It was a damn shame she had to walk past Hoysk's College on her way to Izmerek's place. The bronze statue of Hays himself looked like he was grinning at her every time she saw it, rubbing salt into the still open wound of her abrupt departure.

She sighed and carried on walking.

Slowly but surely, the buildings got more and more dilapidated, the alleys more and more populated. Even in the midday Sun, her breath misted out in front of her as the last vestiges of winter clung on with its fingernails.

She didn’t bother asking why Izmerek lived in such a slum right on the edge of the Meadows, a small two storey dump with a bowed roof and glass so cheaply made it was more opaque than transparent. She knew he had a dubious history.

Probably a gambling problem, she thought.

Eh, ignorance was bliss. She was already a [Mage]. Thankfully she was still learning and not trying to figure it all out herself by some treacherously risky method of trial and error, so according to her little research on the topic she couldn’t actually become a [Wizard].

“Panya!” called out a short [Baker], apron tied around her waist and a dash of flour on her cheek, “Want anything?”

Panya smiled and walked across the street, taking care not to step into any dubiously murky puddles.

“Hey Mrs. Numi,” she said as she stepped into the bakery, taking a deep breath in. “Oooh, fresh plum pastries?”

“Redberry, actually,” said Mrs. Numi over her shoulder as she walked back behind the counter, “I’ve got some plum turnovers from this morning if you want.”

“Definitely.”

Panya had known Mrs. Numi since she started college. She knew the old woman didn’t have any children of her own. It was why, Panya assumed, she always called over anyone young enough to be her child into the bakery.

Funnily enough, Numi’s on Westward Road was one of the only shops around that had never been broken into or had its windows smashed. Panya put it down to how the owner could often be seen handing out Veg Medley pasties to scrawny young kids who had the good fortune of finding themselves outside.

Mrs. Numi waddled up to the counter from the back of the shop, parchment package in hand.

“Here you go dear,” she said, “I put another in there on account of them being a little cold. Hope you don’t mind love.”

“Of course not,” said Panya, smiling as she felt herself salivate a little. She reached inside her waxed cotton overcoat and clinked five dollars down onto the counter.

She saw Mrs. Numi about to say something and raised her eyebrows, daring her to question the payment. The woman backed down with a sigh.

“Just make sure you come back the same way. I don’t know how hard they’re working you, but I don’t feel right with you sleeping inside that college library every night. I’ll be waiting for you.”

“Yes Mrs. Numi,” sung out Panya as she left the shop.

She was always conflicted when Mrs. Numi brought up college. Her parents never seemed to care, but Mrs. Numi did. The very day she’d first started working under Izmerek, stayed at her shop late into the night waiting to see Panya walk back into the safety of Engar’s Gate and the Old Town.

She hated lying to her, but it was too late to turn back now. Mrs. Numi would probably try escorting down to Izmerek’s place every day if she knew.

By the time Panya had finished up the second pastry she was already walking off Westward Road. She had to put the final pastry away for later in her satchel, the permanently muddy (she hoped it was just mud, but it was definitely just wishful thinking) roads forcing her to lift her robe a little to avoid ruining it.

It had only been a week or so, and she’d had enough of her stupid college robes. They were meant for stone and hardwood floors, not the indistinguishable slurry that passed for roads down in the poorer areas of the city. She couldn’t wait for her [Tailor] to finish making her some more practical clothing.

Panya was so engrossed in thinking about what she’d get that she didn’t notice the person-sized lump of rags materialize out of an alley and start following her.

It hung back a little as she arrived at Izmerek’s front door, her knocking growing steadily louder as time went on and no one answered. Panya huffed out and went down a side alley for the backdoor.

She shrieked in surprise as a scaled hand landed on her shoulder and spun her into the opposite wall.

“Hey, what do—”

“Your money or your life,” rasped the bundle of rags, a small dagger poking out of a sleeve-like opening.

The tackiness of the line brought her back down to Urth from her adrenaline-fuelled panic. Panya’s brain took the time to call up the Silver-level Spell she’d been sneaking looks at whenever Izmerek wasn’t looking.

“Okay,” she said, slowly moving her hand into her overcoat pocket. Completely coincidentally, the sound of coins moving in her inside pocket helped to sell the illusion of compliance.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

She took a breath to still her nerves, and in one smooth motion pulled out her wand, jabbed it right into the heap of cloth and shouted out.

“[Tempest’s Volley]!”

Her Bronze-rank wand, a first-year prerequisite for college, shattered in a small explosion as the raw power of the Spell surged down its length.

Panya’s senses shut down, splinters of oak and silvan wood embedding themselves deep into her palm, fingers, and forearm.

She didn’t realise that she’d thrown the swarm of scraps known locally as Sly Svindal ten feet back and five feet up. Straight through the barely-held-together larder wall of Izmerek’s exceedingly humble abode.

No. Of course not. Why would she?

Panya had somehow staggered back into the sunlit smog of the street. Passers-by had heard a loud crash, splintering sounds, and a young woman clutching her hand stumble out into public.

Naturally, they turned tail (quite literally in some cases) and went on about their day.

Panya opened her eyes, trying to see how badly mangled her arm was. By some unspeakably large stroke of luck she hadn’t severed any large veins in her wrist. She wasn’t thinking that, obviously. Her thoughts were more raw noise than coherent speech.

Thick rivers of burgundy were slowly running down her arm, her blood steadily pitter-pattering down onto the floor and adding a metallic tang to the exotic mix of stuff that made up the topsoil of the street.

She tore off her overcoat, hesitated, and took her shirt off as well. Around and around her arm she wrapped, so tight that for a second she wondered if she was doing more harm than good.

Panya struggled with putting the overcoat back on, the contents of her pockets tumbling down onto the ground and away from her. She knew she shouldn’t care about tying her coat up, but years of being taught proper etiquette won over rational thought. Her mind was in a haze as she moved unsteadily back home.

The closer she got to the heart of the city, the more concerned looks she got instead of people giving her the cold shoulder.

By the time she reached Engar’s Gate, her face was blanched, her auburn hair haggard, and her gait putting career [Alcoholics] to shame. She leaned up against archway as the [Guards] on duty noticed and ran over.

Panya pushed herself upright, tried to take a step, and felt her legs finally give way. She dropped to her knees and was held up by the two dwarfs.

All she could hear was white noise when they moved their lips, her sense of the world collapsing down to the confines of her own skin.

“H-Horde,” she mumbled, wishing someone could hear her, “take me to The Horde Estate.”

----------------------------------------

‎ Back at Izmerek’s now well-ventilated house, Sly Svindal could’ve sworn he heard the jingle of coins as he lay in a pile of rubble. He mumbled out an incoherent curse to whoever was playing such a cruel joke on him, and promptly passed out.

It was a good thing for his health that he did. A lizard of his age was liable to have a heart attack seeing a golem so far from the mountains.

The dwarf-sized boulder with limbs was quite young. It had been enjoying its small freedom, breaking out of the small cave of floor to ceiling metal stalagmites and stalactites.

Having consumed all the coloured rocks it had found, most of them weirdly squishy and a few so tasty it regretted consuming them so quicky, the golem was about to try finding a way out of the bigger brown cave it had found itself stuck in when there had been a cave in.

It could tell that it wasn’t the same meat-golem; this one smelled a lot more… acrid than the other, and even felt a lot less conductive to magic. Even so, it took no chances.

Its natural reactions hadn’t developed into moving towards potential danger quite just yet. So, when a meat-golem like the one that had frozen it and taken it away from home came flying through the collapsing rubble, it didn’t hang around.

What it did do was run away from the dreaded meat-golem. Out into the alley. It realised it was in a cavern-like tunnel, strong light emanating from one end. It moved to find a tunnel that went somewhere deeper and damper when it felt its insides grind and churn.

[Class Permutation: Golem Miiran Golem]

Of course, it had no idea what was happening to it. It just knew that know, somehow, it could sense where good metal was. The golem felt a strong vein of it quite a far distance away.

If it had any form of higher thought and a greater experience of life it would have likened the feeling to seeing a lighthouse through heavy fog after weeks of storms. Alas, it just thought about beelining towards the motherlode.

It was about to take a few steps when it also realised that not too far below its feet, there were small, almost miniscule deposits of metal everywhere .

Again, if it knew about anything other than caves, caverns, and crevices, it would have felt like an adventurer walking through a dungeon hunting for Relics, and realising that it was actually walking on silver tiles; not what it was looking for, but absolutely worth digging up.

The golem toddled over to the abandoned warehouse that was slowly deteriorating next to Izmerek’s hovel. Anything of any value had long been ripped off of its carcass, so it just walked through an open doorway, the tarp covering the entrance left flapping in the breeze.

Inside, a few kids were throwing rocks at glass bottles from a distance. There was a tense pause as human, lizard, dwarf, and golem youths all stared at each other, unsure of what was to happen next.

The golem, having realised that these meat-golems were the same size as itself and therefore unlikely to cause it any problems, began barrelling towards them from the other side of the warehouse.

Thanks to its stumpy legs, the ragtag group of friends had plenty of time to inhale, scream, and scarper. The golem felt itself war with two emotions someone more used to sentience would describe as smugness, having successfully scared something off for the first time, and humility, for having been outrun by something it had fully thought it would decimate.

Now that it was alone again it ambled over to an area above a small vein of Miiran, and got to digging.