Kayla was having the time of her life. Not even her master’s grumblings about wasting a week’s time watching ‘incompetent buffoons’ struggle against demons could get in the way of that.

  In fact, she was pretty sure that hidden under all that grumbling was a happy spirit. Out here, the tower master didn’t have to split her attention with paperwork, overeager students, or kingdom politicking.

  That was a shame, since Kayla rather liked standing in for her master when it came to those things.

  “It was a valuable learning experience, was it not?” Kayla ventured, keeping her voice carefully composed. It wouldn’t do to let her master hear the taunting notes. “I got to see the difference in the way regular classes approach combat as opposed to mages.”

  “Girl, you will learn nothing from barbarians who are content to swing their sticks around,” the tower master snapped as if the history books were not littered with barbarians breaking mages into two thanks to the unique strand of magical arrogance.

  But Kayla wasn’t like those foolish mages. She was a good mage.

  “You can’t tell me that the shaman wasn’t at least a little interesting,” Kayla countered. Truth be told, she was a little jealous of the party assembled around Rowan. Both the shaman and the alchemists showed incredible promise. Potential that would be wasted under Rowan’s direction.

  “Her people can be promising, yes, but the fact that we’re talking about a ‘her’ instead of a ‘he’ means that she won’t go far,” the tower master answered.

  Kayla furrowed her brows as she tried to glean the tiny bit of information her master had let slip. The tower master was anything but sexist, especially considering the fact that the system more than evened the playing field. So it was either something about the class evolution or the shaman’s race.

  Sometimes, her master’s teaching style was a bit infuriating. She had very rigid ideas about how Kayla’s education ought to be structured and tolerated very little deviation. And so, Kayla had to go behind the woman’s back and treaty with the various factions inside the towers for her unanswered questions. In a way, that was fun.

  But out here on the road, there was little that Kayla could do. She settled back into her chair and plopped open her favorite book. The book wasn’t some grizzled ancient tome like one would have expected of a mage. Rather, it was quite modern and printed on clean, floppy paper. And as she began yet another read through of the book, she started with the introduction.

  Kayla loved the introduction and could prattle on for days about it. But the rest of the book was equally interesting. On every read through, she could always learn something new about the spells and cards. Even the basic ones often led to some sliver of knowledge that she could squirrel away for future use. And the higher tier spells were like a riddle, to be teased apart line by line. Some were out of her reach still, even with her epic advancement but she could see the path to gaining mastery over them. And she was getting closer.

  All good things come to an end, however, and so did her master’s patience.

  Mere hours after they’d started their blisteringly fast journey by flying over the terrain, the tower master called for a break and dismissed them all to set up camp for the night. The old mage herself waved her hand and an opulent tent that was much bigger on the inside materialized in the clearing she had chosen.

  “You will handle my camp setup. I will be practicing some of my spells.” Kayla informed one of the other apprentices offhandedly and then strolled towards the depths of the forest.

  The apprentice dipped her head low, as was proper.

  As Kayla walked, she ran through a whole host of spells. Spells meant to hide and conceal. Spells meant to protect and hinder. Spells meant to check that a particular, frustrating old cow wasn’t under an invisibility effect and trying to follow her.

  Again.

  Seeing all the diagnostic spells came back clear, however, Kayla finally relaxed. Once she was a decent enough distance away from camp, she spoke.

  “How did the meeting go?”

  A figure materialized out of the darkness of the night, blurry and with indistinct features. The only thing really recognizable was its female gender.

  “Well, mistress. The meeting was interrupted, of course, but that will only feed into their discontent. The important actors fled with our aid. The captured will not spill any secrets they shouldn’t. Those who know too much will choose to commit suicide instead of talk,” the figure said.

  “I’m sure they will. So very self-sacrificial of them. What about our plans for the frontier?” Kayla asked.

  “The kingdom has been sufficiently weakened by the early demonic activity. The fact that they couldn’t even predict the wave speaks volumes. It does give us the opportunity to offer aid,” the figure replied.

  “Don’t push them too far yet. My own position is not quite as secure as I’d like. We need as many nobles as possible backing me if we want to pull this off right,” Kayla warned.

  “Of course, mistress.”

  Kayla didn’t like the sound of the response. There was just a hint of insubordination behind the words. Which meant that Kayla needed to be a bit more clear about her intentions. Her hand shot forward, lightning quick for a mage meant to be casting spells, and wrapped around the fool’s jaw. “You do realize what we’re doing here. If we are discovered, we will be wiped out to the last. Do. Not. Mess. This. Up. For. Me.”

  She wrenched the figure’s head to the side.

  “Yes, mistress.” The reply had the proper amount of respect now.

  Everyone always acted tough until they got physically pushed around by the fragile Cunning Hero. Where Blake was blessed with the title of Radiant Hero, Kayla got the shortend of the stick with ’cunning’ as her hero modifier. It was better than Rowan’s but that really wasn’t much to gloat about.

  Kayla spun around on her heels and started stalking back towards the camp. She didn’t need to say anything else. If they somehow managed to mess up, she’d deal with them herself.

  Her mind was instead preoccupied by the memories of Rowan in combat. She hadn’t expected him to turn out even remotely as promising as he did. In fact, she had expected him to become another failure like Blake. But there was hope yet.

  Having an extra hero on her side would make everything so much easier and she really did hate knowing that, at some point, she’d have to kill that heroism-obsessed moron herself.

  He was cute, but not cute enough to let him jeopardize everything she was working towards.

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