Sylph nodded. “And I can’t help but be at least a little curious about what the monsters can do. There were monsters in the forest that I lived in, you know. They were dangerous, but if you were careful, they weren’t that much of a threat. Most aren’t particularly smart, although the ones that are tend to be deadly.”

“Let’s hope we find some stupid ones, then,” Damien said.

They slipped out of the Treasure Pavilion and headed down the empty streets of Blackmist in search of a monster.

Delph sat on top of the Treasure Pavilion, his legs crossed and his chin rested on his hand. His eyes tracked Damien and Sylph as the duo headed down the street, in the exact opposite direction of the majority of the horde.

“Not very observant,” Delph observed. “Or perhaps simply cautious. What do you think?”

His cloak rippled, slipping off his neck and contorting on the ground, rising up beside him and wrapping itself as if it were surrounding a roughly humanoid form. There was nothing within it, but two dim yellow lights lit up where his eyes would have been.

“Cautious – the girl, perhaps. Not the boy,” a raspy voice came from within the shadows. “He has improved since we first came across him, but he is still no strategist.”

“No, I suppose he isn’t,” Delph agreed. “But that doesn’t make him any less dangerous. A loose cannon can be more deadly than an aimed one in the right situation.”

“I still fail to see why you care about these small creatures.” The yellow eyes within the cloak narrowed. “They have potential, but so do thousands of other students. So did the dozens of strays that you picked up. Yet you waste so much time on these two in particular. What makes you think they’ll be any different?”

“It’s a hobby, Havel. You should consider picking one up,” Delph replied, rising to his feet. He blurred, appearing on the rooftop in front of them. The cloak showed up beside him almost instantaneously.

“Hobbies involve knitting or sword fighting,” Havel said. “Not raising soldiers.”

“What can I say? I’m unique.”

“You’re hiding something from me again,” Havel said. “Tell me, Delph. I hate being left in the dark.”

“Nope. If you can’t figure it out, then you don’t deserve it. Besides, I already know you’ll report anything I tell you straight to the big man.”

“And? Don’t tell me you’re planning on breaking school rules?”

“Break? Never,” Delph said, sounding slightly affronted. “More like bend. If it isn’t expressly written in the rulebook, it’s not actually breaking the rules.”

“That’s true,” Havel said after a short pause. “So what are you doing?”

“Nice try. Still not answering that,” Delph said, chuckling. “You’ll see soon enough. If Damien and Sylph can reach their full potential, they’ll be a force the likes of which this continent has never seen. You can tell, can’t you? Damien’s companion isn’t recognized by the bracelet, and Sylph doesn’t have one – or she didn’t, until recently.”

“So you did pick it up,” Havel observed. “I thought you hadn’t noticed.”

“Now look who’s keeping secrets,” Delph said irritably. He blurred forward, teleporting across the rooftops again to keep an eye on the retreating backs of his students. “And of course I picked it up. The other fools at the school almost did too, but I covered for her. We can’t have any nosy professors messing up my hard work with petty little things like morality and fear.”

“Indeed,” Havel said. It paused, then flicked up to wrap around Delph’s shoulders once again. “Devourer Beast two miles east of the school. The other professors haven’t had a chance to deal with it yet. They’re caught up with the rest of the horde.”

“Of course they haven’t,” Delph said, sighing. “What’s Whisp doing? Drunk again?”

“She’s holding a port lock over the school,” Havel replied, concealing a raspy laugh. “A powerful one, too. I can’t wait to make fun of her for this. For a school that she claims to care nothing about, she puts a lot of effort into keeping it safe.”

“Let me guess. The Devourer is headed straight for Damien and Sylph?”

“Almost exactly. Estimated time of arrival is five minutes.”

“Of course it is,” Delph said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Come on, then. Take me to it.”

The cloak enveloped Delph, swallowing the man as he shrunk down into a gray dot and vanished from sight. Moments later, the man rematerialized in a grassy plain. A short distance away from him, a hulking beast that vaguely resembled a gorilla skidded to a stop.

It was the size of a small building and covered with grotesquely large muscles. Spikes protruded form its shoulders and back, and two beady red eyes pierced into Delph as the Devourer Beast examined the annoying speck that had appeared before it.

The monster let out a low snarl. Faint green mist escaped its mouth, curling across the ground and killing the grass wherever it touched. Delph remained stationary, keeping eye contact with it. With a roar, the Devourer reared back and pounded its chest.

Delph cracked his neck and raised one hand. The air around him started to warp, twisting and pulsating with faint white lines. The professor twisted his hand down and a thrum of energy shot out from him, flattening the grass and pushing the monster back.

“Do you see that, Havel?”

“See what?”

“We’re in a field.”

“And?”

“No collateral damage,” Delph said with a grim smile. White lines spiderwebbed out around him, covering the entire field. The Devourer Beast let out a howl and charged towards him.

Delph clenched his hand. The world shattered, and the Devourer Beast screamed.

***

“What is that?” Sylph asked, grimacing in disgust as a rocky three armed humanoid creature dragged itself out into the street before them. Several large cracks already ran through its surface, and it didn’t look long for this world.

“Low level earth elemental,” Damien said automatically. “Not a very common monster. Weak to blunt force attacks. I think there’s something else, but I can’t quite remember it. Low level elementals were never all that interesting for me.”

The elemental didn’t seem to take kindly to Damien’s analysis of it. It let out a grating snarl and started dragging itself towards them.

“This is honestly a little pathetic,” Sylph said. “You’re the blunt force guy. Take care of it.”

Damien formed a gravity sphere and tossed it at the monster. It was too heavily injured to dodge in time and the spell connected, detonating and ripping a large hole in its chest. The elemental crumbled into a large pile of dirt and rocks.

“I guess the professors managed to catch most of the scary stuff before it reached campus,” Sylph said.

She and Damien had already been walking around the deserted streets for several minutes, but the pathetic earth elemental was the first thing they’d actually spotted.

“I guess,” Damien said, frowning. “I’m still missing something, but I’m not sure what it is.”

The ground beneath them let out a faint rumble. Damien snapped. “I remember now! Earth elementals almost never travel alone. Low level ones are almost always accompanied by a mid-level elemental that acts as their mother.”

Sylph and Damien both glanced down at the ground, then dashed back just as it parted beneath them. A stone beast burst free from the ground a moment later, snarling as it realized that its surprise attack had failed.

Unlike the other elemental, this one looked more like a mix of a mole and a bull than a human. It was bulky and, judging by the sound of its thick legs pounding on the ground, it was incredibly heavy.

“Well, at least this one looks like it’ll put up a fight,” Sylph said. “Distract it.”

Sylph flickered and blended into the background as her camouflage took effect. The monster snarled and charged towards Damien, who dove out of the way, dropping into a roll and rising up with a spell already forming at his hand.

A spiraling drill of gravity magic churned through the air and punched into the monster’s side, tearing away stone digging nearly a foot into the elemental’s hide before dissipating. It roared in pain and charged at Damien again.

Damien didn’t even try stopping it with his gravity magic. He dove out of the way again, opting to avoid trying to hide behind a building. The monster crashed through the wall, bringing the entire shop down in a pile of dust around it. Damien winced, but that made him even more glad he hadn’t tried to hide.

The beast snorted and turned back towards Damien, pawing the ground to charge at him again. Damien brought two more gravity drills to bear, but before he could use them, Sylph blurred back into vision in the air above the elemental.

She thrust a thick blade of dark energy into the back of its neck and hopped down, leveraging her bodyweight to drag it through the monster’s neck. For a moment, it looked as if the stone would resist the strike. Then it, with a grating screech, Sylph’s magic prevailed. She dropped to the ground and the monster’s head crashed down beside her.

Sylph grinned and the blade vanished. She brushed some of the dirt off her clothes. Behind her, the monster’s corpse twitched. It rose, headless, and reared back to strike her. Sylph spun as she caught the motion out of the corner of her eye, but Damien was faster.

The twin blasts of gravity magic shot past Sylph on either side, tearing into the monster’s shoulders and shredding them apart with a spray of stone. The damage was finally too much for the creature to handle, and it collapsed into a large pile of dirt.

“I didn’t think it would be able to move without a head,” Sylph said with a frown. “Thanks for the save.”

“You would have been fine,” Damien replied. “And it’s an elemental. They don’t really have a head. It doesn’t think.”

Sylph started to nod. Then she paused as her cheeks turned red. “You already knew a lot about the monsters I might have seen in the forest, didn’t you?”

“I knew a lot of theory about them,” Damien corrected her. “That doesn’t take the place of practical experience.”

“Oh. Well, that makes me feel a little better,” Sylph said. “Well, I suppose we should go try to see if we can find something else and stop it before it destroys the college.”

“Yeah,” Damien said, eyeing the remains of the store. “We’re doing a great job at that.”

“Better than nothing,” Sylph said, heading off down the street with Damien close behind her. He couldn’t argue with that, after all.

Delph wiped the blood off his cheek with a grimace. He jerked his shoulder, pulling an arm back into its socket. “Bastard was tougher than I expected.”

The Devourer Beast’s body – if it could still be called that – rested in a mangled heap before Delph’s feet. It looked like a giant had grabbed the monster and twisted it like a wet towel, wringing it out completely.

Delph shook his hand off and grimaced. “Disgusting. Anything else that requires my immediate attention?”

“Nothing – unless you wanted to help the other professors.”

“Absolutely not,” Delph replied. “They’d complain when I broke a few of their bones on accident. You know I can’t fight next to other people, Havel. They’re too…squishy.”

“All of you fleshbags are squishy,” Havel said. “So, what now? If we were correct, there should still be several leading monsters dispersed throughout the horde fighting the professors. Their leader is around somewhere as well. I don’t believe it was with the main group.”

“The leader will show up sooner or later,” Delph said. “We don’t have to worry about finding it.”

“How do you know?”

Delph reached into a pocket and pulled out a small medallion. “Stole this from Whisp’s office after she went to start the port lock. They found this on the latest expedition, so I’m pretty sure this is what they’re after. Looks like a key of some sort. I wonder what it leads to.”

“When did you get a chance to do that?” Havel asked angrily. “You never take me on the interesting jobs!”

“I did it while I was having you cleaned,” Delph said. “Which, if I recall, you specifically asked me to do. About fifteen times that week, actually. You were practically begging for a certain dry cleaner–”

“Right, I got it. I remember now,” Havel said quickly. “Why don’t we go back to protecting your little proteges? Aren’t you worried they’ll get squished by something? No time to waste.”

Delph snorted. “You told me yourself that there’s nothing strong enough in the campus to give them any real threat. Sylph is a trained killer and Damien’s companion scares me. There’s nothing in that campus that’s going to pose any threat to them.”

“Except you,” Havel pointed out. “Statistically speaking, at least. Your success rate with pupils isn’t exactly thrilling.”

“Havel?”

“Yes?”

“Shut up.”

“Right,” Havel said. “Sorry.”

Delph just shook his head. The cloak wrapped itself around him, condensing into a small point. He vanished, leaving the corpse of the Devourer Beast behind amongst the ruined landscape that had once been grassy plains.