Kid holstered his assault rifle easily. He placed it against his thigh and it simply stayed, as if held by some form of magnetic force. Then he retrieved his side-arm, a simple hand gun, and proceeded forward.

“Nice spellform,” he complimented Oliver as he passed him.

Oliver said nothing, gave no response or acknowledgement that Kid had even spoken. His eyes remained forward, however, staring into the shrubbery as if he could see past it. Behind them, the rest of Oliver’s team carried whispers of his expression, a small hope smothered by doubt.

It seemed the girl now standing next to Ash might’ve been right. They just might know the mage.

“Come on,” Daniel said. “Let’s go see what we saved.”

Daniel took the lead, walking forward with a casual grace that was anything but casual on his armor.

They moved through the thick bush of grass and leaves and came out on the other side. The soft illumination from different luminous plants and flowers and trees gave them sight and they walked with them as their guide. In a few minutes they stood within the vicinity of the mage.

“That him?” Daniel asked.

In front of them, lying fatigued on the ground was an almost completely naked man. Save his groin covered in what was best described as a tattered loincloth, the rest of him was bare. He had a patch work of hair on his head, burnt up in some places, short where it was supposed to be long, and he laid on his back, staring up at the canopy of trees above him. His chest rose and fell in a steady, if not odd, rhythm and there was no one who couldn’t see the strain on his face.

Kid felt the weight of the man’s aura and stopped.

“What the hell happened to him?” he muttered, asking no one exactly.

From a distance he’d noticed the man’s aura had been odd when he’d been trying to save him from the monsters, but standing so close to the man, he found his aura wasn’t odd. It was wrong. And it was too heavy for the category one Beta mage that he obviously was.

The aura was clearly that of a category one Beta but it was broken. A patch work of dissonance. If a person’s aura was a well sewn shirt of simple cotton, the man’s aura was like a shirt made out of haphazardly patching parts from seven thick, wooly shirts together. It was a chimera of an aura. And it was broken as though all seven shirts were torn.

The man continued to stare into the world above, breathing oddly yet steadily. He was a man in pain, doing his best to stave off whatever outcome seemed inevitable and a wet line ran down the side of his face from his eyes.

“I… I swear I’m not crying,” the man croaked. “I’ve just got… something in my eyes.”

Oliver walked up to the man. His steps were slow and shaky.

“Zed,” he muttered softly. “Is that you?”

Zed smiled into the sky but didn’t look at him. “Hi, Ollie. You’ve grown.”

Oliver returned Zed’s smile. “And you haven’t aged a bit.”

Daniel ignored their conversation while Kid tried to make heads and tails of it. How long exactly had it been since the two mages had last seen each other? And if Oliver had grown in the man’s eyes, how old exactly was the man supposed to be?

“I need a medical report,” Daniel commanded.

Kid’s pondering slipped from him. He was a soldier given an order and he carried it out to the best of his ability.

Kid walked up to the man and stood right next to him. Standing here, the man’s face didn’t look so broken. He was handsome with soft green eyes. The smile still on his face gave him a boyish look.

“Medical analysis,” Kid commanded his armor.

The armor obeyed immediately. A section on his shoulder elevated slightly. A small segment opened and let out a faint ray of light. It dowsed the man in soft green light. It scanned him from the crown of his head to the sole of his feet, hovering slightly above his stomach where his core was before it guttered out.

[Analysis complete. Report provided shortly.]

“What was that?” Oliver asked.

“That tickled,” Zed said at the same time, straining to talk.

“Medical analysis,” Chris said absently, now standing within reach, staring at Zed with a blank expression.

The rest were here now.

Hillary and Jim stood idly at the back while Jason and Ash stood with the rest of their team, almost circling the dying man. As for the girl, she was kneeling beside Zed, muttering hurried words while Big Man Desolate was still coming.

“I found help,” the girl was saying. “We’ll be fine now.”

Kid had half the mind to ask how Chris knew what he had done but was too occupied with what the analysis was showing him.

How the hell is he even talking? He thought. How the hell was he even using magic?

“Daniel,” he said through his com-link. “Incoming.”

He sent the medical report to Daniel and knew the man was frowning as he looked at it. Kid continued to view the analysis on his own, as he waited for Daniel’s next order.

The man had a hole in the side of his stomach where something large had stabbed him. Judging from the blood stained horn of the monster Oliver had mutilated with a single spell, it was safe enough to assume that was what had gotten him. The blood pooled softly from his side and the mana in his body was trying and failing to heal the wound.

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Kid wasn’t surprised it was failing. Mages heal faster than normal humans but a wound from a Beta rank monster with the level of strength the one horned monster had displayed wasn’t going to be healed so easily. Normally, it would take a few days to heal, less if the man had proper medical care, lesser if he had a healing potion. Sadly, a healing potion wouldn’t work here. In fact, it would cause more harm than good.

Somehow Zed had stained his core too badly and it was leaking the little mana he still had under his control. Kid’s medical report showed that it was almost damaged. It was stretched beyond its normal limits, full to bursting with mana that he couldn’t control while its aura grew heavier, weighing down on it. Even now, the mana within it was in total chaos, disobedient and almost explosive. It was like a bottle of perfume filled with the raw ingredients of the unprocessed perfume; it smelled too strongly of the perfume while the bottle did its best to hold itself together so that the cracks running all over it didn’t end up breaking it. Kid wasn’t sure if the analogy made sense but it was the best he had. All he knew was that it was too much mana for a category one Beta rank. Way too much mana.

“What do we do, boss?” he asked Daniel.

“Let me guess,” Big Man Desolate said, walking up to stand between them. “Busted mana core?”

He was looking down at the dying mage so Kid assumed he was talking to the man. The man’s mana core wasn’t busted, not yet, at least, but it was getting there. His mana wouldn’t be able to heal him since his core was no longer strong enough to channel it and the mana it contained was no longer under his command. If they gave him a potion, his core would break itself trying to process it.

“Why aren’t you healing, Red?” Ash asked the man, worried. She squatted next to his injury and stared at it, unsure of what to do.

Kid couldn’t blame her. Usually, applying pressure then helping him gulp down a healing potion would be the proper response, but he wasn’t surprised they didn’t have a potion, they lived out here in the middle of nowhere, expecting them to have a potion was expecting too much. Besides, the injury looked too bad to apply pressure on. The hole was as wide as a person’s splayed palm.

“You’re supposed to be healing, Red,” Ash muttered, her worry deepening. “You aren’t healing.”

“Thanks for the update,” the mage, Zed or Red, groaned. “I had no idea I wasn’t healing. Who woulda thunk it?”

“Even dying he can’t shut up,” Chris muttered.

“Missed you, too, mean girl,” Zed said, green eyes panning slowly to her. “Have you been on your best behavior?”

Something about the look in the man’s eyes disagreed with his statement. Kid considered it might’ve just been the pain.

Kid and Daniel stood off to the side, giving the team their final moment with their dying friend. It was shaving off time from their mission but they weren’t heartless. They wouldn’t take away a dying man’s final moment unless they had to.

“Feeling guilty, Jason?” Zed asked with a smirked, moving on from Chris.

Jason’s jaw tightened as he held back his pain. “We shouldn’t have left you behind.”

“You shouldn’t have brought me to begin with.”

“Zed,” Oliver interrupted. “You’re bleeding out. You need to heal?”

“I can fix that, if you’d like?”

Everyone except Zed turned their heads to Big Man Desolate.

“What?” Desolate asked, confused. “I know a thing or two about healing magic.”

“Healing magic or life magic?” Daniel asked.

Kid held his breath in anticipation. Big Man Desolate’s answer would matter gravely. Healing magic was one thing, but life magic was another. Mages with a specialization in life magic were the most powerful healers out there, and they were one of the rarest along with mages with death magic specialization.

“Does it matter,” Desolate asked, nonchalant, before turning back to Jason and his team. “So what do you guys say?”

There was a moment of silence before Zed broke it.

“Counter offer,” he struggled to say, still staring up.

Desolate tilted his head to the side in curiosity. “Regale me.”

“How good are you guys at fighting monsters?”

Silence followed.

“Why?” Chris asked, suspicious, her barely concealed worry turning into something else. “What did you do, Bloodbath?”

Zed’s lips twitched in a tired smirk.

“Nothing yet,” he said. “So are you?”

“Yes,” Daniel answered, even though the question wasn’t for him.

Zed nodded once, the motion jerky.

“Good.”

Then he stared off above him, as if looking into the distance, as though his gaze could pierce the canopy of leaves and stare into the heart of the sky above.

“Finally,” he said with a sigh, and something changed.

The air around him shook mildly. It grew distorted as if under the effects of severe heat, then his aura flared out around him. Ash flinched away from his body and the girl who’d brought him to their attention practically fled from him.

The reach of his aura engulfed them and spread out. How far, was a distance Kid didn’t know, but he knew it kept on going. Its weight reduced, thinned until it was almost less than the ambient mana in the air. Nonetheless, Kid could still feel it and he was certain any monster within reach could too.

“Is he doing what I think he’s doing?” Daniel asked, his voice frowning.

Kid checked his armor’s sensors, studying the readings it was detecting.

“Yup,” he confirmed. “He’s re-categorizing.”

Daniel’s armored head spared him a look.

“His rising in category,” Kid corrected, sheepish.

He had no idea what Daniel had against the word ‘re-categorizing.’ It wasn’t like it was wrong.

“That feels more like a mage advancing to me,” Daniel said.

“I know,” Kid agreed. “Makes you wonder just how much mana he had.”

“Enough to almost damage his core.”

“Must’ve been a lot.”

The thinned aura coalesced suddenly, becoming a physical thing. The pressure shot up immediately. It was heavy enough that it brought Ash to a knee and the human girl let out a short scream.

Then it was gone, all of it disappeared as if it had never been.

As if it had been imagined.

Kid heard the scowl in Daniel’s voice when the man spoke.

“I don’t like this.”

…………………………………….

Ven’s armor beeped a quiet sound. It echoed within his helmet, a brief dot of red designed to alert him but not distract him.

He gave it the barest attention as he turned and brought down a sword of blazing mana on a monster’s head, cleaving it in two. Ven turned to the side, watching the rest of the team he was a part of conclude on their current skirmish with a pack of monsters.

In truth, he didn’t need to check to know what had happened, his aura sense had done more than enough to inform him of it. He turned to look into the distance. In one corner of his display, he saw what his armor was detecting. A rise in mana off to the east. He could feel the aura all the way from here.

“One of yours?” he asked, turning to Festus.

Festus crushed a monster from all sides with force mana before turning to him.

“No idea,” he said. “Don’t recognize the aura.”

He flicked his hand absently, activating a rune that sent a bolt of yellow electricity streaking through a few monsters. It served to stun them but wasn’t enough to kill them. The output seemed intentionally low.

“Can’t be that far if we’re feeling it from all the way here,” Ven noted. “Want to go help them?”

Festus shrugged.

The mage didn’t care one bit what they did. He was supposed to be the leader of this party yet he acted like he wasn’t even a part of it.

Sometimes Ven wondered how someone with so much control over the vast array of runes Festus had displayed could be so uninterested in power.

All the mages he knew in VHF capable of half what Festus could do with runes were the most ambitious men he knew.

“Alright then,” Ven said.

He turned away from the conversation as a monster threw itself at him and caught it in an armored fist.

“Incinerate.”

The command activated a rune within his armor and he felt the effect course through it to affect the monster. The creature burst into a ball of flames. Ven held the creature in place until it stopped struggling and succumbed to the flames.

Beside him, Festus sighed. “You know you could’ve just dropped it, right?”