They both approached the fountain and sat down at its edge, relaxed but ready for whoever was unlucky enough to come seeking them first.

Time passed slowly. Damien fidgeted, mentally running through his repertoire of spells and trying to figure out any ways he might improve them. In the distance, the sounds of battle picked up. Flashes lit the horizon for brief seconds, fading away only to restart on the other end of the city.

“Looks like everyone is out getting themselves into trouble,” Damien said, drumming his fingers on the stone by his side. “It almost feels wrong to just sit here.”

“It won’t be long now,” Sylph said confidently. “There’s no way not a single other student mistakenly got the idea that we’ve got some secret information to find the fancy artifact.”

Damien grunted. “It doesn’t help that Derrod basically set everyone off at us. There was no reason for him to say anything. It’s not like he cares about who wins this.”

“More like he’s just testing you more,” Sylph said with a frown. “We need to try to stay away from him. I’m already looking over my shoulder constantly. Adding this in on top of everything might start causing some serious problems.”

“Not arguing there,” Damien said. He cracked his neck and squinted up at the muted sun beyond the barrier. It was dark enough that his eyes could actually handle staring straight at it, although it got uncomfortable enough after a few moments to force him to look away.

Sylph leaned forward, drawing a dagger seemingly from thin air and rolling it over in her hand. Damien squinted at her, but he couldn’t tell where the sheath it had come from was.

“Where’d you get that?”

“I have enough knives hidden on me to fight an army of salad.”

“That’s… somehow actually still intimidating,” Damien said. “Doesn’t that get uncomfortable, though? Trip once and you’ve got a pokey thing stabbing you in the side.”

“It’s called a sheathe. And not falling,” Sylph replied with a playful smirk. “But I also position them in places where they aren’t going to stab me if I fall. I’ll show you some other time when we aren’t constantly being watched.”

Damien nodded idly. Sylph’s gaze flicked to his side and he nearly spun before he managed to stop himself. Within his mind, Henry readied himself to enter the mage armor. Damien yawned, rubbing at his eyes to cover his movement as glanced at where Sylph had been watching out of the corner of his eye.

There was nothing but a surprisingly intact house and the thin, dark alleys running off alongside it. Damien drummed his fingers faster in a mixture of impatience and anxiety.

Why is this bit worse than the actual fighting? Can’t whoever it is just come out and attack us already? I don’t want to wait!

“Now you know how I feel,” Henry said. “Imagine that, but every single second of your waking life. That’s how it’s like when you dally around messing with worthless things instead of studying magic or letting me get more human literature to study.”

Your idea of human literature that isn’t about magic is usually horrible smut.

“I take great offense to that. It’s called romance, not smut.”

Your offense is noted and ignored.

Henry snorted. Their conversation dropped off as a shadow twitched at the end of the alley. Damien gathered Ether discretely without taking his eyes off where he’d seen the movement.

“We know you’re there,” he called. “You might as well stop hiding. It’s just wasting both of our time.”

“Nobody is going to actually come out,” Sylph said in a low tone. “We’re on the defense, so that means we’ve got to be on guard. The longer they wait, the more likely we get tired or make a mistake. The attacker has an advantage so long as we don’t know where they are.”

“So shouldn’t we do something?”

“This is a waiting game. Whoever loses their concentration first loses. We only need the slightest opportunity to figure out where our opponent is and attack.”

Damien scrunched his nose. “We could be here for hours, then?”

“Maybe you should have brought a deck of cards,” Henry suggested. “Or a smu– romance novel.”

“I think I’ll just speed things up instead,” Damien decided. “Sylph, I’m going to do something.”

“How dumb is it going to be?”

“Pretty dumb,” Damien admitted, drinking Ether in like a starving man. Sylph shook her head, but two black and green daggers snapped into her hands. She shimmered, fading into her camouflage.

If you could suspend my pain from Mental Energy overuse, that would be great.

“You got ten seconds. Any longer and the benefits aren’t worth the cost,” Henry advised. Damien gave him a mental nod, forming gravity lances and pumping them full of Ether until they overloaded. He compressed the spells with Mental Energy.

He walked in a circle around Sylph, creating two dozen of the spells and locking them in the air. Once he finished the circuit, Damien nodded to himself.

“You said it’s all about knowing when the other person attacks, right?” Damien asked, not trying to lower his voice.

“Yes, that’s–”

Sylph’s sentence was cut off as Damien released every single spell at once, sending a wave of black bolts streaking through the square. They struck the walls of the crumbling buildings around them and dark energy flared.

For an instant, there was complete stillness. Orbs of space magic expanded like blooming flowers around them. Then, with a series of cracks so close together that they might as well have been a single, deafening blast, the world shattered.

Thick chunks of stone ripped away from the floor and walls, flying through the air and shredding through everything in their path as entire buildings collapsed as Damien’s magic ripped their already weakened foundations apart.

The wall of a crumbling room off to their right disintegrated, revealing a flash of a dark cloak before flying shrapnel tore it apart. A massive cloud of dust rose into the air as Damien’s ears slowly stopped ringing.

He waved his hand, tracing the runes for Devour in the air but swapping one of them. A black portal yawned open before his palm and bent inwards, drawing the dust filling the air into it.

Tiny rocks lifted off the ground, flying into the spell as well. Within seconds, the air was clear once more. He let the magic fade, then surveyed the results of his attack.

The city around them had almost been completely flattened. What remained in the square was little more than large piles of stone and chunks of statues. A tattered cloak hung on the leftovers of a wall, covered in blood.

A young girl stepped out from behind the wall, riddled with thin cuts. She walked with the telltale limp of a broken leg and a bump was forming on her head. Shadows twisted at her feet, forming into a brace and propping her up.

“What a ridiculous waste of Ether,” Reva wheezed. Her wounds slowly pulled themselves shut and her leg snapped back into position with a crack. “What did that accomplish other than forcing me to fight in an open–”

Sylph’s dagger caught Reva in the throat. The girl’s eyes widened and she grabbed the handle of the blade. A second dagger thunked into Reva’s right eye with such force that the girl spun, tripping over a stone and crashing to the ground.

“Huh,” Damien said. “Nice shot.”

She lowered her hand and shrugged. “I was aiming for her eye the first time.”

“Were you really?”

“No,” Sylph admitted. “Thought it sounded cooler if I said that, though.”

“Another thing you read?”

“I’m not answering that,” Sylph said. She nodded at Reva’s body. “I’m not convinced she’s dead, though.”

“Probably for the best,” Damien mused. “We don’t want to kill her, do we? She just seems like a prickly asshole that wants power, not evil.”

“I think those things are usually synonymous,” Sylph observed, bringing two new daggers to her hands as she and Damien approached Reva’s body carefully. “Henry excluded, of course.”

Sylph’s shadow erupted up behind her with blinding speed, punching into her back and sprouting from her chest with a shower of blood. Reva’s body sank into the ground as Sylph’s shadow ripped itself free.

Reva emerged a few feet away, bleeding from a line across her neck and with a cruel smirk on her face.

“Talking while you clearly suspect I’m still alive? Idiots. If you don’t want your cocky girlfriend to bleed out, you’d better start crying for your dad,” Reva said. “And hand the artifact over while you’re at it, or I’ll finish you both off before he can get here.”

There was a soft thump. Reva blinked, glancing down at the stump of her arm. Her hand rested on the ground at her feet, not even bleeding yet. Sylph turned, toward her, the hole in her chest pulling itself shut. A jagged scythe hung over one of her shoulders, having sprouted from her back with such speed that Damien couldn’t even place when it had appeared.

Reva’s grabbed her hand, drawing shadows up from her feet toward it. Moments before they touched the wound, the magic slammed to halt. Reva’s brow tightened in frustration, then paled. She took a step back.

“What is this? What did you do to my magic?”

“Shadow magic is just a specialized form of Dark magic,” Sylph said. “Unfortunate for you. It was different enough that it took me a little while to get a good grasp of it, but I’ve got your name now.”

Damien grabbed Reva’s clothes with telekinesis while she was distracted, slamming her to the ground.

“There’s no need to be cruel, Damien,” Sylph said. “She’s lost.”

“But she–”

“Fought back, even if she was the aggressor. What did you want? We aren’t enemies, and she’s done for unless she’s really hiding something. This is supposed to be a training exercise, not a slaughter.”

Damien blinked. He dropped his hand – although he didn’t release the Ether he’d gathered.

“I’ll release your magic so you can stop yourself from bleeding out if you don’t try to attack us or run,” Sylph said. A tendril of wind jumped from her finger and wrapped itself around Reva’s neck like a collar. “But if you try anything, I’ll cut your magic off again and release this spell. You won’t heal from that.”

Reva swallowed and gave the smallest nod that she dared, gritting her teeth from pain. “Fine.”

Shadows leapt from the ground, enveloping Reva’s hand. They lifted it up to her arm and stitched it back on with a black string The girl let out a relieved sigh as the wound sealed shut, vanishing as if it had never been there. She flexed her hand, then turned her glare on Sylph.

“How did you heal? That should have been impossible. No magic just puts you back together without any other effects. Was that some super specialized form of the healing school?”

“You seem to be under the impression that you get to ask questions,” Damien said. “Where do you get off being such an asshole, anyway? You attacked us multiple times today already, didn’t you?”

Reva shrugged. “It’s a training exercise. It’s not like your girlfriend held back when she threw a knife into my head.”

“You’ve got some incredibly advanced form of healing magic. We’ve already seen it in action multiple times,” Sylph replied. “I couldn’t afford to assume it was weak. If you died, it would have only been your own fault.”

“So, what now? You going to keep me here until someone stronger shows up to take the artifact from you?” Reva asked.

“We’ll start by taking any artifacts you’ve gotten,” Damien said. “You can think of it as payment for trying to attack us and ruining Sylph’s shirt.”

“Shit, I didn’t think about that,” Sylph said, looking down at her stomach, where there was a giant hole in her garment. She groaned. “Look at this! What if it gets windy?”

Reva’s eye twitched.

“Artifacts,” Damien repeated. “Sylph wants them. Don’t make me search you myself.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Reva asked with a sneer.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” Damien said. “I wouldn’t touch you. I don’t need to. You’ve already shown that you can easily heal from most wounds, so half a dozen gravity spheres placed in the right spots should show me everything you’ve got, even if it breaks you a little.”

Reva’s cocky expression flickered. “I’ll give you one of them and promise not to attack you for the rest of the trip to Forsad. I’m not going to give more up without a fight, and I’ve still got some left in me. I’m certain I can hold you both off until someone else arrives to join in.”

Damien glanced at Sylph, who nodded.

“That works,” Sylph said. “So long as you add in that you’ve got to leave and not bother us at all. If we see you again, I’m not going to stop Damien from ripping you into pieces.”

Reva reached into one of her pockets and threw a small wooden rod onto the ground in front of her. Sylph snapped her fingers and the wind collar around the other girl’s throat vanished. Reva sank into the earth, turning to shadow and disappearing.

Damien grabbed the stick with telekinesis and brought it over to inspect it, suspending it in the air before his eyes.

“Well, it’s got some fancy runework I don’t really understand,” Damien said. “That probably means it’s a relic.”

“That’s good, but I’m not sure that should be the main thing we’re concerned about right now,” Sylph said slowly.

“What do you mean? This is what you wanted.”

“It is, but doesn’t anything else seem weird?” Sylph prodded.

Damien scratched his head, then shook it. “Nope, not really.”

“Since when have you been so brutal?” Sylph asked. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s important to be able to suppress certain emotions when you fight, but you weren’t acting normal just now. Henry, back me up here?”

“Why would he ever side with that?” Damien asked. “He’s, well, you know!”

“Actually,” Henry said, forming a mouth from Damien’s shadow. “Sylph is right. That was out of character.”

“Are you being influenced by your less friendly companion?” Sylph asked seriously.

Damien blinked. Sylph’s concerned expression was more than he could dismiss. He let out a slow breath and turned his attention inward, trying to scan his mental space. Nothing seemed out of place.

He shrugged, then pulled his shirt up to check the seal he’d placed on Herald. The dark tendrils running along his skin froze as soon as the light touched them. Damien’s neck prickled. The tendrils were larger. Worse, a rune in the center of the first binding circle was starting to fade away.

“Oh,” Damien said. “Shit.”