Caen rushed in, flickering Soul-sense as he cut into limbs and stabbed the unempowered carapaces of the ants. Their chittering was only barely drowned out by the loud whirring of the cutting equipment.

  In moments, the Protectors had cleared the wave of Planar creatures. They stood around, heaving tiredly in the ensuing lull, as Haulers moved aside ant corpses. Sometimes, the awakened trees sent out sluggish roots to begin pulling down the ant corpses into the ground. Several retreating ants had dragged a few of those corpses away with them.

  Guinevere was talking with a member of the Cutter team, but she was watching him. She nodded at him, smiling, and he returned the greeting.

  The team lead told Caen that he would only start being paid after an hour of sticking with the Cutter team. Add-ons, as they were called, were combatants who joined a Cutter team after it had already been formed, and they didn't get paid for their first hour. This, coupled with the fact that Cutter team leads were much more selective than the Attacker team leads, prevented combatants from flooding Cutter teams.

  “Five,” the team lead called out.

  The Protectors in Cutter teams also called out their kills at the end of each wave, so Caen had made sure to hold himself back from standing out too much. “Four,” he said.

  Someone else called out a two. Then there was another ‘four’ and a few more twos.

  “Eleven,” Guinevere said, drawing the attention of several people on the team.

  Caen raised an eyebrow, impressed.

  Someone standing beside Caen spat on the ground. “Rich kids and their artifacts,” they mumbled, walking off.

  Caen approached her, and she turned to look at him. “Hello, Guinevere.”

  “Hey!” she said, smiling. “Caen the glaive guy.”

  “You weren't joking about swords,” he said, gesturing at her weapon. “Is that an artifact?”

  She laughed. “You first. I saw that glaive of yours rip into carapaces with ease.”

  “I wouldn't say ‘with ease’, but yes, it's enchanted,” Caen replied. This was only slightly untrue. The weapon actually had an extremely weak durability enchantment that Caen had inscribed himself. That said, Caen noted to himself that Guinevere had somehow been able to pay attention to his fight while handling far more ants than he had.

  “Well, then mine's enchanted too,” she said, smiling as though they were sharing a private joke. She squinted at his badge. “Huh. You’re a Fire practician as well?”

  “I dabble,” Caen said, shrugging and starting to spin his glaive as he reoriented himself to keep the tree in his periphery.

  “Oh, a kindred spirit. I dabble in Wind magic myself. I—”

  “Guinevere,” the team lead called. “A moment, please.”

  She began walking over to the team lead, but turned to Caen. “Nice goggles, by the way.”

  Caen gave the tree his full attention, isolating its most prominent thread cluster. He had to fight two more waves of ants before he was done Mimicking the tree's affinity. A quick Blood-healing spell on himself eased the soreness in his muscles. Having to sleep in his armor on a shoddy cot was terrible. But his workout routine was the real culprit.

  He began casting the spell for healing burns, which he'd been adapting of late. A spell could still be cast without being fully adapted, but the practician risked spiritual and mental injury as well as unstable spell constructs and terribly inefficient casting.

  Even though Caen wasn’t done adapting the spell yet, he'd gained sufficient familiarity with the individual components to reliably cast it. Because of how often spell constructs collapsed whenever Caen was casting, he'd attained a basic understanding of their innate stability and could usually tell when a particular spell was likely to harm his spirit.

  He used the spell on a small portion of the injury he'd gotten from being hit with ant goop. Due to his inefficiency in casting it, the spell construct was unstable in his mind, but it took, his spirit moving swiftly to perform the requisite patterns. The area of skin around his neck, which still smarted a little, began to tingle and grow taut. It felt as though his skin was crawling.

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  The moment passed, and when he touched the area of his skin he'd focused on, it felt smoother and more tender than the surrounding skin, but no longer hurt nearly as much. Caen eagerly went about healing the remaining patches of burnt skin on his face and neck. He was all but chuckling to himself as he worked, and soon he finished clearing the burn marks. The spell had gotten a little bit easier to cast with each iteration, since this essentially counted as adapting the spell.

  Before he could relish the feeling of having successfully cast a spell that had been beyond him for so long, another wave of ants attacked. Caen was a lot more moderate this time, since he couldn't flicker Soul-sense. Keeping the tree in his periphery while fighting ants was a great deal harder to do. He made sure to avoid getting hit by the caustic goop and worked together with another Body-enhancer who fought with a shield and hammer.

  They announced their kills once more. The team lead had put down four ants. Caen hadn't put down any by himself but had worked with another team member to take down two ants. Guinevere had killed nine ants by herself. She flashed Caen a cocky grin when he looked at her.

  He walked over to a pair of combatants on the team. One of them had sustained a cut along his arm. He wore a breastplate and vambraces, but nothing else in the way of protection. The man was wrapping a sweat-stained piece of cloth around the wound when Caen stopped him, appalled.

  “I'm a mundane healer,” Caen explained. He helped the man dress the wound, and just before he wrapped it with clean gauze from his bag of holding, he cast a mend spell. The visualization indicated that the spell had been cast, yet there were no physical results. Caen's brow furrowed. Something was off. It wasn't that the spell was a particularly difficult one, or that his spirit labored to enact the working. The very act of casting the spell simply felt… wrong, somehow. Like he was misusing it. Not unstable or even dangerous, just… he got the impression ‘improper’.

  Caen cast the spell again. And just as before, nothing happened, despite his mana and willpower being used up. What was this?

  He cast a spell on himself to slow down his heart rate. It took without issue.

  Frowning in thought, he finished with the man and moved on to another injured team member. Amidst mundane healing, he would try to cast a Blood-healing spell, and nothing would happen. Even the spell for healing burns didn't work on others who had been hit with the green glob. And that impression of ‘impropriety’ persisted. It was truly bizarre.

  He dressed a masked woman’s burns from the caustic glob after using some of that solution that helped counteract its effects.

  Then he stepped aside, taking his glove off. He'd continued keeping the tree in his field of vision all this time, and his connection to it was still strong.

  He unsheathed a dagger and sliced into the heel of his naked palm, wincing as blood began to trickle out of the cut. He sheathed the dagger and cast a mend spell. His palm slowly knitted before his eyes.

  He cut into his palm again. And just as before, the mend spell knitted the wound. Out of the corner of his eye, a shock of blonde hair moved. Caen tilted his head upwards by a small fraction and, using his speculon, saw Guinevere watching him with squinted eyes from some yards away. It wasn't very dark here, as dim lanterns hung from the branches of surrounding trees. She may have been able to see clearly if she had a high Gleam affinity, especially if coupled with high values in Divination and Body-enhancement.

  Erring on the side of caution, Caen turned his back to her and put away his dagger.

  It's working on me, but not on others. Does this have anything to do with the fact that I Mimicked the tree's affinity?

  Blood-healing spells worked a lot better on one’s own species than they did on others. On several occasions in the tri-clinic, he'd seen werepeople asked to shift into their huform—which was their human physique—in order to receive treatment from human healers. Though of course, this was a problem Healer naMoon never had. Some written resources Caen had consulted explained that the anatomy and makeup of most animals and awakened plantlife were heavily resistant to nonspecialized healing spells. It just hadn't occurred to him that a healing spell which had been cast using the Blood-healing affinity of a plant would also not work on humans.

  Humans couldn't easily use Blood-healing spells to affect awakened plantlife, and it seemed that the inverse was true. He'd been thrown off by the fact that all the healing spells he cast had worked on him, though.

  Had Mimicking the tree's affinity somehow made him count as a tree himself? That seemed ridiculous to him, but he didn't immediately discard the thought.

  Does this mean that I might be able to use Blood-healing to affect the tree?

  He squatted on his haunches, took out his flask, and pretended to rinse his hand. As the warm water dribbled over his fingers, Caen touched one of the tree's many roots that visibly extended outwards. He began casting a light sedation spell, often used to soothe children before minor procedures.

  His spirit performed the patterns for the spell with incredible ease, but as soon as it did, the tree's soul structure began to tremble.

  A branch overhead snapped towards Caen like a whip. He jumped out of the way, dropping his flask and retrieving his glaive. He batted aside a second branch, though a third smacked him in the chest, sending him sprawling backwards. And then there was chaos. The bulky, serpentine branches of the tree began flailing around.

  In its soul structure, he noticed something new grow prominent. A thread cluster he hadn't seen before. It shone just as brightly as the other two thread clusters—one of which represented the Blood-healing affinity which he was currently Mimicking.

  The chittering of ants echoed from afar, and at the same time, a group of them streamed out of a nearby hole.