Zara glowered worriedly at the trees, inching closer to her brother. “Fifteen, maybe sixteen meters of dense trees where they have all the advantages, and then another thirty meters or so, if we are lucky, where they thin out.” She frowned and shook her head. “I don’t like it. We got lucky earlier because they charged us, and you still nearly killed yourself!” Her shout echoed through a suddenly silent forest.

“What other choice do we have?” He ignored the accusation. There was nothing he could do about it now. Zack knew she was likely right about the fight earlier; they had gotten incredibly lucky. The different monsters and beasts hadn’t worked together. Some had even gotten in each other’s way. It had been a mess, one that was to their advantage.

The forest in front of them would be nothing like that. No matter how short of a time they planned on being inside it.

They hesitated, waiting for the normal noises of the forest to return.

Zelda swaggered forward and began to shadowbox with the needle-like scales tied to her arms. Aisha and George joined her a moment later, and Zara watched in amusement as they tried to clumsily copy her movements.

He sighed. “Okay, you win. We won’t go inside the trees.”

Zelda snapped around and kicked George and Aisha, sending them both flying.

“Uh, she was actually trying to prove the opposite,” Zara muttered, barely holding back a laugh.

“How was I supposed to know that?” He protested. “All that demonstration proved is that Zelda is the only one that can take care of herself. Which makes sense, considering she has been around the longest. The others don’t know anything. You would be constantly expending mana to reinforce and heal them. Which I guess is normal for the way you usually fight.”

Zack was taking his sister’s worries and her words seriously. She had a knack for piecing things together on clues he would normally ignore as background information. If she said that they got lucky earlier, then it was likely the entire fight was closer than he had realized.

Looking back at his condition, in the end, he could only agree with her. When the damage started to bleed through from his astral form, as it had at the very end, it was a bad sign. The pain bleeding through was normal. The damage bleeding through meant he had already pushed it too far, any farther, and he would have entered uncharted waters with the ability.

That fight could have easily ended differently if they had been anywhere else, say, for instance, inside a forest. Actually, inside the trees, it would have been far, far worse. The beasts would have worked together and not gotten in each other’s way. They would have been able to use the environment to their natural advantage and more that he couldn’t think of off the top of his head.

It would have been a nightmare.

“I’m not at a hundred percent yet,” Zack whispered. “My regular mana levels are back to normal, but my astral form is still recovering from before. I can fight, just no prolonged battles.” He snorted, “Can you imagine a regular person with a training class being able to do what we just did?”

Zara simply shook her head and backed farther away from trees and sat down to think. “If the entire class had gotten involved, they might have been able to do something. Assuming that there was no teacher there to help, I’d give them slim odds of even surviving at best. I just don’t know, some of them have been training for years. It isn’t the same or as good as the advantages we have… but maybe a few would get lucky.”

“Yeah, if Jean or Rose was there, that horde probably wouldn’t have survived more than a minute or so.” Zack settled down next to his sister, and together they watched Zelda teaching the other bears how to fight. “Jean is in the military, under the ever secretive Major. So, I would assume that she is a high regular class, maybe even a low specialist.”

Zara nodded. “I’ve been thinking the same. Everything we know about the man indicates he surrounds himself with people who are both loyal and incredibly competent. We already know she is competent in the regular world, but she was chosen as a training teacher of sorts for a prestigious academy. The position isn’t a guarantee, but her real background and reason behind the position pretty much are. She needs to be strong enough to handle anything that might happen inside the portal.”

“What are your thoughts on Rose, then?”

She shrugged. “No idea. I haven’t met her. From what you have said about her and Quinn being ex-travelers, though, I can make some guesses. They are probably mid-to-high range regular classes at most. Anything too low and they would never have gotten teaching positions at the academy as they wouldn’t have been qualified. Anything too high and they wouldn’t have needed to teach as they would have been set for life and simply retired.”

Zack thought over her different conclusions, along with the ways she had come to them. It was always useful to decide on his own if she was correct, or if she had missed something. It had yet to happen, but he held a certain amount of elderly brother hope in his heart that he would someday be able to tease her about it.

He shook his head and slapped his cheeks. “How did we even get on that topic? I thought we were talking about whether or not we were going to enter the forest.”

Zara scratched lightly at her cheek and looked away. “Ugh, you got distracted?”

“Sure, I got distracted.” Zack glanced up at the night sky that had begun to shift from pitch black to the silvery light of a full moon, only without the moon. “Not sure that would help much inside the forest anyway.” Referencing the sudden increase in light.

“The mana crystals would be nice. Being able to heal you if anything happens again, frankly, would ease my mind a great deal. Having them in reserve for emergencies would be great,” She sighed and leaned back a little. “But maybe we are going about this the wrong way. You are already going to sell the information about your ability and its implications to Second. He would obviously then know you need mana crystals. I’m sure either he or Anna would be willing to get some for us. They could even be included as part of the initial deal for the information.”

Zelda stopped mid-punch, George getting a lucky kick to her side in while she was distracted. The older bear smacked him away and angrily stomped her way over to Zara and Zack.

“No, you can keep training them if that is what you want. We haven’t decided yet. I was just saying that this wasn’t the best plan to get mana crystals is all. I still needed to come through to wake you all up though.”

Zack sat to the side, listening to a thoroughly one-sided conversation between his sister and a bear. It was a sight he had seen before, but not in a long time, and the memories it brought back were one of the few good ones he had of back then.

Zelda kicked his foot, bringing him rudely back to the present. It would seem that the argument had concluded while he was thinking about the past. She pointed her scale needle first at him and then at the forest.

“Hey, what was that for?” He pulled the needle-free from her arm and acted like he threw it into the forest, the low light fooling them. “There, now go fetch. I thought you were supposed to be a bear all this time, not a dog, but what do I know?”

Zelda’s head swiveled from him to the forest and back several times before she tackled him. To the side, Zara had fallen over laughing and was unable to provide any further translating services.

“Alright, I give, I give. Here!” He was quick to offer up the needle to the strong and scrappy bear, who specialized in making fleshy things like him hurt, a lot. Not that she would do that to him, but why run the risk?

He could have sworn he heard the bear snort as she picked up the needle and playfully poked him with it.

Zara rolled over a moment later and wiped the tears from her eyes. “Go get it Zido!” She broke down giggling again.

Zelda held her dirty paw up to her eyes and then pointed it at Zack's in a familiar gesture. Then, with that completed, she walked over to the hysterical girl and sat on her. A moment later, she was joined by George and Aisha; the latter taking up her place on the girl's legs.