Mia was the first to scream.

  “Run!!” she shrieked at the top of her lungs.

  She spun around to bolt, but was immediately swept off her feet by Calypso’s leg.

  “What do you mean run, Mia, have you lost your mind?” he hissed.

  “Me?!” she choked on her outrage, sprawled on the ground.

  “What the hell are you doing?!”

  “To me, in a circle, now!” Calypso commanded.

  At that moment he removed the silver ring that pierced his eyebrow and tossed the jewelry at his feet. The ring flared crimson for an instant, and then a shimmering protective dome appeared around us, swirling with red and black.

  The dome was small but fit our entire group, though we all pressed our backs against each other, staring in horror at the dark creatures as we waited for their attack.

  Just in time: a second later the kernals lunged at us, scratching at the dome with claws and teeth, trying to gnaw through its shell like an eggshell. They weren’t succeeding, but the creatures didn’t let up.

  The protective dome held strong against the blows, though it vibrated and crackled with each strike from the kernals.

  “The artifacts work,” Calypso exhaled with relief.

  “That’s good… So magic itself hasn’t disappeared, something just happened to it. Some things still work, but not all…”

  “Any ideas what to do about all this?” Kes spoke up.

  “I don’t know, give me a moment to think.”

  “We don’t have time to think!!” Mia shrieked again.

  “Sooner or later, these creatures will gnaw through any defense, and then what? We shouldn’t be standing here, we should be running as fast as we can!!”

  She looked the most frightened of all of us and kept sobbing, trembling all over.

  I frowned with displeasure. An elf — what can you expect from them? Their young women are very delicate by nature, no matter how you look at it.

  They’re excellent warriors when they need to follow orders, but they fall apart in emergencies. Mia had done brilliantly all through today’s training, but here she was — without magic and her usual means of defense, her composure crumbled immediately.

  I, on the other hand, was calm. Well… relatively calm, compared to the elf.

  It’s impossible to stay indifferent when a giant kernal desperately wants to devour you, ramming the fragile protective dome and spraying it with venom like a shower.

  But in stressful situations, I preferred to act clearly, without panicking. And since I’d had plenty of stressful situations in my life, I was used to it, as they say. The panicking could wait until later, after the problems were behind me.

  “Get a grip, Mia,” Kes said again.

  “How far do you think you’ll get from kernals without magic? You won’t even make it to the nearest tree. Calypso’s right, running is pointless.”

  He said it with obvious reluctance, acknowledging Calypso was right, but it was clear Kes was impressed by the working protective dome, without which we’d all have been swallowed whole by now.

  At any rate, I had no doubt that this five-year-old kernal could munch us all in one bite. And the two smaller creatures weren’t exactly thrilling either. God, their teeth the size of a decent sword would haunt my nightmares…

  If I lived long enough to have nightmares, yeah.

  “Where did you get an artifact like that?” Patricia asked, studying the silver ring glowing crimson in the grass with interest.

  “Why does it work?”

  “I made it myself,” Calypso answered.

  “Is there anything in this world you can’t do yourself?” Patricia snorted.

  “There’s plenty I can’t do yet,” Calypso said with a scowl.

  “Unfortunately…”

  “Okay, so how does this artifact of yours work? What’s its trick that it works even now?”

  “A specific type of magic was used in its creation,” Calypso answered evasively.

  He clearly didn’t want to elaborate. And gazing at the pulsing aura of the artifact, I understood why.

  “Your protective dome has a very dark energy,” I said quietly.

  “And the working artifact radiates such intense darkness that it gives me goosebumps… What is this dark matter?”

  “Shadow,” Calypso replied reluctantly.

  “Just one trick from dark magic that summons a shadow illusion for protection. A protective illusion in this case.”

  “The Mentor categorically disapproves of shadow magic,” Iranor Gvatersky said grimly.

  “And I recall he’s told you many times to stop experimenting with this type of magic.”

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  “Yes, yes, I’m aware of his opinion on this, you don’t need to remind me,” Calypso grimaced.

  “He forbade it because this magic is dangerous for mages who aren’t shadow-walkers beings from the spirit world. In the hands of ordinary people, shadow magic easily spirals out of control,” Iranor shook his head.

  “And when used incorrectly, it can corrupt and affect the structure of a mage’s aura, their consciousness. It’s nothing to mess with.”

  “Oh really? And do you think the Mentor would still disapprove of my experiments right now, without which we’d already be someone’s lunch?” Calypso said in an indescribable tone.

  Iranor and the other classmates had no response to that. Because we all understood now that we were only alive thanks to Calypso defying his father and secretly continuing his forbidden experiments.

  Quite successful ones, judging by the working artifact.

  The million-dollar question: how long would this dome hold, and what were we all supposed to do when the protection failed?

  “Any ideas on how to stay alive?” I asked, addressing everyone.

  “What about our communication bracelets?”

  “Not working,” I sighed, pressing all the buttons on the communication bracelet artifact, which wasn’t responding to any input.

  “Without magic it doesn’t work, we can’t contact Armarillis. Help isn’t coming.”

  “Well, that’s the nail in our coffin,” Iranor muttered.

  “Damn, I’m too young to die!”

  “You’re just too young, but I’m also too gorgeous to die,” Grey muttered, ruffling his short red hair.

  In another situation I would have giggled, but now wasn’t the time for jokes.

  “Hey, what about your magic?” I turned to him.

  “Not working either? Try transforming into a dragon!”

  “I tried,” Grey spread his hands.

  “No luck, as you can see. And… whoa, what’s that?”

  His question was directed at Calypso, who had removed his dagger-shaped earrings, placed them on the ground before him, and was muttering something, moving his hands over the blades. The earrings were growing and changing before our eyes, quickly transforming into actual swords.

  I watched these transformations with great interest.

  “Shadow artifacts too?”

  Calypso nodded.

  “More precisely, these are swords made of elven steel, but hidden in an artifact shell through shadow magic.”

  “You can’t kill kernals with cold weapons,” Polly shook her head.

  “This is Gerossian steel,” Calypso said.

  “It can at least wound the smaller kernals. And I’ve also charged these weapons with shadow magic, including shadow fire… Let’s see if it works… Here goes…”

  He spent about a minute manipulating the swords, tense to the limit, trying to coax out even a few sparks of magic. Brows furrowed, lips pressed into a thin line. At first nothing happened, then both swords burst into black-red flames simultaneously, and Calypso broke into a grim smile.

  “O-o-oh, now that’s more like it!” Kes said with satisfaction, taking one sword in hand and giving it a test swing.

  “With a sword like this we can fight! Hey, you don’t have anything else like this, do you? Any other artifacts lying around?”

  “Unfortunately not,” Calypso sighed.

  “If I’d known we’d end up in a trap like this, I would’ve loaded myself up with a dozen hidden artifacts…”

  “So what do we do? Let’s say we can handle the smaller kernals, but what about the big one? Two swords won’t be enough. You’ve already had lessons with Professor Ditro on kernals, right?” Patricia sobbed.

  “Please tell me you have, and that you know how to defeat this huge thing!…”

  “What good is what I know?” Calypso snapped.

  “To defeat it, you need to trap it in a ring of fire. And how are we supposed to do that if we can’t cast spells?”

  I sank to the ground beside Calypso with a heavy sigh, trying to ignore the horrible screeching of giant teeth against the surface of the protective dome.

  “Yeah… What a mess…”

  I was frantically trying to think of something we could do in this situation, but clever ideas weren’t exactly rushing to my head. I kept snapping my fingers, trying spell after spell in the naive hope that any moment now, right now, it would work, magic would function like before, like normal, and this would all turn out to be some bad joke…

  I glanced at Professor Ditro, who lay motionless several meters away from us. The kernals weren’t touching him for now, but for how long? It worried me greatly.

  I was holding it together so far, but I wasn’t sure I could handle watching the professor being torn apart if the kernals decided to forget about us and deal with their already immobilized victim. And there was no way to protect the professor right now… We could barely save ourselves.

  “Professor Ditro…”

  “Let’s hope they don’t touch him,” Iranor muttered, grimly watching the raging creatures.

  “The kernals paralyzed him, they’re confident he’s their prey that won’t escape. But there are many of us, we smell delicious to them, and right now we’re the tasty morsel worth fighting for. Plus we’ve been tormenting them with flames for hours and killing other kernals, so we shouldn’t expect any mercy from these ones…”

  “What mercy can you even talk about when dealing with ruthless dark creatures?” Patricia sobbed hysterically, seemingly on the verge of a breakdown.

  “Well, true,” Iranor sighed.

  His eyebrows, already thick, had now merged into a single line.

  “I can do a little magic,” Calypso suddenly said.

  We all looked hopefully at his palm, over which hovered a small black sphere — a sort of blob of dark magic. It trembled and kept changing size, growing larger then smaller, but still — it was a blob of energy.

  “How are you doing that?” Grey asked irritably, still snapping his fingers.

  “I can’t do a damn thing!”

  “I don’t know how… Light spells don’t work at all, but my dark magic responds. Barely, but it responds. Casting is hard… Ten times harder than usual, it feels like I just started learning magic and it won’t obey me… But something’s working.”

  However, none of our other classmates managed to produce a single dark spark, myself included. Calypso looked grimly at our useless attempts and turned to me.

  “Lori, try something different. Take off your gloves.”

  “What, again?” I twitched nervously.

  “I don’t want what happened yesterday to happen again!”

  “Lori, we don’t have time for theatrics, we need to act, right now,” Calypso said in a demanding tone.

  “You have a very dense dark aura, try casting without the gloves. If my assumptions are correct, you should be able to do it.”

  I wanted to argue, but after another clash of teeth against the protective dome, several cracks appeared on it, and I decided this really wasn’t the best time for arguments.

  After all, if we all became a delicious dinner for the fluffy little critters today, I wouldn’t need to worry about casting without gloves, right? Because there would be no one left to worry.

  A specific wave of the hand, a couple of spells — and my gloves vanished from my hands, though not immediately; the spell only worked on the fifth try.

  Gone for the second time in two days… It occurred to me that I hadn’t gone around bare-handed this often in a long time. I usually even sleep in protective gloves, and the last time I took them off was about six months ago, I think…

  Well, apparently at the academy I’d have to do this more often. If we survived today, of course.

  Usually without gloves, lightning bolts immediately start running across my hands, but that didn’t happen now. I didn’t feel the usual burning in my chest either, but I was able to create a blob of energy. A black sphere of concentrated darkness hovered over my palm, trembling slightly and constantly changing size.

  “Excellent!” Calypso exclaimed.

  “I think I know what to do.”