Two years had come and gone. Eight seasons worth of change in the new world with a new life.

Damien's family had grown by one member and the area he was allowed to explore had expanded. He'd gone around the Village he was born in a few times, but nothing had stood out as exceptional. It was bigger than your average Village considering that it had an Association, but it was too small to justify having a town hall built and a mayor established with a protection detail from the Empire.

The Village was located just south of the Great Cross, the mountain range Damien had seen while falling that split the continent into three distinct chunks. It exported iron and wood to stay afloat while managing a relatively harmless tier-one Dungeon that was near the iron mine.

The Association was an elegant way of saying Guild in Damien's mind, but he had gotten comfortable with the term since. He'd asked if Guilds existed and wasn't disappointed as they did exist, but were more specialized to the type of strength you had. For instance, there was no Mage Guild or singular Combatant Guild, but there were guilds for both: An Ice Mage Guild, a Fire Mage Guild, a SpellBlade Guild, a Paladin Guild... etc. There was even an Assasins Guild if one knew where to look.

The Guilds only accepted those that passed an admittance test which was far from simple and each Guild ranked their members internally after the test. Guilds gave no tangible benefits to their members but the repute of claiming a Guild's name was immense as it stated you were up to their standards. Requests that were sent to a Guild specifically would be handled only by its members that were competent enough to complete it and naturally, the Guild would take a cut of the reward. Ultimately, the Guilds were a place where like-minded individuals could confer and get specialized work while boosting their prominence.

The Association was something completely different than this. There were no ranking systems in place and there was no test. The Association was a place for requests to be placed and fulfilled; that was it. It bothered with no politics and cared not if its members died. If you took on a threat without thoroughly investigating it or heeding the warning the Association gave in the request, it was better to be rid of you than let you propagate. Danger ratings were the only ranking system The Association used to limit the deaths of their Contractors.

From all he'd seen though, if someone was smart in the way they prepared for a contract, being a Contractor was not all that dangerous. You took work you were strong enough to handle and completed it. If you bit off more than you could chew, then you'd only have yourself to blame for the deaths of you and your crew. It was a system that Damien quite liked because, in a way, it threw the responsibility for one's safety ultimately on themselves, which almost guaranteed all the contracts would be completed.

Adventurer was not a term used in this world as those who did explore and go on adventures in it were Nobles and wealthy Contractors. More often than not, such people never returned from those adventures either. Whether they sailed west to unknown lands or explored more in depth the highest points of the mountain ranges, few ever brought back anything of value.

As romantic the idea of a true adventure was, the general population worked with purpose to complete a task. A contract was meant to be fulfilled in the most expedient manner possible and if not, penalties could be enforced and bad reviews were given. If your review rating fell low enough, you wouldn't be allowed to take on important or well-paying jobs such as protection details and extermination requests.

All that being said it wasn't as if the Association was such a cold place to be. It had only established a reputation of frigidity to ward off any potential misnomers that it was a place of fun. The receptionists cared for the members of their branch just like anyone would. They did their best to keep novices from dying and were always a beacon of light for those who'd had a bad contract. The Association was bittersweet but most who worked there or for contracts were happy.

Damien had noted that there were no Guilds in this Village or within a large distance of his Village. Guilds were only present in the big cities across the Empire, with the main offices exclusively being located in Fornalis, the capital city of the Empire. The closest large city to Carlon was west approximately one month of travel away and named Hathen.

Alexa had trouble fitting in with their family at first due to the fact she was used to a higher standard of living. Once she'd begun to get used to their style though, she'd blended in nicely.

She and Damien had taken up residence in the room next to the office further down the hall. They were originally given two rooms across from each other but after several incidents of Damien sneaking into Alexa's feathers to sleep, his parents caved and used the other as storage again. He'd never really explored much in the two rooms before but he knew they'd been used as storage rooms for Garrett's work. Damien didn't want to force his dad to move everything out and Alexa didn't mind sharing her feathers so....

No matter what he told himself though, Damien always knew he'd done it for selfish reasons. No way was he going to give up the softest bed in existence even if there were hundreds of storage rooms for Garrett. But as long as he used his inherent childish charms and a little reason he'd almost always get what he wanted, so no need to tell anyone the truth.

Beds were nice in this world but a far cry from what they were on Earth and even those paled in comparison to the heaven that was a Celestials wings.

Alexa was nine now and looked it, which was confusing in multiple ways, the biggest one being the fact that it was confusing to him at all. His body was now four years and two months old, but with the longer days and longer years, he looked around six in Earth standards. He should have looked closer to seven, but another thing he'd noticed was that Humans also took longer to physically age, though not by as serious a degree as Celestials. Alexa was closer to fifteen in Earth years, yet due to the slower development, she seemed her actual age to him. To everyone else on this planet, she looked young, probably five or six in their years... thinking too deeply about it hurt his mind.

Humans became fully grown adults by the age of thirteen on average depending on genetics and progress made with mana manipulation, which also slowed the aging process. Luckily it didn't slow it down too immensely for the first twenty years of life. He'd thought he was going to be stuck as a child for fifty of this worlds years and it had terrified him, much to the amusement of his parents and Vanessa.

Vanessa visited almost daily and stayed over a few times after Alexa didn't sleep the first night she was here. Those he referred to in his memories as the golden days.

Vanessa worked as the Villages healer, used only for life-threatening injuries or poisons. When she wasn't performing as a healer, she worked at the Association as an advisor to the branch leader there. She was one hundred and fifty-two and specialized in healing and defensive magic while communed with the God of life. She'd had to heal ten's of thousands of injuries and save thousands more from the brink of death before he'd gifted her with the knowledge of life.

According to her, it wasn't that her magic became stronger, but that she knew how to fix an injury instead of just merely throwing mana at it to accelerate the healing process. She knew how to set a bone so it would heal correctly. She knew how to reconnect tissues and muscles so they would fix themselves in seconds. She could mold the pieces of a punctured heart back into place before using magic to seal the wound.

Essentially, she had the same understanding a doctor did, but only instinctually. When he asked her about the specifics of healing damaged muscles and bones, she could only describe her knowing what to do as a feeling she got when healing. However, she was getting better and better as time went on, which meant she was probably understanding more and more what this feeling was conveying to her even if she didn't get the intricacies of the human body.

If he was right, Damien theorized that he had a massive advantage in this world. It was a given that the Gods gave knowledge to those who communed with them, but it seemed that knowledge was limited by what the person knew and experienced themselves. If someone didn't know anything about ice other than that is was cold, they might learn how to create it rather than just willing their mana to make something cold. If someone knew how to make it, they'd learn how to mold it, how to create a blizzard with it, how to shape it, how it expanded when frozen.

This was all speculation of course, but Damien was confident he was right. Before someone communed with an element, it was suggested they spend at least ten years with the element by their side, constantly studying it. Why else would they study their element before communing with it with a God that gifted knowledge?

That being said, what would you get if you had someone who understood healing as much as a doctor? Someone who understood the properties of metals as much as a chemist? Someone who worked as an electrician in his past life communing with the God of lightning? Would he be a monster that was limited only by how much mana he could manipulate? He'd already wanted to be a lightning mage, but once he figured this out it had set his decision in stone. He could even commune with the God of healing and become a better Healer than Vanessa, though that would take years of healing but when he did...

He already knew most of what people received when they communed with their God.

He knew how to burn fire hotter. He knew how lightning was created and how it interacted with its environment. He knew how fast light moved and how to magnify and focus it to create heat. Hell, he knew how to compress air.

That had been what surprised him most. No one here understood that you could compress the air. No one could fathom it was possible to create a literal bomb out of your environment with air. No one had even learned that hot air lifted and cold air sunk, creating weather patterns because of the sun's influence.

It was ironic, really. This worlds power was based entirely on knowledge, yet the constant war and reliance on magic had basically stemmed the tide of science. That and the fact that all records of civilization prior to 2000 years ago were eradicated completely. Cleanly. As if all knowledge and culture ceased to exist, leaving only people naked and scattered throughout the continent surrounded by monsters.

Many had theories on what happened but it was clear no one had figured it out. Knowledge had left the World and the Gods were the only ones that knew why, made clear by the way they shared knowledge beyond what anyone else knew and by the way they had made known the age of the World.

He'd also learned of the academy that Alexa was planning on attending. Called Eleram based on the world's name, it was a place that any and all could attend for knowledge and was governed separately from the powers of the continent. It was known across the planet and its laws were respected by threat of retaliation of the worlds most dangerous mages.

Eleram accepted everyone at the age of eleven and no sooner. This was because the races all had the ability to manipulate mana by then and had a year to become adept at some manipulation of it by then. The academy kept them until they'd turned seventeen. After that, they had the option of staying as a teacher to further their studies in the academy or leaving. Like the Guilds of this World, the only requirement to enter the academy was a test of the person's dedication to magic. If they were found lacking, they were sent home immediately. Nobles could not buy their way in and slaves had the opportunity to become masters of their respective fields. There were tests every year to reaffirm your ability to stay in the academy, but other than the testing it was free, making its revenue on exporting of superior crafted goods and high profile extermination requests.

The last thing he'd learned about that was of any importance was of monsters. Beasts, demons, creatures of the dark... they were called many things but they all meant one thing if you didn't kill them: death. From giant birds to reptiles that looked like a velociraptor, the planet had many dangers constantly lurking all throughout it.

Many of these monsters lived in Dungeons that were all over the land. Dungeons in this World spawned these horrors that terrorized the world but could never be completely erased from existence. A Dungeon was created when a monster burrowed into a mountainside or found a cave leading inward, drawn by a dense source of mana that had been calling it. Once it did, it would set up a nest and stay near it, soaking up ambient mana and growing stronger. Finally, once strong enough, it would begin splitting off pieces of itself to leave the dungeon and kill or find a new core of mana to use as a source, starting the process over again.

Killing these monsters enriched with mana would transfer some of the mana into the being that killed it, building upon their own power, and would grant the killer access to the mana stone. This was a two-way street, meaning that if Contractors died to the creatures, they could become stronger or, if enough fell to them, even evolve into something worse.

Unfortunately, this also meant that sentients killing each other granted that same boost in abilities, another reason wars were so prevalent throughout this world.

In any case, walking into the woods was asking for death, whether it was by a slime or a member of the Demi-Human race who were a twisted version of Humans. Some were peaceful and acknowledged the rule of the Emperor, but others were too far gone. Lions that lusted for death and battle regardless of the stakes, ogres that devoured all they came across, Goblins that raped and pillaged, and many others. Walking into the forest alone was a death sentence for most in dangerous areas and it was assumed that dungeons were the reason many didn't come back from their adventures into the high mountains. Locations of a few dungeon caves were known of in the Great Cross, but few had been taken down and almost none by the one who found them. Reporting a new dungeon was rewarded with hefty amounts of gold to discourage an adventurer dying in an attempt to handle it by himself.

Opening his eyes from his introspection, Damien was met with the face of the girl that was his bed. He reached out and gently scratched at her feathers, hoping to get her to release him, but it only caused her to wrap him up in a tighter embrace.

Sighing, he lifted his hand near his face and spoke in a whisper, "If you don't let me out I am going to pick your nose."

The girls face twitched but she remained otherwise unmoved. When he began moving his finger towards her face, she spoke up, "I told you, do that ever again and I'll set your hair on fire."

She didn't move after that. He didn't either, frozen in place.

Eventually, boredom got the best of him and he spoke again, "Please, Alexa? I need to start my practice."

Alexa rolled over to her other side, dragging his tiny body in the process.

"You use me as a bed for the night so you'll wake up when I want to. The sun hasn't even risen yet, go back to sleep. I'm your teacher dammit, listen to me when I say you need to sleep more. It's just a silly dungeon," Alexa finished, speaking the last part groggily before her breathing relaxed and she was back asleep.

Letting out another sigh, Damien contemplated his options. One: force his way out. He could do that. He was stronger than her physically now, though not by much. Celestials had a ridiculously strong base but luckily weren't suited to be Combatants. They had a high affinity with mana in general, causing their bodies to be dense with it and allowing them to sense it practically at birth, but in exchange, refining their bodies any further was impossible because of an intense backlash received when trying to take in foreign mana to integrate it with their body. They could only be mages, absurdly strong ones at that.

He was confident he was stronger than ninety-nine percent of the people his age in fact. The year of training he'd done to enhance his physical body was over and he'd gained more than he'd hoped for, nearly doubling what he'd expected to get. He finally ended up sitting at about three times as strong as he should have been.

Unfortunately, none of that mattered in the face of Alexa. She was extremely possessive of him when sleeping. He figured it was most likely a comfort thing, her cuddling him in place of a body pillow or stuffed animal to sap warmth from. If Damien did start moving, she'd probably squeeze him tighter until he couldn't move an inch unless he strained, at which point he'd end up hurting her. He refused to harm any member of his family, even as a joke.

Two: he could coat his body in frost and chill her out, which would work in getting her to let him go and he wouldn't even lose his bed privileges, but she'd torture him throughout the day.

In fact... if he really thought about options three and four, all situations where he tried to go against her wishes right now would lead to pain from his teacher later. The only times he managed to get out without repercussions were when he successfully convinced her, or they left the window open and a pebble flew inside and hit her... which, now that he pondered it, happened more often than random chance.

He did his damndest to repress the third sigh then just hugged his pillow back and tried to fall asleep again, hoping for a rock. His life was being dictated by a child and worse, there was nothing he could do about it.

Emily led her son and adopted daughter up out of the residential district of their Village toward the northern gate.

"Now, repeat what I said again, both of you," she demanded.

"Don't leave your sight," Both replied in monotone behind her back as they followed along.

"I mean it you two, this isn't practice. I know you've been outside the gates before but never to look for a fight. Please keep that in mind," Emily reiterated, glancing back.

"Yes mom."

"Yes ma'am."

"I guess that's the best I can expect," She muttered.

Emily knew she'd repeated herself over ten times today, but it was vital they remembered. If they didn't listen, they could die. However unlikely with her there. The two were dangerous as far as newly starting mages were concerned and probably didn't even need her tagging along for a tier one dungeon, but it never hurt to be cautious.

"Also, Damien, I don't want you doing anything if we hear or notice anyone in our close proximity. As I said before if you're see-"

"I know mom. I won't even use any mana, I promise."

She and Garrett had been downplaying how serious it was that Damien could manipulate mana so young and no one wanted to find out just how intensely the Empire would react if they found a boy capable of manipulation at the age of four. At best, they'd take him in for questioning and tests for a few years. At worst, they'd send a squad to acquire him by any means possible and they'd never see him again.

Nodding her head she opened her mouth again, "And-"

"I have the dagger in my belt, the shiv in my sleeve, and the short sword on my back. I'll be ok, mom. Stop worrying about us. You're making us more nervous by being so stressed."

"Ok, ok."

Stopping herself from going over everything once again, Emily and her kids finally reached the northern district of their Village. It was divided into four separate areas, each serving its unique purposes. Shaped as an oval, the Residential district took up a third of the lower half, furthest away from the dangers of the mountain. In the middle, taking another third, the Commerce district and Worker districts shared the space split down the center, on the west and east sides respectively.

The district they were currently in was the Northern district. It housed the Association, all the Inns, and the taverns while also being the gateway between the Village and the mountain.

Exiting through the gate with a smile and wave to the nearby guards with surprised expressions, the three moved to the main road that lead up the mountain toward the Dungeon.

After about two hours and fifteen miles of jogging through the forest they arrived, none the worse for wear. All three were exceptional specimens physically when compared to an average person, so it surprised none of them that they'd been able to keep such a fast pace so lightly.

The guard periodically patrolled this road so it was also no surprise they met no difficulties on their way.

Staring into the entrance of the first Dungeon Alexa had ever seen was... ominous to say the least. It looked really dark. Spooky.

She had second thoughts about going inside at all. It was around six meters wide and about four meters tall, making her wonder just what kind of creature was large enough to need to carve a cave this enormous. If it was just as big or even half as big, Alexa didn't want to find out.

As if answering her thoughts, a guardsman spoke up next to her, causing her to jump.

"The cave was carved out by earth mages after the forward camp was built, if ya look here n... here, ya can see it's too smooth ta be done with claws. The bigger tunnels let us use er weapons 'thout worry while we take care to keep the little beasties inside at a manageable level."

He finished his explanation and turned to look at Alexa after pointing out spots where it was clearly too smooth to be done by a monster, causing Alexa to feel a bit embarrassed for her earlier worry.

"Ya must be Vanessa's niece. It's nice ta meet ya. And boss! Ya look as beautiful as usual dear, is that ur boy I never met?"

"Boss?" Alexa heard Damien murmur beside her.

"Henry! It's good to see you too. Please call me by my name it's embarrassing," Emily said, approaching the scruffy man and giving him a friendly hug.

"Not a chance boss, feels too weird," the man replied, smiling.

Alexa watched the two interact then turned to look at Damien. The boy was glaring at the guard like he wanted to burn a hole through his face with his eyes. Seeing him like this, confident enough to stare daggers at a guard, was enough to sweep away the rest of the anxiety Alexa had been feeling.

Damien had a way of calming her nerves. A way of easing her mind that no one else had. Perhaps it was how strong he was for a four-year-old that did it, or maybe it was the extreme contrast between his confidence and age that put her off guard enough to relax. She didn't know, but she never slept as soundly as she did when the boy was around and was less prone to agitation as well.

And she loved his wing massages, being the one thing he could do in any situation that would stop her from being mad at him.

She walked up to him and picked his small body up, throwing him up over her shoulders into a forced piggyback, grabbing his arms to keep him from getting away.

She giggled as he struggled against her but held him firm. She knew he was stronger than her, but due to how light he was there wasn't any way he could get out without hurting her and he wouldn't hurt a fly.

The two adults finished their catching up before the conversation finally turned back to business and Alexa refocused on their talk.

"So, ya goin in with the young miss n leavin the boy to me then?" Henry asked,

"Actually, he'll be coming in too. I plan on making him start learning young. Don't worry, I'll keep an eye on him," Emily said.

The man, Henry, looked at Damien and Alexa with a strange expression.

'Why... does it look like he is pitying us?' she wondered.

"Ya gonna run him like ya used to run us then aye? The poor fellow is yet to be eight yet you're puttin him through your trainin..." The guard turned to Damien and her with a sad look in his eyes, "Ah figured she might do this. Ah tried to getcha out of the mix little man, but ya can't be saved. She nearly killed me n the rest ah the crew doin tha same trainin. Ya got a brute of a ma, an ogre in the skin of a maiden. I'll keep ya in my pra-"

A loud clang of metal echoed out across the forest, quieting all the wildlife and sending a few birds flying off into the air. Alexa's hair and nerves immediately stood on end as she watched Emily glare at the guard twitching on the ground with her hand raised like she was trying to melt the rest of his armor through sheer willpower alone. Emily then glanced over to the other guardsman who'd been standing near his partner.

He immediately stood at attention, not daring to meet her eyes. It looked like Henry had well informed them of the training they'd been through.

"The poor man tripped, he should learn to watch his footing, shouldn't he?" Emily asked, sounding more like a statement than a question.

"Yes boss!"

"You'll tell him he needs to be more careful for me, won't you?"

"Yes boss!" he shouted one last time, looking forward.

"Good boy. You," she continued, turning and pointing at Damien who had previously gone entirely still on Alexa's back, "and you," she said, this time pointing at Alexa who immediately let go of Damien's arms, dropping him to the ground, "in."

With Emily pointing at the Dungeon, both Alexa and Damien immediately marched inside without looking back, ignoring the sounds of water being poured on the unlucky fellow who had tripped on his own feet.