Throughout his many travels, Vin had encountered no end of friendly faces and people he enjoyed being around. Erik, the grandfatherly dryad from the Sacred Forest who was always happy to listen to his adventures and help in a pinch. Eithan, the head of Sakis’ stone mages and one of his first ever magic instructors. Forpurt, the wandering capillan and Trusted One of his tribe who enjoyed sharing information. The list went on and on, and Vin never ceased to be amazed at how helpful and kind people could be.

  Then there was the other list.

  Admittedly, the list of people who were less than pleasant to be around was far smaller, but it did still exist. People such as Deorer, the dwarven Smith of Relics from the Crater who didn’t care much for pleasantries and was quick to lob a hammer at anyone he deemed annoying. Or the neilans, a group of people who, as a whole, doomed the entire blue fur clan by throwing their own monsters into their fragment without so much as a shred of empathy. Madam Trebella would have fallen into this category as well, if she’d still been here on Edregon, but her best student and now the infernal with the most knowledge of rituals certainly had a place on that list.

  Xaril.

  Vin stood in front of Kym’s apartment door, hesitating with his hand raised to knock. He’d been informed that Kym, an Advisor from the former prisoners who were now called the Bands, and Xaril, Madam Trebella’s top student, were now living together. Both of them had something of an unhealthy obsession with reading and a dislike of being bothered by other people, so when Xaril had discovered that Kym functionally spent all his time with his nose in a book and had hundreds of tomes scattered throughout his apartment, the infernal had made a beeline for his place and declared himself Kym’s new housemate. Myers had told him Xaril had passed Terra's screening, and the infernal had no desire to go and lead his people like they wanted, so the council had simply shrugged and let the Warlock move himself in.

  It was hard to put a finger on exactly why Vin found Xaril so grating. The infernal didn’t go out of his way to be mean, or anything like that. And he wasn’t a bad person, per se. But he made it quite clear that he didn’t give a damn about other people and only cared about himself.

  Vin was pretty certain if someone actively on fire ran up to Xaril and begged him to throw a bucket of water on them, the only reason why Xaril would choose to do so would be because of fear of the fire spreading to the book he was actively reading and burning the pages.

  Resigning himself to the upcoming conversation, Vin knocked on the door and called out. “Xaril? I need to ask you about something.”

  Vin stood there, not surprised in the slightest at the lack of response he received. He’d already cast Sense Life and confirmed Xaril and Kym were both sitting in the apartment, so he rolled his eyes and did one of the things he very rarely chose to do.

  He leaned on his status as one of the five people in charge of the entire town.

  While he could technically break down the door and walk on in, he didn’t want to give some poor crafter the job of repairing it for no reason. Instead, he called out again.

  “Xaril, if you don’t open the door, I’ll motion for the council to kick you out of town and send you back to the other infernals. This is important council business I need to talk to you about.”

  That actually got a response, and Vin tried to keep the grin off his face as he sensed one of the two lifeforms get up and walk over to the front door. By the time Xaril opened it, Vin was all business.

  “What do you want?” Xaril asked, staring at him with his gold and black eyes.

  For anyone who’d never seen an infernal before, finding one open a door in place of a human would probably be rather scary. With dark red skin covered in jagged black lines running all over them, four nubby horns protruding from their foreheads, and sharp claws on each of their fingers, infernals were probably the last race one would want to find staring at them from the dark end of an alleyway late at night. However, Vin knew that Xaril was a Warlock who relied entirely on his ritual magic to do anything. Unless the infernal began sketching some rune in the air and tossed a few magical reagents on the ground, he had nothing to worry about.

  “I need to talk to you about a particular bit of magic Madam Trebella did at one point,” Vin said, not beating around the bush. Xaril was not one for pleasantries, so no point in delaying what he needed.

  “What magic, specifically? There are lots of things she could do that were beyond my level.”

  “She gave me a charm capable of using Sense Curse from entire fragments away. I need to expand the range of my own sensing spells to that degree.”

  “I know how to do that,” Xaril said. “But only in simplistic artifact form. I could adjust it for you, but the mental strain would kill you if you cast it yourself.”

  “I know that, but I’m actually surprised you bothered to tell me,” Vin admitted.

  “Kym told me if I give someone advice, I should include lethal details,” Xaril said blankly. “Follow me.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Vin struggled to squeeze past the rows of books still lining the entrance hall to Kym and Xaril’s apartment as he stepped inside. Despite the fact that Terra now had its own library where all these books were supposed to have been moved into, he swore the apartment had even more books than the last time he’d come to pay Kym a visit.

  To his surprise, Xaril led him down into a basement that he hadn’t realized the apartment even had. Naturally, there were only more books stashed around the edge of the room, but the center of the room was kept empty.

  Vin didn’t have to guess why that was the case.

  “You have your own ritual spot?” he asked, surprised to learn that Xaril even bothered. He’d thought the infernal would simply spend every waking hour of his life reading once he was out from under Madam Trebella’s thumb.

  “Myers prepared it,” Xaril said, not offering up any other information. “Watch closely.”

  Vin did just that as Xaril’s finger began glowing black, and the infernal began sketching out runes with the speed and grace of an expert. Yet again, Vin was blown away with the sheer skill Xaril worked with as he was reminded of why Madam Trebella put up with the irksome infernal in the first place. Vin had a knack for magic, but he’d been told time and time again that he wasn’t anything like a genius.

  Xaril, on the other hand, was a true prodigy.

  Within seconds, the Warlock had sketched out a complicated series of runes upon the ground, before standing up and nodding at him. “I converted the formation we’d normally place into a charm into one compatible with just about any sensing spell. Assuming you have even the smallest amount of skill, you should be able to adjust your spell manually with this to expand the range.”

  “This is exactly what I needed,” Vin said, ignoring the implied insult as his eyes devoured the runes before something could happen to them. Just as Xaril had said, the infernal hadn’t given him a new spell so much as he’d given him the understanding of how to better tweak any of his existing sensing spells to expand their range. Even just seeing this gave Vin a handful of other ideas as to how he could adjust the tier 0 spells, and his Runic Recalibration Capstone should make the task even easier.

  “Great. Lock the door on your way out,” Xaril said, turning and retreating back upstairs without another word, no doubt going back to whatever book he’d been reading before he’d been so rudely interrupted.

  Snorting, Vin rolled his eyes, but did exactly as asked after he finished memorizing the complex runes. Kym didn’t even look up from the book he was reading on the couch as he walked past the common room once more, and Vin closed and locked the door behind him. Spur had finally removed the guard detail that had been watching Kym at all times, and Vin couldn’t help but wonder what the guard he’d chatted with the last time he’d come here was up to now.

  Sean, one of the guards set to watch over Kym back when they hadn’t been sure if they could trust the Advisor or not just yet, had been compiling a book filled with the signatures and messages of as many of the one hundred first wavers as he could find. Vin had happily signed his book after realizing it was going to become a true historical document, and he could only hope wherever the guard had ended up, he was in a good position to hunt down the rest of his missing signatures.

  It seemed with each passing wave, more and more of the remaining first wavers perished, so there was no time to lose.

  Vin headed back to his own apartment, not surprised in the slightest to find Scule standing on the common room table with beakers in hand, working on some horrible poison that would probably be powerful enough to kill them all should he make so much as a single mistake. He was a twice prestiged Rogue of Poisons, after all, so Vin was pretty used to this by now.

  “Ah, welcome back!” Scule grinned, gingerly setting his equipment down and ignoring the faint blue smoke drifting out of the vial. His latest class upgrade granted him complete immunity to poison, and their team had two different people with Neutralize Poison as a known spell, so he’d become a tad more carefree about his experiments lately. “How was the council meeting?”

  “Boring as always,” Vin said, raising an eyebrow at the blue smoke. “Is Lumel home? You know she’s more susceptible to poisons than the rest of us.”

  “No, she’s doing some more research in the Underside,” Scule said, waving a hand dismissively. “Come on, I wouldn’t be this careless if she were!”

  As a pulmon, Lumel had transparent skin that not only showed the muscle and blood flowing underneath, but acted as something of a gel-like membrane. She was capable of breathing through it when submerged in water, as her people lived at the bottom of a massive lake, but this also meant things like airborne poisons affected her far more easily. Thankfully, they’d discovered this rather early on, when a mild irritant Scule had been working on managed to bother her from an entire room away. Though a quick cast of Neutralize Poison and a promise from Scule that he’d be far more careful whenever Lumel was around solved the problem.

  Reginald squeaked out a lazy hello, currently flopped on his back in the dead center of one of their small armchairs, and Vin returned the greeting with a nod. He still hadn’t quite gotten used to the fact that he could vaguely understand Reginald now after he’d briefly experienced the world as it truly was; nothing more than magic given shape and meaning via runic formations the Gods had created.

  “Any idea what Shia and Alka are up to?” Vin asked.

  “Shia’s helping with getting the epic monster corpse over to the Sacred Forest, and Alka is with her Slayers,” Scule said, frowning slightly at that last bit. “They lost three of their own during the last battle. None of the Old Guard at least, but still a heavy loss.”

  Vin nodded, having already heard the news. The Old Guard was what people were calling the original six Earthers who had survived Alka’s grueling training and had been the first ones to prestige into Slayers. This included Tiffany, the Earther who had become a Merider to solve the problem of her damaged lower body, and Tall Phil, a Slayer with a particularly powerful defensive Capstone. The New Guard were the thirteen new Slayers who had survived Alka’s second round of training. Though it sounded as if that thirteen was already down to ten.

  “If she needs someone to talk to, we should be ready to lend an ear,” Vin said, pausing as a sudden thought struck him. “Though she might be content to simply tell Epli about it.”

  “I still don’t know why she took that schlime with her,” Scule said, shaking his head. “Anyway, I’m going to go back to my experiment. Trying to come up with something that will affect larger monsters in case we ever run into anything else like that epic monster again.”

  “Good plan,” Vin said, already knowing what he had to do. “I’m going to duck over into a neighboring fragment for a bit. I’ve got some magical testing to do.”

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