“Merciful gods,” Professor Lasi said, looking up towards his ceiling, as if he could reach them himself if he tried. “Four drafts?”

“Me, Lukas, Grant Sunsbridge, Ashley Soren,” I confirmed. “I don’t know the latter two.”

“And when are you to be deployed?”

“Tomorrow night,” I grimaced. “I talked to the receptionist after, we’re to meet at the southern edge of the Shuti at nightfall.”

“So little time…”

Professor Lasi was pacing around the room, energetic even though it was hours past midnight at this point. His house was a modest size, located out of the way a few minutes’ walk from the campus of the YMU. Jasmine had suggested we come straight to his home despite the time, and sure enough he had welcomed us in at the door, looking like he was ready to go off to war but for his clothes being slightly singed.

“Four drafts, five people,” Jasmine said. “I’m coming.”

“You cannot,” Lasi said. “I will do my utmost to protect every draft, but I cannot guarantee anything. Your life will be on the line.”

“I’m used to that,” Jasmine said. “I know how you work inside and out, in a way that nobody else at this university does. I can help you save lives.”

I’d already had half this conversation with her, arguing for her to stay behind with Alex. Lukas, at least, had been able to tell Alex off because both of them knew he wasn’t strong enough to be anything other than an active hindrance in the field.

“James,” Jasmine was saying. “Please. I promise you I will survive, you and I both know how to address this sort of situation.”

“Is there any way I can convince you to back off?” The professor asked.

“This is too important to me,” Jasmine said. “No.”

Why is it so important? I had asked earlier, and she hadn’t given me a full answer. Sure, I knew she was drawn to saving lives even at the cost of her own, but this was… something else.

It didn’t matter in the moment, though. What mattered was that Jasmine wanted to accompany me into death and refused to take no for an answer.

“You’ll have to stay with me,” he said. “Both of you. Everyone that was selected. I don’t want a single one going off to fight on their own.”

“Understood,” Jasmine said. “When will you gather the drafted?”

“At noon,” Lasi said. “I shall contact my colleagues prior to then and have them direct the adventuring students to me.”

“That works,” Jasmine said. “You know how to find me.”

“I do,” Lasi said. “You two should get some rest.”

“We will,” Jasmine said. “Thank you for your assistance.”

“Thank me by staying alive,” he said. “Good night.”

“To you as well,” Jasmine said, and we left.

The city’s streets were illuminated by oathlights, but for the most part the buildings around us were dark and dormant, the TAG a notable exception. It was a little eerie, the way that everything felt so still when our situation had changed so quickly.

“You should get some sleep,” Jasmine said. “It’s late.”

“I’ll try,” I said. “You should too.”

“Tell you what,” Jasmine said. “We’re probably not going to class tomorrow anyway, so why not come over to my place?”

“You’re not in a dorm? Wait—you told me about this before. And you're a noble. Right.”

“I have a property off campus,” she said. “I think that it is a fair bit nicer than a dorm.”

“Of course,” I sighed. “I’m alright with that. Lead the way.”

“It would be my pleasure,” Jasmine grinned.

We walked through the streets, the emptiness creating a feeling that the moment we were in wasn’t quite real, like we were in a location entirely other from Yaguan.

“Remind me again why you’re risking your life?” I asked, partially to break the silence and mostly because I wanted to start up this conversation again.

“I care about saving people, and I care about you,” Jasmine said. “And I’ve worked with James for years, so I can actually help.”

“He was your teacher, last I checked,” I said. “Not your coworker. You’re aware of the risks, right?”

“We worked together on more than my education,” she said. “You normally provide less resistance to someone risking themself like this. I can recall a number of occasions.”

That was… unfortunately true. While I’d thought it unfortunate that some poor unprepared souls had perished on the battlefield with us— those two adventurers from the cave and a couple of the ones we’d met in the Sinlen Pass— I’d known that they should’ve known what they were getting into.

So why was Jasmine different? By all rights I should have had the same view towards her actions as anyone else’s, especially since she was a member of the nobility.

But as much as I hated to admit it, I had formed some form of attachment to her over the couple of weeks we’d known each other. It wasn’t a deep one, but it was there. She had a familiarity to her without being laughably incompetent, and she was easy to work with.

“I can care about people too,” I said. “Believe it or not, I’d rather you not die.”

“I appreciate that,” Jasmine said. “But I need to be there. I need to help. I can’t save everyone, but I have to do what I can.”

“What can you do?” I asked. “You’re more powerful than me, but not by all that much, and I’m going to be pretty much helpless.”

“I might be too,” Jasmine said. “All of us but Lasi are liable to. But we can help by evacuating citizens and wounded combatants. Every bit matters.”

“I’m not totally sure I buy that,” I said.

“Believe it, or don’t,” Jasmine said. “Either way, I’m coming with you.”

“Stay safe, Jasmine,” I said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“I won’t,” she promised. “A little shielding to stop indirect hits and temporary healing for downed adventurers. That’s it.”

“…fine,” I said. “I’ll do what I can. I’m liable to be useless offensively as well. If I can’t kill it, I’ll barely scratch it.”

“You’ll have your hands plenty full offensively when we’re dealing with cast-offs and offsets,” Jasmine said. “But that’s something to talk about another time, when you’re not swaying on your feet.”

“I’m not—“ I blinked, and it was slow, my eyelids heavy. I hadn’t even noticed how tired I was. As trivial a task as it had been, the clearing of the old piece of construction had taken a lot out of me, and it was deep into the night.

“You are,” Jasmine said gently. “Come on. We’re here.”

She tapped me on the shoulder and pointed towards a pathway at the end of the avenue we were on. I hadn’t even noticed where we’d gone.

Even with the imperfect illumination provided by the city’s oathlights, I could see a garden growing on either side of the cobblestone, colorful knee-high flowers forming artfully shaped patterns.

“You have a flower garden as your front lawn?” I asked.

“Uhh… yeah,” Jasmine said, a little sheepish. “House Rayes purchased it, and I do upkeep.”

“Of course,” I sighed.

The property itself was a work of architecture that I was sure someone more engaged with the arts than me would greatly appreciate. Its patterned columns and regal style were wasted on me, though, and the only thought I had was that it was big.

“You could fit a company of troops in here,” I said. “You have servants or something?”

“No, I live here alone,” Jasmine said. “I don’t use most of it.”

She led me into the house, unlocking a set of polished wooden double doors that must have been half a meter thick, and as we passed through the house I took note of a hundred little things. The paintings on the wall, military-class oathlights creating soft light through crystal chandeliers, expensive-looking carpet being relegated for a welcome mat, more rooms for both business and pleasure than I could count on both hands— it felt painfully familiar.

Once upon a time, this life was meant to be mine.

I dismissed the thought. There were times to brood on the past, but this was definitively not one of them.

Jasmine led me up a spiral staircase, its gilded railing shining under the house’s lights, and she brought me to a soft red door, the first of what must have been at least a dozen identical doors, spaced evenly down a long hallway.

“This is one of our guest bedrooms,” she said. “It has four beds in it, and in all the time I’ve been here nobody else has been in it.”

She opened the door for me, revealing a room more than thrice the size of my dorm. It was a room fit for nobility, four massive four-post beds that looked like they could swallow a sleeper whole placed evenly throughout the room. Furniture that probably cost more than my tuition tastefully arranged for any prospective guests to dine on, and a number of windows lined the halls, likely allowing rays of sunshine in during the day.

“I change up where I sleep every night,” Jasmine says. “It’s a little lonely, but that’s alright. I didn’t want to hire servants just for a house that I live out of while attending school.”

“Mmm…” I said, nodding. I was feeling the sleepiness now, a sudden onset of exhaustion that only grew when I noticed it. It had been a long day, and I was more than ready to end it.

Jasmine saw my tiredness too, and she smiled.

“I’ve a clean set of nightclothes in the washroom next door,” Jasmine said. “You can get yourself cleaned up, and then it’s bed for you.”

“Not my mother,” I grumbled, but I let her show me the way to the bathroom nonetheless.

It was, just like the rest of the house, unnecessarily opulent, but I hadn’t been surprised earlier and I wouldn’t be now. Noble Houses did like their properties, and I wasn’t about to complain when I was using one. There was a full bath and shower included with an assortment of additional lotions, soaps, and concoctions that could’ve fully stocked a pharmacy. I ignored them, simply rinsing off and changing into the silky white nightclothes Jasmine had left neatly folded on a counter.

When I came back into the bedroom, just as tired as before and even more ready to sleep, Jasmine was waiting, rising from the bed she’d chosen.

“Come here,” she said. “Let’s get you to bed.”

She tugged on my arm and gently nudged me onto the mattress closest to the door.

“Good night, Lily,” she said, patting me on the cheek.

“Good night,” I mumbled back.

She stood there for a moment longer, as if she had gotten stuck making a decision, but soon enough I saw her lithe form return to her bed.

I felt a hint of something that might have been disappointment, but soon enough my eyelids grew leaden and I let sleep take me.

Light was filtering through the window.

My eyes twitched, and I was awake. One might’ve expected me to sleep horribly the night before what would essentially be a suicide mission, but the feather mattress had been sinfully comfortable and I’d had a deep and dreamless sleep.

The sun was higher in the sky than I’d expected. I’d overslept, then. By the looks of it, it was fast approaching noon. Class would have begun already, but then this situation was not one in which attending class was my greatest priority. I would get more than my fair share of practical experience in soon, and if everything went right I wouldn’t even need to die for it.

“Morning, Lily,” Jasmine said. “You looked so peaceful sleeping that I didn’t want to wake you up.”

“Thanks, I guess,” I said. “Morning to you as well. It is still morning, right?”

“An hour till noon,” Jasmine said. “We have plenty of time.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“His outdoor lecture hall,” she said. “It’s the closest to the edge of campus, which is where our train will be.”

“The estimate for primordial surface is tomorrow,” I said. “Do we really need that much time?”

“If anything, it’s not nearly enough,” Jasmine said. “You need to consider that you are an anomaly. I still don’t know how you got so proficient with your magic and your weapons, but the vast majority of students here do not have nearly that level of comfort with their combat skills.”

“And they signed up to be adventurers?” I asked. “Why?”

“We’ve been taking almost exclusively harder jobs, but we’ve rested in between,” Jasmine explained. “A lot of them would be taking daily jobs with a far lower difficulty.”

“Like the demolition run we did last night,” I said. “So still a shitty job, just in the exhausting, mind-numbing sense instead of life threatening.”

“Just about, yes,” Jasmine said. “But they did it for long enough and got to ML 2 anyway, and from there they just had the bad luck to get drafted.”

“What are the odds of that?” I asked. “Four of the sixteen students, counting our party, were drafted, and we’re all pretty low. ML 2 shouldn’t have a high draft priority.”

“That’s just the luck of the draw,” Jasmine said. “I said we would deal with it when we got here, and we’re here now and dealing with it.”

My stomach grumbled audibly before I could formulate a response.

“Oh, I’m such a bad host,” Jasmine said. “Let me get you some food. Follow me.”

The house looked different in the light of day, more regal and somehow more lonely. At night it had felt like the household was asleep, but now it just felt empty. We passed room after luxurious room, each of them long devoid of any human presence. It was unnaturally pristine, as if it was on display and not something that Jasmine actually lived in.

“It’s unnecessary, isn’t it?” she said, catching me staring at the vacant rooms. “I asked for something modest, that wouldn’t stand out too much, and this is what they got me. I love my family, but…”

“It must be lonely,” I said.

“It really is,” she sighed. “I mislike using hired help, so here I am.”

“You should let me move in,” I said, only half-joking. “It’s a hell of a lot nicer than my dorm, lonely or not.”

“Would you truly?” she asked, and she didn’t sound like she was joking.”I get awfully alone in here, so I would have asked before, but I didn’t want to presume…”

“Presume what?” I said. “That I wouldn’t want to live in the highest value home this side of the royal castle?”

“That you wouldn’t want to live with a noble,” she said. “I can tell that you don’t like them, you know. I pay attention.”

“I can dislike nobility without hating every noble,” I said, a little surprised that she’d cared enough to tell, “And it’s not like disliking nobles is going to stop me from enjoying extravagance.”

“Yet you’ve only known me for a matter of weeks,” Jasmine pointed out. “I feared you would think this to be unacceptable.”

“That’s… fair,” I said. “But as long as you aren’t making me pay too much for this I would love to have better lodgings.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to pay me money,” Jasmine said. “Gods know House Rayes has enough of that already.”

“Then yes,” I said immediately. “Please.”

Jasmine beamed at me. “Fantastic. We can figure out the logistics once we return. For now, you should eat something.”

We made our way to a kitchen that unsurprisingly was stocked with a truly unnecessary amount of equipment. There wasn’t an incredible amount of food inside the cupboards, but that made sense given that this would all be stuff that she’d bought herself.

“I have some pastries ready to eat and milk in a cooler,” Jasmine said. “Will that be fine?”

“That’s more than fine,” I said. “I usually have school food, which for breakfast amounts to bread and water, most days.”

She opened a cupboard and found a pastry with a jellied berry center, then poured a glass of milk from a carton left in her cooler.

Jasmine knocked on the cooler as I ate. “You have one of these at least, right?”

“Yeah,” I said between bites. The pastry was delicious, and I took a few moments before speaking again. “But the cooling element is out of date, and we’re expected to top off its magic ourselves.”

“Standards these days,” Jasmine said, shaking her head. “They should be higher, with how much money flows into these schools.”

I finished up my makeshift breakfast, nodding in agreement with Jasmine’s sentiments.

“Ready to go?” asked the noble girl who I’d be sharing a home with if we survived.

“Always,” I said.

“Lukas Noben. Ashley Soren. Grant Sunsbridge. Lily Syashan. Jasmine Rayes. The five of you will be entering combat with a primordial within the next forty-eight hours. I will be accompanying you to maximize your chances of making it out alive, but I need to make the risks you are taking as clear as possible.”

We’d gone straight to the arena, finding the others already assembled there. Professor Lasi had launched into a spiel almost immediately, evidently seeing no point in wasting time.

“Do any of you know what a primordial is?”

I raised my hand, as did Jasmine and Lukas.

“Never assume your knowledge is complete, even if you think it is,” Lasi said. “When the gods left this plane of reality during their Final Departure, they did not leave without a trace in this world. In many areas, there are fragments of pure godly power remaining, simply waiting for time to pass them by. Some of them activate under certain conditions, while others will activate upon contacting anything for a long enough time.

“Primordials are created when a person, animal, Altered, or object comes into contact with an unsealed fragment of a god. Any primordial has a specific set of powers defined by the details of the fragment of the specific god that is absorbed into them. These powers are orders of magnitude higher than yours. No successful evaluation has taken place. Assume that if they had an oathholder class, even the weakest primordial is above fifty. Given time, they will scale up, and will almost always result in a nation-level threat, if not a continental one.”

“You said there were humans that become primordials,” the girl— she must have been Soren— said. I realized with a start that I recognized her. She had been the Sanyin oath practicing magic missiles with me, the one who’d exhausted herself breaking her target but had done it with sheer quantity of magic. “Doesn’t that mean we can reason with them?”

“Your job is not to reason with the primordial,” the professor said, voice ice cold. “It is to slow their growth. Humanoid primordials are already relatively rare, and the number of stable primordials in all of recorded history can be counted on one hand.”

“You say slow their growth, but not kill,” Soren said. “Why not?”

“You will not be able to kill the primordial,” Lasi said. “I will not be able to kill the primordial. It is a being far beyond your comprehension, and a being far beyond my power. Our job is to prevent it from spreading across an entire city before the people who can kill it arrive.”

“And keep each other from dying,” Jasmine added. “That’s the most important part.”

“Precisely,” Lasi said. “There’s a reason why the TAG drafts over a hundred adventurers for this job, and it’s not because they expect all of you to return home in one piece.”

“What can we even do?” Soren asked. “I’m still pretty weak, and you make it sound like there’s not a snowball’s chance in Igni’s hands for me to do anything of note.”

“Offshoots,” Lukas replied laconically.

“There occurs a phenomena known as primordial offshoots,” Lasi said, expanding on Lukas’ words. “Just as the primordial’s power was gained by a piece of a god falling and remaining on this plane, offshoots are castoffs of the primordial’s power, each of them deadly to a non-oathholder and each of them filled with the same killing instinct as the primordial. We will be primarily avoiding the main conflict and attacking offshoots.”

“I barely know combat magic,” Soren said. “I was beginning to train with my boyfriend, but that started just last week.”

“Same here,” Sunsbridge, a short light-skinned boy with dark hair said. “I have very little.”

“Then it’ll be my job to educate you, as much as I can, in the time we have remaining,” Professor Lasi said. “Let’s begin.”

Eight hours. Eight hours had been all the time we had had to learn with Professor Lasi.

We had gone over the fundamentals, the spells that most class one and two oathholders would bring into battle— the magic missile, shield, and telekinetic handling, under the Ceretian school and the fireball and slowing beam from the classic school— and then we had practiced, hour upon hour. Lasi had sent the five of us sprinting around the arena, casting magic as we did.

“With me, your job is not to kill the primordial,” he had explained. “Your job is to stay alive, and you cannot do that if you cannot run.”

He’d brought in a tall man in a dark cloak that I didn’t recognize. A Ditas oath, presumably, since he’d done something and the running had become easier, more fluid. The man had told us it would last for twenty-four hours, and Lasi had decided to make the most out of every moment of it.

When we weren’t sprinting and casting, we were just sprinting, Lasi throwing classical fireballs along with spells that forked in the air, homed in on us, or travelled through the ground.

“Every primordial is unique, and you all will need to dodge any number of attacks” had been the justification for that step.

It had been a hectic session, but it wasn’t anything that I wasn’t already used to. I was tired, yes, and my shirt had been soaked with sweat, but I was still ready to run a mission if necessary and the Ditas enhancement had been more powerful than I’d thought at first. Jasmine and Lukas were even less exhausted, the two of them not even breathing hard at the end of it.

On the other hand, the two other drafted students had suffered. Sunsbridge was on his hands and knees, and Soren was stretched out on her back. They didn’t seem unfit, but they had very clearly not undergone the conditioning regimen that combat-oriented nobles were expected to do. In the face of years of daily training and a pre-established frame for our lives, a single session was nothing.

“You have thirty minutes until the train leaves,” Lasi said. “Return to the campus building. You can clean yourself off, and then we will depart.”

“Yes sir,” Lukas said, giving a mock salute.

Sunsbridge groaned, rolling to a kneeling position. “I… need more… than thirty.”

“Get yourself cleaned off,” he said. “Professor Cayre will restore your energy.”

That was the person who’d given us the enhancement, then. He didn’t teach any of my classes, so I hadn’t recognized him.

“And before you go,” the professor said. “I have one last proposition for you.”

“Which is?” I asked.

“Don’t go,” he said. “You’ll take the years in prison, yes, but what’s a few years when the other option is death?”

“There are people I can save,” Jasmine said.

“I have a duty to my country,” Lukas said.

“If I’m in prison for a decade, my life is already over,” Sunsbridge said.

“I have people I love that I can’t afford to lose, whether that’s through prison or death,” Soren said.

“Are you sure?” Lasi asked. “I do not jest. Should you wish to back out now, please do. I’d rather a student end up imprisoned than dead.”

“And I’d rather be dead than imprisoned,” I said. “Let’s get on with this.”

And just like that, we were off.

The projected location for the primordial’s emergence was Clarsin, one of the closest villages to Yaguan. It was only twenty-two kilometers off, less than half an hour by train. I was half sure that we could’ve enlisted a Caël oath to take us all instead of bothering with train schedules, but I kept that to myself.

The kingdom was, if nothing else, organized. The village was utterly empty but for the adventurers gathered there. It had been emptied out in a matter of days, everything of value brought by the villagers during the process of evacuation. It felt fundamentally off in how what must have been a vibrant town was devoid of the presence of its inhabitants, almost like the feeling of the deep night. It was worse somehow when I knew that I could break a window in any of these homes and see the detritus of a family’s life, whether that was an abandoned cradle, a still-messy bed, or a slowly-decaying piece of unfinished food.

There were a hundred and fifty adventurers, all told, gathered from the region deemed most likely to be impacted by the surfacing.

“Listen up, everyone!” someone was shouting. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman speaking. I turned towards the sound, looking away from the window I’d been staring at.

The androgynous voice in question was coming from a person clad in full armor, the plate mail faintly shining a light shade of blue. They were at the center of the village, their party of four sat around the village’s clock tower. Earlier, their party had announced that they were the highest ranking adventuring party locally and had been given command of this mission, and nobody had felt like challenging the blue knight, their notoriety preceding them. They and their party would be in charge, for now.

Slowly, the bulk of the adventurers began to form a crowd around the blue knight and their party, massing to hear their words.

“I won’t mince words,” they announced, their voice calm but still clearly audible from any point in the village. “Most of you are going to die.”

That put an end to any other discussion that had been taking place.

“Primordials are a tough order to fight for even the full force of the Tayan military,” they said. “And we are not close to that. Our task here is to prevent the primordial from spreading.

“This village is considered lost. The surrounding three kilometers is considered lost. The kingdom’s goal is to contain and eliminate this threat before it can spread to Yaguan.

“According to our intelligence, this is a weak primordial. Its trigger was identified to have been a recently awakened piece of Nacea no more than five centimeters wide, and its target was a human teenager. Its abilities are expected to be a growth offshoot, but we can’t be sure until it surfaces.”

That would be why only a hundred fifty adventurers had been drafted, rather than every single one the TAG could get their hands on. It would be why oathholders of low class had been sent, rather than picking exclusively from the best of the best.

That, too, felt fundamentally wrong. If there was anything I knew about primordials…

“There’s no such thing as a weak primordial,” Lasi told us. “Be ready. Don’t let them fool you into a sense of security.”

Just about that, yeah.

“The primordial is projected to surface within the next hour,” the androgynous knight said. “It could emerge anywhere within a kilometer radius. Wherever it comes out, there will be casualties when it surfaces. Fan out across this village and its immediate surroundings, or risk that too many of us will die when it appears.”

They really weren’t mincing words.

Slowly, adventurers began to heed her call, positioning themselves across Clarsin. Some parties climbed the sides of the short buildings, others entered them, and still others simply found a patch of grass to stand on.

For our part, Lasi guided us to high ground. The five of us students followed him like ducks in a line, his orders to not stray too far from his person still engraved in our minds.

“Why wouldn’t we go to the clock tower?” Sunsbridge asked. “It’s higher up than this hill is.”

“You do not want to be in a clock tower when a primordial surfaces, dear boy,” the professor said. “It’s little more than a glorified coffin.”

Sunsbridge frowned, looking at the tower, but he didn’t comment further.

I followed his gaze, finding the source of his frown. The building was high, maybe twenty meters when nothing else in the town was above five, and there was already a party at the top, standing in a circle on the observation deck at its very top.

The ground shook as I looked, not enough to knock anyone off their feet but a notable tremor nonetheless.

“It’s surfacing!” Lasi shouted, a cry that was repeated across the entire village.

At the foot of the clock tower, the earth cracked, a scar the size of a house ripping itself open in the ground.

From that crack of earth came branches, numerous and thick and moving, and they inched their way up the clock tower, sprouting leaves and offshoots of themselves as they went. The plants were growing from birth to maturity in a matter of seconds, their development occurring in fast motion, and soon enough we saw and heard the clock tower crack.

“Those poor souls,” Lasi said, shaking his head. Whatever the primordial had just done, it wasn’t finished, and yet he’d already written them off as a lost cause.

The battle had begun.