Training Sabrina was made a little more difficult, thanks to the inability of Lia and me to be out in the sun. If not for the dense clouds covering the sky the days after meeting her, things might have turned out a lot differently than they had but luckily, a few kilometres of thick, watery fog hanging above our head filtered enough of the harsh light to let me move about outside. It still weakened me, making combat highly inadvisable, and the brief attempt Lia made was enough to give her a rather brutal sunburn but it wasn’t fatal. If necessary, we could both travel though Lia would have to completely cover up and I didn’t want to know what would happen to her if the cloud cover broke. I was confident that I’d be able to escape before the sun weakened me too much, but it was difficult to estimate how Lia would fare. Neither of us was really willing to try, nor had we really experimented with her weakness before, we merely knew it was there and that sunlight was incredibly painful for her. Longer exposure was something we simply avoided, negating the risks by turning nocturnal.

But with Sabrina, that wasn’t something we could continue. A child needed the light, at least until we completed the compact with Hecate. Afterwards, we would have to reassess and decide on how we wanted to proceed, depending on the details of that compact. Could we keep her with us, during the bloody fights we would undoubtedly be involved in, could we take her with us into the night or would it be better to try putting her somewhere safe and hope that she could have something of a childhood? As much of a childhood as one could have in these times, though even that idea was questionable.

Trying to grant her the power to protect herself or hope that she was protected, as a child should be? The only good solution for her would be for Lia and myself to give up on our path to power, or at least interrupt it for almost a decade but that wasn’t a solution I was willing to take. I liked Sabrina but my desire to reunite with Sigmir trumped the relationship with Sabrina. So, we had to decide on a bad solution for her. Neither truly appealed to me, but maybe the results of her gaining the compact with Hecate would give us an idea. Another important question was, could she already get her class?

I remembered that Rai, despite being about fourteen at the time of our meeting, had just managed to get his class and gained a few levels in it. But was that because his people wanted to make sure he was trained in the skills needed to get the right class or was it because people needed to attain a certain age before they could even start to really gain levels? I wasn’t sure, so far the youngest I had met who had a class was Kevin, roughly the same age as Rai had been, so that didn’t tell me much.

None of the stories I had heard on Mundus really got into the age of the people involved, not that I had heard that many of those. The best I could come up with were tales of child-like oracles with divinely bestowed gifts but that didn’t help. It might mean that people could gain classes beforehand, it might be a metaphor for certain innocent traits that those specific gods wanted in their oracles or it might be something else, possibly some sort of divine shenanigans to get around a normally iron-clad rule. That the gods could bend the rules was evident by the fact that the capsules had immediately granted us access to a class, a class of our choice, not assigned us something based on the skills we already possessed, as it was for normal people. What’s more, we even gained that class through our legacy, even if I had a feeling that many of those classes wouldn’t be attainable here.

For example, a Guild Mage was supposed to learn their magic in the Mages’ Guild. There was no such thing here, so how would somebody who gained it after learning a bit of magic in their first few levels continue onwards? No, from what I had heard, you could only get basic classes, something like my Sorceress, that didn’t need any real outside training but were based on finding your own path.

But even in that regard, there might be exceptions. I could easily see Mrs Wu teach somebody how to fight, regardless of how that training played into the advancement of their class. She might even gain some sort of specialised trainer class, I had no real idea, nor had I ever wanted to intrude on her privacy and use Observe on her, so I had no idea about her level. Weaker than me, but at this point everybody was, at least everybody I had interacted with. Maybe the core of the Withered could compete, though I doubted it. And even if they were, I was looking forward to turning that core-entity into EXP for myself. I had destroyed bigger things, it was only a question of collateral damage and effort involved.

Two days after Silva came back from visiting Apple Gate Farm, another group turned up, this one made up of five battle-ready fighters. Well, three pure fighters, Kenji the wind-mage who had added a bow to his arsenal and a fifth person that I didn’t recognise. The moment Kenji noticed me, his eyes widened for a moment but the majority of my focus was on that fifth person. He was obviously no fighter, he didn’t have the physique or equipment for it, and seeing him was enough to send an odd sensation down my spine. Magical, but not in the arcane way I was used to, making me strongly suspect it was some sort of divine spellcaster. And given that there was only Connie, the cleric of Frigg, at Apple Gate Farm who might be able to introduce somebody to divine spellcasting, I had a good idea whom they served.

But even with that idea, the sensation I got from the guy was odd, not quite what I would have expected from a Cleric of Frigg or any of the Asgardian deities. Though, it also didn’t match what I had felt from Olivia on Mundus, making me wonder what was going on. The taste, for lack of a better word, I smelled in the air was wrong, it was different in a way I couldn’t quite pin down. A serious and strange mystery, but not one I thought I’d be able to solve easily. Something to look into, though I wasn’t quite sure how to start. Before the change, there was the joke that the best way to lose a friend was to talk about money, religion or politics, but I had never seen the guy, so I obviously couldn’t lose a friend. But I certainly wouldn’t make one, nor would I find out a lot, especially given my slightly troubled social skills.

Instead, I focused on Kenji, at least I knew and had trained him.

“Good afternoon, student,” I greeted him with a smile, getting a surprisingly deep bow in return.

“Greetings, Teacher,” he replied, his head still lowered, “I’m deeply grateful for your previous guidance and would like to ask for a lesson.”

Wondering what the story behind his behaviour was, I decided to agree. Teaching magic was an interesting pastime, one I couldn’t indulge in often enough. It was wonderful to learn magic for myself, but there was something special about seeing the amazement and excitement in a student's eye as they delved into the Arcane. In addition, there were the EXP I gained when a student truly learned something new, when they reached a milestone of some sort, under my direct guidance. I wasn’t quite sure how that part of the system worked, but I acknowledged that it did, so teaching didn’t just benefit my students, it was highly beneficial to me, too.

As we moved to one of the corners where we could be relatively undisturbed, Kenji must have noticed my rather corporeal shadow, also known as Sabrina.

“Say, Teacher, who is that?” he asked, causing Sabrina to hide behind me.

“This is Sabrina. I seem to have adopted her during these last few days,” I told him, without going into details. Instead, I asked him about his recent experiences and what direction he had developed his magic in, mostly listening as we sat down. Amusingly, he didn’t seem to be interested in the incredibly obvious physical and magical changes I had undergone by crossing the first divide, I knew he had to have noticed them, but other than a slight widening of his eyes and that overly formal introduction in the beginning, there had been neither acknowledgement nor question about it.

Instead, the focus remained on the topic I had picked, with him talking until I either asked a question or tried to clarify something, while Sabrina was listening closely to both of us. Her curiosity was on full display, bringing a grin to my face that just wouldn’t fade.