Things change though, when one day Flaminius tells me that the chief had asked for my presence. I get slightly confused at this, not knowing anything that I’d done that would warrant a meeting with the chieftain, but shrug my shoulders and make my way over to the chieftains place.

Takes me a little bit but, after a ten or so minutes I get there.

“Ulfr, how are you, get in here” the chieftain welcomes me.

I walk on over inside, still pretty confused on what’s happening. Inside I see the chieftains daughter already there sitting down. “sit down, sit down Ulfr. Relax” the chieftain says motioning for me to sit down. “I bet you’re wondering why I called you in here today Ulfr” the chieftain says.

“today marks one month that you’ve been a full on citizen. In this time you’ve been studying with Flaminius and working under Vegter” the chieftain says.

“Tomorrow you will be going on a hunting trip with my daughter. This is to see how far you’ve progressed, and see what your limits are now” the chieftain explains.

“um, me and your daughter alone?” I ask, not expecting the chieftain to just let me, an almost unknown stranger be with his daughter alone.

“haha, she’s strong enough to handle herself. You probably couldn’t hope to beat her in a one on one fight for a while yet boy” the chieftain says chuckling.

“Daaad, stop embarrassing me” the chieftains daughter whines.

She then turns to me and smiles, a big toothy, radiant smile. “don’t worry about him. My names Elaina” she says, holding out her hand for me to shake it. Guess shaking hands is customary in ork-culture too.

A little stunned I shake her hand, feeling her strong, callused, slightly soft hands shake my hand vigorously. My mind starts to float a little. I can feel my head in the clouds.

“we’re going to be leaving tomorrow afternoon” she says, stunning me out of my reverie. “you should get whatever you want to take with you packed. I’ll be taking care of food and supply’s and such” she says, escorting me out of the room.

“goodbye. See you tomorrow” she says waving me away.

I wave back, thinking of something to say back to her, before realizing that she had already went back inside.

Huh, well a change of pace and an outing would be appreciated. I’ve kinda fallen into routine for the past month or so. This has done wonders for my magic and my forging, not so much for anything outside that though. Although my relationships with Vegter, Clara, Caden and even Flaminius has been improving in that time, so it was a pretty fair trade.

Felt like I was losing the reason I was training and working for everything. Speaking of, ever since I’ve gotten through the trial, I’ve felt sort of aimless. I achieved what I wanted to, cementing my place here, but I didn’t really have a goal after that. Obviously learning magic and forging is all well and good, but lately I’ve been starting to think that maybe I should be using my pretty extensive talents to do something, other than just learn and train.

Maybe branch out my social circle too. I only know like four or so people here. Six if you count the chieftain and his daughter. Mayhap this little hunting trip will be the opportunity I’ve been waiting for to finally expand. Plus, it puts me near the chieftains daughter, and that (for whatever reason) seems like a great idea. Totally not ork hormones being fifty percent of the reason I’m happy to go on this trip or anything.

And, I mean, it’s not like I don’t look good or anything either. Ork bodies gain muscle easy, and with me spending half of every day banging away at metal, I’ve developed pretty nicely. Still not going to try to fight physically unless I have to though.

By this time I had been pretty thoroughly entrenched in my thoughts, and so when I stumbled near Vegter’s house I wasn’t exactly paying attention. “Ulfr, what did the chieftain talk to you about” Vegter yells, startling me.

“the hell Vegter, I nearly crapped my pants. Warn a man before you wreck his ears will ya” I reply, having built enough of a familiarity with Vegter by now that we had bit of a repertoire going by now.

“shut yer smart mouth boy and tell me how it went” this comment comes from Clara. We’d gotten to know each other better over the past month too. Really starting to feel like these two are like family.

I start to tell them all about the meeting that I had with the chieftain. As I recount the tale, both Vegter and Clara make comments about me and Elaina. Somewhat inappropriate comments.

“shut both yer mouths” I yell, a blush starting to find it’s way onto my face. They of course just tease me some more. After that we proceed to go and eat dinner, which was really good tonight. After I finish eating I excuse myself and go to lie in bed thinking of the coming day.

___________________________________________________________________

The next day I pack a couple things into a bag I borrowed from Vegter. My rune book, a couple thingy-ma-bobs I made with Vegter, some food Clara gave me, even though I told her that Elaina was bringing food this just made her make enough for both Elaina and I. with that done, I go about my day as I usually would, working with Vegter till noon.

I say my goodbyes to Vegter and Caden, and make my way over to the chieftains place. Going to meet Elaina there.

“Ulfr, you came” I hear once I get near the chieftains place. “Elaina, how are you. Of course I came” I say, congratulating myself that I managed to say the lines I was repeating on the way over.

“got everything packed” she says, moving closer to me. “Yep” I reply with what I can only assume is simply the biggest grin, on my face. Yay, finally something new. Something fun and adventurous. Also hopefully something pretty safe. Don’t want something like the hydra fight popping up again.

“well let’s hope for a good hunt” Elaina says. “before we go on out onto the hunt though, I need to explain a couple things to you. For safety reasons” Elaina adds.

“for this hunt, we’re just going to go into the forest. What we’ll be hunting will mostly be decided by what I see you’re able to do. Really though no pressure” Elaina explains. Seems a bit loose, but as long as it’s fun, that won’t matter much.

Elaina brings with her a pretty light bag of supplies, saying there won’t be much need since the forest already provides everything. I shrug my shoulders at this, deferring to her since she has loads more experience in stuff like this.

We travel through the village into the forest, taking the same route I took when I was taking my survival trial. Step by step, we go farther and farther into the great green expanse of trees and foliage. After an hour or so, Elaina finally stops.

“to start off this hunt, we’ll have a light race. Nothing overly competitive, just a friendly race. Need to know your capabilities before we do anything more” Elaina says. I nod at this, seems fair that she would need to know what I can do before we do anything overly dangerous.

“okay, seems like this might be fun” I say. Elaina smiles at this.

“alright, on my mark we’ll start” Elaina says. She starts counting down from three. When she reaches zero she zooms forward. She goes so fast that she makes a breeze wherever she runs. Okay, didn’t expect for her to go that fast right out the gate.

In the month that I was studying magic I learned a lot of new tricks, one of them being a better way to move around, rather than the air-balls I was using before. I summon up a little wind hurricane right under me, and use it to levitate myself up and forward. This method is faster, more stable, and simply looks a lot cooler than the way I was moving around before.

I start moving so fast the scenery just zooms on by. I start catching up Elaina, and she seems to notice this, because she starts to speed up. Guess that wasn’t her limit, huh. Well I can go faster too.

I start pumping up the amount of air is in the spell. I was also increase the spells power outage. That’s another thing I learned to do in the past month. How to supercharge my spells. Just got to increase how much energy I’m putting into the spell.

At this moment I’m going so fast, wherever I go the wind starts rushing. I am starting to feel like a tornado myself here. I start catching up to Elaina, and this time I’m almost right next to her when she starts speeding up again.

She starts jumping from tree, almost smashing the tree she’s jumping off of to bits. I can only stand on slack jawed awe at this. How in the hell is she doing something like that. Gotta ask her how she’s doing it after the race.

I don’t do nothing at this either though. I start to summon more tornado spells, and a couple other air type spells to act as a speed boost. I also summon up a very thin barrier of metal around me. At the speeds I am going at I could probably do serious damage to myself if I hit anything. That and the wind is rushing past so fast, it’s starting to hurt slightly.

Again I start to catch, I even manage to get in the lead for a couple moments. Elaina though doesn’t seem to like this though, managing to go even faster. She’s jumping from tree to tree so fast now that trees are starting to break, shatter, and even fly away, from the force that she is exerting.

What. The. Hell. That shouldn’t be freakin’ possible. a body, even an orkly one, should not possibly be able to handle going at such speeds, let alone be able to exert that much force. And on top of all that, she’s making it look easy. Jumping from place to place with the ease and grace of a princess. What. The. Hell.

The chieftains words ring in my head. Haha, she’s strong enough to handle herself. You probably couldn’t hope to beat her in a one on one fight for a while yet boy. guess he was right.

Even with all this though I don’t give up. One last try. I bring myself up above the forest, preparing myself for what is probably a monumentally stupid idea. Especially for something that was supposed to be nothing but a friendly race. This race has been super fun though, and I really don’t want to give up now.

I gather up wind and fire, and make what basically amounts to a jet engine behind my back. To protect myself from the fire, I encase myself in a crap-ton of stone. by this time I’m moving so fast my body simply can’t handle it. I can only do this for a second or two more. I glance down to see Elaina looking up at me incredulously. Bet you can’t top this. As if reacting to my thoughts, Elaina starts to move even faster. So fast she seems supersonic, but she’s probably not, probably just really, really fast.

Seriously, she couldn’t have just let me have this I think. At this moment an extremely stupid, or suicidal bird decide to use my distraction to dive bomb me, getting evaporated in a second. It manages to scare the crap out of me, and make me lose focus for a moment. My magic starts to give out.

So there I was covered in the remains of a dumb bird, falling perilously to the ground. I only had one thought in my mind at that moment.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuu