of her back. Their eyes were the same too, at a quick glance, a chilling blue that could pass for gray in the right lighting.

“Say Alex,” Cedric began from the side, sounding a little odd. Alex turned back to him. The spear that’d been in his hands was now firmly strapped to his back. It was either a gesture of good faith or to show that he didn’t consider Alex a threat. “You mentioned earlier that the Wild Boars had been giving you a rough time. I mean no offense in commenting on this, of course, I simply didn’t expect a fellow chaser to have problems with a few boars.”

“Oh that.” He grasped for a plausible answer. “Well I’m not a… professional, as you said. Just doing the whole going off on my own sort of thing.”

Cedric’s face lit up. “Ah, of course, of course. A hopeful like Diana and Daven here. Good on you.” His eyes darted into the distance, somewhere over the hill, then back at Alex. “Say, you’re not from Riverbend, are you? I don’t remember seeing you there when I last came by.”

“No, no,” Alex answered. Saying otherwise sounded like a good way to be caught on a flat out lie. “I’m not from around the area.”

“Well in that case, why don’t you come with us?” Cedric asked. “We still have to bring back a few monsters for the Selection Festival in the village, and it certainly won’t be the boars you finished off.”

He doesn’t even know me and already he invites me to join him? Why?

Alex spared another glance at this crew. Daven was smiling earnestly to the side, while his sister just shrugged. Behind them, Valerian simply gave him a firm nod.

“Sure,” he said in the end. As much as didn’t want to follow strangers around, he needed to get situated in this world, and he wouldn’t be doing that bumbling around the forest by himself. “Why not?”

xxx

After another round of handshakes, they made their way downstream from the site of the explosion for a few minutes and crossed over at a narrower point. Then they were back to the tree-dotted hills Alex had been slogging through before.

Cedric told them you could follow the stream further until it met the river they called the Dunnser River, then follow that river for some five miles to reach the small and appropriately-named village of Riverbend, tucked against the western shore of the Dunnser right where it turned south.

From the little he could glimpse from Cedric’s words and Daven’s incessant chatting, the village was more a hamlet than anything, a few dozen families that lived in the area and had come together to form their own little community for mutual support and safety in numbers. As mundane as it sounded, Alex was excited to see what kind of society a world with magic and monsters would spawn.

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Did monsters attack human settlements or did they keep to the forests and open country? Were only a privileged few capable of magic or was it available to everyone? The questions flooded his mind, but he was wary of inquiring any further. He didn’t want to stand out more than he would already just by being an outworlder.

Grimacing at the reminder, Alex glanced down at himself. On one hand, he was glad his clothes had turned less noticeably foreign by being singed and blackened from the explosion, and absolutely filthy from all the rolling around on the ground. On the other, he didn’t look forward to the itchy, roughspun fabrics he’d no doubt have to wear in the future.

“Well?”

The voice jerked Alex out of his thoughts, and he blinked at the young woman walking beside him. As they traveled, Alex had seen Diana shooting inquisitive glances his way when she thought he wasn’t looking, but he had chosen to ignore them.

For the most part, Valerian and Cedric had taken to walking ahead of the crew, as Cedric was the only one familiar with the area and Valerian seemed just as experienced as him, if not more so. Alex and the now-confirmed siblings had trudged further behind, with Daven talking enough for the three of them. But every once in a while Cedric would call him up to check on some animal tracks or anything else that caught his attention. Alex hadn’t asked, but it was clear Daven had a good head for fieldcraft if the others depended on him for things like that. Adding that with the bow in his hands and the way he could blend in with the forest, it didn’t take a genius to figure out those were the skills of an Archer.

Now that Daven was off at the front again, it seemed Diana had finally decided to speak her mind.

“Sorry, what was that?” he asked.

“The explosion,” Diana said. “Was it some kind of fire trace folded with wind? Or even three conjoined elements? Adding lightning on top of those two might give that bright snap of light before it went off. Hmm. No, not that.” Her eyes had completely turned away from him at this point, and she spoke more to herself than anything. “Maybe a charged relic could achieve that kind of power, or even a handcrush one for a one-time use. Could have been an amplifier too, but I didn’t see any on you.”

Alex only listened and tried to make sense of her words. He was certainly interested in whatever relics or amplifiers were if they could produce that sort of spell without the risks. He realized Diana had stopped talking and was actually waiting for his response now, and he coughed into a hand.

“Ah, no,” he said. “Not quite. Well, it was a fire… trace, but it was more a combination of luck and on the fly thinking than anything I planned to do.”

She hummed, sounding almost disappointed. “So you’re not trained, then?”

“Like I told Cedric, I’m really not a professional.”

Diana looked at him weirdly. “Those are two different things. I meant as a Mage, not as a chaser.” She shook her head and walked in silence for a while, brows drawn in thought. Until her eyes widened as if she’d been hit by a sudden realization. “You… you crammed fire until it exploded, didn’t you? Wasn’t that what happened?”

Alex almost faltered. Had she seen the confrontation with the boars or was she that sharp? Outwardly, he merely raised an eyebrow. “What would make you think that?” he asked.

“Well, I’m... not trained myself,” Diana said, frowning for a moment. “But that’s one of the first things any passing chaser will tell you about being a Mage. Never compress traces when you haven’t been trained for it. Especially fire.”

“Worked out well enough for me,” he said.

The frown returned full force and she clicked her tongue. “You are lucky to be alive,” she said, “that’s all. You should take this more seriously.” Then she stalked ahead as if he’d somehow offended her.

Taken aback by the sudden hostility, Alex paused for a second before he forced himself to shrug it off. He didn’t know what he’d said to set her off, but it didn’t matter if she didn’t like him. He didn’t need to make friends with any of them, just secure safe passage through the forest. All while milking them for whatever information he could without arousing undue suspicion.

And if he could kill a few monsters and level up by piggybacking off of them, no one would be worse for wear.

Alex picked up his pace, trotting after Diana and the others. They had zig-zagged past slow rolling hills for the past hour, and the sun had reached its zenith at the center of the sky. Even at midday, the temperature was pleasantly cool in the shadow of the forest.

He nearly lost sight of the crew as they went past some thick shrubbery at the foot of a hill. When he made it there himself the others were nowhere in sight, until he spotted Diana beneath a grove of trees a bit further away. She turned around the moment he saw her and stomped away, almost like she felt bad for leaving him behind and wanted to make sure he knew where to go.

Beyond the grove of oak trees was a small glade not unlike the clearing Alex had been dumped on. At the center of it, Valerian stood grooming a stocky pony harnessed to a caged wagon, though by how awkward it looked, Alex would bet that it had been hastily repurposed from a wooden grain cart. The pony’s reins were tied to something staked on the ground in front of it, hidden behind a clump of tall grass. Cedric knelt beside it, and Diana strode up to him before doing the same.

“There he is,” Daven called, squinting at him from beneath hand-shaded eyes. He was laying down on top of his splayed out cloak on the grass without a care in the world as if he was sunbathing. A full quiver lay by his side, some thirty iron-tipped arrows poking out of one end. “Thought you got lost there for a second, man.”

“No, no. Doing just fine.” Alex looked around the area as he walked up, eyes lingering on the caged wagon. “If you don’t mind me asking, uh, what are we doing here exactly? Cedric mentioned a festival…”

“Just a small time chaser job, from what he tells,” he said. “The village is paying us to bring back a few monsters for the Selection Festival, all bound and easy. Two of them, I think. Or is it three?” Daven frowned, then looked to where Valerian was inspecting the pony. “Hey Val,” he called, “how many kids were there again?”

The large man stopped what he was doing. “Three,” he said without looking back. “One of the families has a pair of twins of age.”

“Ah, well there you go. Three monsters it is, then, all ready for the kiddies to dispatch.”

Alex felt his eyebrows rising at those words. Why in the world are they taking monsters for kids?

Daven must have seen the odd look on his face. “What?” he asked. “Don’t tell me they don’t do that wherever you’re from?”

“Something similar, yes,” Alex lied, schooling his face, “but not quite like this.”

“Makes sense.” Daven nodded. “I s'pose everywhere is different. Our own village did the same, but Cedric said it’s not really the way things are done in the cities. Says there’d be too many kids to make things work, but I reckon they’re really just a bunch of wusses.” He chuckled at his own joke.

Alex shrugged. “Haven’t been to a big city myself, so I wouldn’t know.” With the others working, he decided to take a page out of Daven’s book and sat down beside him. It felt good to relax for a while after all that had happened.

After a few minutes of lazing about, he was curious enough to ask, “So, are we going to chase some more Wild Boars or what’s the idea?”

“Dungeon.”

Alex’s eyes shot up. “What?”

Valerian had moved closer to them, leading the pony by the bridle. “We’ll be going to the nearby dungeon now,” he said in that low voice of his. “Best get ready if you wish to come.”