As Faye stalked down the road back toward the Steading, following the shadowed figure of who she suspected had set off the attack on this farm, she considered what she was aiming to do.

Do I attack someone out of suspicion they did something? How does adventurer authority work? They both talked about attacking the Steading and Arran and the others… so that makes it okay?

She grimaced. So far, she had fought animals and monsters. They were wild things, but not sapient.

But my skill already identified them both as hostile. Would it have done that if they were innocent?

It came down to how much she trusted her skills, the system-granted magic abilities that supposedly could tell a person’s intent when Faye could not.

As they drew closer to the Steading, there were some lanterns that had somehow been lit. These were, again violet in colour.

Faye suspected that Ceri had a hand in making them.

The figure stalked through the violet light without pause. As she did, Faye realised that the woman — or what she assumed was a woman from the voice she had heard — was wearing a strange assortment of armour and clothing.

In just that brief moment, Faye had seen more antlers and branches than she had seen metal. Instantly, her mind wandered to the gaming terms she recalled from home.

A druid? Magic?

Her musings on what her opponent might have access to were ruthlessly curtailed when the woman ahead suddenly stopped at the edge of the road. She raised a hand and stood still for a moment.

Faye was not sure what she was doing, but a few seconds of silence later, violet streaks rippled across the air in front of the figure before her.

She heard the woman’s curse clear enough.

Alongside the curse came another word and a slashing motion with her arm. Something emerged from the ground and whipped at the barrier alongside the road. It once again rippled with violet magic.

Now’s my chance.

Faye drew her wooden sword and ran forward. In her mind’s eye, she gathered the energy she needed for a fire dart. She tried to recall what exactly she had done to the lesser briar before, as the fire dart had come out differently.

Taking hold of the mana emerging from her hand and trying to enforce her demands on it was difficult but was bearing fruit almost every time she tried. She grinned. It was almost intoxicating. To literally wield fire from the hand.

Her opponent turned around when she was still twenty paces away.

Without a word, she gestured and the same whip-like attack that had been ineffective came for Faye. She judged its line of attack and neatly sidestepped. She flung her left hand forward, willing the flames to emerge.

The dart flew a little straighter than most darts, but it wasn’t exactly the same as the one in the yard.

Her opponent easily dodged it, regardless.

“Pah, a mewling mage,” the woman before her spat out.

She raised both hands in an entreaty to the heavens.

Faye wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen, but something in the air around her changed. A heartbeat later, her [Swordfighter’s Sense] went berserk.

She dove to the side, hitting the road hard and rolling into the depression designed to funnel water away from the surface. Gritting her teeth, she scrambled forward.

That’s when the heavens opened up.

A thunderous sound echoed across the land. Blinding light flashed.

A moment later, Faye came to her senses. Or that wasn’t right, her senses returned. The road was pockmarked with black marks.

Shit! She just called down lightning.

“Where did you crawl to, little mage?!” the lightning-wielding woman shouted. Faye could not see the woman’s face, but if the way she was screaming at Faye was any indication, she was probably staring around wild-eyed and a little manically.

But with no other attacks coming, Faye assumed that the woman had not been able to see where Faye had rolled.

Concentrating on slowing her rapidly beating heart, Faye closed her eyes for a moment and breathed steadily. Pulling on her mana reserves, she forced more mana into the Fire Dart spell than she had for the first cast.

Just as it was filled to bursting, Faye rose in a crouch and pointed her hand.

The woman spun and immediately caught the movement.

The mana ignited.

The woman’s hands stretched out toward Faye, illuminated by a vibrantly green light that emanated from everywhere and nowhere at once.

The flames scorched forward, straight as an arrow, and quick as a thought. Instead of a dart, it looked like a thick bar of reddish orange fire two fingers thick. It lit the night with its orange-red light, casting dancing shadows across Faye’s opponent’s face.

By that light, Faye saw the thorns and whipping tendrils of wood that was churning up the ground and coming directly for her. There was no way she would be able to move in time.

The thick bar of fire that she had cast drained her mana by an enormous amount compared to a regular Fire Dart. The sudden absence of that much energy was fatiguing in a way that Faye predicted would leave a heavy migraine behind.

Pushing that unpleasant thought aside, she tried to rise from her crouch in the ditch at the side of the road.

The thorns and woody vines slammed into her, entangling her legs in their wicked grasp. They dug in, tightly encompassing her leg from shin to lower thigh. Thorns punctured her thick cloth trousers and the padding there.

Faye gritted her teeth and tried not to cry out.

The other woman had no problem with letting out her anger.

“Argh, you fucking worm,” the woman shrieked. “How dare you bring fire to the edge of Her demesne?”

Faye had no idea who the woman was shrieking about but had no desire to stop and chat. She quickly drew her dagger and attacked the snare of vines that were entangling her leg. She was not sure if the flames of her spell had reached the woman or not, but there was no real time to think about that.

The woman was stalking closer. Something she was casting twisted her features and hands into ugly shapes. This time, the light emerging was a deep crimson. The same as that which had inhabited the briars.

“Hear my call, oh Goddess of the darkness.”

Oh, shit, that does not sound good.

The dagger was biting into the wooden vines easily enough, but the core of each vine was dense and resisted cutting. Faye was tuning out the chanting of the woman’s spell, which was getting more and more ominous sounding as it went on.

Getting the dagger to cut halfway through the main vine across her thigh, she sheathed it and grabbed either side of the cut and twisted.

Thorns cut into her hands, some that she had not seen and hadn’t shorn away, and others further down the vine twisted their barbs into her leg further.

Faye let out a cry of pain, just as the woman’s chant rose in pitch to become a kind of scream.

She looked up and caught sight of a ball of twisting crimson darkness float away from the woman. It was making a steadily accelerating beeline for Faye’s immobile form.

“Shit, shit, shit,” she repeated under her breath.

With a final, desperate twist, the wrist-thick vine splintered apart. With that, the pressure on her upper leg lessened greatly and Faye let out a whimper of relief.

The crimson orb of swirling magic was still coming toward her and was now only a few paces in front of her. The light was almost mesmerising, swirling inside an invisible glass orb… it looked halfway between ink in water and smoke inside a glass.

In a frantic act, Faye raised a shaking hand and pointed at the orb.

Fire Dart!

A quick, basic dart of flames ignited with her thought and scorched through the orb. Upon contact, the orb exploded in a nova of mana.

Faye felt the foreign, nasty magic attack her. A cloying, disgusting taste entered her mouth, and she broke out in an immediate clammy sweat.

The enemy caster was closing with a twisting gait. She snarled as she came forward. Faye found that despite the orb exploding, the light of her crimson magic was lingering. In that horrific light, she saw the woman’s face… or the mask covering the face. It was half of an animal skull, made into some kind of headdress. The antlers stuck backward, and fronds of thread dangled in front of her eyes.

“You have trespassed in Her holy demesne. For this, you are to be subjected to retribution.”

Faye cried out. The magic had seized something in her chest and squeezed. She felt like vomiting, but nothing emerged when she bent forward.

The entangling thorny vines were still wrapped around her lower leg. But she was able to move a little. She unconsciously shrunk down to the road surface as the woman got closer.

“Your blood shall cleanse. Be thankful, your disgusting mana will be good for something.”

The blood-obsessed woman was now within touching distance of Faye. An awful, decaying stench emanated from her — Faye had no idea if it was her clothes or her body, but it hardly mattered.

A clawed hand — no, they were fingernails, not claws — came out from the shadows and grabbed Faye’s chin, jerking her eyes up to meet her attacker’s.

They were wild, wide and dangerously bloodshot. The woman’s lips were stained dark, Faye couldn’t see which colour, and her teeth were similarly stained.

With the woman’s insane gaze fixed on Faye’s, she wondered for a moment what and who the woman thought she was. She would not care, other than if she met other insane casters that were willing to use her blood for something…

The pain inside faded slightly. Suddenly, Faye’s nerves realised that she was still clutching her wooden sword in her right hand. With a grunt, Faye thrust her left hand forward, the mana she held there igniting into flames as she pushed at the witch’s chest.

The woman screamed, her hand dropping Faye’s chin immediately. Before she could respond further, Faye whipped the sword up and across her body.

The tip of her blade caught the edge of the woman’s jaw, catching the edge of her skull headdress and ripping it off her face.

“AGHHHH!”

The high-pitched wail emanating from the slashed and bloodied mouth of the woman was ear-splitting, but in that moment, Faye looked down, held her mana against the thorny vine and willed it to ignite.

A small push of mana later, the blackened ash that remained of a hand-sized piece of vine drifted away. With a steeling of her nerves, Faye pulled her leg away in a single motion.

Pain.

Faye’s scream joined in. Her opponent was still on fire, her disgusting accoutrements fully ablaze. Hobbling forward, Faye got within range and slashed the woman’s leg badly enough to have severed a ligament. She went down to a knee, still shrieking, head turned to the night sky in agony.

Bringing the tip of her wooden blade around, she positioned carefully and thrust it cleanly into the soft flesh beneath the mouth and up into her brain.

The sudden absence of the shriek was oddly loud in Faye’s ear. The flames carried on crackling.

Congratulations! You have defeated a level ten [Primalist Caller].

Bonus experience points awarded for defeating an enemy one tier above you.

Congratulations! You have created a new spell. [Scorching Lance] has been added to your spell list.

Bonus experience awarded for creating a [Tier 1] spell

~ Spell Info ~

[Tier 1]

[Scorching Lance]

[Active] [Fire]

[High cost] [High damage]

~ Description ~

A beam of concentrated fire that scorches enemies, dealing high immediate damage and ongoing burn damage. Damage of [Scorching Lance] increases if target undergoes sustained attack. Damage of [Scorching Lance] is increased if target is already ignited.

High chance of igniting target.

Reading over the notifications, Faye promptly dropped her sword and fell to the road. She dismissed the words from her mind, staring instead at the corpse of the person she had just murdered. Not even murdered but burnt alive. The final thrust of the sword a mercy, but one that made Faye feel sick, disgusted with herself in a way she had never felt before.

She dry-heaved.

Her stomach clenched and clenched again; worse than any cramp she had ever experienced.

The tears fell freely, and each time she caught another whiff of the burning corpse her body tried to evacuate every last drop of her soul onto the road.

Sometime later, Faye realised that she was getting stiff. The cold was seeping into her bones and joints, locking her up. The pain in her leg was a sharp constant at the back of her mind, but the thought of moving to stand made her tremble.

The Primalist’s corpse had burned out. The remains no longer stank but looking at the charred corpse still felt like a gut punch.

She would have killed me, Faye reasoned with herself.

But another, quiet, part of her replied.

You didn’t need to follow them.

Faye had fought before. She had bled and caused others to bleed before. Each time it was stopped before it went too far. Each time there was someone there to stop it descending into this… madness.

Lying a few steps away in the dark was the broken headdress the Primalist had been wearing. She could only just see that the front edge was cracked, split when Faye’s attack had hit it. Looking at headdress with its bones and dirtied threads, it was easy for Faye to say I was in the right.

But she had just killed another human.

She shuddered or realised that she had been shivering for a while already.

The cold had invaded her body completely.

She shifted, and the pain of her injuries shot through her. She coughed, each hacking cough sending more vibrations of pain throughout her body.

Eventually, she subsided.

Without shifting too greatly, Faye wormed a finger into the belt pouch she had stashed the potions from Steader Meirí in. For a moment, she tried to force her thoughts into order. Which was the one for healing?

She glanced between the two.

Try as she might, she could not focus. She could not bring herself to care, either.

She put the top of the bottle between her teeth and tore at the waxed stopper, spitting it away when it finally came free. She hesitated only a moment before knocking back the first potion.

A warmth seeped down her gullet and settled in her stomach, which then condensed and revitalised her mana reserves.

That was the mana one, then.

She tore out the second bottle’s stopper as well, downing its contents in a quick gulp, trying her best not to grimace.

Neither tasted much of anything, for which she was thankful. But the decaying flavour of the Primalist’s spell still coated Faye’s tongue and memories enough to taint them.

The second potion spread throughout her body, smoothing away pains and releasing the cramping muscles. The potion was not strong enough to completely close her wounds, but it meant that her leg was no longer completely ruined. She could move without agony ripping through her.

Faye stood.

Pushing herself to move, she ignored the ashen remains and scene of battle behind her. This Primalist had an ally… someone that had complained they were not taking part in an assault against Arran and the others.

She could not let them stand alone.