Everything had started to settle into a routine as the months passed. Teach classes, run the adventuring club through combat drills, kick their asses on the day before the weekend, run them through a job during the weekend. Occasionally, spend hours failing to say anything to Luci’s shrine.

This week’s job was a gathering quest to collect Pyre Roots. Thorne’s troop was out getting Cloud Lotuses instead, so it was just Casimir and the team. He couldn’t range out as far without another teacher to watch the kids while he was rustling up trouble, but he still ensured that things didn’t get too boring for the kids.

Idly, he wondered whether he should let them have a job without monster attacks for once. Show them how a normal day as an adventurer goes. Eventually, he concluded that he’ll just get someone else to take them on a job, so he didn’t have to be there.

…Something wasn’t right. This was the third time Casimir had babysat the students at this location, so he had gotten pretty familiar with the normal mana profile of the area through his mana-attuned senses. The sounds of bubbling water mana underground, mixing with the sharp smells of fire mana as the geysers built up power for an explosion, the thick roots of the pyre flowers gathering that power and slowly converting that mixture into pure fire mana, a process that tasted almost, but not quite, like a salt lick.

But there was… an odd tone of whistling air mana, one foreign to this area. Something was using magic… Casimir looked around, hoping to catch something with his eyes. The advanced fusion of Detect and Analyze mana, Mana Symphony, had two layers: it allowed one to detect mana with their non-visual senses, but analysis was still mostly limited to sight, so he needed to lay eyes on the caster to get a true idea of what was going on.

Naturally, the instant things seemed off, Casimir leapt into a crevice he noticed on one of the stone walls and concealed himself as best as could be, quietly killing the bird that was previously living there.

Where was it… there! Casimir detected a nearly-invisible silhouette, and from the incredibly subtle pattern of concealment, Casimir knew exactly what he was dealing with. “Why in the depths is there a Cloud Slicer here?”

This was bad. Cloud Slicers were elite-ranked monsters, the penultimate assassins. They were intelligent, nigh-undetectable, fast as hell, and with attacks lethal enough that even heroic-ranked adventurers could easily get killed if they were caught by surprise. The good news is that they were assassins in more than just ability, but also attitude. They attacked anyone who got near the clouds where they formed and lived, but they only descended when convinced by another intelligent monster to kill someone specific. This meant that it would only kill its target if given the opportunity, prizing escape above all other priorities once it accomplished that.

The question is… who was the monster targeting? Was it him? Or one of the students? Or was there someone else here, and the assassin was a coincidence? Casimir didn’t like this at all.

Well, there was one way to test things. Casimir cast his best decoy illusion, a combination of light and wind mana that created a pretty-good facsimile of Casimir’s own appearance. Cloud Slicers had good senses, but it would not be the first time Casimir’s had to deal with them, so he had a pretty good idea on how good an illusion has to be to fool them.

As Casimir had feared, that subtle eddy in the local mana burst into motion, the languid movements accelerating into a tornado of cutting winds, utterly shredding both the illusion, a nearby boulder, and two yards of ground. What had put a hit out on him?

Still, Cloud Slicers did have one big weakness: the glass-like material they were made of was fragile as all hell, so a propelled sling bullet right as the winds died down shattered the thing’s head, and the magical concealment immediately ended, revealing an incredibly fine pile of crystal that, while difficult to see, was far from undetectable. Very valuable crystal, so after scanning the area for a second Cloud Slicer, Casimir took a few seconds to section it and stuff it into his enchanted loot bag.

The students should be fine… but Casimir rushed towards them anyway.

-----------------

Things were not fine. There were five thugs in the area when Casimir arrived, large men with thick muscles and rough appearances, although the battle had paused into a standoff as one of them held Illivere in their grip, knife pointed at her throat. Hanna was downed with her front covered in blood, with Faron desperately pouring the bottled life mana down her throat.

Peter was standing as still as possible, glaring at the man with Illivere but taking no other action. One piece of good news was that three of the men seemed to be in pretty bad shape themselves, the one free man more focusing on healing his downed allies (poorly) rather than attacking Faron and Hanna.

After taking a second to assess the situation and everyone’s sight lines, Casimir glided quietly along the ground, getting ever closer as Peter and the hostage taker spoke.

“Now, drop the axes on the ground, brat.” The man said condescendingly. Gritting his teeth, Peter started to tense, but deflated at the man moving his knife even closer to Illivere’s throat. Slowly, he let his axes fall from his hands, defeated.

“Good boy.” The man said, grinning as he relished in the power he had over the kid. “Now-” Peter’s eyes widened as he finally noticed Casimir standing behind the stranger, which was as good a time as any.

Casimir grabbed the arm of the hostage-taker, wrenching the knife away from Illivere’s throat and breaking the arm with a surge of mana enhancing his grip strength. For her part, she immediately seized the opportunity, escaping easily and taking a defensive position near where Faron was trying to keep Hanna alive, passing him an additional vial to assist. As expected, she was able to remain calm and composed even when her life was threatened.

The thug started to scream, but a choking curse reflexively applied killed the noise before it could inconvenience anyone. Afterwards, he modified the curse’s parameters, turning the strangulation into merely impeded breathing before the inherent resistance could kick in. Then, he compounded it with his newest mastered curse: a lightning mana curse that induced spasms in his throat muscles, disrupting any attempt to breathe evenly. “Do you like my hiccup curse, asshole?” Casimir said.

“*Th*hic* Last Ga*hic*” The guy choked out, kneeling down and cradling his broken arm.

“So you do know who I am.” Casimir spat, kicking him. He spared a glance to the other men, who were trying to escape. With a gesture, he cast choking curses on them too, each one collapsing one after the other, pawing at their throats as if to ward away the spell. After the last one fell, he relaxed the curses, like he did for the first one. “Sit quietly and don’t make me chase you, or else.” He thought about using a brief fear spell to reinforce the threat, but the mind mana wouldn’t convert properly, so he instead created a menacing rumble in his voice with force mana on the last two words. The men settled down, cowed by the threat.

The first man had acclimated to the hiccup curse, focusing on his breathing as he awaited Casimir’s judgment. The enemies handled, for now, Casimir moved on to Hanna, examining her injuries. Life aspected spirit bloodlines had many advantages when it came to recovering from injury, among them was a natural recovery speed comparable to weak regeneration curses, ones that only accelerated natural recovery instead of guiding it. The “potions” poured into her wounds and throat certainly helped keep her alive, but it would take hours for her to recover from injuries this severe.

Still, this was an easy fix. Casimir didn’t have the time or attention to use one of his top quality healing curses, but for Hanna, he doesn’t need to be nearly as careful. He laid a web of life mana on her soul, reinforcing the soul’s image of what she should be, and linking it to the pools of undirected life mana, on top of pouring a portion of his own mana into the recovery process.

Seconds after Casimir pulled Faron and Illivere away, Hanna’s eyes burst open and she leapt to her feet, muscles bulging as the last of the spell induced a mana rush before dissolving. “Okay. Casimir said. “Now that the immediate issue is resolved…” He detonated the hiccup curse intentionally, with the thug jerking and twitching from the electrocution, but he stopped his incessant hiccuping. “...what in the world were you idiots thinking?” He kicked the man towards his buddies, following him so Casimir could address them as a group. “Did you think I’m less dangerous than whatever monster hired you?” If they were working in tandem with a Cloud Slicer, it had to be a monster calling the shots.

Before Casimir could get creative with threats, the one that was healing his companions cracked, waving his hands to emphasize how unarmed he was. “Don’t kill us, we’re sorry! It wasn’t anything personal, man, we’re just following orders!”

Casimir scowled. “What orders, and from who?”

The guy was quick to answer. “We needed the girl! As for the boss… Uh oh.” The enchanted chest armor the thugs had, light as it was, started to surge with mana on all five thugs, leeching their mana to fuel the effect. Casimir knew he didn’t have time to disable them, so he leapt towards the students, creating a magic barrier just in case.

As he had feared, the five thugs burst into blue-hot flames, incinerating in moments. After a moment to gather his bearings, Casimir started metaphorically kicking himself for his reaction. Of course they had enchantments set to kill them. If he had his mind all in order, he would have remembered to check for things like that. This was why calming spells were so useful, they prevented you from making stupid mistakes like that.

Bah. Casimir created some water and washed away the ashes of the thugs. Turning to his students, he looked them over. Now that Hanna was back up, she had administered healing to the rest of the team. “Okay kids, this job’s gone to shit. Follow me and we’ll get this done quickly.” After twenty more minutes of walking straight to the mature roots and scooping them out of the rock, which was originally going to take at least two more hours of careful searching, testing, and extraction, Casimir led the group out of the forest, slaughtering the one monster that bothered them on the way out and leaving the body to rot.

The silence was oppressive, but the students were safe.

-----------------

When they were back in the guild hall and seated at a table, Casimir finally relaxed. “Okay, now we can talk about it.” He said.

Peter, Faron, and Hanna’s questions all stumbled over each other, but they eventually calmed down, with Illivere immediately starting her own question: “So you’re The Last Gasp?”

Casimir nodded. “Yep. I know, I don’t really live up to the rumors.” Most of his current rep was either David talking shit or from his short stint as a solo adventurer before his sabbatical, which was when he was… not himself. “I’m not some emotionless killer, “ anymore. ”... and for the vast majority of my career, I was part of a team. But I assure you, I can set a breathing curse on someone with any mana type I’ve bothered learning to use. I’ve earned that title.”

Peter pointed his finger at Casimir in challenge. “Stone mana.”

“Coughing curse, creates grains of sand in the throat.” Casimir said immediately.

“Fire” was Peter’s next challenge.

Easy. “Thirst curse, it makes breathing painful.” One of the less useful ones, honestly. “If you do it right, they end up coughing blood.” People’s bodies tended to crack open if you used fire mana to dry parts out. Quite nasty, actually. “One more before we move on.”

Peter struggled to come up with one, but Faron provided it for him: “Metal.”

“Metal mana doesn’t work well with curse structures.” Casimir explained. “That said, one of the things a metal curse can do is induce stiffness, and breathing requires enough motion that a metal curse can impede it in that way.” That one was more for bragging rights than anything Casimir has ever had the desire to use. Metal mana was rather… dense. It wasn’t an efficient option for most uses. But there was a reason he learned how to use metal to conjure lockpicks and arrows with shaping magic, and that was because it was useful. “Now, any other questions?”

Hanna spoke up next: “D-did you let us fight them? To test us?”

“Nope.” Casimir said bluntly. “They sent an elite-ranked monster against me. It was a distraction, but an effective one.” Well, the thing was stealthy enough that if Casimir wasn’t actively searching for monsters, he probably would have missed it and died. There’s such a thing as being too honest, though. “That's why I’m sure they’re working for a monster, like a devil or dragon.” There shouldn’t be any living examples of those that would have a grudge against Casimir, so the thug’s insistence that they were after Illivere seemed true. But why? “Monsters don’t do the bidding of humans, but the reverse can be true. The suicide enchantments proved that none of them was the boss.”

Peter seemed incredibly interested in the mention of ‘elite monster’. “What was the monster? Was it cool?”

Casimir shrugged. “It was a Cloud Slicer. Don’t usually see them on the ground, normally they just attack people who fly too high. Their bodies are basically glass, they typically get used in high quality potion bottles.” The material allowed for the easy containment of more volatile alchemical preparations. “Next question.”

“Should we inform my father of this?” Illivere asked, as if the information conveyed was no more pressing than her taking a small vacation.

Casimir didn’t like that idea. “He may end up banning you from the adventuring club, or withdrawing you from the school altogether.” It was a smart move, honestly, but it resembled failure too much for Casimir’s tastes. No adventurer liked to be told that they weren’t good enough, after all.

“Ah.” Illivere replied. “...He can be illogical sometimes, when it comes to my safety.” Casimir rather disagreed on how illogical it was to remove a vulnerable target from the dangerous place after a failed attack, but he kept his peace on the matter.

“We have to attack!” Peter insisted. “Let’s kick their asses the next time they come sniff around and get their boss, that’ll show them.”

That was dangerously optimistic. “We don’t know enough about their resources. That could be the most they could bring to bear, a gamble, or that could have been a half-assed probing strike. If it’s the former, it could be months before we see a hint of them. If it’s the latter…” The Academy has numerous defenses that prevent assassin-type monsters like Cloud Slicers from getting close enough to their targets to do anything without getting detected, but whether it would be more likely to try another stealthy approach or to instead do something more brute force… Casimir hated bodyguarding. “...we’re going to put a hold on further quests.”

The students seemed to be expecting that restriction, as they nodded sadly rather than fight him on that. Hanna raised her hand, speaking once Casimir turned his attention to her. “How long do you think we should wait?”

Good question. “...You’ve done enough jobs that getting more done doesn’t help much for your skills, so I’m going to say ‘when I'm confident you can hack it at standard grade’.” Which will probably take… the rest of the semester at least, if not that then the rest of the year.

Better get started.