Faye moved through the sparse trees; her eyes peeled for anything that indicated more of the same, sickly green mana had been left around this area.

What if they were going the other way?

Her thoughts were running a mile a minute, but she tried her best to focus on the signs around her despite the distraction of her thoughts.

The ground was filled with muddy leaves left over from the autumn, though they had formed a thick carpet of mulch by now. In amongst the mulch were the occasional signs of traffic. A footprint here, a scuff there. Faye barely paid attention to them, and instead concentrated on the foreign mana.

Gavan followed in her footsteps.

The trees thinned the further they got from the Steading. It was easier to move forward, but there was no cover. Faye hoped that whoever it was that had poisoned the food stores was either entirely too confident or just distracted…

A few minutes later, her fears were realised.

The deep thrum of a bow was the only warning she had before an arrow streaked toward her face. Fortunately, the battle instincts she had been developing enabled her to move out of the way in time… by dropping to the floor in surprise.

Luckily, Gavan was not standing directly behind her when the arrow came for them, or he would have been impaled by it. Instead, he responded by throwing out a trio of [Ice Shard]s toward where the arrow had come from.

Faye scrambled to her feet, drawing her sword, and she pushed forward through the open ground. She ran at an angle, there was no reason to make it easy for the archer and dodged behind trees whenever she could.

Another arrow cut across her shoulder as she emerged from the next tree, pulling at her braid, and tugging on her scalp painfully enough to elicit a yelp.

She thrust her left hand forward and threw out a rapid fire burst of [Fire Dart]s.

Gavan was doing the same from the other side with his [Ice Shard], creating an enfilading cone of shards that ripped bark from tree trunks and slammed into the trees with enough force to cause massive splinters to blast away from impacts.

With [Mana Sense], Faye’s sight became a morass of mana motes that made it practically impossible to see through to their attacker, so she switched back to ordinary vision. She ducked behind a particularly large tree for a moment to catch her breath, then darted back out from the same direction she had entered, hoping to confuse the archer.

With no other arrows coming for her, yet she decided to circle around further. Too far and she would put herself at danger of friendly fire, so she only went a few metres further.

Gavan’s deadly ice storm had finished, leaving the clearing they were emerging into eerily silent. Faye strained her ears to hear… anything.

A stick snapped to her right.

She dropped to her knee and threw out [Fire Dart]s in the direction of the sound. Each one impacted the ground or a tree and exploded in a blast of flames that threw stifling air back at her. Despite that, Faye heard the twang of the bow once again.

She threw herself aside, but she had not responded quickly enough. The arrow slammed into her leg and pierced straight through. She screamed out in pain.

The archer stalked forward, putting another arrow to the string as they did.

She looked up and did not recognise the archer. He was a tall, well-muscled man. His armour was made of various pieces of leather and furs that were blackened and burnt, and his face was covered in blood from a wound on the side of his head.

He did not say a word as he stood above her and aimed the arrow, point blank.

Before he could pull back on the string, Faye used the hand that was not clamped around the arrow in her thigh to aim a [Scorching Lance].

The bar of fire that was almost as thick as her fist punched upward quicker than the archer could react. By chance, it hit the archer on his leading hand — the one holding the bow — and the intense heat of the lance melted through his fingers and set both the bow and his sleeve on fire.

He had pulled back on the bowstring slightly, but the tension was no longer held properly, and the bow basically sprang up into his face. That hardly mattered. The spell had scorched through his hand and had splashed against his chest and face.

His screams were terrible.

An [Ice Shard] slammed into the side of his head from the left, silencing his screams and sending his body toppling away in one swift motion.

Congratulations! Your group has defeated a level 15 [Wildlands Hunter].

Experience shared.

Congratulations! You have earned enough experience to level up. You are now level 13.

Faye hissed out a breath as she mentally accepted the notification. Levelling up from the ambush was a pleasant surprise, she just wished that she had not needed to get shot through with an arrow in order to get the next level up.

Gavan rushed toward her.

“Are you okay?”

“No!” she hissed out. “I don’t know what he did to this arrow, but it kills.”

“You look alive enough, to me,” Gavan responded. He was kneeling and looking at the wound already.

Faye had to laugh, but a wave of pain emanated from the wound as Gavan prodded around it.

“Owww, shit, do you have to do that?” she asked, “and, it was an expression.”

“You do exaggerate a lot,” he said. Then, looking up into her eyes he smiled grimly. “This will hurt.”

“Just fuckin—” she started, but her words were cut off as she screamed out in pain. Gavan had snapped the arrow and slipped it out of the back of her leg in a smooth motion. “— do it…” she finished with a whimper.

“Sorry,” he said, “found that anticipating it is worse than the pain.”

Faye just hummed.

The healing glow of Gavan’s magic illuminated his face, and it was as if a cool cloth had been placed against her too-hot flesh. The pain immediately drained away and she felt her muscles relax.

Gavan was too engrossed in the healing to notice anything, but something pinged against Faye’s senses — penetrating the mental barrier against pain her mind had erected. Without being sure what it was she was feeling, she did not say anything but tried to puzzle out the sensation.

She grabbed Gavan’s hand. He did not stop healing, but he did spare a glance. She tried to focus, but instead settled for warning him.

“Mana,” was all she got out.

Gavan nodded.

She grinned to herself. Of course. He had not missed it. He was luring in whoever was using magic.

Nice to have a professional along, she thought.

The next moment, Gavan erected three [Ice Wall]s around them, enclosing them in a triangle of safety. Three bone-jarring impacts resounded as something slammed into the walls from the outside. Gavan winced.

“That would have hurt.”

Faye nodded in agreement, and a moment later gasped in surprise as the last of the pain faded completely.

“Wow, thank you,” she said.

“Healed you more than I have in the past. No point only getting you to the threshold, like before. Might as well take you all the way.”

She nodded. Her sword was lying beside her, abandoned as she had fallen to the ground. She grabbed it and stood to test her leg. It was as good as new, better perhaps. Energy coursed through her.

“Aftereffect,” Gavan said, noticing her movement. “It’ll fade and you’ll feel like shit in a few minutes.”

“Best clean up after ourselves, then, right?”

Gerrec cursed. The mage had noticed him and had erected some kind of ice barrier to prevent his spells from landing. Too bad because that kind of strike usually took out whatever it hit. It was rare for Gerrec to find anyone that could withstand his first strike.

He cursed again as he thought about Von dying. The man had always been an overconfident little shit, but there was something awful about dying to pieces of scum like this that set Gerrec’s blood boiling.

He was not sure who the mage and his apprentice were, but it was clear they were not the kind of people that deserved to be left alone. And now they had taken out Gerrec’s partner.

Cracking the knuckles on his right hand, he knelt down once more and placed his palm against the bare earth. Closing his eyes, he concentrated.

Best clear up after ourselves, then, right?

The voice came to him through the ground, the earth picking up the vibrations of the apprentice’s voice as she spoke and transmitting them to his hand.

This pair were confident of their ability. It just meant that he might have a harder time bringing them down a peg or three before burying them deep underground, like he did with all his enemies.

Pulling on the threads of mana that ran all throughout the ground — thousands of them, twisting and swirling through the rock and soil of the ground that made up the basis of Gerrec’s magic. He pulled on a few choice threads, encouraging the dense rocks hidden underground to come to the surface.

As they breached the soil beneath his feet, he commanded them to break apart. Soon, he had dozens of projectiles of dense, fist-sized rocks.

He began launching them at the icy walls, once after another, in a rhythm that matched his breaths in and out. He could not help but smile as he threw each one.

No, no perverse poison mage was going to get away from him — even if he had access to spells other than those deadly, sickly ones that Gerrec and Von had encountered time after time in these woods.

Thundering booms echoed throughout their small fortress as the mage outside began throwing projectiles at the ice.

Faye grimaced and covered her face as a splinter of ice broke away from the inner wall and chips fell away.

“Well, that’s unpleasant,” she said, “what will we do against that?”

Gavan grinned. “Give him more of a target.” He gestured at the wall furthest away from the attacking mage, and it dissolved into water and dropped to the forest floor. They moved away from the splintering walls that remained and Gavan turned and spread his hands wide.

A slightly curving wall of ice materialised across their vision, blocking approximately five metres in total from left to right, and tall enough for the other mage not to see them over it.

“You know we can’t see him either, right?”

Projectiles continued barraging against the ice, but this time they slammed into the centre of the wall, trying to break through. Gavan gestured again and reinforced the wall.

“Yes, but people tend to focus on the wall. You go left, I’ll go right. Attack from the edges. Go on a strike on the wall.”

Faye shrugged. Gavan would know better than her. She accepted his idea and they both ran to the edges of the wall. Faye lifted her hand to indicate she was ready. Gavan did a moment later, as well.

A projectile slammed into the wall of ice.

Faye did not just step out from the wall but ran out. On her first step out, she ignited her sword. On her second step, she caught the mage in her sight. On the third, she whirled and slashed out with her sword, casting [Blades of Flame] as she did.

On the other side of the [Ice Wall], Gavan had emerged and immediately threw out a fan of icicles as deadly as her sword. They slammed forward with incredible speed toward the mage, though the first few were slightly off target as he had cast the spell before truly seeing where his opponent stood.

Faye had not stopped moving, which was the only reason she was not pulverised with a fist-sized rock that shot toward her as if from a cannon. It smashed into a tree behind her, though she did not look to see the damage.

Sliding to a stop, she swung her blade and cast [Blades of Flame] once more, before reversing direction and moving to the right, zigzagging toward the enemy mage.

She heard a curse from the unknown mage, and a moment later she could not see anything as dust and debris rose from the forest floor in a cloud. Blinded, Faye had to scrunch her eyes shut tightly to avoid damage.

It was getting hard to breathe with the particles in the air. She stumbled backward, reaching forward with her sword to make sure she did not run into anything.

Something pelted her from behind, a small rock, and she cursed mentally. The whirlwind of dust and debris was starting to field small rocks. She had to get out of the area, fast, or she might get brained by a rock and bleed out before Gavan had chance to find her in this maelstrom.

Gerrec cursed. The mage and his apprentice were no slouches. That wall had been tougher than he had given them credit for, and his boulders had not broken through as quickly as he had assumed.

Then, when they came swarming at him from out behind it, he realised their true plan. Fortunately, he had mastered the dual casting of his spells years ago and was able to target both the mage and his apprentice at the same time.

His aim had not been true, but that was forgivable, he reasoned.

The apprentice was throwing fire at him, small arcs that blazed out from her in a slightly curving path that made them predictable. He was able to step out of their path easily enough. Her master, on the other hand, was flinging enough ice Gerrec’s way to be a real nuisance.

Instead of targeting the poisoner, Gerrec was forced to smash the incoming shards of ice with his rocks. That meant taking his eyes of the apprentice for a moment, which is how he missed the incoming arc of fire.

It slammed into him with more force than he had been expecting and it threw off his concentration. His rock projectiles faltered for a moment and in that gap the mage threw up his hand.

Gerrec activated another of his spells: [Whirlwind of Dust]. It was a protective spell he liked to use because most monsters or enemy combatants were ill equipped to deal with the amount of dust and rock particles the spell was capable of outputting.

And his own earth sense ability allowed him to keep track of any entity within his cloud, making it even better.

The apprentice immediately stopped and turned aside, trying to feel her way out of the whirlwind, which was fine with Gerrec. He sent a few larger pieces of rock her way, but the whirlwind required some time to boost its power — drawing mana from the surrounding area to fuel itself to grow larger the longer it went on without disruption.

The enemy mage, on the other hand, vanished behind another triangular fortress, which Gerrec sensed as a pillar of nothing in his whirlwind. The dust on that side of the spell flowed around the triangular fortress, leaving him blind.

But it did not matter if he could not see his opponent when the opponent could not move from the walls.

He grinned.

Faye stumbled as she emerged from the maelstrom of dust and rocks. She felt the bruises already forming on her back and arms, but she was thankful nothing had hit her head.

Looking back, the clearing they were fighting in had been entirely covered by the whirling dirt and dust of the mage’s spell. She shook her head. That kind of thing was a great spell and she wanted to get her hands on something like it, though a part of her knew that if she tried to do that with the magic, she currently had access to she would end up burning the forest down.

Perhaps even burning herself in the process.

Whilst a firestorm might not be the best idea, Faye knew that she had an opportunity here. She was no longer being targeted by rocks, which meant she could move to a new position.

Taking off at a run, she circled around the maelstrom. Unfortunately, it seemed that the mage was no idiot and had surrounded themselves with a fairly even coverage of whirling dust and debris that Faye was reluctant to charge into.

Instead, she moved back from the maelstrom until she could more easily visualise the size of it and kept moving around it. That way, she was a little more certain of where the centre of the dust storm was.

She figured it was the best place to start.

Sheathing her sword, Faye pictured the mage standing in the centre of the maelstrom and pointed both hands at them. Then, drawing as much mana as she could, she cast two [Scorching Lance] spells into the heart of the dust maelstrom.

The twin bars of thick flames punched into the whirlwind and Faye lost sight and sense of what was happening in there.

That was until, like a cloud of gas going up, the entire dust storm ignited from the point of contact with her [Scorching Lance] spells and turned the entire thing into a blazing inferno.

“Oh, shit.”