Caen dropped his connection to the tree immediately. The thrashing branches had begun to still, but a large swarm of ants had now come upon the Cutter team.

  He flickered Soul-sense and tore through ants, maiming more than he killed. It was an unfair matchup. Their soul structures quivered, destabilizing whatever working strengthened their carapaces for just an instant. And that was always enough.

  He halted those caustic sprays of theirs as he moved, but still got hit by droplets a few times. He wasn't the only one. A few Protectors in the Cutter team screamed in pain or shouted directions.

  Guinevere was a blur in the corner of his vision as she moved all over the place. Caen himself moved from ant to ant, leaving them injured enough for someone else to finish them off.

  It took the Protectors nearly ten minutes to wipe out the entire wave. While Caen had killed only three ants, he'd grievously injured over twenty of them. Guinevere had killed fifteen. She squinted at him as he helped with the wounded.

  Caen wondered about how else he could affect the tree. That sedation spell had been too weak to harm the entire tree, but there'd been an effect—even if a tiny one. Why else would the tree have attacked him?

  This was an opportunity. Finding a way to somehow interfere with the tree's ability to resist damage might greatly increase the speed at which the Fellers worked. Ideas for which spell to use and how he might have to alter them fluttered around his mind.

  * * *

  At the healing tent, he Mimicked a stout Spirit-healer's affinity and cleansed his own spirit. Afterwards, he spent some time cleansing the spirits of a couple of patients. Then he assisted his father in mending a few spiritual injuries. Since the spirit couldn't actually be seen, he had to rely on diagnostic spells, and, to a lesser extent, the improved spiritual faculties of the Ereshta'al bloodline. The passive augmentations made the process so much easier for him. Ever since discovering Mimicry, Caen had started to understand just how different magic must have seemed to other people. It was… easy.

  Wounds in the spirit were commonly the result of insufficiently adapted spells. But often enough, poor technique in spell casting or an improperly executed spell component placed too much strain on the spirit and caused tears. Sometimes, these healed by themselves, but continued exertion of the spirit could exacerbate tears and worsen them till the mere act of moving the spirit was agonizing. Caen himself had experienced his fair portion of these in his childhood. The amount of pain experienced depended on how attuned a person was to their spirit and how severe the injury was. Wounds in the spirit bled into the mind and into the body.

  He went to help the Blood-healers afterwards. Now that he'd better acquainted himself with the spell for healing burns, he treated those who had been sprayed with the ants’ caustic glob. The Blood-healer whom he Mimicked was a chatty young man who eventually left the tent, causing Caen to switch to mundane healing. He didn't want to spend more mana anyway.

  On his way out, he saw his cousin, Tuni, making out with the chatty Blood-healer by the side of the tent. Caen lifted a scandalized eyebrow. When had she even arrived?

  Lunch, as always, was free and completely unchanging. Mashed potatoes and oats.

  When he stepped into the unfortunately-named Odaton-plane Plane, he paused and looked down at the black wooden platform there.

  He moved out of the way of traffic, but continued to study the platform. He'd assumed it was black all this time, but it was a very dark green. It was rounded but not a perfect circle, and was quadruple the girth of any of the surrounding stumps. He stepped off and walked its perimeter, inspecting it. It looked like it had been embedded into the ground, but seemed suspiciously similar to the colossal one he'd seen from afar while accompanying the Delver team.

  He connected to it, and its soul structure proved his theory. A tapestry spanning hundreds of feet below ground. Not a single one of its roots breached the soil. There were two prominent affinity clusters in its soul structure.

  He sat there at the front zone with his back to one of the nearby stumps and began attuning ambient mana to replenish his reserves while he examined the tree's soul. As expected, one of its active affinities was Flora magic while the other was Blood-healing. He was surprised to find that this tree's instance of the Blood-healing affinity was quite a bit weaker than those of the much smaller stumps.

  There were so many mysteries here that he didn't know how to begin getting the answers to, so he just focused on his training. He jumped from the colossal tree stump to the stumps of smaller trees, going through the motions of locating, isolating, and imitating; the only way he knew to improve his speed in Mimicking an affinity was by thoughtful repetition. He spent the next few hours doing that as well as training Blood-healing and Flora magic with boosted affinities and in abjection. He alternated between abjection and boosted affinities, paying attention to the specific differences.

  * * *

  He visited the workout field where he'd meditated that morning and was pleased to find a large number of combatants there. Several different sparring sessions were going on at the same time, and those watching cheered, jeered, or called out incomprehensible advice. There were several fights between Body-enhancers as well as Elementalist practicians.

  Caen sat among them and used Mimicry. He jumped from soul structure to soul structure, timing himself with his pocket watch, as well as comparing active thread clusters to his own, with the goal of getting better at distinguishing the features of affinity clusters.

  A familiar spirit grazed his own very briefly. Aunt Vensha. He whirled back and found her jogging past with two members of her party. Caen returned the greeting just before she moved out of his range. He made a mental note to look for her later.

  Caen spent a few more hours there training different aspects of Mimicry. He had a jotter out and kept recording his observations on thread clusters. With so many samples available to him, he recorded what sensations and nuances he got from each one, using diagrams and musical notes.

  There were similarities between affinities of the same discipline. It was becoming easier to notice these the more he looked out for them.

  His average time for any instance of Mimicry was already down to about ten minutes. Locating thread clusters only ever needed to be done the first time, and even then, he was usually able to conclude that in seconds. Isolating the elements of a given thread cluster was always an involved process. Imitating the thread cluster was even more convoluted, as he had to consciously shape and mold these. But he'd found that he spent less time doing either with soul structures he was familiar with. He was certain he could bring his time down even more.

  He also spent some more time running through magical exercises. Practicing these with Mimicked affinities was very slowly starting to influence how well he could perform some of the exercises in his abjection.

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  Later that night, Caen helped out at the kitchen. He and another young man were tasked with fetching water from a well. Zeris had mentioned yesterday that the officers’ quarters had internal plumbing, but everywhere else used wells. Even the healing tents.

  They used an eight-wheeled cart to transport the large buckets to and fro. The other man was a Body-enhancer, so they worked quickly. Caen was able to Mimic his affinity twice in the meantime.

  He purchased some food with a few meal tokens and made his way to the aides’ hall. Zeris wasn't there yet, so Caen sat on her bed and meditated on his soul structure while he waited.

  He felt Zeris's spirit when she entered the hall. They had supper together and chatted about their day as Caen carried out some Dream-guarding and Spirit-healing exercises, Mimicking Zeris's affinities.

  She told him about the other two students who had come down here to learn with Ladia. They were both older than Zeris and treated Ladia with far more reverence than Zeris thought was warranted. Caen told her about what he'd tried doing to the tree.

  Zeris laughed. “Did the tree hit you?”

  Caen glared at her. “No.”

  Zeris laughed harder.

  “I saw Tuni today,” Caen said an hour later. They'd finished eating and were now working on one of her equations together. “She was making out with—”

  “Oh, you've met Akab. Pretty boy. Dreamy eyes. A little shorter than me.”

  “How do you even know that already?”

  “Caen, I'm special. People always tell me things.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  * * *

  Caen walked back to his tent, exhausted in mind and spirit. At least he had the beautiful time construct sitting in the corner of his vision. It usually lasted for about eight hours, and by the time he woke up tomorrow morning, it may have already dissipated.

  He sighed pleasantly. Tonight, he would think some more on what spells he could use on the trees tomorrow. He had a number of interesting spells within his smaller grimoire that might prove useful.

  When he opened the tent flap, it was the scent of charred wood and straw that hit him first. His eyes played catch-up. Four cots in the tent had been burned badly. This had clearly been caused by a controlled flame, because there was barely any hint of smoke in the air, and while soot and char stained the tent walls, nothing else had been damaged by the fire.

  Naturally, Caen's cot had not been spared. The surrounding wood of it was darkened and charred. The straw mattress was torn and ripped. The novel he hadn't made time to read lay shredded all around. His backpack had been overturned and slashed through, his spare clothes rended, and his backup chymical solutions lay in glowing puddles, several of their canisters and glass vials broken. Nothing here released noxious fumes, which was a precaution he regretted now. Coming back to see the unconscious body of his tent’s arsonist would have been rather cathartic.

  He'd kept nothing of true value in his backpack, but it still rankled. He'd gotten that bag for a steal at an auction sale in Southway and had needed to save up for weeks to buy those ingredients. With a breathing sequence, Caen pushed down his mounting irritation as he rummaged through the debris for whatever could be salvaged. It was fortunate that he stored everything that was expensive or difficult to replace in his bag of holding. He smiled sadly when he realized that his alarm ward was still functional. This all had to have been the work of those people from last night. That Fire practician and his friends.

  The woman who was always with a book walked into the tent, mouth open. The wereperson walked in behind her. Of course, both their cots had been burnt severely, along with that of the Vedul woman.

  “What in the three realms happened in here?”

  “It was those kids from last night,” said a lanky, shirtless man who looked to be in his forties. He was peeling a mango in the bed beside the wereperson's damaged cot. “Asked me to mind my business as they damaged your things. And honestly? I think y'all shoulda never gotten mixed with them in the first place.”

  “They were going to burn down the tent,” the wereperson said, sneering.

  The man shrugged and returned to his mango.

  "This is clearly a violation of the habitation code," Caen said, looking at his fellow victims. "We should report this to the camp guards."

  The wereperson blew some air through his nose. "Yeah, okay. Good luck with that."

  "Don't bother," added the woman as she toed the remains of her belongings aside. “As long as no one gets terribly injured, those incompetent slouches prefer to stay out of most squabbles.”

  * * *

  “And you said they burnt down your cot, huh?” the bored-looking camp guard asked, opening up a large leather-bound book he'd retrieved from the floor.

  “And my belongings too,” Caen reiterated patiently. He sat now at a table with six other people dressed in military uniforms. They were inside a squat shed beside the soldiers' lodge. He'd interrupted their game of cards, and none of them looked all too pleased about that.

  "So, what, you need a new cot or something? We can have you assigned to another tent."

  “But what about the—”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure, we'll get around to looking into it. What did you say their names were again?”

  Caen held back an irritated sigh. "I'm registered as a healer, I'll just get a cot with the other healers." He stood up to leave.

  "Actually, that's a violation of the habitation code," the guard said, voice growing stern. "Very serious infraction, too."

  "More serious than vandalism?" Caen asked, incredulous.

  The man ignored his question. "Non-negotiable. We don't mix healers and combatants together."

  "I'm both."

  “Hey, I don't write the rules, man.” He looked back down at the open book before him. “So, how's tent 67 sound?”

  * * *

  At the bathhouse, Caen sat on a slab of stone as he unlaced his left vambrace. The bathhouse was an open pavilion with a low stone slab running around its edges. It was empty. A pitifully frail lantern hung from the ceiling above, and rather than strain his eyes, he relied on his speculon.

  He had just done some maintenance on his glaive and guns, after which he’d fetched some water from the well in a wooden bucket to wipe down his armor.

  Out the corner of his ‘eye’, he noticed movement in the distance. There were no moons in the sky tonight, and with how dark it currently was, he shouldn't have been able to make out anything, but his speculon clearly picked out a trio of people discussing inaudibly and making sharp gestures as they approached the bathhouse with apparent stealth. Several of them were holding weapons. Caen immediately began relacing his vambrace.

  One of those people was the Fire practician who had tried to burn his tent yesterday. The very same bastard who had tried to steal his glaive some nights ago.

  Caen glanced around cautiously, using a breathing sequence to keep back his irritation. To his left, he found two armed individuals skulking in his direction with their backs to a small, dark forest. Several others were approaching from other directions, clearly trying to surround him. Two of them were particularly large and muscular. He counted twelve people in total. One of whom he recognized as the man the Vedul woman had pummeled yesterday. Yellow Tassels.

  “Alright, then,” Caen said to himself as he put his helmet back on.

  He wore his crafting goggles. His revolver and pocket pistol were primed and holstered.

  Caen emptied a vial containing a yellow liquid into the bucket of water, then he doused a handkerchief in it. He immediately wrapped the sopping wet handkerchief around his lower face as he changed his breathing sequence to accommodate the lowered air intake. The acrid smell was overwhelming.

  The next second, he took out two vials of acid from his belt bag and mixed them in his bucket of yellow-tinged water, which began to foam, churn, and release toxic fumes just as the nearest of his assailants reached the pavilion.