[Earthborn candidate #254726, Function increase level 5 cluster]

  Name: Finn Race: Human Class: Mage Subclass: None

  Level: 2 Experience Energy: 2,283.33333333333333333333333333333% to next level

  Strength: 15

  Stamina: 14

  Endurance: 14

  Dexterity: 20

  Intelligence: 21

  Wisdom: 21

  Charisma: 15

  Health Points: 86 Mana Pool: 100 Mana Regen: 1.13 MP per minute

  Carry Weight: 350 lbs Potion Sensitivity: 14 (level 2)

  Survivability Index: 1.85667%

  Skills: Tracking level 10, Enchant Item level 2, Craft Spell level 2, ????, ????, ????, ????

  We rode late into the night. I’m proud to say I didn’t fall off, though it was a close thing. The going was slow at first, so they could give me some instruction. I was lucky; the horse I had gotten on was mellow enough not to give me too much trouble. It was my inner thighs and butt that were giving me trouble. Basically, everything under my belt other than my feet. I had gotten the whole moving-with-the-horse thing, but it was a lot more work than I had ever expected. I had still grabbed the pommel more often than not, and over-squeezed my legs together every time I felt off balance.

  Before we had gone five miles, my groin, thighs, and ass were on fire.

  When we caught up to Mott’s horse, I was almost glad to see it for a chance to stop riding. The lieutenant’s body was battered and bloodied, his foot still stuck in the stirrup. The ragged void left by my ice shard spell went all the way through his head, but had filled up with a mixture of dirt and brain gunk. I fell off my horse trying to get down to free the body, only to be joined by Harper.

  She got down and looked at the corpse’s missing eye and possibly nose, poking at it with a long, thin-bladed knife. Meanwhile, I tried to get my legs to work. I crawled over and was able to use the tree Mott’s horse had stopped by to struggle to my feet. The tree trunk worked as something to lean against as I grabbed the corpse’s foot. She shook her head and looked up at me as I slowly maneuvered his foot out of the stirrup. “How was your spell so strong, new guy? You’re only level two versus his thirty-five. And why didn’t you do more than hit the rest with that lightning spell? You just froze up.”

  I dropped the man’s twisted foot, feeling ill. The horse was too tired to care and ignored me. I looked away from Harper and the body. My legs, though still sore, finally felt steady enough for me to take a couple of steps away from the tree and over to the saddlebags. These I could get into and not have to face the body of the man I’d killed. Murdered. “I… don’t know. I was angry and afraid. And I threw everything I had into the spell; into killing him. And then, I was out of mana after hitting the others with chain lightning.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “Juan, is this a Mage thing? Boosting a spell with more mana? I’ve never heard of this before.”

  The old bowman sat on the horse, watching back the way we came. “You know Mages are rare, Harper,” he said carefully. “The last one I knew was about thirty years ago. I remember watching her take down a rock giant we’d stumbled into in one spell.”

  Is that what I had done? “Wait. Is this normal?” I asked while stuffing three large pouches of money and a surprising amount of biscuits from the saddlebag into my backpack. Everything was expensive. And even if it wasn’t as expensive as I originally thought, if I was going to survive I needed to be able to buy the necessities. And better gear.

  Juan stroked his goatee. “As far as I know, there isn’t another class or subclass that can do that. Though Berserkers do something similar, except with their stamina and health. It is always a good idea not to be too close to them when they fight for that reason. A brush from their backswing can kill a person.”

  I stopped searching through the saddlebags for a moment. Kill someone by accident? I need to be careful with my spells, or else I might hurt innocent bystanders. I might hurt the people helping me with reckless use of certain spells.

  “Then it’s just a Mage thing. A freaky, fucked-up Mage thing. Loot the body, New Guy. He’s all yours.” Harper grinned at my discomfort over looting the body and moved away with a bow and a fancy gesture.

  It was a moment I would never forget — looting a man I’d killed, his one eye accusing me while the oozing mass where the other one should have been testified to my horrendous act. I was desecrating what once was a man named Mott. It was surreal, and that saying from the movies about how you never forget your first one echoed in my head.

  I took his belt knife before I checked his pockets. It wasn’t easy to do it, but I reminded myself that if our roles were reversed, Mott wouldn’t have given two shits about the morality of looting my body. The justification didn’t help. Rummaging through his pockets, I found a few more pieces of silver, a gold ring, and a folded letter addressed to the man.

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  A whiff of perfume wafted from the often-read note, its folds worn from being opened and folded back up God knew how many times. I started to open it up, but stopped myself. This letter was important to him, and it wasn’t right for me to read a letter from his wife or lover. Privacy and respect, especially for the dead, were important. I could give him that, at least.

  Carefully, I tucked the letter back where I had found it. The last thing I wanted was to deepen the pit of guilt I was already drowning in.

  Our ride continued, and we turned west at the first crossroads we came to. By then, the moon had come up, and it was much easier to see the road, but I wasn’t aware of my surroundings. It was the image of the ice javelin I had sent toward Mott that my mind fixated on. It had been different, bigger than the ones I had used on the wolves. With a wild, chaotic look, it had been more than just an icicle. The thing had the feel of an ancient glacier. All of that crushing power had been focused into a single point. It had been something from inside me, propelled by that fear and anger and something else I didn’t know how to describe. Was it this world, what the Voice had done to me? Or something else that I had brought with me?

  I shuddered myself back into the present to find us stopped among the trees, only then noticing Juan had led us deep into the woods to make camp.

  “Cold camp tonight. No fire.” He rasped.

  There was a sleeping roll behind the horse’s saddle, and I put it to the smell test. Freshly cleaned, with more than a hint of horse. I felt very lucky. All things considered, wash day for gear in the mercenary camp could have been tomorrow! And to sleep with someone else’s stink in your nose was not a thing I’d wanted. I would have dealt with it if that had been the case, but I wouldn’t have liked the experience. I wondered about the man this had belonged to and looked away.

  Juan glanced at me and sighed. “I know that look, muchacho. You want to talk about it?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I muttered. Part of me knew I should.

  “It’s hard to take a life. Even if it means you get to live because of it,” he replied. He smiled sadly and then shook his head. “But you said you didn’t want to talk about it. And that’s fine for now.”

  “Thanks, Juan,” I said and found that I meant it. Knowing he would listen, that I wasn’t alone, was enough.

  He nodded once. “Come, I’ll show you the best way to tie up the horses for the night, so they can eat,” he said cheerfully.

  After helping tie the horses to a nearby tree, I sat down on the bedding. I checked my stats, finding that I had a lot of experience energy. I quickly accepted it and went up four. Fucking. Levels. Part of me was angry that Mott was only worth four levels of experience to me. Was that what a man was worth? It was chilling to think about whether the experience gained from murder was adequate. Was I already getting used to it?

  Shaking my head, I focused on my stat points. There were 10 stat points, two more than I expected. My intelligence and wisdom had already gone up to 25 each. I put two each into my strength, stamina, endurance, and charisma. After a moment, I put the last two into my intelligence.

  Well, toss out those diapers and the binky; I was ready for pull-ups and crayons! I was a bit more powerful and was not thinking about how I got the experience. Nope. Not doing it.

  It wasn’t until morning came and we were munching on dry biscuits that Harper noticed my level jump. She walked over and ruffled my hair. She had to reach to do it, so there’s that for a consolation prize. “Good job, New Guy! Keep it up, and you just might make it to level 10.”

  “Hey! Stop that.” Feeling indignant about being treated as a red shirt, I glared at her. I remembered hearing the term from Sean and had stopped what I was doing to ask him what it meant. He had me watch some clips from some old scifi show, including the crew going on missions away from the spaceship. Every extra who died in the clips wore a red shirt. At the time, it was pretty funny. The term hit differently now. “Why can’t you call me by my name, Harper?”

  “Oh, I could. But then I would get attached, and it would suck a lot more when I have to bury you, New Guy.” She smiled sweetly at me and turned toward the horses.

  Ouch. I had nothing. No rejoinder, nothing remotely clever, other than my muttered “Oh.” This place, this hell, was not one that bred familiarity. Why bother getting close to anyone new when they were just going to die when you look away for a second? For Harper, I was just another new guy. A red shirt. And I am so fucked.

  Juan had an entirely different reaction to my leveling, getting me to tell him where I had put the points. “As a Mage, you need to put most of your points into intelligence, stamina, and dexterity. The mental strain from higher-level spells is less the higher your stamina is, and you’ll want to be prepared for the longer casting times by increasing your Dexterity.” He looked at me sternly while handing me a few pieces of jerky. “No more points in strength.”

  Nodding in thanks and understanding, I inwardly sulked while gnawing on the tough meat. While I still wanted to put points into strength, I trusted Juan knew what he was talking about. We left soon after, and the forest gave way to rolling hills. I didn’t see any mountains in the distance, so these were not foothills at the base of a range. Like the Denver Metro, which isn’t actually in the mountains, and was on the edge of the foothills and rolling plains. Lots of hills in the Great Plains.

  “I need a moment, be right back,” Harper muttered, leaving the trail and cresting a grassy hill to our right.

  Continuing to examine my map, I vaguely noticed her leaving. Outside of where I had traveled, it was still dark and kind of swirly. I hadn’t noticed the moving parts of the map before, and the clockwise movement of different points was hypnotic. The distraction almost made me miss the blinking spot I had seen yesterday. Still to the west of us, it was also slightly south of us with the direction the road was taking us. I decided to ask Juan about the abnormality.

  “Hey Juan? I’ve got a question about something on the map.”

  Juan slowed his horse, allowing me to catch up. “Oh? Describe it to me.”

  I focused on the blinking spot, tightening my grip on the saddle horn because of a touch of vertigo. “It’s a blinking spot, slightly to the south but far west of us. Can you tell me what that is?”

  Juan had an unfocused look in his eyes, raised an eyebrow and stroked his goatee. “Hmmm. I don’t see any blinking spots. Are you sure it’s not a swirl? That happens when you look at your map while in motion.”

  “No, I see the swirls. This is an actual dot on the map that is blinking.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve never heard of such a thing without an active quest. West of us, you say?”

  “Far to the west. I don’t know how to tell the distance, but I zoomed my map out once to see how far we came. And if there are mountains nearby. It’s maybe halfway between us and the edge of the map.”

  He nodded his head. “Okay… I still don’t see a blinking light. There is a mining camp in the general vicinity. And some caves.”

  Evidently, that was enough for my map to update in that vicinity. The blinking dot was near what may have been a cave entrance. The entrance was not far from what looked like a village, with a pickaxe next to it. I had a feeling that this was important. “Can we stop by there?” I asked excitedly.

  Juan’s eyes unfocused, and he looked thoughtful. “It’s out of our way. It is more important for us to pass on the information about this threat. If people from Earth are being sent here again, then we need to be prepared. Then we can go investigate your blinking dot.” He sounded sure of this, so I didn’t press the issue.

  “Brask!” Harper’s voice tore across the field. I caught a flash of her, hunched low over the saddle, her horse pounding over the ridge — and then the ridge itself seemed to boil over in teeth and claws.

  Hide, yes, but only so she could attack from a direction her target didn't expect. She is one hell of a rogue!

  Could it be... organized Honey Badgers?