As I approached the class’ meeting spot on the campus green, I noted that there were more figures than usual. When I got closer, I picked out professor Emir Blackflame, as well as the Erudite himself, standing around near professor Alydia.

  By the time I arrived, professor Alydia was already drawing the temporary safety marks on the students, so I lined up for my own. After finishing, she clapped.

  “Excellent! Let’s go.”

  “Professor, aren’t you going to tell us which house we’ll be going to?” a second year asked.

  “Isn’t tha’ parta’ the challenge?” Salem asked. “Ah. I mean. Sorry professor.”

  “No, you’re quite right Salem. You’ll have to learn through doing. Now, as we’re transporting multiple people, I’ve requested a little help. Erudite?”

  The Erudite’s staff appeared, and he tapped it against the dirt gently. Blue light enveloped us, and then…

  I was standing in dust, the smell of baking clay under the scorching sun in my nose. Salem, Jackson, and Yushin’s scents had vanished, leaving only the slightly unpleasant scent of human, and the scent of an ocean breeze, salt air, and sand. Far off in the distance, though, I could smell blood, violence, and a miasma of hate.

  I flicked my eyes around, noticing that I was in a canyon, in what had to be the southern demon lands. In the canyon with me was the Erudite… and Wesley?

  But that didn’t make sense. Where the hells was my team?

  “Oh dear,” the Erudite sighed out. He didn’t sound concerned in the slightest as he spoke, though.

  “What happened?” Wesley snapped.

  “It seems our teleportation spells got sent off kilter due to air currents or something,” the bland man said unconvincingly. “And wouldn’t you know it, my pool has just run entirely dry. Luckily for all of us, there’s a redoubt a few miles away with enough ether restoration candles to allow me to teleport us to safety. Let’s go there and fetch some.”

  He tossed a sheet of paper, which I snagged before it could hit the ground and looked over. It was a map of the surroundings, with the redoubt marked, but not our current location. There was enough topography that I thought I might be able to figure out a rough position but–

  “Give me that,” Wesley said, snatching it from my hands and scowling. His eyes flicked over it, then he frowned.

  I spun up my northfinding cantrip, glanced around at the rocks, then back at the map and pointed.

  “Here we are,” I said, “which means we need to go… that way!”

  Wesley’s brow twitched in what looked like annoyance, but he eventually nodded.

  “You’re right. Let’s go. But if we encounter demons, you had best not slow me down. I am not trusting my life to someone who needs a team to feel comfortable delving the first layer of the library.”

  He stalked off, and I glanced at the Erudite.

  “Actually… Can we wait until nightfall? It’s much cooler then, and it will save water, as we won’t sweat from the heat. It would also let our companion restore his so horrifically empty ether pool.”

  The Erudite seemed to gain a spark of life and shook his head.

  “In real life, holing up around this cliff until nightfall would be a very viable strategy. But while we try to simulate some real conditions for class, I can’t afford to wait that long, and your protections would run dry. Good thought, but…”

  He glanced around, and inspiration struck.

  “Pretend this is the, uh, sacred bloodmoon, if we wait till nightfall, the demons will grow ten times stronger.”

  “Got it,” I said, hastening to catch up with Wesley. I began moving my hands and shaping ether, then pulled a strip of leather from my pockets and tapped my chest. As I did, I poured a portion of dragonfire into it, allowing the shimmering armor to grow far more dense and potent. As I did, Wesley glared at me, but I couldn’t figure out why.

  “Do you need arcane armor too?” I asked.

  “I already had it on before I came to class,” he said. “I was prepared.”

  The ‘unlike you’ hung in the air, but I chose to be the bigger man and let it slide.

  We walked through the desert for several minutes before my nostrils flared and I held my hand out.

  “Wait. A demon’s getting close. Lots of brimstone and fire, so probably some sort of fire aligned demon, but it could always have some other tricks. Power… a bit hard to tell, but I’d put it roughly in the range of a fourth circle caster?”

  To my surprise, Wesley didn’t make a snide comment or roll his eyes at me. Instead he snapped his hands out in the gestures of arcane missile, mumbling out the words of power, but holding the last syllable.

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  Despite myself, I was a little impressed. Holding a spell was hard. You had to keep your hands in the final gesture, which for arcane missile resembled pointing at someone with two fingers. If you relaxed any of your fingers, the spell would fail. You couldn’t speak another word, as that would disrupt the words of power’s chant, and you had to keep your ether molded into the exact shape of the spell, which was admittedly the easiest part by far, at least for me.

  I grabbed him and the Erudite, then pulled us closer to the orange sandstone wall we were walking near, pressing us close as we continued to slink forwards, wishing that I had some way to hide us from the demon’s senses.

  We kept creeping forwards, until I heard a voice ringing out in the tongue of demons. I wasn’t as well versed in that bloodline tongue as I was the celestial, but I caught something about cooking, which was presumably a threat.

  After a few seconds of demonic threats, it swapped to Ceyish.

  “Come out, little half sea-elf and fireborn beast! I can smell you both. If you come out and surrender, I will allow you to live with nothing but the sacrifice of some of your blood to me! But if you make me find you, I will kill you!”

  I glanced at Wesley. At least that explained his scent.

  Wesley, on the other hand, seemed to interpret my look as being about the demon’s words, as he rolled his eyes and pressed closer to the stone cliff face.

  There was a thump in the dust and dirt then, as the demon landed about a hundred feet away. It was an ugly thing, about the size and general shape of a human, but with batlike wings, hands that looked more like the front arms of a lizard, thick legs that could have been stolen from a rhino, a monkey’s tail, and the head of a goat. It surveyed the ground, and Wesley struck. He muttered ‘doe’, the final syllable, then started moving his hands, preparing another. I cursed under my breath and began casting my own spell.

  Wesley’s arcane missile, completely invisible, tore through the thin membrane of the creature’s right wing, leaving a gaping hole. The demon roared and whipped around, launching forwards at us with blinding speed, fire erupting from its feet to propel its movement.

  I could fix that.

  I’d not had the opportunity to use this particular draconic ability, but it was a personal favorite of mine, and one of the main reasons that during my fights with Greta and Gerhard, none of us had actually released dragon’s breath.

  Even as I continued my chant, I sucked in a deep breath. The flames propelling the demon forward streamed into my mouth, feeding into the very bonfire of power within my soul, strengthening and restoring it. The conversion rate wasn’t particularly good – so bad, in fact, that the demon’s entire flame stride power wasn’t even able to replenish what I’d put into my arcane armor – but it was still able to almost completely nullify the demon’s explosive moment.

  Another arcane missile from Wesley thudded into its chin, and then another hit its cheek, and I finished my own spell. The dust and sand at the feet of the demon erupted into a cacophony of glittering lights and abrasive sand, causing the demon to stagger back.

  “How dare you!” it snarled. “I’ll kill you!”

  It snapped its hand out, releasing a needle of black, necrotic power at us, but aiming through the sands and lights was near impossible. The bolt struck the wall of the gorge, and Wesley’s next arcane missile found the target he’d been aiming for.

  The invisible force gouged into the demon’s eye and into its brain. The monstrous beast staggered forward before falling to its oversized knees, and dissolving into flickering fire.

  I sucked in a breath, consuming it as well. There was even less of a fiery bloodline power in this than there had been in the movement ability, but I figured that every little bit could help me restore myself faster.

  Speaking of which, I began Xander’s massage. Casting a single second circle spell hadn’t deplenished my reserves by much, especially now that I’d had some time to work with Jackson’s bottled explosion technique, but there was no sense in not restoring myself.

  Wesley dusted his hands off, even though he hadn’t touched anything, and we started moving again. Wesley was silent, so I was the same, but I kept my nose on the winds. We were gradually getting closer to the smell of blood and violence, which had me concerned.

  As we grew even closer still, I held out a hand.

  “We’re going to walk into a battle if we keep going forward,” I said with a frown. “The redoubt is about three miles forwards, though, so we’d have to pass through it or go around.”

  “We’ll have to go around,” Wesley said.

  “Can we?” I asked. “We’ve been sticking close to this cliff face for a while, but that works against us now. We can only go east to loop around, unless you can fly us up the cliff without drawing attention from any demons that might be flying at the battle. If we go east, though, who knows how far we’ll need to go. If this battle is taking place over a wide area…”

  “That wouldn’t make sense for demons, they tend to operate in small packs. If this is an ongoing battle, it’s likely between a squad of warriors scouting from the wall and an aberrant summoning demons, or a demon powerful enough to summon more of its kin.” Wesley said, turning to walk eastward. “You will use your senses to scout around the battle so we don’t get too close, which means we should be fine to go around. Let’s go.”

  “We’ll still be more exposed,” I said. “We won’t be able to shelter under anything.”

  “Would you prefer we fight through the crowd of demons?” Wesley retorted. “This isn’t a good option, but it’s the only real option we have.”

  I pressed my lips together in frustration, but didn’t argue with him.

  As we made our way through the sand, though, it was clear that winged demons overhead were much more able to spot us. Over the next half an hour I was able to smell no less than five demons approaching, and we quickly fell into a rhythm, with me casting glimmersands to blind and distract the monster, while Wesley fired off arcane missiles to kill it. When one demon, a particularly skinny one that looked to be made of living bone, didn’t fall to the first few missiles, I joined Wesley’s assault with my own attacks. The bone spurs the demon fired were strong, but my enhanced arcane armor was able to shed the attack, and Wesley got a shield up in time.

  As we fell into the pattern, I found myself starting to think that we could actually take this challenge on without too much difficulty. I was getting great practice with using the massage to restore my ether, my dragonfire was replenishing itself at a much slower, but still steady rate, and Wesley… Well admittedly, I had no clue how he was doing, but I wasn’t about to ask.

  My positivity was abruptly shattered when I smelled something new, though. A reeking rot and decay, combined with the scent of brimstone.

  This demon’s stench wasn’t that much stronger than the others, but there was something about it that set off danger bells in my head. A moment later, I placed it.

  Though this demon didn’t have much more power than the others we’d faced, that power was much denser. Enough that it felt genuinely dangerous.

  I froze, and Wesley’s head snapped over to me.

  “What is it?” he whispered.

  “A much stronger demon is heading our way,” I said.

  Then there was a soft chuckle, and a voice that was entirely too cultured and smooth for me to associate it with a rot demon came from behind me.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say I’m coming your way,” the voice said. “After all, I’m already here.”

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