“What do you mean you don’t know what it was?” Beryl demanded.

The aftermath of the fight had been a flurry of activity. The undead spirit’s final wails had been loud enough to rise above even the clamor of the storm, and Oliver and Rose had quickly been joined by not just Beryl, but also Hugo’s two laborers, the bulky men each carrying a heavy worker’s hammer. Unfortunately, the three possessed no better resistance to the storm than their boosted strength. They had to double over just to walk forward in the face of the wind–had they attempted to assist in the fight itself, they would’ve been a dangerous distraction.

Rose had managed to defeat the thing with Oliver’s help, but they both knew how close it had been. Oliver ran through much of his stamina and no small amount of focus fending off the apparition's opening attacks, and between her Mantle, healing, and final attack, Rose had nothing left either. In fact, Oliver wasn’t even sure how she had managed so much magic in the first place.

As soon as they were back in the carriage, the full weight of the battle hit both of them. Rose hadn’t bothered to change, wrapping herself up in a thick blanket then wiggling around a bit until she had pushed her wet clothing out of the bundle then passed out. Oliver wasn’t much better. He changed his tunic easily enough, but lacked the privacy to strip off his breeches. He accepted it–just switching shirts had been enough to show him how much his injured shoulder still hurt, and Rose clearly wasn’t going to be healing him any more until tomorrow.

The exhausted boy had promptly leaned back against a bundle of flour sacks covered with a blanket and closed his eyes, only to have his attempt at rest interrupted by Beryl.

“All that reading, and you don’t know what it was?” Beryl asked again, her face dark with worry for her friend. That same worry was rapidly turning to frustration that she was apparently more than happy to vent on Oliver.

“I didn’t spend much time on Ruined World outsiders, no,” Oliver replied, before his words were interrupted by a yawn. He wanted nothing more than to stretch, but his aching shoulder told him that would be a mistake.

“Well, don’t you think you should try to look into it? Isn’t that why you bought those books of yours?”

Oliver tried his hardest not to grimace, but he knew he wasn’t doing a good job. “My books will still be there tomorrow. When there hopefully won’t be any rain to ruin them, and when I won’t be dealing with an aching shoulder, a focus headache, stamina drain, and a complaining wannabe warden all at once.”

He regretted the words as soon as he said them, but the fight had left him weary and exhausted in a way he never had been before. He thought of the potions Adeline had given him, but decided against them. For now at least, there was no need. He knew he should apologize, but also suspected that trying to do so tonight would just make more of a mess of things.

“Wake me up if anything else happens,” he said instead.

Then he rested his head back, closed his eyes again, and barely had time to wonder what Adeline would’ve thought of the fight before he passed out.

#

“So was that it?” Hugo asked Oliver the following morning.

“I’m not sure,” Oliver replied with a sigh. “I’ve never fought an undead before. Connections to the Ruined World are rare in the heartlands–Chained World outsiders are much more common.” He paused, then shook his head. “I can’t say for sure that we really took care of the problem until I do some research. So I don’t think you’re free of us quite yet.”

The stout merchant rolled his eyes and huffed. “Well enough. Though I’d prefer, then, that you keep yourself out of my business transactions.”

Oliver gave the merchant a quiet little smirk. “Perhaps don’t conduct yourself in such a way that I feel the need to step in, then.”

Hugo grumbled and turned away, seemingly to survey his employees’ work on the wagons, but Oliver distinctly heard the words “noble bastard” in the merchant’s grumbling.

The storm had broken at some point in the night, and the morning sky was a cheery blue that showed no remnants of the foreboding storm clouds from the night before. Unfortunately, the wagons had not passed through the inclement weather without some damage. Hugo had them both propped up by the enhanced strength of his laborers, and the wiry figure of Harriet was examining the wheels and the axles they rested on.

The weathered woman was the most important member of Hugo’s company, with the possible exception of the merchant himself. Her gifts, carpenter and rancher, were simple, but they made her critical to keeping both the wagons and the draft animals that pulled them functional. Hugo had explained it as a common gift combination among professional teamsters, and despite being only novice level, Harriet cost more to retain on his staff than his other four employees put together.

“What’s the plan from here?” Oliver asked. Rose was still resting in their own wagon, which had come through the storm mostly undamaged. It had been provided by the wardens of Correntry, who had a handful of specially reinforced wagons created specifically for wardens joining caravans the way they had.

“Looks like we’ll have to replace a couple wheels, but that’s easy enough. The real problem is that the second wagon has a cracked axle.” The portly man spit to one side, disgruntled. “Harriet will be able to keep it from breaking, but we won’t be able to push too hard until we get to Jellis.”

Oliver knew that Jellis was a significant town, one of the largest outside of the trade cities, and that it anchored the far end of the Flax Road. It would be the halfway point in this mission, and get him heading back towards Adeline. “How long to Jellis, then?”

“Normally, we’d be perhaps a week out, give or take a day. But it’s gonna take us most of today to fix the damage, then with our reduced pace to keep the axle from cracking… at least two weeks. Maybe more.”

Oliver nodded thoughtfully. It wasn’t ideal but, perhaps…

“Right, I’m heading back. The three of us will be taking rotating shifts throughout the day to watch out for any other attackers.”

“You think that’s needed?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But if another undead like the one last night attacks, I think you’d rather have us there and ready.”

“Isn’t that the Professional’s honest truth? Right enough then.”

#

“Two weeks, at least, to make Jellis,” Oliver announced to the girls as he hopped into their wagon. “I told Hugo we’d take rotating shifts standing watch while his team is working on the wagons.

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Beryl grunted, irritated. The pair had apparently made use of the space while Oliver was gone talking to Hugo, as they had both changed, and Rose had made it out of her blanket–though she still looked a little peaked from the night before, her crimson hair mussed and dark circles blooming around her eyes.

Oliver settled down in his own seat, unwrapping the oilcloth he had used to protect his books from any errant rain. Rather than open a book though, he paused, grimacing with indecision. FInally, he forced himself to bull forward and say, “Beryl. I wanted to apologize for last night. I was tired, and…”

Beryl waved a hand. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not,” Oliver insisted. “I was drained, and hurt, but that was no excuse for taking it out on you. I’m sorry.”

The muscular girl narrowed her eyes at him. Since they had met, the two had never been close, though Oliver wasn’t sure why. He had put it down to simple negative chemistry. Beryl seemed as frustrated with his introversion as he was with her bawdy overconfidence. The time on the road had only made it worse, with Beryl going days without speaking to Oliver in anything more than monosyllabic grunts and the occasional sullen comment.

But his words apparently managed to get through to her, at least a little bit, and she nodded. “I appreciate it.” There was a weighty pause, and Oliver hoped that she’d take the chance to apologize in return–but apparently not. “I’ll go take the first shift.”

Rose smiled apologetically while her friend clambered out of the wagon. “For what it’s worth, that’s the closest Beryl really gets to an apology. At least it got her to not argue over shifts.”

Oliver shrugged, acting as if it didn’t much bother him, and Rose came over to join him where he was resting against the side of the carriage. The canvas ceiling of the covered wagon was low enough that even Rose, the shortest of the trio, couldn’t stand up straight, but it was still odd to Oliver that she crawled on all fours instead of just crouching to walk over to him.

He looked away and picked up one of his books to hide the inevitable blush her motions caused, while Rose settled down next to him. “How’s your shoulder?” she asked

Of course, that was why she had come over. To check up on him.

“It’s fine,” he lied. “A little sore, but I can move it easy enough.”

Rose frowned and studied him. “Are you sure? I’ve recovered enough mana, I should be able to give you a little more healing…”

Oliver tried to insist that he was fine, but Rose didn’t entertain the claim, her hand already beginning to glow with healing magic that settled over him like a warm blanket. With a smile, he picked up the Umbral Lexicon and began flipping through to the section on outsiders of the Ruined World.

He reflected, as he skimmed the thick book, Rose crouched next to him, her fingers gentle on his arm, that this wasn’t so bad.

#

“There it is,” Oliver announced. Half an hour of research while Rose tended to his shoulder had left him more relaxed than he’d been in weeks. The girl had stopped her healing several minutes before and lapsed into dozing on the sackcloth pile next to Oliver.

Rose blinked blearily and yawned at his words. “Wha?” she mumbled.

“I found our friend from last night. Looks like it was a specter.” As he spoke, Rose stretched her arms over her head, groaning and twisting her back one way then another. Oliver flushed a little bit and kept his eyes set on the book before him instead of the sight of the slender girl’s writhing body.

“Yea?” After a moment of silence, Rose asked, “So what’s a specter?”

“A type of immaterial undead, obviously. Lesser rank, considered among the weaker undead… there’s a few varieties of ghostly undead in here, but lost souls would’ve been weaker and more numerous, and if it was a phantom… well, we wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity to do any research.”

“Didn’t seem weak to me,” Rose pointed out. “Until my healing killed it, which I still don’t understand.”

Oliver’s mouth twitched, and he quickly flipped backwards to the introductory section on undead, the most common form of outsider from the Ruined World. “Specters are considered weak because they rely entirely on their immaterial nature. Since they don’t exist physically, physical attacks are useless against them.”

“Like how it ignored the first time I tried to use my wind on it? But I was using magic to control the wind, shouldn’t that have worked?”

Oliver shook his head. “It’s about potency, how much magic is concentrated on enhancing the natural properties of the attack. At our level, we can’t normally put any potency into our elemental attacks. I just got lucky that the vanguard gift uses potency for both my special attack and my defensive ability. My attack was magical enough to interact with it beyond just the physical level and wound it. But even then, if I had been fighting that thing alone, I wouldn’t have destroyed it before I ran out of stamina.”

“Why did my healing magic work on it then?” Rose asked. Her eyes were wide as she eagerly looked over the section Oliver had flipped through. While the warden trainee lacked the education Oliver had received throughout his entire life, she more than made up for it with natural intelligence, and her expertise with healing magic far outstripped Oliver’s barebone knowledge of the Mage gifts.

“I think you’d understand better than I do,” Oliver told her. He pointed at one specific paragraph in the entry on the Ruined World. “Something to do with the intrinsic nature of the undead. I just remembered one of my tutors when I was younger insisting that it was the best way to fight them.”

Rose’s brow furrowed as she read the paragraph he indicated. “‘Being substantially infused or wholly composed of death-aspected magic produces a non-intuitive vulnerability to typically beneficial life aspected workings…” Rose’s eyes went wide, and she gave Oliver a startled look.

“What is it?”

“I have no idea what any of this means.” Her expression cracked into a grin. “Seriously, did this author just not even want to be understood?”

Oliver found himself grinning in return. “Well, it was written by noble scholars. You know how we are.”

Rose’s smile grew, and she burst into a fit of giggles that quickly pulled Oliver’s exhausted brain in, and he was soon laughing along with her.

“What was that thing you did to it anyways?” Oliver asked after they managed to control themselves. “I’ve never seen you do any spell like that before.”

“It’s my augment,” Rose explained. “It’s called Healing Wind. It lets me use my wind as a focus for my spells. So I can heal from farther away, or over a wider area.” She grimaced and rolled her neck at the thought, and added, “It sucks away my mana like nothing else, though. That’s why I was so drained afterwards.”

“Mana? You mean quintessence?”

Rose’s grin returned. “No, I mean mana.” She arched an eyebrow at him as she asked in a teasing tone, “Oh? Did I find another one of those rare little blind spots of yours?”

“Oh shut up, at least mine are rare,” Oliver shot back, still smiling. Relaxed as he was, the back and forth rhythm of the teasing was comfortable. It made him think of Adeline, or his sister, before she became a sentinel.

“Mana is a special resource you get if you have a Mage and a Primal gift. The Mage’s mystical well and the Primal’s quintessence pool blend together into a single resource that can be used on both gifts. It’s a big part of what makes dedicated casters like me work.”

“I’ve never heard of that before…” Oliver mused. “I was wondering how you kept going last night the way you did. I was just about run dry by the time we got in here, but you kept your Mantle up, healed me, and threw multiple attacks at that thing.”

“It’s handy,” Rose acknowledged. Her eyes darted down to the book in Oliver’s lap, and she asked, “So, are you going to use that fancy noble learning of yours and tell me what any of that is supposed to mean?”

Oliver chuckled, and the two began picking apart the elaborate writing style for actual meaning.