We. Finally. Made it. I feel exhausted, and we haven’t even fought anything yet!

“Alright, gather around!” Lisney yells. There aren’t any creatures around us yet, but the fighting is so intense in the distance, there is still a lot of noise here!

“Watch the explosions in the distance. That is the best way to tell when the monsters will get here. That goes for both ground and sky, so pay attention! Speaking of which, the first wave of flying ones is almost here; so, Ellis and Mell, get ready!”

We all prepared to kill the creatures when Ellis and Mell would shoot them to the ground, but the monsters didn’t reach us at first. We are the only ones on this hill, but there are a lot of other people close by. The people way in front of us keep shooting them down before we have a chance. We won’t have to wait too long, though, because there is a much larger group of creatures right behind the others.

*Boom* a ball of fire explodes in the sky in front of us, killing a bunch of monsters and injuring others. Then the creatures got close enough for Ellis and Mell to attack.

“Fire!” Lisney yells, to which Mell launches a fireball and Ellis shoots an arrow. Ellis’s arrow flies through a creature’s wing, but doesn’t damage it enough to bring it down. Mell’s fire slams into a creature, and it starts to fall.

“Kill it!” Lisney yells at me just before it hits the ground. “Ok!” I yell in reply before running toward it. I activate my first dragon realm while running and pulling out my sword. I run up to it and kill it before digging out its core. I then run back to Lisney and the rest.

“Chalia? What the hell did you just do?”

“What do you mean?” I ask looking up at her.

“You activated your aura, and everything flew away from us! And now nothing will approach us!”

“Oh, I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’ll turn it off now! Q-quick!” I say as fast as I can. Retract! The dragon realm retracts.

“That’s not quite what I meant, but ok. Oh, and don’t worry about cores until after the battle! You don’t want to get trampled while looking down at a monster corpse!” Lisney tells me.

“Oh, ok,” I say. Ick, and now my hands are all gross now! How did that go? Gus taught me how to clean my hands. He said to imagine a white light on my hands and say…Uh…Oh! I remember! “Bring about a change on my hands and purify the filth of this fool, Holy Cleansing!”

*Snort* *Chuckle* Kriv just starts laughing. “Did you hear what she just said?” He asks Ellis and Mell. They don’t say anything, but I can tell they want to laugh, too. It worked though! At least I have clean hands again.

Wait, what happened to Lisney? “Are you ok?” I ask her. She’s just standing there, staring at me!

“Holy Cleansing? You have a friggin primordial essence?!” Lisney finally asks. She shakes her head real quick then turns back to the creatures that are coming toward us.

“Incoming!” She shouts.

The rest turn their attention back to the battlefield around us. Wow, that’s a lot of mana beasts! The first one approaches, so I run past it, digging my sword into its side—and it goes straight through! That felt way too easy…

“Chalia,” Lisney says while killing a different creature. “Learn to fight efficiently. This is only the first wave, and they are weak creatures, so try not to move around much unless you have to. And learn how to make your enemy move instead of yourself, because that will save energy and it will help you protect others!”

“Ok!” I say. Let’s try this! First let’s go for this small, bear-like creature. It’s running at me, but I’m not scared like I used to be! I lower myself a little like Gerald taught me, to balance better. Then I point my sword at it. Woah! It just turned and went around us!

“There you go!” Lisney shouts. “That’s a first step! Now keep trying stuff like that on bigger creatures, but if it’s small, then keep your sword down until it gets close. When it is almost in range, then step forward and slash it!”

Ok, so kill the smaller ones, and make the bigger ones go around us. Got it.

I wait for the next creature to come close. This time it looks like a frog, but with dog feet. It’s pretty gross. I hold my sword beside me until it gets close, then I step forward and swing my sword upward, cutting it right in half. Yuck, yuck, yuck! It split in half, but it was moving, and some of the guts and stuff fell on me!

“Haha, that happens sometimes. You’ll learn how to keep yourself clean in time, but you can’t be afraid to get a bit dirty in war. Get ready for the next creature!” Lisney says before giving suggestions to the others, as well. Mell and Ellis are still just trying to shoot down the flying creatures. They need a lot of practice, though…

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“Red smoke!” someone yells in the distance, just before Lisney screams out, “Red smoke! Run this way!” and takes off toward the side. I take a look to the side and see blasts of red smoke quickly coming in our direction—like, really really quickly.

“Run! Lisney yells again. Kriv had also been standing still, looking out, so we both start running after Lisney.

“Oh, hell no.” I faintly hear Lisney say. I look out, and see that the red puffs of smoke are still coming in our direction. The ground starts shaking, and I hear very loud explosions, shouts and screams.

Then I saw it.

All of us froze as we saw this massive creature running towards us. It was taller than a building with eight floors, and just as wide. I was so scared!

A bunch of people were attacking it, but it wasn’t slowing down at all. We were dead. I knew it. We knew it. We were about to die.

But just then, as everything around us felt like it was slowing down, I start seeing after-images from my side until right in front of us she stops. Auris.

I watch as she kneels with her right knee on the ground and also places her right hand on the ground. Then for a brief moment I see a bright green magic circle blink. Everything close by us dies—The grass, the trees, all the plants, and even all of the smaller mana beasts touching the ground. I feel a pulse that instantly makes my stomach feel sick. But then green magic surrounds her. It looks and feels so amazing, I know I would have forgotten to breathe even if I weren’t already terrified!

Then she steps into a lunge and seems to blink toward the creature. All the green magic surrounding her moves, condensing over her fist and arm. She yells something in another language and then slams her fist into the creature. She seems so small and tiny compared to it! But right when her fist touches the creature, a large magic circle spreads out from her fist, and small green magic circles appear everywhere on the creature’s body, then the small circles change to see-through green magic chains.

The chains and large magic circle then explode, and there is so much green light I have to close and cover my eyes. And the explosion is so strong that all of us fall down!

“Perimeter!” I hear her voice say while my eyes are still recovering. I then also feel someone pick me up again, move a distance and gently set me down. They then fly away again, before I can even see anything.

Finally, I can see again.

“Weakness is the dip on its back! Mages alternate heat and cold on it; earth mages keep him in place. Auramancers, use general supression! Melee, and general archers, hold the perimeter and guard the mages. Elemental archers, attack just behind its head. Use ice aspected neurotoxins if you can. And if you are not at least a specialized B Ranker, get the hell back to your regular stations!” Auris shouts out in a commanding tone.

“Who in the thousand hexes is she?” A muscular axman asked.

“That’s Auris!” His companion, a slim swordsman answered.

“Well damn. I knew she was S-Ranked, but I never thought it was for her combat abilities. Who the heck just straight-up stops a calamity-class in mid-charge? Loroven’s the only one I’d have pictured being able to pull that off. Maybe Augor from the Merc’s guild.”

Meanwhile, the fight is continuing, but they aren’t making much progress. Auris keeps making and exploding those green magic circles, but she is getting pushed back.

“Someone call Schraeder!” Auris yells out. Just moments later, a portal opens and Mr. Schraeder walks out.

“Aw, heck yeah. We get to see Mr. Schraeder in action!” The big man says, with a scary smile.

“ELEMENTS IN FORMATION!” Mr. Schraeder’s voice explods outward. Just inside the perimeter, magic circles with all kinds of different colors appear. All the mages stop attacking and begin running to different magic circles. After everyone has chosen the magic circle they want to be at, Mr. Schraeder yells out “Inline!” and everyone gets into orderly formations at the magic circles. There are some magic circles with nobody at them, but these circles go away.

“Load!” He yells, and everyone starts pouring mana into the magic circles, which begin growing larger, and more complex.

“Align!” Lots of little dots appear high in the sky. The mages work to move each of their magic circles to the dots of the same color.

“Lock, release!” After a moment, the mages relax, some of them even sitting down, exhausted.

“Integrate!” Mr. Schraeder yells, but not as loudly. The circles then moved around, changing and combining into a single massive, white magic circle. The circle then begins tilting toward the mana beast. Mr. Schraeder kneels on the ground with one knee, as sweat falls to the ground from his forehead.

“TERRAN JUDGMENT!” he yells again.

The white magic circle instantly turns brown, and begins shrinking as a huge rock spear forms in the middle of it. It has to be as wide as the mana beast, and over fifteen times as long!

Then the rest of the magic circle explodes, and the spear shoots from the sky, and sinks straight through the back of the creature!

The spear has just barely gone through it, though, when portals open our group and people throw us through them, and we land just in front of the city, behind magic barriers.

Then there is a loud “bang!” and the huge magic barrier bends inward and becomes a lot dimmer before finally bending back to where it was. If we were still out there when the sound wave arrived, we might have died! Oh, wait, Auris is still out there! Is she okay?

My heart starts beating faster as I look around, trying to find her in here, or out there.

“Bang!” The spear in the back of the creature explodes, causing the barrier to bend in again, getting even closer to breaking, before again going back to where it was.

I keep looking out, but I still can’t find her!

I’m scared. What if…

“Chalia, are you ok?” I hear beside me. I turn to the side to see Ellis’s soft, brown eyes looking at me

Right at the same time, I hear Lisney mumble under her breath, “By the gods, another primordial essence user?” I glance back out toward where the creature was stabbed and exploded by the spear. There is a lot of dust and stuff in the air, so it’s hard to see, but I can barely make out something.

It’s a domed shield, made of green magic circles.