I wake up bright and early the day after, reminiscing about how Vegter’s training was B.S. Well let’s just hope that the literal magic of magic is enough to actually get me through this dumb trial business. Vegter barges into my room telling me that we have to meet with the chieftain, and that I better be prepared for the trial. Even saying, and I quote, “if even half of the profound wisdom of what I said yesterday than this should be as easy as taking a dump” unquote. Ugh. We eat our breakfast in a hurry, Clara seeming the slightest bit happier today than she was yesterday. I must be growing on her. That or the food’s just extra good today. We leave at dawn, which still seems incessantly early to me, but whatever.

As we walk down the road to the chieftain, we see Caden running at us. “wait up. I heard that you were going to perform your first trial today, I wanted to come and provide moral support. See how you did” he says, coming up to walk beside. Guess I grew on him. That or he just wants to see some entertainment. We continue on our way to the chieftain’s place, eventually getting there after a couple minutes of walking.

“Well boy, you finally came” I hear the chieftain bellow. “I heard that for your first trial you picked the survival trial. I still need you to confirm which trial you picked though” the chieftain says. “yes I picked the survival trial” I reply. “wonderful. Agni, Skanda get the boy to the edge of the forest. Leave him there and go back to pick him up in four days” the chieftain says. Crap, I wasn’t expecting being stuck in the forest for four days! Vegter told me that most of the time people were in there for a day or two max. maybe the chieftain is making this harder on account of me saying that I’ve lived in the forest my whole life.

As I am thinking this two big orks walk up to me. They motion for me to follow. One of them looks like a roided out Vegter, while the other looks a little thinner and faster. These two must be Agni and Skanda. As I follow along with them I look behind me to see Vegter and Caden waving goodbye. I wave back to them, hoping that this won’t be the last time I see them. Agni, Skanda and I walk for a long, long time, getting closer and closer to the outer edge of the village. We eventually reach a place where there aren’t anymore ork-made buildings, only some vegetation. Instead of dropping me off here like I expected we continue to walk along, until we finally happen by a great expanse of trees. “this is the outer edge of the forest. You are expected to remain in there for four days, only ever coming back here by the end of the fourth day. Good luck” one of them says to me. They then leave me there walking on back to civilisation.

Okay, guess this is going to be my home for the next four days. My plan to get me through this trial is to stay as close to the outer edge of the forest as possible, because in all honesty I do not trust my forest navigation skills enough to get me out of this forest. First thing I should try to do is look for food and shelter, and a good place to get water. After that I should try to fortify my position until this trial is over. I walk around in the thick vegetation and foliage, looking around for any of the plants Vegter said was edible, because even if I’m not hungry right now I am sure I’ll be hungry later.

Eventually I find some berry’s that Vegter said would be good eating. I continue to walk around for a while more looking for a place to rest and hopefully get some water. After what feels like an eternity of wading through dumb, thick, stupid forest, I finally happen across a cave, and, even better, there’s a stream right next to it. Because of the way that I was walking, I am actually really close to the outer edge of the forest, which is a plus. After walking the entire day from dawn to, I guess mid-noon, I am extremely thirsty, so I go and guzzle down what feels like liters of water. After I finish drinking water, I inspect the stream for any fish. Having an extra avenue of food is never a bad idea. As I look into the water, I see multiple little fishies swimming around. The berry’s weren’t exactly filling, so I summon up a couple tiny rock pellets and spear some fish right through their heads. This releases a bunch of blood into the stream, so I wait a little bit before getting my fish, hoping the blood didn’t attract any predators. Thinking better of getting myself soaking wet, I instead make a somewhat hollow ball of air and sort of levitate the fish out of the water. I learned a couple tricks when I was experimenting during my stay in Vegter and Clara’s house, one of them being how to levitate things (with balls of air), and another being how to start up a fire.

I go and gather dry kindling to set up my fire. All I really need, to start a fire, is to summon up a ball and take out the frictional energy all around me and infuse it into the my magic, and ta-da I’ve got a ball of heat ready to start burning stuff. To make an actual ball of fire I would need to have fire already around me. I then bring over my ball of heat and set it on the kindling, starting me up a nice cooking fire. While I don’t have much in the way of any actual skill in cooking, I can still fry me up some fish so I should hopefully be set for this whole trial thing.

I look around me and see the stream, a good source of water, the cave a meters away submerged into the ground, a good shelter, and all the edible vegetation and fish around me. This place is perfect.

After setting up the fish and cooking them I start devouring them. Now with a full belly and a it being almost dawn, I go into the cave to go to sleep. That night I sleep somewhat peacefully

The next day starts out well. I wake up to the wonderous sight of the dark, slightly damp cave that I fell asleep in last night. I go check outside to see what time of day it is, looking up at the sky to see the it’s slightly before dawn. On any other day I would be mad I woke up so early but today, I am going to need every minute I can get. First thing I do is go over to the river to get me some fishies. Vegter told me how I should be able to smoke some meat if I ever got any, so I set that up first thing, releasing a dreadful amount of blood into the stream, once again worrying me about attracting any predators. After waiting a couple minutes I summon up a couple balls of water and float the fish over to me. What I need to do today is to fortify my safe have so that even if I get attacked by anything I won’t have to instantly cede my ground and run away.

The first thing I do to set up my defense is make a barricade of stone spikes around the perimeter. This won’t help with stopping anything that is already determined to get to me since they could just jump the barricade, but hopefully it’ll intimidate any nuisances so I won’t be up to my ears in any random dumb pest that sets it’s sights on my food. Next thing to do is to levitate myself pile of kindling all over. This’ll make it so that I have easily accessible pile of fire if the need arises.

The balls of frictional energy that I use to make my fires aren’t really useful as weapons but with these kindling pile all over I should have fire balls readily available. How cool is that! Friggin fire balls, every wizards dream. Anyways, back on track. Next on the to-do list is to set up a warning system, just in case anything get’s into hear while asleep or not paying attention. For this I make little balls and spike of pure sound. These little suckers took me a lot of experimentation to get right but if made properly these balls and spike of sound should stay stable and break upon intact, creating an extremely loud high-pitched noise.

By the time I finish up all of this it’s late noon, the sun almost three quarters of it’s journey over. That took a long time.

With all of this I feel pretty safe in my haven. The rest of this whole trial should be a walk in the park. And with that thought in mind I fall into restful sleep.

Not knowing that I had just jinxed myself