The adventurers hadn’t told her where they were taking her, so she was surprised when the house that they led her to had an attached annex. What appeared to be a larger extension to the side of a modest house built in the same style as everything else in Lóthaven turned out be the relatively thin, but permanent, walls to a courtyard that looked almost identical to places she had trained in the past.

She hadn’t been far off the mark, either, because the three adventurers had immediately begun a series of drills and exercises that by the end of the day sent her into a dreamless sleep.

The next day, they had done the same. Waking up at dawn, the four of them paired off and performed a variety of exercises that trained reflexes, strength, endurance, and balance.

In the middle of the third day, Faye straightened out from a stretch and wiped a sheen of sweat off her forehead. Her hair was tied back out of the way, but somehow a thread had gotten loose, and she lazily blew it away from her face.

“I think I’m done,” she gasped out.

“You’re doing well,” Ailith said. “For a girl that has no levels.”

Faye mock glared at the woman, who had taken to calling Faye a girl at every opportunity because she had realised how anger forced Faye into a burst of bigger effort.

This time, Faye was too out of it to do much in response.

“She’s not wrong,” Arran chimed in. “Honestly, I expected you to crash out yesterday morning. The fact that you’ve joined us for three days in a row is very impressive.”

“I’m not unused to hard work,” Faye panted. “I just have limits, ya know?”

Gavan handed her a cup of water. She smiled in thanks and downed it in one gulp.

Arran dusted off his hands and stood before her with his arms crossed.

“Well, let’s take the rest of the day off.” He nodded. “There’s not much more to be gained from pushing you like that. But it’s good to know that your limits are higher than what we’d normally see from a raw recruit.”

“Recruit?” She was too tired to say the rest out loud.

Recruit for what?

Fortunately, Arran seemed to have expected it.

“Adventuring, Faye. What else?”

The house that the adventurers lived in was fairly modest by Faye’s modern sensibilities. There were three small bedrooms on the first floor and the ground floor consisted of one big kitchen and living area, a door on the ground floor led to the bathroom — which was literally a room with a bathtub in it.

Open plan living wasn’t the same here as it had been back home. But she found that she enjoyed it.

She did not enjoy going to the outhouse.

But Ailith had laughed at her when she had complained and said that in the summer the smell could get awful, so she should be glad for a little separation between her and the facilities.

Faye had conceded the point. Reluctantly.

After training, Faye found herself sitting at the table. Slumping at the table may have been more accurate a descriptor though. She had laid her head on her arms as she tumbled into the seat and decided she would not be moving any time soon.

She rolled her head to the side to see what the others were doing to take her mind off how tired she was.

Gavan was sitting in the corner of the room, studying something she couldn’t make out by the light of the window, and Arran was preparing some food. Ailith had stretched out on the couch on the other side of the room.

“I’m dying,” Faye murmured. The pain of the workouts had caught up to her. She felt like jelly. Whenever she tried moving, her limbs barely responded.

“No, you are not,” Ailith called out. “You are just a weak little girl. This is making you stronger. The pain is just the gods’ way of telling you that they’re remaking your puny body into their ideal image.”

Faye spent the effort it took to raise her head and look at the woman, huge even without her armour. She glared at her and she said, “Really?”

Ailith looked up at her, serious eyes boring into Faye’s own, for five seconds of silence.

“No, you’re just overworked.”

Faye dropped her head back onto the table and moaned. “You’re the worst.”

Ailith laughed, Arran joined in from the kitchen, and even Gavan chuckled.

It was a lovely bonding moment for them.

It took the majority of a day for Faye to feel somewhat normal after that. Of course, every time she moved the pain erupted again. Later, after fuelling up, Arran and Ailith dragged her outside for a few stretches and light work.

This routine went on for another few days. Faye felt the negative effects of the intense workouts less and less. When she thought about it, she wasn’t sure why her body was this unused to the exercise. It wasn’t that much more than her regular training sessions at home.

Actually, it was the same as when she had been preparing for a competition. So why was it making her feel this way?

Arran and Ailith did not leave Faye much time to ponder the mysteries of her situation, though. They worked her ragged.

It was at the end of a full week, which was apparently ten days long here, that Arran called a halt early one morning in the middle of some torturous stretches.

“Faye, have you received a skill since we started?”

Faye looked at him and blinked. “You mean like where I see it tell me I received a skill?”

“Yes.” He nodded.

“Nope. Should I have?”

He frowned. “You should have had something by now. My training methods aren’t subtle, but they work… usually.”

Faye shrugged. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t have the skill notification, but at the end of the day, she knew she was improving. She felt it.

“I can tell that I’m getting better, though.”

Arran nodded, but he was still frowning at the problem. “That’s true. But really, I would have expected more growth than this for you. I’m not sure why it isn’t working the same way.”

Gavan had exited the house and here he chimed in.

“She needs experience.”

“No, we’ve already thought of that. She’s too weak.”

Faye bristled. She turned to Arran. “I am not weak. Take me to a creature, and I’ll show you. I killed things out in the mountains. I can do it down here, too.”

“We will protect her, Arran,” Ailith said from the other side of the courtyard. “That’s my job.”

Arran looked to Gavan, who shrugged, then turned and went inside.

“Fine. One encounter. Then we return. I want to know what Faye’s like in the wild.” Ailith nodded and went inside, too. Arran turned back to Faye. “We don’t say that it’s dangerous just to scare you, or to lord it over you, Faye. We mean it.”

“I know, but I meant it when I said that I spent days and nights out there on my own before I met any of you and I’m still here. I did it with my training weapon.”

Arran flinched. He ran a hand through his hair. “I can’t say that I can argue with results. You’ve got to listen to me out there. And please tell me you’ll at least consider loaning one of my sharps.”

Faye nodded, and grinned. “Are you sure we’ll get out? The guards aren’t my biggest fans.”

“Leave them to us,” he said.

“What do you mean, not allowed to leave?” Arran said, straining himself to stay within the boundaries of a normal speaking voice.

“Your group has someone in it that is incapable of leaving the safety of the town walls, Arran. You know this.”

Arran was dressed in his adventuring gear; his breastplate was scuffed and scratched but clearly well-suited to him, his sword was belted to his hip, and his high leather boots completing the ensemble that struck quite an impressive image as he stood with his hands on either hip.

The gate guards were different than the ones Faye had run into previously, but it had not been a fluke that the others had told her to shove off.

Both guards stood in front of Arran with closed expressions. One was holding out a hand as if to physically restrain Arran, who was getting closer with each back and forth of the argument.

Ailith loomed over Arran’s shoulder, her choice of weapon — a large hammer — casually rested on one armoured shoulder. She had donned her helmet with the visor down so her expression couldn’t be seen. She didn’t move. Her presence alone was enough to add weight to Arran’s words.

Gavan, on the other hand, was standing next to Faye. He held an open book in his left hand, his right casually twirling a slender piece of wood around his fingers. Faye was watching it apprehensively. He’d dropped it once, a few days back, and it had started a fire in the house. The wand was as innocuous as anything could be, but she was certain it contained a lot of power.

As for her own gear, the adventurers had been kind enough to ensure she was moderately protected. They had given her a padded gambeson — a thick, layered piece of cloth armour that most sword fighters would use in historical European martial arts practice. She liked this one a lot because its shoulders flared upwards slightly, and she thought it looked awesome. The toggles that cinched it closed down the front were made from kind of bone pieces that stood out from the darker dyed cloth used for the armour, and the lower half of the gambeson covered the tops of her thighs.

The best aspect of this armour was the hidden weight. As soon as she’d donned it, she knew that the padded armour had hidden plates of metal inside. It was superior protection compared to anything else she’d ever worn.

On her hands, she had been given gloves that matched the gambeson in every way, except that the metal plates were smaller and on the outside, giving them a scaly look.

Arran had told Faye that she was lucky she was as small as she was, because his old training gear wouldn’t have fit her otherwise.

Ailith wanted to throw some heavier, full- or half-plate on her, but even Ailith’s older gear was far too large for Faye. It prompted quite a few ‘little girl’ comments.

She’d ground her teeth at them both but said nothing. The dancing glee in his and Ailith’s eyes was enough to let her know that it was something of a joke, and she knew it would have been in bad taste if she’d actually told him to stuff it.

But she was waiting for her moment.

Tuning back into the argument with the guards, which Arran was handling a little better than Faye had, she realised that they weren’t arguing so much about whether or not they were allowed outside, but more on the cost of leaving the town.

“Oh, stab me with a rusted blade, man, I am not going to give you more than a few pieces. You’re being ridiculous!”

“Ridiculous is you wanting to take her out without permission and expectin’ us not to get it in the neck for lettin’ you!”

“Aye, the watch sergeant will skin us alive for it. Not to mention what would happen if she didn’t come back. Everyone knows about the golden haired uncrested girl that thinks she’s allowed to push grown men around.”

Faye rolled her eyes, hard. They were still going on about that?

“Don’t,” Gavan said, almost absent mindedly. Faye looked at him, surprised.

“What?” she asked.

“Don’t say anything,” he replied, quietly enough that no one else was paying attention.

“I wasn’t going to!” she hissed out. “What do you take me for?”

“Mmm.”

“I wasn’t!” she insisted, her hushed whisper enough to catch a glance from the guard closest to her. She glared at Gavan and stared back at the guard.

God, please just let us get out. Please.

Arran held out a hand, she wasn’t sure what was in it, but a moment later the guards had moved aside, and he was striding forward, holding up a hand for the others to follow him.

Faye followed, a little gleefully.

The gates were open, as was usual throughout the day it seemed, and the four of them stepped across the threshold and out of the town’s boundary together.

The road snaked uphill at a slight incline, rounded a bend around the base of a larger hill and quickly disappeared from sight. To either side of the road were hills, some steeper than others, but it was to the right that Arran led them.

Faye saw that they were heading towards a densely packed forest. The trees were tall, thin, and pine-like. She had no idea if that was their name here, but they had the evergreen style needle leaves.

Soon enough, they were beneath the boughs of the forest.

The trees didn’t smell like pine trees. In fact, they were fairly odourless, or at least were overpowered by the strong smell of animals.

“What is that smell?” she asked.

“The beasts around here like to mark the boundaries of the forests. It’s their way of telling us we’re entering their domain now.”

She looked around, curious to see what the life was like here.

“You won’t see any of them yet,” Ailith said. Her voice echoed strangely from within her closed helmet. She was striding forward at the front of the group. Her hammer still rested on her plate pauldron. But now that she wasn’t looming, Faye realised that she was much more limber and dexterous than she’d first thought. The armour didn’t look like it weighed anything at all.

Soon, the pathways through the forest they were following dried up. The dirt path went from somewhat wide and well-travelled to thin and barely passable. They started weaving back and forth a little more to get through the undergrowth and trees.

“What are we looking out for?” Faye asked. She was eager, her hands kept itching to draw her borrowed blade.

“There are various things in the forest, most of them rather low levelled. We’ll see how you do against them.”

Faye nodded and kept her senses alert.

Inside, she was giddy with excitement. Somehow the air in the forest smelled fresher, more alive, and healthier than anything in the town. She knew that didn’t make much sense, there wasn’t industry after all to muddy the air other than home fires, or the larger forge fires of the town.

Either way, she took deep breaths. Even that musky, animal smell was part of the charm.

Something rustled the bushes off to their right, but before Faye could even react, Ailith brought her hammer down in a sudden explosive movement.

The giant hammer head slammed into the earth with a shattering roar of sound, a crack of earth splintered off into the bushes.

Faye couldn’t hear anything else over the noise of the impact, but when it died down, she realised that the wildlife had gone silent.

A few moments later, the sounds of birds started up again.

“Got it,” Ailith said.

Arran nodded. Gavan didn’t react much at all. Faye, however, was a little perturbed.

“What on earth was that?” she asked.

“[Hammer Rupture], a second-tier offensive ability that’s almost Ailith’s only ranged attack,” Arran supplied, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

“Was that magic?” Faye asked.

“Magic?” Ailith exclaimed.

“No,” Gavan said.

“It certainly looked like magic,” Faye continued. “The way you tore the ground up and then somehow didn’t even need to see what it was to kill it?”

Ailith snorted. Her helmet turned towards Faye a little. She couldn’t see inside the helmet’s gaps, but she knew that Ailith was pulling a face.

“It was no magic, girl, it was pure skill.”

Gavan rolled his eyes and pointed a hand off in a different direction. He quietly spoke some words that Faye never caught, and a distant crash echoed through the trees toward them.

“That,” he said, “was magic.”

“Show off,” Ailith muttered.

Faye just looked around. She had no idea what Gavan had done, but for the fact she heard the crash she wouldn’t have known anything had changed.

“You all know that I need to actually take part in something in order to get experience, right?”

Gavan paused for a moment, then turned a page of the book in his hand, carefully not looking at her face. She took that to mean he was embarrassed. Ailith, on the other hand, just snorted.

“Then you can walk in front of the rest of us and stop the creatures before they reach the group.”

Nodding, Faye stepped forward, trying to overtake her companions. Arran’s gloved hand stopped her.

“She’s kidding, Faye. We can’t let you go out front, but you’re right, we need to let you take something on. You’ll get your chance.”