The walk back was slower.

  Not because of the terrain, but because everyone was finally letting the tension bleed out of their muscles. As we exited the darkest part of the forest without encountering any resistance, everyone seemed to start breathing easier.

  Jerome kept pace besides me, twirling his stick with theatrical flair. “Level twenty-eight,” he announced at one point, far too cheerfully. “Can you believe it? The system really said, ‘Here, have a little pity.’”

  “I stopped at twenty-five,” I said. “To see if I’m going to get better options and to gain the most out of the achievements related to the low levels.”

  “Eh, you do yours; I think I’ll take my chances with higher stats and more skills,” he replied while gesticulating. “I will take one for the team and tell you all about the tragedy of being higher level.”

  The smile didn’t quite reach his one remaining eye.

  I could feel it, the subtle shift in his behaviour, the way he refused to look at you directly in the eyes... He never mentioned the roots nor the voices. Never the time he’d spent half-walking, half-being-walked through the forest like a marionette with its strings inside its very body.

  My curse started acting up again, my mood souring, my thoughts becoming darker. So I put on my best smile and tried to make him open up a little.

  I slowed just enough to let him drift closer. “You don’t have to pretend, you know.”

  Jerome snorted. “Pretend? I’m just naturally charming.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  For a moment he kept smiling. Then, very slowly, he stopped.

  “…maybe later,” he said softly. “When I’m not worried a monster can come out of nowhere to eat us.”

  “Fair enough.” The pressure from my curse eased, satisfied that I’d at least opened the door.

  Behind us, Rhea was practically bouncing as she walked.

  “I still can’t believe it,” she said for the third time in five minutes. “A ritual that I can apply on the air! And the achievements are going to work on it! Did I tell you about the modifier? It stacks with compounded arrays. That means if I—”

  “I’d be surprised if the System didn’t give you a class like magic teacher or something…” Melissa muttered fondly.

  Rhea looked bashful for just a second, then turned to me. “Elias, you said you modify your spells on the fly, right? That’s like adaptive glyph weaving but without the glyphs. That’s insane.”

  “It’s also painful,” I replied. “My head feels like someone keeps trying to carve something into it with a spoon.”

  Melissa glanced over, suddenly interested. “That’s because you’re brute forcing it.”

  I blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “Brute forcing,” she repeated, like it was obvious. “You’re pushing raw energy through a structure that wasn’t designed for it and hoping it holds. Of course you get migraines.”

  “That’s how I make my magic do what I want,” I said.

  She stared at me like I’d just claimed the sky was a government conspiracy. “No. That’s how you think magic works. Skills have parameters.”

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  “Parameters?”

  “Yeah. Variables, and limits.” She waved a hand, blue light flickering faintly around her fingers. “Mana Analysis shows me the matrices behind my barriers. I can tweak them. Shift density, elasticity, hardness, and shape. You’re just… overpowering yours until they obey, somehow...”

  Rhea’s eyes went wide. “That’s so inefficient!”

  I opened my mouth. Then closed it. “My Arcane Sense skill is not giving me that kind of information about magic. Can you show me how to go about it?”

  “Yes,” Melissa and Rhea said together.

  Melissa huffed. “We’ll talk when we’re not walking through monster territory.”

  Which was exactly when the trees thinned and the camp finally came into view, flickering with torchlight and broken palisades.

  Conversations died down as we approached, and something tugged at the edge of my arcane sense.

  Left flank.

  Fast.

  Before I could even open my mouth, Quinn stepped out of the brush a few metres from where I had felt him, clothes half torn, hair full of leaves. He beamed when he saw us. No, not really… just when his eyes locked on Melissa.

  Relief washed over him so hard it was almost embarrassing. For half a heartbeat he forgot to breathe, then he straightened.

  “Yo,” he said, “How did it go?”

  He looked around us, counting heads, then added quickly, “Before you ask, yeah. Everyone’s alive. Mostly. We had a wave of those root-infested monsters hit the camp. A bad one. We were dealing with them, if barely… but then suddenly they just… ran. Like something lit a fire under their ass.”

  He gestured back towards the tents. “We’ve got people hurt, some badly. The doctor is basically held together by prayers and good intentions right now.”

  “I’m on it,” Mary said, not even looking back, and then she was gone, cutting a straight line towards the side, where some people were lying besides the fires.

  I nodded to Quinn. “We killed it.”

  He shrugged. “Of course you did.”

  “Where’s Tom?” I asked. “So I don’t have to tell the story twice.”

  Quinn jerked his chin towards the central fire. “Arguing with half the camp, apparently.”

  That sounded promising in the way storms sounded promising when you were already soaked.

  We walked into the heart of the camp and straight into a pressure cooker.

  Tom stood, hands raised in a calming gesture. Across from him was an old crafter, one whose name I didn’t remember. A mage I saw already, and the fighter who’d gone scouting yesterday flanked him like moral support. I really had to get a list of names; it was such a pity that Matthew died. He would have been a godsend in these situations.

  Marcus was off to the side, whittling branches into thin spears with focus, pretending the entire argument did not exist.

  Alya stood near the fire, arms crossed, scowl sharp enough to shave with.

  Marco was vibrating.

  The crafter was basically shouting when we arrived.

  “This is madness!” the old man snapped. “Absolute madness. You split us up this morning, and what happened? People almost died. Again. We’re sick of risking our lives for nothing!”

  Tom tried to interject. “No one was left to—”

  “We were left!” someone behind the crafter shouted. “The monsters hit, and half our strongest were gone!”

  The old man jabbed a finger towards the woods. “You rush ahead, chasing power and glory, while the rest of us bleed to keep the people safe. You are gambling with other people’s lives!”

  Marco finally snapped. “How could we know that a damn talking monster was going to attack back here! And anyway, we came back to save your sorry ass! Maybe next time you get introduced to a deadly magical world in which they told you explicitly that there would be danger.” At this point Marco was red from screaming, “Choose a class a bit more useful than a damn potter! You are fucking useless and even have the guts to complain… I will think twice before starting to point fingers here! You will…”

  “How… how dare you!” the crafter shot back. “You don’t know anything! None of you do! So stop acting like heroes and start using your brains!”

  Tom was massaging his temples as if it could save him from the clear migraine he was suffering. “If we don’t move, we die slowly instead of quickly. You all know that, and having someone that moves forward and deal with the worst of things allowsdeals us to follow with fewer risks, but the risks are here regardless. That’s why we insisted on the hunting rotations; we just had no time to implement them, but the levels we all got today are going to make a big difference. We need to proceed! Don’t you get it? If we don’t reach the beacon in three months, we are all dead.”

  Every head turned as we got closer.

  I could feel the camp’s mood like a static charge. Fear, anger, exhaustion, helplessness. All boiling together, ready to explode, and Tom apparently couldn’t keep them together; somebody had to, or I’ll have to deal with a massive backlash from the curse.

  Words alone couldn’t explain how much I hated to deal with all of this nonsense, but I put on my big boy pants and readied myself to take control of this mess.

  On the way back I already thought about how to go on about the main group; I talked it over with the others and got the go-ahead. So I started with just that.

  “I know what to do…”

  20 chapters ahead!