As the three of them were eager to get on with their quest, they swiftly packed the camp and extinguished the fire.

They moved on, heading towards the ravine they had scouted for a week now with purpose, their way lighted by the blood red moonlight slipping through the dense canopy.

Animals and monsters stayed away from the ravine, knowing it to be the home of trolls and with the wind carrying their unique stench, it wasn’t hard for even the dumber animals to keep away from them.

Kali could feel her heart beating in her chest, pumping blood filled with adrenaline through her body with a nervous vigour. She wasn’t sure what it was she felt as they approached the ravine, but the closest thing would be a mix of relief and nervousness.

That week of just watching and sneaking around was nerve-wracking, so knowing that they were finally going to do something was refreshing, revitalizing even. She’d been burying herself in that tome and exerting her body with numerous Spell backlashes over the week for this, she was more than ready … or so she should feel, right?

Was she really ready? She hadn’t got the chance to test her Fireball loaded Needle on anything truly dangerous, and she worried that her tests on an immobile tree — no matter how hard — weren’t the best way to check whether it’d work on a troll.

Not that she would even have to use that spell if it all worked out how they planned. She’d given a berry to Vorgnar, who was holding onto it now and would shove it into a wound he would make on the Troll.

‘Plans never survive first contact with the enemy.’

That was a quote and a half. She didn’t even remember the context in which her brother said it, but it was making her worry at the moment.

What if the troll survived the berry, and she had to use her spell? Would it wake up all other trolls in the nest, making them fight through five more trolls to escape, or would it rouse all of them throughout the ravine and have dozens of the hulking man-eaters descend upon them?

Kali stopped those thoughts before they got out of hand. Self-doubt would do her nothing good aside from making her even more nervous than she already was. Wasn’t I supposed to be inflated with arrogance from that Frost Wolf’s essence? I could use some of that confidence now …

Where was this sudden lack of confidence coming from?

She had to wonder; she wasn’t lacking any confidence back in the Bandit camp and neither did she feel like this back in the Village.

I really should stop this.

She was going to stop thinking too, but the sound of the still distant trolls sent shivers down her spine. Was it the enemies she was facing this time?

She’d faced monsters, huge and / or dangerous magical beasts and humans so far, but trolls were something new.

Monsters were to be feared and respected, humans were to be feared and hated, but trolls were the stuff of nightmares for her. She found herself waking up to nightmares where a troll was gnawing on her more times than she would have liked to admit just over the last month.

It will be fine. The spell works, the berries work and I am not alone.

That was something she was aware of, but it didn’t quite sink in to her. Her subconscious wasn’t willing to accept her two companions as anything more than temporary partners to be used so she could stay alive and escape this human ridden empire.

She just had to do that now, didn’t she? Izuna was the reason they were here in the first place, so the girl better make herself useful.

Kali knew the Fox-kin was strong, her prowess with a glaive was something to behold and her skill in that weird mental talent of hers was useful, even if not against ‘muscle brained’ trolls.

Vorgnar … well, he was both knowledgeable and skilled in many things, obviously having centuries of experiences to lean on, which was especially apparent when Kali only had herself and Izuna to compare him to. She pitied him; he was supposedly one of the strongest beings on the continent and yet he got himself beaten black and blue by a runaway elven princess who barely knew which end of the sword is she was supposed to hold.

She felt the core of that bear in her pocket, unsure of why she even kept that thing and hadn’t just absorbed it already.

It wasn’t supposed to be like that, neither of those things. Vorgnar had been meticulously going on hunts more than he’d been scouting like the two girls, and his level was slowly catching up to her, but she felt it was still a bit below her.

He’d make a better use of it.

Kali changed her course, slowly inching closer to where she heard Vorgnar running and hopped down next to him.

“What is it?” he asked, not even slowing his sprint.

Kali hesitated for a moment, but she felt this was something she had to do. She shook her head and quickly snatched the core out of her pocket and gave it to Vorgnar, pushing it into his confused hands.

“Take it,” she said, jumping back up into the canopy.

Her nervousness settled down a bit, and she felt her muscles relaxing. She felt like she’d done something worthwhile already.

From there, the trio quickly reached the side of the ravine where they raised their care another notch.

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Vorgnar activated whatever artifact he used back in the bandit camp and went nearly invisible. Kali flicked up her ears. She’d been practicing paying attention to what she came to call the ‘song of nature’ and ignoring it when she didn’t need it.

Now, as she crept closer to the edge of the ravine, she could hear the ‘song’, much like a backdrop. It was background noise that she was aware was there, but it wasn’t something her conscious mind paid more than a sliver of attention to.

Slowly, she shifted a bit of her attention onto it, flinching ever so slightly as the barrage of new sounds bombarded her mind like whiny little kittens asking for her attention. The metaphorical kittens used their claws of course, how else would they get her attention when there were thousands of them even in just a small hundred meter sphere around her.

The edges of her lips curled up. She could clearly hear the trail of wailing grass and whatnot left behind in Vorgnar’s footsteps. The artifact might cut off all sound in a sphere around it and following that was possible — she’d done just that in the bandit camp —, keeping track of him through the ‘song’ was much easier.

Just more practice. I can keep it up if I hold the spatial hearing at only a hundred meters.

Giving herself a mental nod, she tuned out the song again and let her spatial hearing extend to its entire range, covering a sphere with a diameter of a whole kilometer with her at the center.

She could hear, and through her hearing, visualise this part of the ravine clearly in her mind.

The wind cresting over the mountain and blowing down its slopes had an easy route through the ravine, howling as it blew through the gaping wound on in the forest’s greenery.

Kali could hear how it flowed over each rock, boulder and uprooted trunk in the ravine and she could hear how it broke on the entrances of the troll nests.

She halted her movements for a moment. She could hear the nests, but the depths of them grew increasingly muddy before her mind’s eye. She could visualise it all and hear it for a good twenty or thirty meters in, but after that all she got were vague impressions.

Those are inside the 500 meter radius … why can’t I hear them?

She looked down. One such nest should be right under her boots with only a few dozen meters of hardened dirt and roots separating her from them. That was well within her range. So what could be obfuscating her senses?

Her ears twitched, once they stood up on her head and flattened to the sides of her skull, and then they stood perpendicular to it, pointing down at the ground under her.

She heard bugs, worms, and even a few mice scuttling about.

The farthest one is at most two meters underground.

So dirt thicker than two meters blocked her spatial hearing? That was new.

She frowned, or was it? She couldn’t quite remember ever hearing underground caverns or anything like that with her spatial hearing despite her five hundred meter radius being more than enough to cover some shallower ones.

Maybe she shouldn’t have neglected doing her own scouting during the last week, but then again, she had new spells to make and Runes to learn and practice so pushing the boring troll stalking to the others was the obvious choice.

She did do some scouting of her own, but those were all during the day, when the trolls were mostly out and about so not hearing the ones inside their nests somehow never seemed suspicious in her mind.

Thinking back, she couldn’t remember ever hearing anything really far underground. Weird.

That brought with itself the question of ‘why?’ Why does two meters of seemingly simple dirt block her hearing?

She glared down at the outwardly inconspicuous dirt. There had to be a secret hidden in it. She’d always thought that her spatial hearing was some super powerful magical sense thingy that anything other than wards made by expert mages couldn’t block. Then came the dirt and had to disprove her.

She bit her lips. This was really not the time to prod random mounds of dirt for answers. They were on a mission! So, despite her reluctance, she pushed this new knowledge to the back of her mind. There were so many things to investigate, but despite having all the time in the world now, she was somehow always pressed for time.

Kali caught up with the other two, foregoing doing unnecessary — but fun — acrobatics on her way in favour of speed.

A bush marked the edge of the treeline and Kali jumped up, kicking off of a trunk midway and sending herself over the bush. She landed silently on the other end, her boots touching down only half a meter away from the ledge.

She glanced right. About twenty meters away Izuna was crouching near the ledge, her head moving as if she was looking for a spot to land.

Kali tilted her head, glancing down at herself. There was nothing but good landing spots there.

She listened for a moment, noting any troll that might be doing the equivalent of patrolling. Trolls weren’t the type to do any actual patrolling, that’d require a more complex hierarchy than ‘the biggest and meanest troll is boss’. Organizing patrols and keeping the lazy trolls awake at night to keep guard was something that probably never even occurred in the hollow head of the troll boss.

There was only a single one wandering out in the red moonlight that was within her range, and even that one was at the edge.

Kali stared at it, her eyes piercing through the darkness.

The troll was scratching its back on a large boulder like a bear would on a trunk.

She stared at it; it was alone and away from most nests. No, we go with the plan.

The ravine was mostly open and if they failed to silence the troll before killing it. It could wake up the whole ravine and have them converge on their heads. It was much safer to target the nest right under her feet. Even if they couldn’t keep it silent, they were at the edge of the trolls’ territory, so running would be much easier.

It came with the caveat that the nest had more than one troll. Three to be exact. They chose this nest both because it was the farthest from the other nests and since it was one of the smallest ones.

Kali shrugged, psyching herself up a bit. You are a badass mage Kali, time to kill a troll and become a real adventurer … or something.

She stepped off the ledge, plummeting like an owl and landing like a cat. Soundless and deadly.

Her new-ish sword appeared in her hand and the feel of its handle under her fingers calmed her racing heart somewhat. Hopefully, the sword would prove useful in this fight to come, even if she hadn’t once managed to touch Izuna with her training sword throughout their week of sparring.

She crept up to the side of the opening.

The ground beneath her feet was stiff and stable, crushed and pressed into being that way under the feet of the three trolls living in the nest. With them weighing a ton or more, making a beaten path like this was something that just happened when they walked around.

Kali glanced behind her, hearing Izuna finally come down into the ravine and approach her.

Where is Vorgnar, though?

There were no plants around in the upturned dirt to wail in his footsteps, so Kali could only resort to searching for a sphere void of sounds. There, just on the other side of the opening. She gave a slight wave.

The plan they made up was simple really: sneak into the selected nest, search for the troll closest to the opening, incapacitate it and make sure it wouldn’t scream and then shove berries into it until it died.

Plan B would come into effect if other trolls were woken up, and it comprised Kali throwing two or three of her exploding Needles at the troll before the trio would skedaddle whether they managed to get the core or not.

Live to fight another day, or something like that. Trolls weren’t especially migratory so they could always come back later, though Izuna being as much of a fidgety and objectively nervous mess as she was spoke of the fact that time was probably of the essence for the girl.

Not that knowing that fact made Kali any less annoyed with her antics. So she was pressed for time, so what? Kali herself was on the run from probably three damned countries, some of which counting among the superpowers of Aetheria.

Kali shrugged. She was more than willing to get on with it herself. If she was by herself, she’d have abandoned the mission a while ago when she realized some damned dog was following them around. It gave her all sorts of bad vibes, but maybe she was just too paranoid.

If Vorgnar doesn’t think it is too big of a problem, it probably isn’t. His knowledge comes from experience and not adventure books.

Kali hummed under her breath, giving a glance backwards where Izuna finally stepped up behind her. She nodded at the elf and Kali nodded back.

Then she crouched down and stepped into the opening, noticing Vorgnar having done just that a moment before.

She followed in his footsteps and Izuna wasn’t far behind her, being the least sneaky.

You can do this, Kali.

She psyched herself up, though it did little to calm her racing heart.

Let’s go kill a troll.