Kestra had decided that moving away from her camp site would be a much better idea than sticking around for anyone with a tracking skill to locate where she had exposed her book of revelations to this new realm. She hadn't meant to forge another spell, but had hoped to trick her body into better night sight.

There was a feel to the way her Night Sight potions had affected her body, and when it got too difficult to see in the gloom of night, she stopped and concentrated on making her body feel that same affected feeling.

Congratulations!

You have successfully taught yourself the [Novice] Grade [Tiger's Eyes] spell!

+100 EXP

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Tiger's Eyes

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GRADE: Novice

See in low light circumstances like a tiger prowling the night.

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Components: None

Cost: 3 Mana to cast, 2 Mana per minute to maintain

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That gave Kestra some ideas, which she set aside for the moment. Her current priority was getting away from where she had stopped, and leaving as few tracks as possible.

Even with her new spell granting her Night Sight, Kestra couldn't move as quickly as she would have liked. The vision she gained wasn't the same as her normal vision, just enough to see where the tree trunks and brush were located, but not good enough to make out where roots tangled the ground.

Her map and the blue screens were always visible, nor did they change what she could see the way glancing over a fire at night made it harder to see into the gloom beyond the fire. The map didn't seem to give off a glow, despite somehow being more substantial than the screens.

Checking the map, she confirmed she was still heading in the right direction to get to Sortalheim.

Only one moon rose overhead, and the brilliant band of light that swayed with the seasons in the sky was no where to be seen, yet more proof if Kestra had needed it that this was not her home world.

That moon had begun its evening ascent a few hours before sunset and sat high in the sky when Kestra heard rustling in the undergrowth that didn't sound right. She stilled beside a tree trunk and slowly, stealthily set to stringing her bow.

The crunching sound of heavy, flat footfalls sounded to her right. She carefully angled her body in that direction, hoping to better see what was treading through the woods.

The crunching sound stopped. A muffled huff of breath made the hairs on the back of Kestra's neck stand up straight.

"If ya ain't hostile, show ya self," a deep masculine voice called out, not loud, but still projected to carry.

Kestra did not want to meet the natives alone and in the dark. She wasn't sure if the cities would be any better, but at least it was easier to spy upon a solitary location. She sank as far into that feeling of being One with the Land as she could enforce, letting her eyes sway focus just enough to prevent falling into tunnel vision.

A few long, slow breaths passed. Blue screens flickered at the edge of her vision, but Kestra ignored the distraction.

"This is ya last chance to show me ya ain't got bad intentions," the man said.

If Kestra could have shrunk away, she would have. As it was, she planned to hold very, very still until the man left, and then swing wide of his path.

She felt movement behind her and ducked, sending her bow back into her Holding ring while pulling out her short blades and thrusting at the body that had suddenly loomed out of the dark behind her. She felt the weighty thunk of her blades hitting armor even as she rolled away and took off running.

Crashing sounds announced her pursuers, and she didn't even get a chance to open up her stride before a weight slammed into her side and knocked her into a tree trunk.

She dropped one of her blades, sent the other back to her ring even as she twisted and tried to get a punch at the throat of the man that had charged her.

"I told ya," he grunted as he grappled her. "If ya ain't hostile show ya self!"

Kestra didn't bother saying anything, focusing on fighting to get loose. She got a knee up, braced against the tree trunk and shoved them backward. They fell, tumbling through some brush, and just when she thought she was free, the second man tackled her.

This man got hold of her arms and twisted them up behind her back until she choked out a scream of pain, muffled by the dirt.

"Stop thrashing or I'mma break your arm!" the second man warned.

Kestra shuddered at the pain, but stopped kicking.

"Puck! Status!" the second man barked out.

The first man said, "A-flipping-fine. You?"

"He stabbed me, got the jacket. Look for two long knives, be careful in case they're poisoned."

The man called Puck asked, "You cut up?"

"Nah, but my jacket's gonna need repairs. Get the damn knives secured, then come help me get our peeper sorted out."

"On it," Puck answered. A soft glow bloomed near the man's hands, directed to the ground.

The man giving the orders, and currently sitting on Kestra's back, shifted his grip on her in a way that made her wheeze in pain. When she could focus again, she felt thin bands of some hard but flexible material cutting into her arms and keeping her bound.

The man moved quickly, standing and hauling her up to her feet. He held her by her throat. "Now. What are you doing out here in our woods?"

Kestra didn't know what to say. She tried to swallow, but the grip on her throat made that difficult. "Going to Sortal--" she got out before the hand tightened.

"You're one of Ramakith's Hounds, huh?" her captor growled, his grip tightening.

"Quest! I have a quest! For the anchor!" she choked out.

The grip loosened, not by much, but enough that she could gasp in for breath.

"Tell me about this quest," he ordered.

"Visit a realm anchor, that's it! My map pointed me to Sortalheim. I don't know anything about the current politics, or this Ramakin Hound!" Kestra said.

"I only found one blade, and it's clean of any poisons," Puck said, returning with her short sword. He pointed his palm toward Kestra's feet and sucked in a breath. "Well, hello, Miss. So, ya ain't a local. Izzat what-cher sayin?"

The man behind her growled out, "Fuck a duck!" and his hand slackened on her throat even more.

Kestra swallowed, choking due to the bruising.

The man behind her grabbed her more to keep her upright than to bind her. "Minor Heal," he said, and a familiar sensation of mana-fueled recovery eased her bruising and closed up the scratches across her face.

She drew in a shuddering breath, suddenly feeling starving while the post healing exhaustion struck.

"Fuck a gods-damned duck," her captor growled again.

Kestra hadn't felt this weak in years. She fought against the dizziness and fatigue to stay conscious.

Her captor laid her down.

"She don't look she's from Earth," Puck commented.

"Shine that glow stone over her clothes," the other man said. Puck complied. "That's not linen, and these are buckskins. Boots are strange, too. Something like moccasins, but fancier. Nah, she ain't dressed like anyone we've run across so far. What do you make of her knife?"

"It's well made, but simple. No patterning to the iron, and the proportions are more like a Roman gladius than the saber styles the smiths around here favor." By the admiration in Puck's tone, Kestra wasn't going to bet on getting her blade back. The strange content of their words bothered her.

Were they transmigrators, too? But from a different world or realm?

"Well, she hasn't started on any kind of tempering, and she's got one perfectly opened aperture while the rest all look like ground gravel. I think she's a fresh drop, but who the hell knows where from."

"Back to camp?" Puck asked.

"Yeah. We can always oath bind her to keep her trap shut if she's stupid enough to continue on after hearing us out." The so-far unnamed man hoisted her up and over his shoulder. The quickness of his movements violently shoved the air out of her, and combined with her healing exhaustion, knocked her out.

She came-to staring at the man's back, swaying with his strides.

She must have passed out again because the next thing she knew she was being slipped off the man's shoulder and dumped against a stone wall. There were lights coming from enchanted bits of quartz, and several more people around them.

"You know, Tank, if you wanted some companionship, there's more than a few women in the camp who'd jump at the chance," an older woman said as she bustled over, practically shoving her captor out of way as she reached out for Kestra, a healing aura preceding her.

"She needs food if you don't want to kill her with over healing, Ruby," her captor, Tank, growled. "And we think she's a fresh drop. Said she was following a quest to Sortalheim to find the anchor there."

The older woman stopped. "She doesn't look the others you've brought back."

"Food, Ruby. Then you'll be invited to the interrogation," Tank ordered.

"Yes, Tank," she said, ducking her head and heading off.

Kestra noted that her Night Sight was gone. Probably happened when she passed out, she guessed.

The stone walls she could see were irregular, and as she looked around a bit more, Kestra realized they were in a worked cavern. She had seen enough when dungeon delving with her team to recognize the smoothing over of natural formations.

Tank squatted down in front of her, making no effort to hide the intense scrutiny to which he was subjecting her person and gear.

He was a large man, easily one of the tallest she had yet met, and seemed to be a moderately muscled man under his gear. He wore leather armor, but there were plates sewn in between thinner layers of the leather. It was an interesting idea, and one she thought might have intriguing applications for enchanting.

His skin was paler than most of the humans she was used to though darker than the elves she had met. His hair was the color of light streaming through honey, and his eyes were a pale color, too, probably gray, but she couldn't say for sure in this lighting. He had a square face, high cheekbones and wide, thin lips, a broad forehead that showed concentration wrinkles despite the man's seeming youth. If he was thirty, Kestra would be surprised.

Then again, he might be a high human, one of the heritable magically gifted apotheosis paths. In that case, thirty was barely past puberty.

Kestra had had a low affinity for mana, so she hadn't been that interested in learning more. If not for Dualla's interest, she wouldn't have known that much.

He moved like a [Scout] while radiating the hunger for conflict of a [Warrior]. A soul-deep ingrained discipline added crispness to his movements, while his bearing conveyed the arrogance of a high strata Honorable, possible even a noble.

When Tank met her gaze, he asked, "Where are you from?"

Kestra licked her lips. "Does it really matter to you?"

"Are you from the Ten Horizons?" he asked.

Kestra shifted, grimacing at the strain her bound hands put on her shoulders. "Isn't that an odd question to ask?" she responded.

"Yes or no: Are you from the Ten Horizons?" he repeated.

She sniffed. "What would you do if I wasn't?"

"Warn you that the man in charge of Sortalheim, Lord Ramakith, is hunting transmigrators. He's already managed to enslave several."

She stilled. That was good to know. "And what else?"

"That depends on you. We aren't slavers, and we don't just welcome everyone with open arms. If you want to leave, you'll take an oath that will bind you to keep our secrets, and off you go."

"With all my gear?" she asked, shooting him a skeptical look.

His jaw tightened. "We aren't thieves."

Kestra sighed. "No, I'm not from the Realm of the Ten Horizons. If there's a name for the realm or the world or what-have-you where I'm from, the gods never shared it, and Druerjan held enough dangers for us not to need to explore into draycon or gnomish lands."

Some of the tension eased out of him. "Will you swear by the Ten Horizons you speak the truth?"

Kestra narrowed her eyes and glared at the man. "What will that do?"

He smiled. "If you lie when you swear you speak truth, you lose a tenth of your total experience and skill ranks. If you swear to do something or not do something and break your oath, you suffer extreme pain, possibly have your cultivation crippled, maybe even death."

She stared at him, weighing her words. After a moment, she said, "I swear by the Realm of the Ten Horizons that I hold the title Transmigrator."

A golden glow swept over her, and did nothing else.

Tank relaxed even more. "I swear by the Ten Horizons that so long as you keep our secrets and do us no harm, nor seek to do us harm, I will not seek to harm you."

A similar golden glow swept over him. He smiled. "Return that oath and I'll let you out of your restraints."

Kestra shook her head. "I don't know you well enough to make such an oath. How about for the duration of this instance wherein I guest within your camp, for so long as I see you and yours acting with integrity, I will refrain from knowingly causing harm to you or yours within this camp?"

He pursed his lips. "That's finicky."

Kestra stayed quiet and let him think.

Ruby returned with a bowl of camp stew while Tank was thinking, and Puck showed up, as well.

"Fine," Tank said. "I'll accept that oath."

Kestra repeated it as an oath by the Ten Horizons, and Tank leaned her forward. She felt a shift of mana before the thing binding her arms released her. She never saw it, but she did spot the engraved ring on Tank's finger. Probably a ring of Holding or the like, she surmised.

Kestra fell upon the stew as soon as it was handed to her. When the blatant trembling in her muscles eased, she smiled her thanks to the older woman, but she didn't slow down. The food was barely making it to her stomach before the mana pushing her healing stole it away to fuel the magical recovery.

There were a few mana-rich herbs mixed in, but not enough to supplement her healing.

"You cracked my skull pretty good," she commented to the man Puck when her bowl was empty. "I can feel the healing like an itch under my scalp, and if there's more stew to spare, I could use the sustenance to sustain the healing."

Puck wasn't as tall as Tank, but he was close, and he was wide, broad with muscles. Both he and Tank were clean shaven, but Puck was about as dark a Druerjan human, the color of Summer-bleached dirt. His hair was a reddish shade of brown-black, and long enough that he wore it pulled back in a braid that extended down his spine, though his eyes, too, were pale. They appeared green in the current lighting.

"Well, next time someone says ta show ya self, maybe ya should listen," he said.

She bared her teeth at him in what might have been charitably called a grin. "Yeah, I'll do that the next time the goblins are migrating and looking for a snack."

Ruby looked over at Tank. "What is a goblin?"

"On Earth, just a myth. What is your name, by the by?" Tank asked.

She bit back her instinctive scowl. "Huh. I'm going to have to learn a whole new Etiquette," she muttered to herself. Louder, she said, "You may call me Kestra." In case there was some power of names shenanigans later on, she decided to withhold the Boom-Smiter surname that showed up on her Profile.

"Kestrel? That a kind of falcon?" Puck asked.

"Kes-tra," she said, emphasizing the syllables of her name.

Ruby smiled. "So, Kestra, why do you speak of goblins if they are myths?"

"I'm not from this Earth place," Kestra said, adding, "and goblins are ravenous sub-sapient colony monsters. The easiest way to deal with them is to spray them with something that interferes with their sense of smell, so they turn on each other. Get enough of them to cannibalize their colony and they'll undergo an advancement into a hobgoblin. Hobgobs will naturally finish off the rest of their colony, and then you just need a Silver rank guild team to take out the hobgob when it starts looking to scavenge mana from something not goblinoid. If they're just hatched at a spawn point, they usually won't get the numbers to start a migration, but if they're being spawned by a lair, well, tracking down the lair becomes a major priority for all sapient species, natural or spawned."

Ruby blinked. "Spawned? Like frogs?"

Kestra shook her head. "Mana pools in different locations, and Elamshaq, the god of tribulations, will sometimes turn those pools into spawn points. Creatures that require a mana-rich environment to propagate will then seed the spawn points with their essence, and monster eggs form. Under the right circumstances, the eggs hatch, and you get new monsters."

Kestra's belly rumbled and Ruby excused herself.

"You, ah, believe that monsters come about because of this god?" Puck asked, looking uncomfortable.

Kestra snorted. "No. Monsters are just mana-hungry beings. Humans that can't live without mana are technically monsters, even if it's not polite to say so. No, they aren't there because of Elamshaq, but he's the patron of monsters because his domain is tribulations, the great struggle, and for most people 'monster' means the beasts that have become aggressive in their search for mana. No one likes when the voice of the world announces his 'blessings'. Sure, if you survive there's usually some great reward, but most people would forego the reward to avoid the tribulation."

"Wait," Tank asked, "Voice of the World? Did you have levels and all that?"

Kestra shrugged. "I lost 'all that' when I was selected to transmigrate. But, yeah. We had the voice of the world; here, there's the painted screens. At least there's still Alchemy and skills, and spells are much easier to form. Don't even need to develop Arcane Senses or take a [Mage] class. Speaking of, what kind of classes does this realm have?"

Puck asked, "You mean classes like go to school classes or classes like occupations, jobs?"

"Something more essential to who you are than a mere job. I was a [Combat Alchemist] before my connection to the voice of the world was broken."

Puck's entire body perked up like a puppy hearing the snack pouch rattling. "What does a combat alchemist do?"

"Make potions, powders, ointments, tonics, oils, and all sorts of interesting alchemical concoctions and items ahead of time to better fill in whatever role their team needs. I was our acting [Healer] and long range, high damage dealer, as well as working on a secondary [Scout] class for when I had to be in melee range. I'll have to learn the available ingredients here, but exploring the differences in Alchemy between my world and this realm should be fun. I was skill capped for Alchemy and went to the holy place to get my class advanced, and my third class unlocked when I got selected."

"Did you happen to make explosives?" Puck asked.

"Mm. I had some recipes, but getting the ingredients for a lot of them were too costly. I mostly stuck with Burning Air pots and a few types of acidic dust, as well as prepping bane arrows for my team mates."

Tank and Puck exchanged a look, with Tank asking, "Think you could make some of that explosive stuff here?"

"For what purpose?" Kestra asked. "I mean, big explody stuff is fun and all, but if you're after collapsing tunnels, a good Geomancer is a more reliable bet, and if you're thinking of projectiles, explosions can screw up rune scripts on the ammunition that pneumatic enchantments can be set up to empower."

"Enchanted ammo?" Tank said, his gaze turning inward.

"Yeah. Mana sticks to the enchantments, so you can do a few things with bows and bowguns, but if you want your arrows to actually penetrate a metal golem, they need to be enchanted, too. That's the main reason pellet guns are nobles' toys. Too convoluted and the ammo's too small to be useful against anything more powerful than an almiraj. Get a nice farm of goldenwood, or better yet silverwood trees growing, and you have room on mana-dense wood to scribe odes to Noq-el." At their curious glances, she said, "God of death. The one servitor of his that I met was pretty relaxed, and congratulated me on earning the Survivor achievement just before my Revival potion kicked in."

Kestra frowned, suddenly realizing how loquacious she was being. She held out her hands and saw there was a very fine tremor pulsing through her forearms. "Huh. I'm acting like I've been out of supply in a dungeon for two weeks. What Abyssal oddities is this?"

"How's your stamina bar looking?" Tank asked with the arch look of someone who knows the answer.

Kestra turned to blink up at him in confusion. "Stamina bar? What are you talking about?"

"Your bar, that shows how much of your pool you've used up," Puck explained.

Kestra paused, letting her arm return to her side. She began her psychic probing of this realm's new soul-side attachments. During her poking, she found different holographic bars, similar to the blue screens, and discovered she could move them around, change their size and their colors. One of the three bars was for her mana pool, another for her stamina, and the last for this EXP that turned into levels. She returned them to the default colors of sky blue, blood red, and honey gold respectively.

She also discovered a kind of holographic illustration of her own body, with eleven circles connected by dimly lit tubes, similar to a very simple blood system, and five layers of anatomy: bone, then organs, muscles, blood, and skin. All of those were nearly translucent, and without the soul connection to clarify, Kestra would have had to guess at the systems. The mana system was gritty, needing to be flushed, and only the circle at the back of her skull appeared to be open to draw in more of mana.

Ruby returned at some point and handed Kestra another bowl of stew, which she mechanically ate.

Those were interesting, but the fun bit Kestra found was the stack of blue screen messages. She did some tinkering around as she had with the pool bars, and suddenly had four stacks of the message screens that would stay compressed until she focused on the holographic indicators for their categories. The first she chose to view as a blue square, for general notices that didn't fit in her other categories. The second she color coded the same honey gold as her EXP bar and contained the notices of her EXP gains and leveling notices. The next she colored grass green for skill and spell acquisitions and rank ups. The last, for achievements and title notices, she went with the same red as her Stamina bar.

Which only just stopped blinking at near empty.

Tank took the empty bowl from her hands, returning her attention to her surroundings. He passed it over to Puck, then stood, holding out a hand to Kestra. "You're really out of it. Let's get you tucked into a bedroll and we'll talk more when you're recovered."