Trenn stood in a stiff T-pose, his jaw set.

  He had survived demonic squirrels, Reptile Kin hunters, and a full-blown goblin war. He had been shot, stabbed, bitten, and beaten. Now, he was humiliated.

  He was being fitted with the Hobgoblin’s armor in the Guardian Lodge's workshop.

  The layered leather and hide armor was, technically, a massive upgrade. The quality was undeniable—thick but supple, stitched with the skill of a true artisan. It was also, quite possibly, the most ridiculous garment he had ever put on.

  The Hobgoblin Warlord had been short and stout. Trenn was tall and lean. The expertly crafted breastplate ended a solid four inches above his navel, and the armored cuisses, designed to protect a Hobgoblin’s thighs, barely qualified as shorts on his longer legs.

  Mara was erupting in laughter.

  So loud and genuine it seemed to startle the shadows in the lodge. She was bent over, one hand braced on her knee, the other pointing at Trenn as she was wracked with a fresh wave of howling, unrestrained hysterics.

  "It's... It's a crop-top!" she snorted, tears welling in her amber eyes. "A crop-top and tight shorts!"

  Trenn closed his eyes, a long sigh escaping his lips. He slowly shook his head, having accepted his fate.

  Mara’s hysterics finally tapered off into a series of wheezing gasps. She wiped a tear from the corner of her amber eye, her shoulders shaking with the aftershocks.

  "Alright, alright," she said, her voice thick with amusement. "Stop looking so tragic. We'll make it work."

  The laughing fit vanished as quickly as it had arrived. In its place was the focused hunter he knew, her professional demeanor clicking back into place with the practiced ease of a sheathed knife.

  Trenn's gaze fell to the wide workbench, where the pieces of his old Reptile Kin armor lay in a grim, dissected pile: the curved breastplate, the vambraces, the greaves.

  “Your armor’s going to be a mismatched mess, but it’s some of the best handiwork I’ve seen in a long time. I’ll try to do it justice,” she said, with a startling focus on her work.

  She took the Reptile Kin breastplate and held it against the Hobgoblin's crop-top, her eyes narrowing as she calculated angles and stress points. He'd only ever seen her as a warrior, a predator. But this was different. This was the focus of a master artisan.

  “Are all Guardians trained armorsmiths?” Trenn asked.

  Absorbed in her task, Mara answered absentmindedly. “Yes, we’re taught to be entirely self-reliant from a young age. That includes clothing ourselves.”

  Her hands moved with a fluid confidence. She used a sharp bone awl to punch new holes in the Hobgoblin leather, her movements quick and precise, before lacing the two pieces together with thick, waxy sinew-thread.

  The work was silent and serious until she knelt to attach the greaves to the bottom of the ridiculous shorts.

  Her hands stilled.

  A low, rumbling chuckle started deep in her chest.

  "It is practical, I suppose," she mused, her voice laced with a fresh wave of teasing as she ran a strip of leather around his calf. "Nothing for the leather to snag on."

  She gave his leg a light, dismissive pat. "So much smooth belly and leg. You really are just... bare skin."

  Trenn let his head fall back with a quiet groan.

  He had faced down death and dismemberment with more dignity than this.

  “If you don’t quit it, I’m going to start making jokes about how soft and shiny your fur looks,” Trenn retorted, trying to find an angle to tease back.

  Mara’s head snapped up, and she looked straight at him, momentarily forgetting her work. There was something strange behind her eyes, something Trenn didn’t recognize. There was a long, uncomfortable silence.

  “You think my fur’s soft and shiny?” she finally asked, not breaking eye contact.

  “Well, yeah? Back home, we think furry predators, like dogs and cats, are cute,” Trenn stammered.

  Mara laughed, breaking the tension. “Is everything a pet to you, Trenn, the Phys Ed student? Rock Slimes, Giant Moths, and Guardians of the Mana Forest alike?”

  “Mara, listen, if I—”

  “Oh, stop it, I’m playing with you. But if another Guardian heard you commenting on my fur, they’d think you’re flirting with me,” she finished, with a satisfied grin.

  Trenn flushed. Avoiding Mara’s gaze, his eyes drifted to the large, scarred workbench that held the sum of their new life. It was all there. The spoils of war and the price of victory, laid out in a quiet, stark inventory.

  Skate sat at the edge of the bench, smooth and clean, doing its best impression of a big round rock. Beside it, a large leather backpack bulged with the necessities for a long journey: neatly wrapped parcels of dried meat, a tightly rolled bedroll, and the worn alchemy book.

  Next was his kris knife, next to the Hobgoblin’s enchanted long-club. The heavy, rectangular bat hummed with a latent power, its spiraling carvings drinking the firelight.

  Next to it was the black amulet. It had been quiet since the battle. It hadn’t hummed or vibrated. However, Trenn was certain its powers involved divination.

  He had seen the Hobgoblin avoid attacks he could not have foreseen when the amulet had hummed with power.

  On the other side of the bench lay Mara's new bow and a neat row of arrows she had been painstakingly fletching.

  They were equipped. They were ready. They were survivors…

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  This brought his gaze to Bomber.

  The Giant Moth lay on a small, V-shaped stretcher they had fashioned from branches and leather.

  Crude wooden splints, bound with clean linen strips, encased three of its puffy, insectoid paws. Its magnificent pink and yellow wing was bent at a sickening, unnatural angle, crumpled and broken.

  The poor creature was a statue of pained stillness. It lay motionless, its wide, dark eyes staring into nothing, its entire being focused on the singular, agonizing task of not moving its shattered limbs.

  The lightheartedness of a moment ago was like a cheap lie in the face of such quiet, profound suffering.

  This, Trenn thought, his throat tightening. This was the true cost of their victory.

  The quiet in the workshop stretched, heavy and somber.

  Trenn couldn't look away from Bomber's still, broken form. Mara’s deft hands slow their work, and then stop completely. The teasing was over.

  She moved to stand beside him, her shoulder brushing his as they both looked at their fallen friend. Her voice, when she finally spoke, was soft, stripped of all its earlier mockery.

  "You can stop worrying," she said. The words were a gentle command.

  "The Gnome vets at the Hive will heal Bomber."

  She gestured with her chin toward the pathetic sight. "I've seen their work. They live with giant bees," she explained, her voice dropping as if sharing a profound secret. "They know how to treat a broken wing.”

  She pointed to the carefully applied, glowing green paste on the moth's bandaged paws. "And thanks to the healing balm, those bones have already started to knit. They'll be set by morning."

  The words were a lifeline, a tangible thread of hope that pulled Trenn from the mire of his guilt. The Gnome Hive wasn't about “learning about his Wild Mage spells”. It wasn’t a stop on the way to the mainland, either.

  It was a hospital. It was a promise to save a teammate. A teammate who’d saved him more than once before. He looked from Bomber’s broken form to Mara’s confident face.

  "And you're sure they'll help?" he asked, his voice low. "For free?"

  Mara turned to face him fully. The quiet, empathetic healer was gone. In her place was the predator, the strategist who saw the whole battlefield.

  A sharp, prideful grin split her vulpine features, her amber eyes blazing with a fierce, triumphant light.

  "For free?" she scoffed, the sound a dry, incredulous rasp. "Trenn, listen to me."

  She took a step closer, her gaze pinning him with its intensity. "If the goblin clans had united under that Warlord, what do you think would have happened? Us Guardians?" She gestured vaguely towards the deep woods beyond the lodge. "We would have pulled back. Melted deeper into the Mana Forest. It is our way."

  Her expression hardened, her voice dropping to a low, serious growl.

  "The Gnome Hive? The regent, and their Queen Bee?"

  "They don't have that luxury. Their home is a fortress, but it is a fixed point on a map. The Goblins were coming for them. Not for raids,” she paused. “For war. For conquest."

  She let the strategic reality of their victory settle in the quiet workshop. He was more than a survivor who had gotten lucky. He was a force that had altered the balance of power for the entire region.

  "You didn't just win a fight for your own life, or for Tyndral’s," Mara declared, her voice ringing with a conviction that chased away the last of his doubts. "You broke an army. You saved the region from the Goblin invasion."

  "They owe you, Wild Mage."

  She gave the final strap on his new, piecemeal armor a satisfying tug, a gesture of completion, of readiness.

  "They're going to treat you like a hero."

  Later that night, long after Mara’s soft breathing had settled into the quiet rhythm of sleep, Trenn was still awake. The lodge was a cavern of deep shadows and dying embers, the world outside painted in the silent, spectral light of the twin moons.

  He couldn’t rest. His mind, buzzing with the day's revelations, was a chaotic storm—a hero. The word was as ill-fitting and ridiculous as his new armor.

  He pushed himself from his bed of furs, his movements slow and quiet, and padded across the cold wooden floor to the workbench. There, nestled between the heavy long-club and his kris knife, lay the amulet.

  He picked it up. The leather thong was cool and supple, but the stone itself was a void. It was a polished, non-reflective black gem, the size and shape of a large eyeball.

  An idle impulse took him. He lifted it, holding it directly in front of his eye like a monocle, and peered into the darkest corner of the lodge. The world exploded with detail.

  The murky shadows resolved into a landscape of sharp, clear shapes. He could see the grain of the wood on the far wall, the texture of the stone in the hearth, every individual strand of fur on a hide draped over a chair. A world painted in shades of silver and grey.

  A slow, disbelieving breath escaped his lips. A tool this useful couldn't be ignored. He slipped the leather thong over his head, letting the cold stone rest against his collarbone. The effect was instantaneous. The darkness outside the lodge’s single window was no longer a flat, impenetrable black, but a deep, detailed tapestry of blues and greys.

  He could see in the dark. He closed his eyes, reaching inward for the amulet's predatory hum, but there was nothing. The stone was a silent, empty vessel. He remembered the lesson from the waterfall.

  He focused, flexing that strange, new muscle in his mind, and gently pushed his own hum—his Wild Mage resonance—into the cold stone at his chest. His vision tore free.

  One moment, he was in the lodge; the next, he was floating silently above the roof, looking down. The world was rendered in moon-drenched clarity. He could hear the sigh of the wind through the pines, the distant hoot of a nightbird.

  His Clairaudience was only half of it, he realized with a jolt. This was Clairvoyance. He could see the threads of his influence, the gentle, humming connections that bound him to his allies. Skate was a warm, steady presence by the hearth. Bomber was a flicker of pained but loyal light on its stretcher. Mara was a brilliant, sleeping flame of white-furred ferocity.

  He sensed another power coiled within the amulet, a property he hadn't understood before. It was a focusing lens. A tuning fork for his soul. It could take the raw, chaotic hum of his Wild Mage resonance and refine it, sharpen it, giving him a level of control he never knew was possible.

  A way to alter the pitch of his Mana. He focused, pushing his resonance into the orb again, but this time it wasn't a gentle nudge. He maintained a steady current, an active channel of power. He harmonized his hum with the amulet’s.

  He turned his gaze to Skate. The connection was already there, a familiar, comforting presence. He took a deep breath and pushed his new, refined hum into his pet.

  The world tilted and tore away. There was a sickening lurch, a profound disconnection, and he was looking at himself, in mismatched armor, as he crumpled to the wooden floor.

  He wasn't in his body anymore.

  He wasn't floating above the lodge, either. The world was not sight or sound. It was a universe of vibration. He could feel the texture of the floorboards, the faint draft from under the door, the radiant heat of the dying embers in the hearth, all as direct, physical sensations. He had no eyes, but he could perceive everything.

  He was the sphere.

  Forward, he thought, the command was a pure, kinetic impulse.

  His new spherical body rolled across the floor, the sensation of the wood grain passing beneath him a bizarre and thrilling new sense. He could feel the subtle shift in his own mass as he moved.

  Bounce!

  The command was instinctual. He became pliable, his form compressing like a coiled spring as he gathered and explosively released the tension. He shot a few feet into the air, landing with a soft thud.

  He could feel the kinetic force of the impact, not as pain, but as pure energy to be absorbed and redirected. By keeping his body pliable and adjusting his mass with each rebound, he maintained a low, steady dribble for a few exhilarating seconds.

  It was enough. He pulled back.

  The connection snapped.

  Trenn gasped, his own lungs filling with air as his consciousness slammed back into his body. The hard, cold reality of the wooden floor pressed against his cheek. For a moment, he lay there, his heart hammering, a profound, ringing disorientation echoing in his skull.

  Well,

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