Alyssa ran her fingers over the surface of a whitish-blue fruit, feeling the ways the magic in it flowed and twisted. Poison tended to have this glossy-spiky texture, whereas Harvest felt more of a warm and fuzzy water. Those were the two main elements she usually felt for when looking for food, and this fruit was very warm and fuzzy.

She slipped it into her woven-reed basket and began to clamber around on the tree it had been growing on, looking for additional ripe fruits she could gather. A couple more made their way into her collection that way, but she moved on before too long.

The next set she found was a bush with needle-like leaves that had a purple underside, and produced nuts of a similar shade. She'd actually collected these purplenuts a few times before, and though they were bitter and tough, Clark had found they became kind of savory when roasted for an extended period of time. They objectively weren't that good, but it added at least a bit of variety to their food in a not entirely unpalatable way.

There were enough purplenuts on that bush that it actually filled up her basket, and so Alyssa closed up her basket and turned back towards Shelter. The visibility at the moment wasn't the greatest – the forest didn't seem to get the sorts of weather she was used to back home, what with the eternal daylight and lack of rain or storms. Instead, they got massive banks of fog settling across the Jungle, casting everything into an eerie half-white. Not that it stopped her, she was very familiar with this particular route by now and ran along it with confidence.

As she hopped onto a fallen log, a tremor suddenly shook the ground, sending her sprawling with a clatter. The food-basket tumbled from her grasp with a handful of what she'd collected making its way out through the gaps in the container, and only long practice kept her with a firm grip on her spear. Before she even fell to the ground fully, she'd redirected her momentum into a half-spin, ensuring that she landed with both feet planted solidly, and both hands firmly grasped on her spear.

She didn't bother calling out. There was nothing in this blasted wilderness that could understand her words, but she kept her head on a swivel as she assessed the woods around her. So far, she'd yet to run into a vinebeast in the wilderness past her very first encounter with them, but it was always possible whatever crude intelligence the creatures had – or creature, she personally thought that there might only be one thing that kept remaking its bodies – realized that it could hunt them far more effectively by picking her off when she was alone.

The damned mist made it hard for her to tell what if anything was out there, and her feet swept across the forest floor, smoothly spinning her in a constant arc, ensuring her balance was always steady without giving the opportunity for something to sneak up behind her. There wasn't any visual sign, and the only thing she could hear was her own labored breathing, but she could feel something through the blanket of bushes and roots she was stepping on.

What it was, she couldn't tell. It wasn't Force, Air, or Wood, and its impressions were too indistinct to know beyond that.

Then, action.

As her back was facing the way she'd been headed, something materialized out of the mist, lunging at her with obvious intent.

She couldn't dodge fast enough, and the thing caught her arm and clung to it, sharp claws digging into her skin as it skittered its way up her limb towards her face like lightning. She barely had enough time to close her eyes and look away from the thing before it reached her head. Needle-like claws were dragged through her scalp, drawing blood that instantly matted in her hair.

Alyssa's spear fell to the ground, unused as both hands were instantly occupied with whatever ferocious squirrel-thing had decided it hated her. As it started to climb over her head, Alyssa brought her left arm up to shield her face as her right arm tried to knock the thing off of her.

She half succeeded, as her hand did connect, but its claws were literally too deep inside her, and all she really managed to do was prompt a blossom of fresh pain from her head as it dug in harder.

With a flying lunge towards a half-remembered fallen log, Alyssa frantically slammed her forearm – which the squirrel had just attached itself to – against the rotting wood.

For the first time, she finally recovered against the tiny thing as it was momentarily stunned by the impact. It stayed firmly lodged in her arm, though, and she got a good look at it.

"Not a squirrel, then." she muttered. It was more lizardlike than squirrel-like, with obvious horns and scales on its mist-white body. It even had a hook on the end of its tail, currently halfway buried in Alyssa's bicep.

It recovered, but this time Alyssa was ready for it, and the moment it released its tail from holding onto her, Alyssa moved to sweep it off her arm. It stayed, fixed in place and tearing her arm open a bit more, but that just gave her the chance to get her hand fully around the mist-fur.

It thrashed furiously in her hand, of course, and its tail swung wildly in every direction, but that just gave Alyssa the chance needed to unhook it from her arm and take a better look at the creature.

Its tiny mouth was full of massively oversized fangs, and between that, the glowing red eyes, and the misty coloration of its scales it almost made her think of some kind of vampire horned lizard.

"What was that about, huh?" she asked it, trying to ignore the amount of blood running down her arm and neck.

She felt it become less substantial in her grasp, as though it was trying to melt into the mist around her. "Oh no you don't."

Wasn't I just thinking about how it wouldn't understand me?

Didn't matter. Both it not understanding her and it trying to slink away, specifically. Once upon a time, intangible creatures had been a tremendous bane for warriors everywhere, but these days how to punch the immaterial was something she'd learned as a kid in her first self-defense classes. Having an actual Force-based Class brought doing so from 'easy' to 'absolutely trivial,' and this not-squirrel mist-fur didn't know what it had gotten itself into.

"I wonder if Oliver can make anything out of you. Preferably alive."

Alyssa looked away from the mistfur to study the arm it had clawed up, and… yep, that was a good amount of blood. With a firm grip on the mistfur in one hand, Alyssa retrieved her spear, hooked it onto her gathering basket, and set on her way. She hadn't lost that much from the basket, it would be fine.

"Ho, Ride! You're injured?" Jacob called out in greeting as she approached the camp.

"You know it!" she called back with false cheeriness. Her arm ached, and it was stiff from both her muscles seizing up and the amount of dried blood clinging to it. "Caught the little monster that did it though!" she raised up the not-squirrel in her other hand.

Henrietta had seemingly materialized right next to Alyssa, and was waving a thin tendril of ink over her arm for some unknown purpose even as she called out an order. "Haleford! Come work your magic!"

"What's going on?" Oliver looked up from his perch on the Shelter wall, where it looked like he was shoving reeds into the semi-woven structure at random angles. She was just glad it looked like he wasn't about to make her sit in one place for a really long time while he 'calibrated' his wards around her, like he'd been doing before her foraging trip.

"Oliver! Great, you're here. I don't suppose that Air ward you were working on needs a blood sacrifice? Ideally one that would be really painful for whatever you're sacrificing?"

"Should I be concerned?" he started wandering over.

"Healer Haleford!" Henrietta called again, this time walking towards the shelter as she did so. "There you are. You have a job."

Alyssa raised her left arm to give Clark better access to the limb as he started to wipe away the blood and wounds, while presenting the not-squirrel, still clutched in her implacable grip to Oliver. The critter had apparently exhausted itself after turning into mist had failed to let it escape from her, and was now just breathing shallowly in what might have been perpetual shock. "Do you need to sacrifice a non-squirrel-like mistfur for anything?"

"Not as such, no," Oliver muttered as he studied the creature. She felt his magic prod at her Force cage and did the magical equivalent of loosening her fingers to give him better access.

After a moment of deliberation, he shook his head, "Nah. I'm almost done with the Air-control ward, and I'm avoiding composite-element enchantments, so there wouldn't be a place for it even if there was. I don't have any plans for... I think that's Steam, and a general Blood sacrifice isn't really needed."

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"I thought you loved sacrificing things. I believe you mentioned a goat?" she teased, then tensed as Clark's fingers caught on a bit of a scab and pulled hair out of her arm. He was starting with the smaller pieces for some horrible reason, and that meant frequent jolts of pain.

"Oh, in other circumstances this would be great. Amphicoreous life is always a treat to pull apart, but unless I just want to kill it for a burst of Death, and I could just use a fish for that, I don't have the setup needed to actually use it," he grumbled.

"Dang, your magic is lame," she teased.

"Hey! It's immensely useful. Technology and Arcane are two of the most powerful elements there are, but it's not my fault that they need a proper lab to take full use of them."

"Oh, I don't know… you could have reclassed given you knew that we were going to be coming to a primitive world."

Oliver made a strangled noise, but Henrietta cut in, "Ride. Smith. Stop it. Smith is a highly capable artificer, which is the role he's here to fill. A morturge wouldn't be any better than a thaumaturge. Ride, what happened to you?"

"Well…" she gave a quick recap of her earlier encounter.

"Did you say that the squirrel caused a tremor in the ground?" Henrietta questioned.

"Well no," Alyssa defended herself, "Just that…"

She frowned, "How did that happen? Also, it's definitely not a squirrel."

"I'd like to see the place you were attacked," the Commander asked, frowning. "If you're completely accurate, then there's something that still doesn't make sense."

"Knock yourself out," Alyssa lazily waved her arm, then winced as her wounds protested.

"You need to hold still," the healer unhelpfully informed her. He still hadn't gotten to the absolutely massive chunk of matted blood and cuts that was her forearm, instead just wiping away the tiny flecks of blood on the outer edges of her wounded area.

"Guess I can't show you where it was," Alyssa mostly ignored Clark, though she returned her arm to his semi-cautious ministrations, "Doctor's orders, but you might be able to find your way, depending on how good you are at tracking."

"It's not one of my skills," Henrietta sighed, "I suppose it likely doesn't matter too much. How long will it take for her to get better?"

"How the heck would-"

"Oh, just a couple days?" Clark answered, which Alyssa supposed made sense now that she thought about it. "Though I am less certain of that than I would like. All of my experience with injuries that I could not immediately heal were of ones far worse than this one."

"It's surface level scratches, how bad could it be?" Alyssa scoffed.

"The number of injuries might be making it harder," Oliver chipped in. "I've had similar things happen with Technology maintenance skills. Quantity matters just as much as severity for repairs, sometimes even more."

"Wash your arm off," Jacob added when he passed by. "Right now, Haleford is trying to clean you at the same time he's healing you, and that hardly would make his skill any easier to use."

"Alright!" Henrietta clapped her hands, "Let's all take a step back. If Haleford needs help, he can ask. Smith, how are your wards coming along?"

She pulled the man along, leaving Alyssa alone with the other two members of their little band. Jacob merely gave her a curt nod and returned to his work. With the newfound threat of vinebeast attacks, Jacob had stopped ranging outwards and instead focused even more on clearing out the area around Shelter, pushing the Jungle back one swing at a time.

Alyssa was happy, because it meant they had so much timber to fuel their various fires. And it helped them get a stockpile, though Alyssa figured their stockpile might not last that long, with Oliver preparing to do actual metal working.

In preparation for that, they'd returned to hunt down the parent droopnose – an event that had been far less exciting than Alyssa had hyped up in her mind. They'd come across it while it was sleeping, and while it did wake up before they delivered the killing blow, Jacob's [Frostblade] was, even at level one, as strong as a decent-quality steel sword. It wouldn't cleave through actual armor, but the feathered overcoat of the droopnoses really weren't on that level. He'd stabbed it a few times, cut its tendons, and then finished it off once it had lost strength in its limbs.

Getting it all back to the camp had taken a few trips, but it had given them an appreciable amount of meat and bones with which to work, and Oliver was supposed to turn all of that metal into something useful for them soon.

Any day now would have been great.

They hadn't found any copper since then, but they hadn't looked terribly hard on account of already having plenty.

Clark said something.

"What was that?" Alyssa asked, her mind having been elsewhere at the time he'd spoken.

"I would like you to try washing your arm," he repeated, pointing towards the pond. "Needing to be efficient with my spells is something of a new experience."

Alyssa shrugged, and started heading back towards the shelter, only to realize she still had the mistfur clutched in her hand. She held it up to her face, looking at it more closely. Its reptilian eyes stared back at her, and it began to thrash around, an action that only prompted her to hold to it all the tighter.

Still, she didn't really want to kill it. It might have been a bloodthirsty little demon-animal thing, but right now it was just a scared little creature in the grasp of something far beyond its comprehension. Could she really bring herself to kill it so heartlessly?

"Hey Jacob! Can you do something for me real quick?"

It was satisfying, watching the little demon-critter meet a gruesome end. It scratched her up, something that was taking Clark quite a bit of time to patch up, so she had Jacob entirely annihilate it.

Entirely fair and proportional.

So, she was in a rather good mood. Clark may have been an idiot, but he was rather good with his hands and his skill... now that he knew how to use it anyway. The feeling of cool-but-warm water flowing over her wounds was quite pleasant, almost enough to get her able to ignore the string of Magespeech nonsense that Oliver was spouting with his ward.

"Hah!" Oliver crowed triumphantly, in something that didn't sound like the last cry of nerdspeak incantations.

"Are you successful?" Alyssa's mood soured somewhat as Clark moved away from her to congratulate Oliver, but she just did her best to close her eyes and ignore it.

Not that it did much.

"Yes! The Shelter is working great. And I laid the right foundations, everything should be working. It's just taking a second to get started, but the inner pressure should start building here any second...."

FWOMPF

SPLASH

Alyssa's eyes shot open just in time to see the last remnants of a fireball dissipate into the air, and what looked like Clark body-slamming Oliver into the pond.

"You know," Alyssa drawled, "even though I was getting used to seeing you with hair, I have to admit I do get what you were complaining about. Your eyebrows definitely aren't one of your strong features, you look so much better without them."

Oliver glared at her. Not that he could do much more than that. He was submerged almost up to his nose in the pond, partially floating and partially sitting as Clark swept back and forth around him, treating his burns with a glowing hand.

"But hey! At least you know your spell works! Of course, I feel like it would have been better to test it without the dust explosion, but you're the expert and all that."

The glare intensified.

"But what I find really impressive is how well you're able to start fires. Fireballs, self-igniting timber, you really run the whole spectrum of ways to get fires started. I wondered for a while whether I'd been taught wrong, and fires were actually hard to make with magic." She shrugged, "You know, what with you not being able to light a fire when we first landed and all."

That got a reaction, and Oliver sat up more straight, pulling himself half out of the water.

"Woah, woah! Down, down into the water," Clark worked to re-submerge the Artificer, but Oliver wasn't about to let that stop him.

"Did that look controlled to you?" Oliver snapped.

"Didn't say it was," she shrugged.

"Do you have any idea how irresponsible it is to cast a spell if you don't have complete control over the mana you're working?"

"Fire's kinda irresponsible to begin with. I would have thought it would make it easier. Go with the flow, you know? Let it do what it wants. Which, if your wands are anything to go by, is catch on fire. With pretty colors, too."

"One does not simply let magic do whatever," Oliver was physically struggling to sit up now, as Clark tried to force him back underneath. "That's how you get accidents. Deliberately letting a spell go uncontrolled is-"

"Is it really uncontrolled if you do it deliberately?"

"Ride." Henrietta cut in, as apparently she'd wandered away from her experiments.

"Let them continue!" Jacob tossed in, "This is great fun!"

Henrietta sighed. "Haleford. It's your call."

"It would be nice to not fight Oliver as I heal him," Clark traitorously answered.

"Then that's that." She leveled a death-glare at Alyssa and Oliver in turn, "Let Haleford do his work before you go back to sniping at one another."

"Yes ma'am," they replied. But Alyssa said it better.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.