When he downed the last of his dinner, his weakest self-healing ability finally deactivated. Ioha hadn’t even known there was a separate self-healing ability for hearing. That ability had a paltry eight points now, which was pathetic, but eight points from a single event was a lot.

  He looked through the abilities on his display and grabbed his mug of water. A number of self-healing abilities climbed a point each, and watching how their associated regeneration abilities had gained three points each was sobering. He must have lost part of his face. The hairdryer had become a flamethrower of questionable quality. The newest of his mass taunts gained a few points as well. All in all, it might not look like a lot, but in the three days since he met the raid he had gained several weeks’ worth of abilities compared to time spent on patrols. For some unclear reason, he also got his first point in disarming someone with a spear. Maybe he broke a tooth for the centipede, or worm as the people around him called it. Most importantly, his hard shields and barriers rose with a point each.

  After dropping bowl and mug with the logistics crew, Ioha went inside his barn. During their probing mission, the defensive and logistics troops had worked wonders on the camp, and the interior was a perfectly serviceable sleeping hall. Ioha lifted his old brigandine with a sigh. It was finished. He stuffed it inside his satchel. The gambeson had to go as well. He had hoped the set would last another week. In his backpack lay the replacement. A gambeson dyed blue, aquamarine, one of the girls said that he got as a gift from Hiro’s second a month earlier. Viking girl probably had something to do with it. Over it, a brigandine in burgundy, the same colour as his new shield. The colours clashed a little, but his armour needed to be replaced. He had grown too much.

  He strapped on his sword, slung the shield over his back, donned his helmet and went out again with his partisan in one hand. Rede waited by a table near the cooking fires together with Verina, Derina and Harvali.

  “What do you think?” Rede asked as soon as Ioha sat down. The question hadn’t been directed at him, but Ioha understood they wanted him to hear the answers.

  “C-rank frontliner,” Derina said. “You did good work.” The last was aimed at Ioha directly.

  “D-rank frontliner,” Harvali objected. “B-rank defender. We have to redefine our concept of a frontliner.”

  “I agree with Sir Terendala,” said Verina. “Boy be needing a better head on his shoulders first.”

  Pushing the sheath behind his back, Ioha sat down as well. With a grimace, he realised he’d got used to the stupid tails on his old brigandine. The bench was colder than he expected. “So,” he began and leaned on his shaft, “you got me out here just to tell me my rank assessment was correct?”

  The afternoon sun glared down at them and burned hot enough for Ioha to be reminded of the occasional trip to Japan in late autumn. The gates changed how people travelled. Once he even popped over to celebrate a birthday for one evening. Sure, too expensive but nowhere ruinously so. He undid and shrugged out of his brigandine and loosened the gambeson. It was unseasonally hot for autumn in Isekai. With a grin, Ioha compared sitting here with braving a pavement café in Gothenburg two years earlier. You couldn’t really compare with Sweden. Back there, temperatures had already dropped to what was considered winter here.

  Rede coughed, as he often did when he wanted to think before he spoke. “No, not really. Your assessment was a technical one.”

  “He says you be a real C-rank here,” Verina shot in. She looked tired and somehow older than when they met at school.

  “You have B-ranks among you. Why me?”

  “You really lack at listening. How did you pass the theory?” Harvali quipped. That just had to be a reference to school.

  “Harvali, I passed my written exams by a very wide margin, thank you very much.” How could he not? They were designed for teens.

  The sun crept in behind a cloud, and Ioha clasped his padded armour shut. Autumn was autumn, after all, and his body took the weather here for granted these days.

  “You’re needed because you’re able to gather the low ranked monsters,” came the explanation from Rede.

  Ioha looked at him. “You sound like that’s a problem.”

  “You’re able to gather the C-ranks as well. We didn’t expect that.” Rede’s smile had become a thin line. “We lost one. Remember the worm that got through?”

  If he meant the giant centipede, Ioha remembered all too well. He nodded.

  “No way you could select what you, eh… pull?” Rede continued.

  “Sorry. Well, I can target them one by one, but with the numbers involved that takes too much time. My mass taunts affect every enemy within range, or at least attempt to.”

  “Attempt?”

  Ioha scratched his head. His abilities weren’t automatically successful. “It depends on taunt, but I don’t think the blobs can avoid me any longer. I still lose some spiders, and I honestly don’t know about the worms.” That was technically true. They were affected by his punitive taunts, but the damage he inflicted on them wasn’t worth mentioning when the C and B rank adventurers attacked in force. Apart from his single target taunt, and to a degree a non-damaging mass taunt, he had nothing that could force something to attack him. The blobs obeyed his punitive taunts only because they’d die within minutes, or even seconds, if they didn’t. “You just have to kill the big ones before they eat me.”

  “Follow me!”

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  Ioha rose and tagged along after Rede. On their way to whatever the greybeard wanted to show, Ioha fastened his brigandine. The ever present stench had grown stronger and an attack on the camp seemed more than just likely. Around them armed men and women kept reinforcing the defences, and Ioha realised why tents grew out of fashion, if they had ever been a thing to begin with, but he was once told that magic had become more common over the years, so maybe. A palisade with towers for archers and clean killing zones on the outside grew up overnight. Building structures were a function of the strength of the mages you brought. He should have known. Isekai grew at an absurd pace.

  “Young Questingtank, look here.”

  At the side of the wagons lay something larger than the two of them together. It had scales and looked a little like if a beetle and a cow had mutated, fused and grown. “What the hell?”

  “This one is sentient. It’s somewhere between C and B rank, so we classify it as B-rank. One of our flanking parties caught on to it when it tried to get behind us.”

  “I guess it’s dangerous then.”

  “For the party? Not very, but it still took them a few minutes to down it, which in itself is dangerous.”

  So that’s why we have mages. Someone has to get rid of the blobs and spiders when this shows up. “I see.” Ioha studied the thing. “I believe my shields could hold up, but only if I kept recasting them.”

  “That, young Questingtank, is why Sir Terendala gave you a B-rank as defender. Could you do anything else?”

  He could. As long as he didn’t need to plan ahead, Ioha could set up a new copy of a grid he already had in place in a fracton of a second. He was no longer sure it should be called spell casting, but by definition it was. “I believe,” he began, “I could defend my position, but a moving battle would be troublesome.”

  “Good!”

  “Good?”

  “You smell that?” Rede swept with his arm in the air.

  Ioha did. He readied shield and partisan. “Where do you want me?”

  Around them, people walked in groups to the defences. Very few of them had to be told where to go, something that spoke volumes about the difference in experience between them and him.

  “I want you on that,” Rede said and pointed at a platform that must have been built during the short time since they returned to camp.

  You bastard! The greybeard had already calculated how far Ioha’s aura of destruction reached. He’d stand out like a Christmas tree on the platform, and there was room for two parties to rain down pain from protected positions in a semicircle around him. “Trying to make me a hero or something?”

  “Hero? No, just a deathtrap.”

  Ioha grimaced and walked to his stage. A narrow ledge led to it along one set of walls. Whatever came his way would have to climb up through his area attacks to reach him. Why settle for the lesser evil? He placed a set of hard shields around the platform and a metre of magic goo below it. Just in case he lost his footing, he surrounded himself with more shields to use as handrails. After that, he cast a series of barriers to funnel anything into his little private place of hell, and to prevent anything from climbing over them, he lined it all with shields triggered to throw anything back that made it on top. Yep, extermination raid. Bastards are here to kill as much as possible in as little time as possible.

  “Ready!”

  North of them, Derina burst out of the treeline with his entire party tidily lined up by his sides. They ran impossibly fast on top of the grass rather than the ground beneath it. For the first time in months, Ioha felt a pang of envy and regret. The battlefield dance he watched was everything that cats were about. With a final display of choreographed perfection, all of them jumped high into the air and spun to face the enemy when they landed on the rampart behind the parapet. There was almost no sound from where their feet touched.

  “Sir Questingtank,” Derina said and smiled down at him.

  “Yes?”

  “Treeline’s more interesting than us.”

  He had been too caught up watching his seniors from school. Ioha turned and swore. The entire treeline spewed out blobs and spiders, and larger shadows moved behind them.

  Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit! Five sets of his grid, but he had to add another layer on top of them, and he lost precious seconds while he designed the second level. Another wave of blobs and spiders crawled out of the forest just as the first hit his traps, and he had to cast as wide a net of mass taunts as his range allowed him. There’s no way I can reach…

  “Cat’s, we kite. Make me proud!”

  Behind him, half of Ioha’s bodyguards just vanished, and he groaned. Damn, there goes my right side cleaning.

  Then a churning mass of low ranked monsters entered his killing zone, and Ioha released both area attacks before he let out a roar of challenge. The grids got overwhelmed, and he had to recast all ten of them. Below him, the ground boiled with one hellish effect after another created by mages who desperately needed their brains examined. The critters boiled, froze, melted, exploded, or burst into flame in a disgusting show of concentrated destruction.

  When the second wave got inside his killing zone, Ioha gave up and burned some aura to get very clean. Whatever the mages did, cleanliness wasn’t part of it, and Ioha was continuously splattered by an impressive array of yuck. He gathered all monsters that the cats brought to him with single target taunts to make sure he peeled them off the fleeing cat.

  “Ware worms!”

  What the hell? Oh, hell!

  The third wave had over a dozen of the centipedes added to the hundreds of blobs and spiders that covered the field. His ten grids got wrecked in seconds, but it was enough for archers and mages to prepare.

  Damn!

  B-rank mages were different from anything he had ever seen at Spellsword Academy. One moment hundreds of monsters tore his grids apart, the next Ioha’s outer section of defences were replaced by a bluish white carpet of inferno. There were popping sounds from where the worms suddenly ceased to exist.

  “No cattle this time. Clean the forest!”

  There was no fourth wave. The treeline just vanished, to be replaced by a burning one further in. A rolling wave of heat rushed across the field and dissipated just before it reached their defences.

  “Collectors, see if you can salvage anything out there!”

  “Ironsnake, you suck. That’s a mansion in gold, gone.”

  “Casualties?”

  “None.”

  “Marda, please tell me which one of us you’d prefer dead for that mansion.”