Taveon grinned, holding out the scroll as Faye just stared at him with her mouth open.

“Of course, spells are simple. That’s why the system creates spells. They are compact, efficient methods of teaching magic to others.”

Faye threw her hands in the air, shouting. “Yay! Magic spells!”

Arran shook his head. “Damn it, I can’t believe that there are two of you.”

Gavan just grinned, flicking a hand at Arran, as if he were about to throw a Fire Dart at him.

“Don’t even think about it,” Arran warned, thrusting a finger at Gavan. “Or I’ll let you be Faye’s practice dummy.”

Gavan thought about it for a moment, but a subtle shift in his hand caused a dart to flicker to life and speed its way towards Arran’s face. He had already moved, anticipating the spell.

The two then proceeded to engage in a slightly more violent game of tag than Faye had ever engaged in. She shook her head.

“Taveon, I’m guessing that accessing these spells is easy for someone with the help of their system. What about me, with my lack of access?” She took the scroll from his hand, and carefully looked over the smooth surface. For now, she put it through her belt, it would be secure enough there.

“That’s one of the reasons we are out in the woods,” he replied. He was looking around their clearing. “The monsters in the area aren’t stupid, though sometimes their pure aggression can feel like stupidity. No, they are cunning. Sensing the power of our little group, the majority of the weaker monsters in the area are avoiding us.”

“I fought a few kinds of monsters before,” she said, looking around. “I can’t see any of them right now, though.”

Even in the tops of the trees, there were no signs of the gliding creatures she had been killing previously.

“Monster to person match ups often favour the monster, especially when there is parity in level. However, when a low-level monster is paired up against a higher levelled person, the balance heads much more toward the person’s favour.”

Eventually, he stopped looking around the clearing. Focused on one spot, he said something under his breath. Faye felt a rush of wind blast out from Taveon’s position, except that it wasn’t a real physical sensation.

“What was that?”

“I activated a spell,” he replied. “It’s a little more advanced than the one I will show you today.”

“You said that there are system types for spells, what does that one fall under?”

“Very good question,” he said. His attention was still on the same spot he’d come to rest on, but he answered her perfectly. “That was what are called area spells. They, as the name suggests, cover an area. To be completely technical about them, they more often cover a volume of space — but the majority of people think of them as area spells, and that is how the system defines them after all.”

Faye nodded.

“Area spells are somewhat varied, but the general idea is that they cover a wider area, do not have to target a single creature, and affect the beings within its area of effect.”

“Area of Effect spells, got it. That’s another easy one,” she said.

“Ah, our guest is on its way.”

“Guest?” she said, gripping the handle of her dagger harder.

“Yes, I have a question to answer about your system access. Are you ready?”

Faye looked at him, and he simply gestured to the side of the clearing where he’d been looking. Something in the distance rustled the undergrowth, and it was coming closer.

She drew her dagger.

“Your sword has a longer reach, Faye,” Arran said. She jumped. He had been on the other side of the clearing a moment ago.

“Don’t scare me like that! And I know it does, but the dagger’s made from metal. Plus, it was the knife that helped the most the other night.”

“Why should it matter if the dagger is metal? Your sword is just as good, if not better, at these low levels. Taveon, what did you taunt?”

“It is a simple unclassed equivalent beast,” the older man replied, unconcerned.

Arran nodded, then pointed at Faye’s belt. “Put the dagger away and draw your sword.”

“But…”

There was no more time. The undergrowth separated and the fronds of grass no longer hid the small deer-like creature that emerged from them. It was green, well-camouflaged, and its antlers were spiralling out from the top of its head in unexpected directions.

Looking again at Arran’s face, which hadn’t budged, she slammed the dagger back in its scabbard before the thing got closer. It was pawing at the ground, nervous perhaps at the sight of three enemies.

“Walk to the left a little, encourage it by shouting or something,” Taveon said.

Glowering at the two men, she drew her wooden sword and stepped to the side like Taveon had suggested.

When the deer still hadn’t charged, she locked eyes with it and called out.

“Come on you stinky piece of venison, come and—”

The deer had practically thrown itself halfway across the ground toward her in the time it took her brain to catch up with what her eyes were telling her. Instinctively, she launched forward into a thrust. The tip of her blade was aimed at the deer’s general mass.

The deer was either too enraged or too dumb to realise that it needed to attack from a different angle. The thing impaled itself on her thrust, and she put her whole body into stopping its charge.

The mass of the deer slammed into her hands and her body in quick succession. Fortunately, she was able to sidestep and allow the animal to go down to the ground.

Congratulations! You have slain a level 2 [Grass Deer].

Experience gained.

“It gave me a notification,” she called. Somehow, she wasn’t surprised that Taveon was already looking at her through his hands, held out in front of him as if he were holding a circular piece of glass in front of his face.

“Yes, I see. Your system is reacting to the experience you’ve gained.”

Taveon turned to Arran. “She needs something stronger than that deer; it was probably only at the third level.”

“It was a level two grass deer,” she said.

“This time, Faye, I need you to concentrate on your status or attributes as you deal the killing blow.”

“Alright,” she said.

She stood with her sword in her hand, nervously looking from left to right. Arran had disappeared and, it seemed, would bring something more powerful back with him this time.

The sounds around them of the forest were fairly even, and the sun filtering through the leaves made for a strangely peaceful environment to be awaiting some kind of beast that would happily attack her the moment it saw her.

“Why did the deer just run straight for me?”

“There are different thoughts,” Taveon said, “but the one that most favour is that the inherent rage beasts feel for humans is linked to the system somehow. Either they’re given enough strength to feel like they can beat the humans they encounter, or the system forces them to attack to our benefit. It’s rare that a beast will not attack.”

She nodded. That seemed to track well against her experience. Of course, there were times that the beasts showed some sense of self-preservation, but like that deer… there were definitely times that a regular animal would have just run away.

“So, does that change with different levelled beasts?”

“Higher levels often mean higher attributes for beasts, too. This invariably means that they gain more intelligence. Whilst most beasts will never reach sapience, there is a level of cunning in most higher-level beasts that make them extraordinarily dangerous, yes.”

Arran emerged from the other side of the clearing, pushing a bush out of his way.

“I have something coming, it thinks it’s stalking me. Faye, get ready because it will switch to you when it sees you. It senses weakness.”

Faye scowled at him, but he was grinning and not watching her face.

I am so going to beat him in a duel, one day.

Sure enough, when the bushes at the side of the clearing rustled and Taveon quietly murmured, “It’s here,” in her ear, Faye felt something’s attention lock onto her.

Turning away from the direction it was approaching from slightly, she kept the corner of her eye on the undergrowth there, and her sword ready to move the instant she needed it to.

Stats, attributes, come onnnn system.

A red and white blur shot through the grasses and launched itself at Faye. It would hit her squarely in the thigh if she let it, so she pivoted on her left foot, bringing her sword around in a defensive slash. The blade hit solidly, but she felt it catch on the body of the beast rather than cutting through it.

The beast hit her in the left side, though it didn’t seem to be able to hurt her as it was writhing around the wound she’d given it. Instinctively, she lashed out with the pommel, striking it as it came closer to her.

Allowing it to drop to the ground, she stepped backward and dropped to her knee, bringing the tip of her blade down and through the body of the creature: a fox, she could see now that it wasn’t moving fast enough to blur her vision.

Congratulations! You have slain a level 5 [Common Fox].

Experience gained.

Stats, she thought.

This time, when the mental command ran through the forefront of her mind, an explosion of information and text blasted into her thoughts.

[Stat Growth:] Tou+2, Str+2, Agi+1

Attributes

[Toughness:] 13

[Strength:] 15

[Reaction:] 12

[Agility:] 12

[Logic:] 10

[Intuition:] 11

[Willpower:] 11

[Charisma:] 9

[Magic:] 1

“Woah!” she couldn’t help but shout out.

“Ah, excellent!” Taveon said.

“Well done!” Arran added, at the same time. The men all grinned at one another.

The information was fading, becoming less… concrete.

“It’s fading!” she said. “Why is it fading?”

“Tell us, but only if you want to—” Arran called.

She started shouting out the words and numbers she saw, one by one.

By the end of it, Faye had run out of air… she had been shouting them out as quickly as she could as she wasn't sure how long they were staying — and the stats faded away as soon as she had finished.

Good timing, she thought.

She caught their expressions.

“What?” she said, “You said to tell you what it said.”

“Tell us, not shout it out loud…” Arran said with a half-hearted chuckle. “If anyone else was around, you’d have just told them exactly what your attributes are… as well as your growth. I wasn’t sure what your system would give you access to, but it seems functionally sound.”

“Did you interpret the system words in any way, Faye?” Taveon asked, clearly more interested in what she’d said rather than how she’d said it.

“No, that was exactly how it told it to me,” she said. The words had faded completely from her mind now, but she was certain she hadn’t added or taken anything from the information.

“Curious that your system uses two terms for the same thing, stats and attributes, if I understood you correctly?”

She nodded. “Is the translation not working? They mean basically the same thing to me.”

“I believe it is working, yes. I can tell that you’re using two different words, but the nuance is lost on me, I think.”

“Me too,” Faye admitted. “But it doesn’t matter, does it?”

Taveon grinned at them all. “No, but I have dedicated my life to studying knowledge and discovery of new ideas… please forgive an old man his vices.”

“Oh, no, Taveon, not at all!” she said. “I didn’t mean to belittle your work.”

The man smiled, like a grandfather might. “I have endured much worse than that in my lifetime.”

Arran broke in. “Your attributes are somewhat balanced. This is good. It means that you’re stable to begin with. I have seen others that are not nearly as balanced as this at fifth level, good. Perhaps less agility than I would hope for, as your swordmaster.”

Faye nodded.

“The most disappointing stat was magic,” she said, moping a little. “I can’t believe that it’s so low!”

The rare sound of Gavan’s laughter rang out in the forest. The others turned wide eyes on him.

“Apologies,” he said, after calming himself. “But we discussed this, remember?”

“Oh? I guess,” she said, confused. “Why is it so different?”

“Well—” Taveon started at the same time as Gavan spoke.

“It just is.”

The two looked at one another. Gavan’s implacable stare against Taveon’s more… irritated.

“Hmph, fine, you win. I cannot be bothered to argue with you on this, yet again,” Taveon muttered. He turned back to Faye, “Suffice it to say, for all practical purposes it does not matter. You can cast magic with a score of just one. There are people, however, with no magic score. Those people cannot cast magic.”

Faye nodded. She remembered their earlier discussion mentioning that. She had thought that her magic attribute would be similar to the others, just growing… slower?

“However, now that we have determined you can use your system when given access to experience… you can try to learn that spell.”

Faye took out the scroll from her belt again, to which Taveon nodded.

“Arran, something small, please. Just grab it and bring it quickly, she won’t need much.”

The duellist nodded and practically vanished again.

“Now, when Arran lets you dispatch this creature, Faye, you will receive some experience. The experience gain is essentially an influx of energy into your body, given by the system as a reward. Think of this energy as powering your system.”

“Oh, okay."

“It’s more complicated than that, of course…” Taveon muttered, with a shake of his head. “But you really don’t need to know that for our purposes.” He pointed at the scroll she held. “Hold the scroll — open, yes like that — and when you see the message informing you of your experience gain… think learn, or use, or some other action that makes sense to you. You are trying to absorb the information on that scroll. It’s nothing like you would have done before. If you don’t do it the first time, do not worry, we have others we can use. Take your time.”

She frowned, remembering something that she had barely had chance to think about yet. "This won't steal my only skill point, will it? I don't know if I have enough of them to waste..."

Taveon shook his head, "No, no, they're quite different. We can go over those another time. Think of them as... the chance to upgrade a skill. They normally only affect class skills."

Faye nodded, then focused back on the task at hand. She looked at the scroll with annoyance. The paper was written on with a multitude of inks, in various colours, thicknesses, and levels of luminosity. A diagram in pale, silver ink was imposed over writing that she could only just recognise as the same from the book shop — but there were scripts here that she hadn’t yet come across.

It was as if she was staring at a real-life Rosetta stone.

“This is incredibly frustrating,” she whispered. Being able to read would be so useful.

“Here we are,” Taveon said. Perhaps he hadn’t heard her, but she caught a smile at the corner of his mouth as he turned to watch Arran enter from a different direction yet again.

“Simple tree dweller,” Arran called. “Should be simple.”

“Your dagger will be more appropriate this time, Faye,” Taveon instructed. “Be careful that you do not hurt yourself when you focus on the paper. Remember what I said, concentrate on an action word…”

She nodded, drew her dagger and placed it against the struggling rodent’s neck. She drew it down in a smooth, simple slice. Not for the first time, she thanked her lucky stars she wasn’t vegetarian.

Congratulations! You have slain a level 1 [Tree Rodent].

Experience gained.

Immediately, Faye locked her eyes on the paper in her hand and thought:

Absorb.

Do you wish to learn the imbued spell from this scroll? Imbued spell: [Fire Dart]

Yes / No

Yes, she thought.

The paper in her hand didn’t so much combust, or fall apart, as it separated into motes of blue light that floated away on the wind.

“So pretty,” she said. Blinking, she turned to Taveon. “Was that all?”

Taveon, Arran, and Gavan were all looking at her in various states of shock.

“Is that all, she asks,” Gavan said, “is that all?!”

Arran just grinned.

Taveon wiped his hand through his hair. “I think I need to create more scrolls.”

Before anyone could tell her differently, Faye held her hand out to the side, pointed at a tree and exclaimed, “Fire Dart!”

A blast of fire and a heavy punch of force lanced out and struck the tree she had been aiming for. The mark it left was nowhere near the same as what Gavan had produced, but that hardly mattered.

“Let’s goooooo!” she screamed. “I used magic! Didn’t even need a wand or stupid pointed hat, look at me goooo!”

The peals of laughter from her friends mingled with her continued screams of exuberance, punctuated often by the rush of Fire Dart and the impact on the poor, poor trees around the Lóthaven forest.

Arran, Gavan, and Taveon were clustered close together, each of them watching as the young woman in front of them threw out Fire Darts at the trees. The blasts of flame didn’t mar the bark at all, but she hit the trees more often than not.

“That was incredible,” Arran murmured, one hand clenched before his mouth.

Taveon just grunted.

“How many uncrested do you know that could do that?” Arran asked Gavan.

“None of them,” he muttered back. “I did it, though.”

Arran hummed in response. He knew that his friend had only been able to learn his first few spells the same way that Faye had because his mentor had told him the correct process.

It seems that Faye hadn’t needed the full set of instructions.

“It’s her system,” Taveon said. He was holding his head in one hand as he watched her throw the basic spell around the clearing. “There’s something strange happening, to be sure. But however it shows her information it is clearly doing so better than most natives to our world.”

Arran frowned at that. “Are you saying that she’s seeing something that people here cannot?”

Taveon shrugged. “I haven’t the faintest idea. Only she can tell us, in time.”

They watched her a little more, standing in silence. She had flushed out some other small animals that were only first or second level if his sense was at all accurate. After a while, he saw Faye flinch and he smiled in commiseration.

However, instead of stopping, the woman pulled her sword from its sheath and sliced at her ‘enemies’ instead.

“What do we do?” Arran asked the others. “She’s supposed to learn to be a Swordfighter. But such a natural grasp of spellcasting…” he trailed off.

There were those that knew that magic was there and practically forsook it — such as Ailith. There were those that were open to magic but had not been given the chances to learn. And there were those like Gavan, who had been given the means and instruction to learn from an early age.

It was usually only those that had the backing of rich, or well-connected, family that were able to dedicate the time and energy to learning magic from such a low level. For Faye, the adventurers’ backing was the equivalent to a powerful family — he marvelled at that for a moment, that a woman that had been a stranger such a short while ago to enter their lives like she had… Arran shook his head and brought his thoughts back in order — but regardless of their help it should have taken at least a few failed attempts to learn the spell.

That was the conventional wisdom.

As one of her trainers, it was partially his responsibility to ensure her training went along the path that would most benefit her and her circumstances.

Now he had seen that Faye had a chance at a path that many wanted and couldn’t go down. What responsibility did they have to open those doors for her?

Grimacing, he realised that he would need to speak to the Administrator about it. A chance like this couldn’t be squandered.

For now, he simply watched as Faye seated herself with folded legs and closed her eyes. He wasn’t sure what she was doing, but it seemed that she was still in her experimental mode.

“Taveon,” he said, “what other spells do you have access to?”

The older man grunted again. “With me, no others. I did not expect her to move past Fire Dart. I can scribe others. It will take some time. Perhaps Gavan will assist me?”

“Yes,” Gavan replied.

“The Administrator must know,” Arran said, with a twist of his mouth.

Taveon nodded. “Tell her. We have a duty to prepare the girl for whatever path the system has opened for her. It seems that magic may be that path.”

Gavan hummed. Arran could tell his friend was happy, though he didn’t show it on his face. He had wanted another magic-using companion for years.

“Seems like you might have that back up on the team, eh?”

Gavan let out a grin, and Arran couldn’t help but join him.