“We need to get going,” Jasmine said. “Their lives are in danger.”

“Yes, let’s,” I agreed. “They’ve found us a nest.”

It was unfortunate that the first people to find the nest had been the ones with the least experience and the least magic power, but sometimes that was just how the dice rolled.

The rune had passed an image into my mind’s eye, but that hadn’t been all. It had brought with it the knowledge of their current location and an understanding of how to get there.

“The next branch on our left,” Jasmine grunted as we ran.

I nodded in lieu of a response. The name “branch” was perhaps giving it too much credit. We were looking for a narrow access tunnel— more of a crack, really— barely wide enough to inch through sideways. Twenty or thirty steps inside a suffocatingly small space, chest pressed against one wall and back against the other.

Jasmine paused for a second as we reached the crack. The ball of fire she had created flickered, then dimmed, and she inhaled deeply.

“Not a fan of tight spaces?” I asked, less out of consideration for her than an urgency to get to our objective.

“Bad memories,” she muttered. “I’ll be fine.”

With that, she took another deep breath and disappeared into the crack.

I can respect that. I followed her, wincing at my impacts of the dirt walls. The crack wasn’t uniformly dug, and crags of hardened dirt poked into my body as I stepped through it.

The ball of true darkness was still with me, but even with the dark eliminated the crack was naught more than dirt and stone. I could see Jasmine’s vague shape ahead, shimmying through the narrow pathway as if she’d been born to it.

The minute it took us to traverse the crack felt far longer than that, but at least we were finally in the tunnel on the other side, albeit a little dirtier and scraped up.

“You good, Lily?” Jasmine asked.

“Fine. You ready?”

She nodded, and we took off. Another minute of sprinting, and the location that we’d been given was right around the corner.

We turned into a dead end. The tunnel only ran another thirty paces or so before a dusty pile of boulders and packed dirt blocked it. A cave-in?

The two other newbie adventurers were staged halfway between us and the end of the tunnel. Sam was still lying faceup in a puddle of red, and Naomi was tending to him, shotgun on the floor. Scattered between him and the tunnel blockage were three bats, each half again my size. They had to be Altered. They too lay in pools of their lifeblood, massive holes and burns marking their bodies.

“Thank the gods you’re here,” Naomi said, voice halting and broken. “I’m hopeless at emergency care.”

“I can take a look at Sam,” Jasmine said. “I have a bit of training.”

I myself took a closer look at the man.

Jasmine must have been humoring Naomi. Sam wasn’t moving or breathing, and there was a gaping hole in his chest. I probably could’ve seen his heart, had his flesh not been so mangled and the blood so copious.

The noble approached the dead man, muttering an incantation. It took her fifteen full seconds to cast, and small flames flickered from the end of each of her fingers on one hand, elongating into beams of energy. The beams grew and grew, flickering one way and another like a strong wind was blowing, until they eventually latched onto a few parts of Sam’s body.

Jasmine looked up. “I’m sorry.”

A cry tore itself from Naomi’s throat, raw and animal. It wasn’t the scream of someone who’d just lost a coworker or friend of theirs. I’d heard enough of those over the years to tell.

It was the same noise my mother had made when my father, may the gods damn him, had been executed.

The slim man stood and punched Jasmine in the side. She staggered back as he paused to draw in a deep breath, only to continue his cry.

Still screaming, Naomi sprinted towards the cave-in, shotgun in his arms.

“Wait!“ Jasmine shouted.

“It’s no use,” I said. “He’s not going to hear you now.”

“He’s going to—“

“He punched you to force you out of his way,” I said coldly. “Naomi has a shotgun now.”

“I can’t just leave him to die!”

A clicking sound, from deeper within, followed by flaps.

Before I could react, a dark form flew out of a gap between two boulders. It was followed momentarily by another.

It was met with an explosion that reverberated through the tunnel, blisteringly loud and unexpected. I covered my ears as the explosion repeated itself once, twice, thrice.

The cacophony of sound roared for long seconds even after both Altered bats dropped dead and the shotgun ceased firing.

I spoke, and found that I couldn’t hear my own words through the ringing in my ears.

“He won’t see reason,” I said, raising my voice without changing its flat tone. “Someone close to him just died. Back off.”

Jasmine seemed about to say something, but the sound of flaps was coming from the cave-in again.

This time, I took a moment to cast true darkness four times in quick succession. Only the smallest flow of power was necessary to do so. Four small balls, one for each of our ears.

True darkness didn’t just mute light or dark. Sound, smell, touch, taste— anything that the human mind could perceive, I could negate.

I would’ve stuck with just making myself the makeshift earbuds, but shouting at a temporarily deaf woman didn’t seem very fun.

As the first Altered bat passed through, I saw Jasmine’s lips move.

The first bat dropped like it’d forgotten how to fly, then twitched as Naomi dumped more oath-enhanced lead into it.

The second was met by a bolt of flame, precise and powerful. I didn’t know the name of the spell, but it was familiar to me. The bat’s brain would have burned to a crisp in an instant.

The third, fourth, and fifth bats, however, had no spell waiting for them. They barely made it through properly, squeezing past each other so harshly that it was dripping blood.

Jasmine had stopped casting, presumably because Naomi was already at the entrance.

He never stood a chance.

One of the bats raked an elongated claw across his front as another flew over it and landed on Naomi’s head.

All it took was a single second of violence and Sam’s lover joined him in death, his head rolling freely across the dirt floor.

I dispelled the darkness, and was surprised to find Jasmine not immediately shouting at me. She’d tried to save a dead man, and yet for some reason she looked more sad now than angry at me for not helping more.

“You just can’t save them all,” she whispered, just loud enough that I could hear it.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s fine,” she said hoarsely. “That’s just how these things go, isn’t it?”

I nodded. He didn’t know what he was getting into.

Even if I didn’t really feel sad for the death of someone I’d just met, it was still a shame.

Adventuring really was a shit job.

“We do have a more pressing concern,” I said, trying to keep my words from seeming too dispassionate. There were still three Altered bats in front of us, pecking at Naomi’s body rather than attacking us. It was only a matter of time until they noticed their next prey.

Jasmine pulled herself together with remarkable speed. “Right. Let’s get this done.”

She shouted a short incantation in the span of a single second. Another one of the brain-searing bolts flew from her hand. A warm wind brushed my cheek as it passed me, and another bat clicked its last.

I didn’t know enough true spells to contribute my own ranged attack, so I drew magic from the ever-present threads of it thrumming through the world, coalescing them into an ethereal, roiling mass of power inside both of the daggers clipped to my side. I could feel myself getting weak in the legs as I did so, but I knew I was still within my limit for the day. I could materialize a decent bit more magic before I started really hurting.

I’d only brought two daggers with me, but the Byron family’s knife fighting style only mandated one in hand at any given time. The other was a little more… flexible, so to speak.

I palmed the dagger on my right and brought it up to my shoulder, noting idly that the other two Altered were beginning to fly towards us.

“Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” I whispered. “Nameless one, you shall ruin.”

With that, I flicked my right arm forward, a little snap of the wrist accentuating the motion. The words I’d uttered were not of the oathtongue, but I almost felt a sense of approval from the broken god I had bound myself to.

As far as I could tell, ruin or something similar was the primary element of my magic. Records of the god I’d sworn an oath to had long been lost to the annals of time, so I wasn’t too sure.

Whatever the case, the dagger flew true, and it left a wake of sizzling energy, the air behind it feeling darker and wronger.

The knife sank into one of the Altered, and it simply fell apart. Its flesh imploded like a rotten fruit being stepped on, revealing what probably had been organs but were rapidly degrading into dust.

Jasmine made a noise of surprise, but I didn’t bother listening to her. Instead, I started sprinting forward, my remaining dagger in hand.

Of the three bats that had killed Naomi, only one remained, and it stood on the dead man’s corpse. It jumped at me, and I ran to meet it.

Altered beasts were sometimes intelligent, but these didn’t seem to have much of a thought process behind “attack”. I ducked under a claw swipe, dashed behind it, and stabbed it in the back.

Dust to dust, I thought as meat started to slough off the monster’s back.

More clicking from the cave-in. I pulled my dagger out of the bat’s back, then glanced at the bat I’d killed with a thrown blade. Too far to reach in the moment I had before the next wave would be on me.

Rather than waste precious seconds going for the other dagger, I knelt down next to Naomi’s body. Sure enough, the still-loaded shotgun was next to him, having acquired a new coat of crimson coloring.

Any noble child worth raising had had extensive arms training along with their magical education, and I had been one of them once upon a time. The firearm felt natural in my hand.

I had picked up the gun not an instant too soon. With my dash forward, I was only ten or so paces from the hole, and another bat tried to close that miniscule distance.

It almost made it halfway to me before I squeezed the trigger. The report of the gun, so deafening earlier, seemed almost muted when I was holding it. Come to think of it, Naomi had been an Aedi oathholder. He’d probably enchanted it to be quieter for himself.

He’d definitely enchanted the shells, at least. There was a muted detonation inside the bat, and even with my limited magic sense I could detect the wave of oath-created power emanating from its innards.

Another Altered. Another shot.

I heard yet another click and fired again. This time, though, the blast dinked off the Altered like I’d only thrown a rock at it.

I cursed. This bat didn’t look any different, which meant it was my bullet that had failed. He must have run out of magic power. The rest of the bullets weren’t enchanted.

I flicked my dagger into the bat instead, rolling aside to avoid its diving grab at me. It flew far past me before falling, almost making it all the way to Jasmine.

I could still hear more coming, and I had no more knives and an ineffectual shotgun.

Swearing silently, I summoned magic as fast as I could, drawing on my oath hard. A blast of pain in my chest accompanied it, sudden and sharp. I stumbled back but continued, passing the ball of power into the shotgun’s tip.

I started backing up. I needed to get my knives back to have a fighting chance against the mass of Altered beyond the cave-in.

Another Altered bat flew at me, and I reacted off pure instinct, swinging the gun like a club.

I silently thanked whoever had constructed the thing, because it didn’t so much as crack as it hit the bat. The bat, however, fared significantly worse, cracks in its body radiating out from the point of impact. I clubbed it again. Hopefully that would confirm the kill, but I wasn’t confident. Blunt objects worked a lot less well with the magic my oath granted.

I backed up another three steps, then stumbled. There’d been a waylaid boulder that I hadn’t seen. Combined with the pain I could still feel from the overdraw on my oath, I fell on my ass.

The bat was still alive, if only barely. It started dragging itself to me, leaving behind a trail of glistening blood. Even then, it was moving faster than I’d be able to run.

A searing heat passed by my side, followed by another. The Altered crawling towards me stopped moving, and off by the cave-in, another one dropped to the ground.

“You know you do have a partner,” Jasmine admonished me. “Please don’t do that again.”

Huh. She’d actually saved me. I wished I could say I would’ve done the same thing in her shoes.

“Let’s back off for now,” she said. “I think they won’t attack us if we do.”

Was she trying to gain my trust for something? I didn’t know what a noble lady would want from someone who was ostensibly a civilian, but there was an outside possibility that she’d heard rumors about my true lineage.

I shook my head clear of the thoughts. There was a more immediate issue to focus on.

“Yeah, let’s wait for the others.”

The other adventuring party reached us almost fifteen minutes later.

A single glance at them was all it took to reveal why they’d taken so long. Levolo was limping, a long, bloody gash at his side barely healed. Right, Skye was a Nacea oathholder. Skye, the pink-haired girl herself, was also nursing a wound on her arm. Though it looked like the cuts had been deep, neither of them were bleeding anymore. The benefits of being in a party with a healer, I supposed.

“Are you all alright?” Jasmine asked.

“A little beaten up, but otherwise yes,” Skye replied. “We did manage to clear one nest, though. What happened here?”

“The duo ran into the other nest,” I said. “We didn’t make it in time.”

I neglected to mention the fact that Naomi had still been alive and healthy when we got here. I didn’t want to get dragged into an unnecessary argument over whether we could have saved them.

“That’s a shame,” Skye’s brother said. Kai, that was his name. “This happens almost every job these days…”

Something about his tone of voice made me feel like he hadn’t expected us to survive, either.

Jasmine nodded. “I’ll see what my House can do for their families once we get out of here.”

Nobody responded, but I could see visible surprise on Kai’s face.

“Nest remains inside, yes?” Levolo asked, the Ditas oathholder pointing at the cave-in. “No nest mother at other nest, so she must in here, yes?”

At my nod, the last member of their party—I couldn’t remember her name for the life of me, she was the Und oathholder with a massive sword—hefted her weapon. “Yeah. Let’s go, then.”

Skye looked at Jasmine. “You said you were a class four Igni oathholder, right? Have you learned the classical fireball yet? Usually, we’d just get Levolo to smash down obstacles, but he needs to conserve his strength while he recovers.”

“I can cast it,” Jasmine said. “Do you want me to do it now?”

“On my signal,” Kai said. “Give me a second.”

Kai started casting, chanting in the oathtongue and gesturing precisely. It looked like his spell had a material component as well, a carefully placed icy rock on the ground that was beginning to dissolve.

The first sign that something was happening was loose dirt by the cave-in swirling up into a cloud. It would’ve been a pretty common occurrence in the plains just outside of Yaguan, but there was no wind to be seen here.

It swirled in slow motion, as if someone had forgotten to tell the dust that it was supposed to fly. I squinted. It looked like there were flakes of ice forming in spots. They might actually have been ice, too— there was a noticeable chill permeating the ambient air.

“An embrittling storm,” Jasmine noted. “Impressive for an Und oathholder that’s only class two.”

“You recognize it,” Skye said. “You’re knowledgeable.”

Jasmine shrugged. “An education in oathholding is expected out of any noble, even ones from House Rayes.”

I’d never gotten to finish mine, but I had a passing familiarity with the art.

“Now,” Kai grunted. “Use it now.”

Jasmine shouted something in the oathtongue, and a blazingly red sphere blasted out from her hands. The classical fireball, at least the one under the Ceretian magical system, wasn’t actually so much fire as it was a combination of heat and force with a thin veneer of flame. Generally first accessible to oathholders of the god of fire and light, most decent mages would be able to learn it eventually.

It was an exceptionally effective tool, even when weakened by the lack of light underground. Jasmine’s fireball slammed into the cave-in. The fallen boulders, weakened by Kai’s embrittlement storm, shattered like so many pieces of glass. Skye barked an incantation, and a weak wall of force appeared in front of us, preventing the shrapnel from hitting our motley group of six.

Dust filled the tunnel, but even with the visibility lowered to almost nothing, I could make out innumerable dark forms behind it. The tunnel must have opened into a cavern or something, because clicking sounds were converging on us from all sides. If the man who’d given us the job was correct, this nest would also have the nest mother, which probably meant an abnormally powerful Altered was waiting for us inside.

The girl who barely spoke in the party of four—Ainsley, the Und oathholder, I finally remembered— stuck her hand out behind her as the dust cleared. Skye slapped her hand to Ainsley’s, and the latter’s body glowed. Some form of enhancement magic?

As Ainsley received the boost, she took off, Levolo a good five or six paces behind her. Whatever Skye had done, it had made the Und oathholder fast. She made it to the still-settling dust in a matter of seconds, and her ridiculously overlarge broadsword flashed a deep blue as it made contact with a bat. As she did, I could see a scattering of phantasmal tendrils bursting free from her blade, body, and the ground, each of them leading to another Altered bat. They twisted, and all the bats around her slowed drastically, moving as if they were passing through molasses. Ainsley made quick work of them.

Und oathholders prioritized area of effect, if I remembered correctly, making this girl a perfect fit for this situation. They were scary in their element.

As Ainsley executed one final slowed monster, she kicked off the ground, flipping back and allowing her party’s tank to take the lead. He didn’t seem like anything special, beyond being an exceptionally strong man clad in magically enhanced steel, but he’d cast a spell and the bats were on him like flies on honey. He smashed them methodically, wielding a massive mace that must have hit with the force of a derailed train. Further back where we were, I could see Kai casting another spell, and whatever he was doing, it looked like it was weakening the bats that were on Levolo.

For our part, Jasmine was contributing with a few basic fire spells of her own, combined with what must’ve been a magically enhanced shot from her revolver. I didn’t have anything ranged other than Naomi’s shotgun, and that gun wouldn’t hurt any of the Altered, their damned magical skin protecting them from any unaltered bullet. It did look like the coordinated effort of the other five would be enough, though.

Even as the thought passed through my mind, I felt a presence. It invaded my mind, and every instinct in my body flared up, telling me that I should be utterly terrified. My body seized up, and my mind wanted to follow suit, but fear was an old friend of mine, and anger was an older and dearer one.

I gnashed my teeth in rage. How dare a pathetic little shit of a nest mother try to touch my mind? It had to be the nest mother casting some form of intimidation spell, I had no doubt in my mind about that. None of the other Altered bats should have been able to cast magic.

The fucker was going to pay for this.

The wave of burning anger having washed away the mind-numbing fear, I noticed that the others had been caught up in the effect as well and some of them were also shaking it off.

“That’s the nest mother!” Jasmine shouted the obvious. “She must be coming out soon!”

The number of bats had decreased, in large part due to the efforts of Ainsley and Levolo. The nest mother must have decided that it was time to attack the people killing its children.

I finally got a clear view of the end of the tunnel, now that the dust has settled and the next phase of our fight was about to begin. It did indeed lead into a small cavern, inside which the nest was housed. It wasn’t particularly large, only around the size of a modest farm and house, but it was still spacious enough to host the dozens of bats we’d fought past already.

The nest mother appeared, and it was big. At least two times as large as any of the bats we’d fought before, and maybe half again as tall as Levolo. If it got any larger, it would likely have trouble navigating the tight tunnels of the mine.

“That’s a Sonni Altered bat mother,” Jasmine announced, sprinting ahead of the group. “It will have at least some level of spellcasting ability with oaths to Und and Voci.”

That was going to be rough. Hopefully, having an enemy monster with an oath to the god of plague wouldn’t mean permanent damage for us.

The six of us started to advance, and then it all went wrong.

Rather than approach us, the bat hissed. Or at least, I thought the Altered was hissing, but even regular bats didn’t make that cry. The sound had been gas, foul and yellow and plentiful, and it flooded the cramped tunnel in the span of heartbeats.

My legs locked up. Then my arms. Then my chest. I could still stand, and I could still feel my body parts, but whatever that gas was made of, it wasn’t allowing me to utilize my muscles, and I couldn’t move an inch. I couldn’t even turn my head to look at the others, but the lack of footsteps meant that it was a safe assumption that it had affected everyone the same.

Not a lethal poison, thankfully, but it wouldn’t be much better in a few moments when the bat came to us.

I was hoping Skye had a response, what with her being our resident healer as a Nacea oathholder, but she stayed paralyzed. Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen her recover from the first wave of terror. Was she still affected?

Shit. As a Ditas oathholder, Levolo might’ve been able to do something, but it was very possible he didn’t possess the right spellcasting knowledge to unparalyze himself.

Jasmine was ahead of us all, having started her approach towards the nest mother earlier than the rest of us, and she had no counter to this.

The bat continued loping towards us, magically enhanced claws scraping out a keening sound against the ground, the noise of sharpened bone on rock spine-shiveringly unpleasant.

I wasn’t willing to die here, and though I didn’t have any particular investment on keeping the others safe, Jasmine wasn’t bad company and I did still need a partner. Would be a shame if I pissed her off and let everyone get eaten.

With my limited chest, I took in as deep a breath as I could, and I started drawing magic power. Anything I could get, even if it was impure or improperly formed. I had never had sufficient training in oathholding before my House had been dismantled by the kingdom, and my list of spells was functionally empty right now. This was going to be a messy affair.

I could feel the effects of the overdraw on my oath almost immediately. A blinding migraine smashed into my skull with the force of an angry god. My lungs began to protest as the air I breathed was used up far faster than I could replenish it. My heart felt as if I had just shoved a wooden stake through it. I kept pulling magic from the world, my oath with a broken god stretching and twisting with every moment.

By the time I had gathered enough to physically manifest a ball of power, I could barely see through the distortions in my vision brought on by the effects of my oath on my body. But I had accomplished what I needed, and that was enough magical energy to destroy. To cleanse. To degenerate.

The magical power spread through my body, and though it burned itself out almost as fast as it spread the paralyzing gas running through my veins got burnt out faster.

I could move again, but it had cost me. Dark spots were clouding my eyes, and I reckoned I probably had another forty or so seconds before I passed out from the sensation of knives being twisted into my heart and mind.

I’d dropped my knife at some point. I couldn’t be bothered to pick it up. The bat was already almost at Jasmine.

I took a step. Another. I was still holding Naomi’s shotgun, and blindly, I fished for the slot where the shells entered the weapon. It was a pump-action, but it had been modified enough for ammunition to be easily accessible to the wielder.

I passed my magic power into the few remaining shells inside. With my magic, those shells would ruin the gun in the next three or four shots. All I needed.

One more laborious step. I dropped to one knee to support myself.

The nest mother was going to reach Jasmine before I did. The woman who had decided to call herself my partner was beginning to move, arms pulling back inch by excruciating inch, but it would be far too long before she could do anything.

I took aim. Squeezed the trigger. Again. Again. Aga-

The shotgun shattered in my hands, but the necessary damage had been done. Three new gaping voids had appeared in the nest mother, edges glistening with destructive magic.

Behind me, I could hear footsteps. Someone had finally broken free. Hopefully, they’d confirm the kill.

The last thing I saw before the world went dark was Jasmine, turning to me with an emotion I couldn’t describe in her eyes.