There’s really not much more to say about the rest of the day’s ride.

We pass through ten or fifteen more little towns before reaching the forest. We only stop in one, and even then we don’t even get out of the wagon. The tavernkeep is clearly ready for us; he just hands a pile of prepared sandwiches up to our wagon and we’re ready to go again. I wonder about the carters just in time to see Chase finish inhaling one sandwich and start on a second. Or, given how fast he’s going, it could well be a third or a fourth. The food disappears so fast that I’m practically certain that his gluttony is skill-assisted.

I get myself a very nice sandwich, tomato and lettuce atop a stack of a spicy pepperoni-like salami. Well, okay, I say tomato and lettuce, but they’re both violently purple, so who knows. They taste like tomato and lettuce so that’s what I’m going to call them.

The Bascroft Forest is exactly the kind of forest that I imagine when I think of a deep fantasy-setting forest. The trees are old-growth deciduous hardwoods, untouched by human hands. Literally everything is covered in moss, from the rocks to the roots to the bark of the trees’ huge, gnarled trunks. Our path is unobstructed, but the canopy reaches outward to gather every drop of sunlight nevertheless, covering the road with intermittent patches of green-dyed light.

I get Make Ready working early in the afternoon, about fifteen minutes after discovering that my right pinkie finger is noticeably crooked and that it’s been making some of my angles wrong. Unfortunately, I make zero progress on figuring out how it works because its workflow breaks Read Mana. It works like this: I cast Make Ready, I cast Belighten, I deactivate my casting points, and then the next time I activate them Belighten goes off exactly as if I’d just completed it. Unfortunately, Read Mana dies when I deactivate, so all I can see is that spells cast under Make Ready have differently-colored mana than when they’re cast on their own. I’ll have to figure out the spell-delaying function by inspecting Stall, then.

That’s when I realize that I probably know enough about how magic works now to usefully practice all but the last gesture of Shield for One. I’d dismissed it earlier because I didn’t have any way to know whether I’d cast successfully other than completing the spell and observing the effect, but with Belighten learned I think I could check for a coherent path through the spell with well-defined crossovers.

I cast Make Ready a few more times to make sure I’ve got it, using it on an even mixture of Belighten and Find Spellcraft.

Then I move on to partially casting and very, very carefully inspecting Shield for One.

About the only interesting part of that spell is how the variable parameters seem to work. Basically, there’s some mana that, instead of being concentrated into a whirlpool for another stream to pass through, is sprayed out over a curved track that the other stream follows. Extending the curve means the main stream spends longer being bombarded by the other mana, which I assume increases the value of some constant that’s used to determine the size of the shield.

Other than that, nothing particularly new happens. We pass another convoy in the late afternoon; it goes about the same as the previous passing. Liv occasionally directs one of the guards to fire an arrow into the woods, but we aren’t attacked and we don’t seem to seriously attack anything. I occasionally find and fix a stream of mana in Shield for One that’s scattering or flying off into space instead of being fed into a succeeding feature.

I can’t tell exactly what time of day it is when we roll into Fordlams, but I’m hungry when we do.

Note to self: Build a pocket watch spell.

The town turns out to be a cross between a highway rest stop and a rustic resort. The road widens to four paint-delineated lanes, one of which is already occupied by another caravan. Our wagon train settles into a second for the night. The parking lot is lined with buildings; there are two inns, a guardpost with tower exactly like the one in Caulfield, two alchemists, no fewer than four blacksmiths, a couple warehouse-looking buildings with giant doors, and a couple dozen unidentifiable but large house-looking structures. Unlike Caulfield and Calfort, everything in Fordlams is solid stone. Every window has heavy shutters. Even the roofs are built for defense, with what look like slate tiles instead of the wooden shingles I’ve seen on other buildings.

The defenses tell me that there are some scary critters living in the forest and that they like to hunt people. The concentration of blacksmiths, alchemists, and warehouses tells me that the Republic of Eld hunts them right back and then turns their corpses into loot. I bet that almost all of those houses are absolutely stuffed with monster hunters. I also bet that the warehouses are equally stuffed with monster corpses.

People begin to disembark but don’t immediately start moving toward the inns. Instead, it looks like we’re going to wait around while Chase and Mas check over the cart, starting with the drawbar.

“Whitney!”

Or, okay, it looks like all the merchants are going to wait around while my team gets the good seats. Score! I scurry over to follow them into the closer of the two inns.

“Do you have to stare at literally every single thing that draws your attention?” Liv asks, jokingly exasperated.

There’s only one answer to that question. “Yes! Entirely necessary,” I declare huffily. “Part of the wizard contract that wizards have to sign before we’re allowed to call ourselves wizards,” I sniff, pompously holding my nose in the air as I sweep through the inn’s front door.

The inn’s about a third full, which agrees with there being one caravan already lined up in a parking lot that has one lane for traffic and three lanes for parking.

Agnes drops Axelos on the floor next to a table in the corner. I dump my backpack next to him and settle in. When the tavernkeep wanders over to our table I order a bowl of stew, having looked around and decided that the bread bowls on other tables look like a good size. I haven’t yet had any bad food, so I don’t worry too much about the menu.

“How has your second day been?” Heather asks me. “Not too boring, I hope?”

“Frankly, spending my second day reading documentation is exactly in line with the other jobs I’ve been on,” I joke, getting some small laughs. “Yesterday I met my team, survived orientation, and got a user account. Tomorrow I’ll learn that deploying my code involves printing it out and faxing it to accounting.” I pause to ponder my current situation. “Or, as the case may be, by personally force-feeding it to some slavering gribbly that wants to eat me. Which I’m not sure is any worse? I hate dealing with accounting.”

“Hear hear,” Agnes says, to general approval.

“So how does everyone else deal with days like that? Or,” I ask hopefully, “are they not particularly common?”

“Not common, thankfully,” Heather reassures me. “Even yesterday was unusual. Axelos had much better strategic mobility than most of our problems.”

“When we have a task, most days are spent gathering information,” Liv says. “We find and interview eyewitnesses, hunt down relevant experts, ask the Bureau of the Guard what they know already, hit the archive to figure out our perp’s Gift, that kind of thing.”

“We execute a warrant on average once a day,” Heather says, backing up Liv’s offhanded list. “Approximately one in three of those end in a fight.”

“That’s… a lot,” I say, grimacing.

“We don’t get sent out for the easy cases, and lots of people that are misusing Gifts or that recently Visited from a violent world try to run away when they see us coming,” Liv explains.

“I feel like I should feel bad for those people,” I say thoughtfully. “They’re just doing what they think is necessary to survive, right? And probably was necessary historically.”

“They’re still dangerous,” Heather says flatly. “They may end up in front of a therapist instead of in a jail cell, but we’re the people that can find them and stop them.”

It’s at this point that our meals are delivered.

The stew is just what I wanted. Thick sauce, lots of onions and carrots, garlic, pepper, and some kind of crunchy tuber that I can’t identify. The bread bowl is also good, a very dense crusty white bread.

Everyone else seems equally satisfied with their meals.

Heather looks at me once everyone is finished. “Have you learned the shield spell yet?”

“Maybe?” I hedge. “I think that I have it correct, but I haven’t attempted to cast it because I didn’t want to mess up the carters.”

“Well,” Heather says. “We still have three hours of daylight. Fordlams has training facilities. Let’s go use them.”

Agnes, Ji, and Bob stay behind to take care of Axelos. Liv, Heather, and I head for one of the warehouse-looking buildings, which turns out to be a weird sort of gym. We leave our bags at the inn, though I do remember to bring the grimoire.

One wall is lined with a huge variety of free weights and benches. The other wall is a shooting range, a couple targets at one end of the warehouse and some benches and stands at the other. Near the entrance there are several rows of weapon racks, stocked with what look to be the most durable training weapons I’ve ever seen. Finally, the entire middle of the room is a mishmash of different terrains: smooth stone, loose scree, a perfectly-mowed lawn, a tiny patch of forest, a crude house made out of plywood, and more.

We’re not the only people here. A hunter-type man is dead-lifting a frankly ludicrous load of plates hung off a bar that has to be magical. I note that, instead of a mat, he’s standing on a ten-foot-square slab of shimmering black metal. I have a feeling that it’s the only reason his feet aren’t going through the floor. A woman wearing a bandoleer of glowing polychromatic vials stands at one end of the range and releases volleys of scintillating green sparks toward the targets.

Then, with a CRACK and a blast of splinters, a spar in the little plywood house erupts into violence.

I flinch and almost look for something to hide behind, but I’m too busy watching the fight. Especially since Liv and Heather don’t appear to be reacting much.

The new hole in the wall reveals two vaguely humanoid blurs furiously trading blows, arms and legs cracking together. One of them changes tactics, dancing backward and out of sight, arcing arms throwing off bright crescents of light that the other fighter bats aside with quick, precise strikes. Wherever the deflected blasts land the wood explodes outward, rapidly enveloping the house in a cloud of falling sawdust. The defender propels himself into the air and out of the house entirely with a particularly energetic high deflection, producing a flying chunk of wood that he smashes back into the house with a spinning kick. A fraction of a second later the other fighter tumbles into view on the other side of the house, having gone through the far wall with a tearing crash. He doesn’t bother getting up after that, simply laying where he came to rest.

The victor alights on one of the gym’s roof trusses, smirking.

The loser’s vituperative swearing briefly competes with the house’s groaning and creaking, then vanishes entirely under the sound of the house collapsing completely.

The whole thing might have taken twenty seconds.

So that was a thing.

If I’m going to contribute anything at all to a fight I need to go hard on derivatives of Make Ready. Or just find a more efficient way to cast spells, none of this somatic components junk.

“I have to wonder whose responsibility it is to rebuild that house every sixty seconds,” I think out loud. “Or where all the plywood comes from.”

“Magic item handles both,” Heather answers. “Standard equipment for hunter training facilities. Takes about ten minutes to reset after a fight like that.”

“I should really be expecting that kind of thing by now,” I sigh.

“It’s kind of adorable the way you go back and forth between expecting us to be universally competent and utterly clueless,” Liv teases me.

“Look, where I’m from, dying and landing in a new world is literally and literarily a joke. I managed to convince myself to roll with it instead of getting all angsty—”

“And thank you so much for that by-the-way the angsty ones suck,” Liv interrupts in a rush. “Please continue,”

“—But despite all of our best efforts I’m still occasionally pattern-matching against ultra-niche genre fiction written as power fantasies by depressed teenagers trying to escape their dreary daily lives,” I say, the words flowing straight from my brain into the air. “…I think I got a bit too far into that rant,” I admit. “Sorry, little bit stressed out recently, been trying not to think about it.”

“You’re doing fine,” Heather says. “Speaking of which, spell testing?” She motions toward an area that looks exactly like the inside of the inn across the parking lot.

I don’t bother sitting down. Instead, I flip to the page with Shield for One, cast Read Mana, carefully point myself toward open space Just In Case, and start casting.

To my shock, I get it immediately.

As usual, the spell itself is a whirling maelstrom of rainbow glitter, and its product is a spray of several different colors of mana. The spell’s only visual component looks to be a tiny square of blue light hovering about two inches in front of my finger, maybe four inches across. It seems to be produced by some sparkles returning from where the shield should be, some unknown distance out in front of me. I set the variable parts of the spell to middling values but I don’t know what absolute measurements those would have resulted in.

Very usefully, the spell appears to have attached itself to my finger, just like Find Spellcraft did. I could’ve dealt with it being attached to my origin but it would’ve been a bit inconvenient.

“Cool! Okay, actually,” I say, “Hold on, it’s a bit hard to see the display and I’m not sure I need Read Mana any more, so let me re-cast this…”

I do so. It takes about forty-five seconds. Yuck.

“So, I’m betting that this little thing here is a shield strength readout,” I say. “Because if there’s one thing that’d get a spellcaster super dead, it’s thinking they have a shield when they don’t.”

“Also a vulnerability,” Liv says. “I’d be able to see it and hit a weak spot no trouble.”

“There is that,” I say, imagining just how easy it’d be for Liv to use that against me. “It could also just be a way for me to see exactly how big the rectangle I made was, since both height and width are variable. Can you see the spell itself?”

“No, only that it’s stopping dust from drifting,” Liv answers. “Can I poke it now?”

“Go right ahead.”

I hold the spell steady as she walks out a ways, maybe ten feet, hangs a corner, walks another five or six feet, and turns to face me. Then she draws her rapier, stabs, and withdraws to an easy guard position in a single fluid motion that happens so fast that I could have blinked and missed it entirely.

“Decent,” she evaluates. “Feels like it does a better job holding my sword after it penetrates than it does actually stopping it.”

“And I have a red spot on my display where you stabbed it,” I say. “Seems to be healing quickly, though.” It takes about ten seconds for it to return to a blue that’s similar to the rest of the shield.

Liv whips the tip of her sword across the shield, producing an odd ringing noise and two yellow lines in the middle of the blue square. She takes a look at the display before sheathing her rapier and backing up another fifteen feet.

Then she flings what feels like an entire kitchen sink at me, hands flashing back and forth in an odd dance that touches every part of her body. Every movement results in at least one sharp bit of metal flying at me. My shield rapidly turns from blue to mottled yellow, then yellow with orange patches, then yellow with bits of red, and when Liv stops her final throwing knife thumps to the floor on my side of the shield.

“Fuck, you people are scary,” I say.

“Don’t worry,” Liv reassures me. “That’s a very good shield. The maximum intensity is low, but it’s piecemeal rather than monolithic, damaged areas begin recharging immediately, and the recharge rate doesn’t vary based on how much damage it’s taken or how many areas have been damaged.” She walks back toward me. “I’m basically your worst-case match-up because I can focus a single part down. Anyone else, you just rotate damaged parts out and you’re set.” She bends over to the pile of knives, shuriken, needles, metal toothpicks, chopsticks, hairpins, razor-edged disks, and spikes, and starts rapidly disappearing them back into what must be invisible pockets or her storage artifact.

“I also didn’t feel a single thing from it,” I realize. “Means I don’t have to worry about momentum transfer from large hits.” Now that’s an interesting thing. I wonder if it’s just flipping Newton the bird and ignoring reaction forces or if it’s transferring the force to some other object, like the ground under my feet. Fascinating. “I’m really going to have to practice with this, huh.”

“Yes,” Heather says. That’s when I notice that, while I wasn’t looking, she’d found a giant rope bag full of dodgeballs and a basket of hacky sacks.

“Aw nuts.”

“Think fast.”