Jun burst out of her tent, magic already at her fingertips as she looked around, ready to throw up a barrier or snare an attacker.

  She wasn't the only one as Cian and Michael burst out of the boy's tent a moment later, the first half dressed as his shirt hung open, revealing his admittedly well-sculpted chest and a sword held ready in his hands, while the latter wore only his skintight underclothes with a pair of metal knuckles gripped in his hands.

  Looking around the camp, Jun didn't see anything out of place besides her half naked teammates who scanned the surrounding area for threats alongside her. Arwen's tent was still set up a distance away from theirs, their so-called advisor not even bothering to come out. With every passing second that she spotted nothing out of place, Jun relaxed slightly more, until she realized that the other two members of her team didn't seem stressed at all.

  Between the boys' tent and the one the girls shared, Aya tended to a pan of sizzling bacon over a small cooking fire as Keira adjusted a strap on her camouflaged armor, their body language alert but not panicked or stressed. Next to the scout, Aya's cheeks turned the faintest shade of red as she looked at the two boys on their team for a few long seconds before she hurriedly fixed her stare on the sizzling pan she held over the fire.

  Looking up, the scout wolf whistled at Michael, a smug grin scrawled across her face. "Love the show Michael, but I'm about to go check out those horns. Stop being a distraction," she chuckled as she gave a strap a test pull.

  Michael's face darkened with embarrassment as he looked around, double checking that they weren't under immediate attack before ducking back into the tent he shared with Cian. "Stay safe sister," Cian said quietly before he turned and followed their healer back in.

  Keira nodded in response before she jogged out of the camp, the amusement on her face fading into a serious look as she passed Jun by and quickly disappeared into the ring of trees surrounding their camp. Jun glanced wistfully at her bedroll only to see that Shiori had taken advantage of Jun's rush and moved to occupy the warm spot she left behind. Awake and with her bedroll stolen by her Master, Jun sighed and joined Aya by the fire, the smell of cooking bacon prodding her stomach from slumber.

  Looking at her friend, she could see the girl's cheeks were still a pale shade of pink. Whether the color in Aya's cheeks was from the cold or from the state the boys had come out of their tent in, Jun wasn't sure, but Aya's eyes darted from the pan she held to their tent every so often, giving Jun a decent idea of what occupied her friend's mind. "Everything alright?" Jun asked in a quiet voice.

  Aya jumped at her sudden question, and for a moment Jun had a strange sense of irony, like the two of them traded places. Normally, she was the one acting awkward, blushing at things and getting surprised by small things while Aya just seemed confident all the time. Seeing her friend like this was different.

  "Yeah, I'm fine. Everything's fine," Aya said with a puffing breath that turned to mist in the cold air.

  Shrugging, Jun helped Aya finish cooking, warming up a small pile of mochi and boiling a pot of snow for tea. Whatever her friend was thinking about, Jun didn't want to press the issue, too afraid of saying the wrong thing and angering her. If Aya wanted to talk, she would. If she didn't, she wouldn't. As they cooked, her thoughts turned to the blush she'd seen on Aya's face and what she knew about romance. Admittedly, it wasn't much.

  She had one romantic relationship, and that was with Ash before... everything changed. It wasn't the healthiest romance, and it'd been on a completely different world, a completely different culture, and Jun had been a completely different person back then. She doubted much of what she remembered from a brief romance in high school was relevant now. She might as well be a novice.

  An amusing thought flickered through Jun's mind as she pictured a skill screen popping up to inform her she gained a Novice ranked skill in [Romance] or something, and she couldn't help but smile. She was still getting used to the system and skills, so it wouldn't surprise her if something like that actually existed, but the thought just seemed ridiculous.

  As the water for tea started to boil, Cian and Michael came back out of their tent, fully clothed and armed this time, and started to break down their tent, shoving the pieces into a storage bag as they went. While the boys broke things down, Jun couldn't help but give them an assessing look while she poured herself and Aya a mug of tea. Watching the muscular boys, men really, she could admit to herself that her teammates were attractive, stirring something in her even though her gaze was more often pulled to others of a more graceful nature. Still, she couldn't imagine romance among teammates was the smartest idea, no matter how attractive they were. Love and lust made people do strange things, like deny who they were for years or do things they weren't comfortable with just to make the other person happy. Add in weapons, magic, and dangerous bounties and it just sounded like a bad idea to her.

  Besides, though she was afraid to admit it to anyone or make a move, there was already someone she was more interested in, someone on a completely different team, though she wasn't sure she had a chance and was afraid trying might change things, make things awkward. Wistful fantasies started to tease across her mind, distracting her for a moment as her ears heated and a tingling sensation tickled her stomach and the palms of her hands. A breathy sigh. The warm and soft embrace of someone. Hair tickling her as kisses trailed down... the blow of a distant horn brought Jun back reality, her heart thumping in her chest as heat bloomed across her face. Shaking her head, she idly scratched her palms, focusing on the sensation as she banished such inappropriate thoughts for another time.

  Camped in the outer layer of a magical forest surrounded by monsters and hunted by goblins was not the time to think about those things, no matter how peaceful things seemed at the moment. After finishing her breakfast, Jun and Aya started packing and breaking down their tent, Shiori refusing to move until only Jun's bedroll remained to be packed, then transferring herself to one of the open seats around the still burning cook fire. An hour after Keira left, the only things remaining in their camp were the food they'd set aside for Keira, a few camp chairs, and Arwen's tent.

  "It's weird Arwen hasn't come out yet," Michael said, eyeing their advisor's tent critically. It was strange.

  "Maybe he's still sleeping since we woke him up last night? We did get back late," Aya offered, her eyes flicking from Michael to Arwen's tent and back.

  "Maybe. All he's done on this expedition is eat and sleep. I almost miss his ridiculous training. At least then it felt like he was actually doing something."

  Jun sat quietly as Michael and Aya went back and forth, quietly debating why their Advisor hadn't shown up to steal some food yet. As the two talked, Jun watched Aya get more animated than usual, the pink flush on the girl's cheeks deepening slightly. Remembering her own distracting thoughts from earlier, Jun chose to stay out of it, letting the two talk uninterrupted while she sipped on another cup of tea and watched the surrounding area with Cian. Still, even as she stayed out of Aya and Michael's conversation, she couldn't help feeling curious about the subject. It was strange that Arwen wasn't out yet.

  Every other morning the elf had appeared shortly after they finished preparing food and claimed a portion of it for himself before sitting around as they broke camp, just watching them without raising a finger to help. The only thing their advisor did himself was handle his own tent, the thing appearing and disappearing fully set up with a wave of his hand. Jun and her friends had thought he was conjuring the thing with a spell, but Shiori had privately told her that one of the elf's rings was a dedicated storage device just for camping supplies. Seemed like a perfect item for a lazy and useless advisor.

  "...I don't hear anything." Cian said quietly, his voice surprisingly close.

  "...what?" Jun replied, realizing that Cian had moved to the seat next to her unnoticed.

  Cian gestured towards Arwen's tent. "Arwen snores. I don't hear anything."

  Jun blinked as she processed what Cian said and realized he was right. Every time she had watch, she'd noticed a faint whistling snore coming from Arwen's tent and eventually learned to tune it out as unimportant. She would even hear it first thing in the morning as their Advisor slept through the party making breakfast, only realizing the sound stopped after Arwen was already sitting at the fire and eating. But she hadn't heard Arwen's snoring at all since she woke up. She'd been preoccupied first by the horns that blasted every few minutes, then by whatever seemed to be playing out between Aya and Michael right in front of her. That kind of oversight in the wild was dangerous.

  Getting up, Jun rushed to the opening flap of Arwen's tent and listened carefully. Aya and Michael's conversation trailed off as they noticed her, and the crunch of boots on snow told her that the other three had moved to join her. Other than that, she heard nothing. Frowning, Jun started to reach out for the tent flap before she froze, her fingers inches away from the innocuous seeming fabric. Memories of the solo bounty she'd done with Arwen just a few weeks ago flashed through her head as the man carefully disarmed dozens of malfunctioning arrays. As useless as their Advisor was in actually teaching them, he seemed to know what he was doing with those spells enchanted into a permanent or semi-permanent form. Jun wouldn't put it past the man to trap his own tent with something dangerous. He seemed like the type.

  Taking a few quick steps back, Jun started casting, wrapping herself and her teammates in a barrier and summoning a snare anchored to the ground to inch towards the fabric for her. As her spell's tendrils touched the fabric, Jun felt her spell shatter, moments before the tent vanished in a flash of light!

  Gasping, Jun flinched back, instinctively feeding mana into her barrier as she braced for a blast. One that never came. Looking up, Jun was greeted by Arwen looking at her with a raised eyebrow.

  "No respect for a man's privacy?"

  Jun blanched, dropping her barrier as she opened her mouth to respond. "I—"

  "We—"

  "She—"

  Aya and Michael started to answer at the same time as Jun, only for everyone to stop as Keira came running back into the camp, clearly out of breath. "We need to go," she said in a rushed voice, her head turned to look behind her.

  "You should eat."

  "What's going on?"

  Cian and Aya spoke up at the same time, the warrior gesturing over to the campfire as Aya looked at the scout.

  Shaking her head, Keira ignored her brother and met Aya's eyes. "The entire blasted horde is out there hunting right now! The entire countryside is crawling with goblins! We need to go now," she said firmly. "There was a patrol only a few minutes away that spotted me. I was able to hunt them all down, but with that many goblins out there it won't be long until they're missed. We need to get back to the Forest now."

  As Keira's words washed over them, Cian handed his sister the plate of food they'd set aside for her and the scout hurriedly shoveled food into her mouth. While she ate, Aya started issuing orders. "Finish cleaning up the camp, anything not packed in 3 minutes gets left behind."

  Nodding, Jun rushed to start shoving what hadn't already been packed into her bag, her teammates copying her as chairs and other small odds and ends were quickly folded up and shoved into bags. As they packed, Jun saw Arwen watching them with a look of disappointment. "Running at the slightest hint of a challenge, disappointing," he muttered just loud enough that she was sure he meant for the students to hear him. None of them took the bait as they finished sweeping the camp for their belongings and prepared themselves for a fast hike out.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Before long they were ready to go and Keira hastily shoved the last of her food into her mouth, stowing the dirty plate away as she led the way out, still chewing as she moved. The students fell in behind her in the same order they took on the hike in with Jun, Shiori, and Arwen bringing up the rear. As they left the grove, Jun could hear Arwen muttering under his breath about their decision to leave, his disappointed words leaving a frown on her face.

  As if reading her mind, Shiori spoke quietly to her, the cat's magical voice tickling her ears as she padded across the snow next to her, a black spot of ink on a field of white. "Ignore the idiot advisor kitten. Your friend is right, the risk of this region is too high for you to stay here."

  With Arwen next to her, Jun couldn't respond without him noticing, settling for a covert nod under her hood that she was certain Shiori would notice.

  The first hour of their retreat was quiet, the echoing horns of the goblin horde growing quieter the more distance they put between themselves and the grove. With Keira leading the way, it wasn't long before they were near the edge of the foothills, the snowcapped trees and shadows of the Forest's outer layer just a few minutes away. But that was where their luck ran out. Just before they crested one of the low hills separating the mountains from the true Forest, a loud horn rang out, just a few hundred feet away from them.

  "Fuck!" Emily swore, catching a goblin's spear on her shield, deflecting the thrust away from her as she parried another goblin's sword with her own. Before either could recover she darted forward, her sword stabbing deep into the sword wielder's neck. Pulling her sword out, she reset in time to block another thrust from the spear-goblin, bashing wide with her shield to shove its weapon off line, breaking its defense. However, before she could take advantage of the opening, another goblin took the dead goblin's place, hacking at her with an axe and forcing her to drop back.

  Before the goblins could close with her again, arrows sprouted from both of their chests, dropping them to the ground. Another war horn called out, and Emily could see more goblins rushing after them from the hills above, thrown weapons and rocks already flying towards her. A sharp retort rang out as Gina cast another spell, a cloud of snow exploding back as a large gust of wind blew projectiles away and knocked the pursuing goblins down in a tangle of limbs.

  With their pursuers stalled for the moment, Emily turned around and started running back to the rest of her team, cataloguing the situation as she moved. Mara was back up, but both she and Chao were wounded, blood staining the side of her friend's uniform and the feathered shaft of an arrow sticking out from the warrior's shoulder. From the way Mara held a glowing hand to her side, Emily could tell she was focused on healing her wound. Samuel and Melody were busy peppering the goblins on the hillside with arrows, while Gina looked exhausted, the large spell clearly draining her mana reserves. Off to the side, Paladin Brava looked on with some concern even as he casually dodged the occasional arrow.

  The goblins' ambush had been well timed, hitting them as they moved between two hills on their first hike to check out the foothill region. What had seemed like a single patrol of goblins had just been bait. Gina had used her [Wind Blast] to knock the patrol down while Samuel and Melody picked a pair off with well-placed arrows. However, before they could finish off the downed goblins, another patrol hit them from behind, with Mara going down with a scream as she took an arrow to the side. Even a brief glance had told her the wound was bad, likely fatal if not for the fact that Mara was a healer and her amulet was already glowing as the girl ripped the arrow free.

  As Mara had started healing herself, Chao defended her, catching another arrow on his shield that was meant to finish Mara off, while Samuel and Melody had turned around to return fire. The fight had devolved from there with her team dealing with the attack from behind while Emily held off the patrol up front. Goblins were smart, but this ambush was too well positioned, like they expected her team to show up.

  "Drop back to the Forest!" Emily shouted orders to her team even as she ran back to them. The only confirmation she needed that they heard her was Chao sheathing his sword and scooping Mara up, carrying the injured healer as he started to run out of the kill zone they were trapped in. Samuel did the same with Gina, picking up the exhausted battlemage while Melody followed close behind, turning every few seconds to fire another arrow at the recovering goblins as she moved. As Emily caught up with her friends, a goblin war horn rang out from the hills above, only to cut out as Melody turned and snapped another shot into the blower.

  Ivar smiled as another goblin war horn echoed out across the landscape, this one closer than the others before.

  "Come on boys! That's the sound of glory calling!" Karl yelled, already starting to jog in the direction the horn came from.

  Chuckling, Ivar followed after his friend, the rest of his team trailing along behind him.

  Standing among the blood soaked snow of their latest fight, Ghorro nodded approvingly as his students headed for another battle. The six students were strong, true warriors that didn't shy away from a fight and had a true thirst for blood. Not that it was a surprise. Unlike that pansy elf, he was a good teacher that actually taught his students how to fight and didn't just get them killed for not being good enough.

  From the top of the hill they had a good view of the surrounding area and what they saw was bad. The horn they heard cut out as an arrow cut the signaler down, the horn spilling from the goblin's hand as a couple dozen of its comrades picked themselves up on the opposite slope. Between them and the goblins, a familiar looking team was in a fighting retreat with Melody returning fire as Emily blocked arrows headed for the archer. Behind them, the other four members of their team were running for the Forest, two of the members Jun recognized her classes being carried by the others.

  Even from this distance Jun could see the blood staining Mara's robes, and from the way Gina wasn't casting, she must be out of mana and still recovering. Goblin corpses littered the ground between the two hills, and while at first it seemed their classmates would escape, they couldn't see the other group of goblins using a stand of trees as cover to maneuver unnoticed. They'd be cut off and pinned between two groups in less than a minute.

  Keeping pace with the students was the well-armored, serious looking man that was Melody's team advisor. Jun didn't know much about the man, but if his behavior was anything close to Arwen's, she couldn't trust him to intervene before her classmates were killed. Even if she didn't care for Melody and her friends, it wasn't enough to condemn them to death by inaction.

  "We need to help them!" Jun yelled, channeling her mana and running to a better vantage point, already calculating where to position her spells. While such positioning was normally instinctive for her, she rarely tried to manifest spells from more than a hundred feet away, that being the longest distance in any of the Academy's spell ranges. Manifesting from multiple times that range felt different.

  "Jun's right! Keira, tell them to head up the hill, that goblin force is going to hit them if they keep heading back to the Forest, Cian, cover me and Jun! Michael, prepare to receive wounded!"

  Out of the corner of her eye, Jun saw her teammates moving at Aya's orders. Cian pushed past her, pulling out a large rectangular shield as he placed himself just in front and to the side of her. Aya moved next to her, a glowing red ball of mana already manifesting as she aimed. "I'll handle the flankers, can you handle the ones on the hill?" Aya asked, her face screwed up in concentration. More glowing red balls started to appear radiating a fierce heat, and despite the snow and ice surrounding them, Jun started to sweat.

  Nodding, Jun recalculated and cast. As Keira got within shouting distance, pointing Melody's team back up the hill, she casted. Jun's barrier manifested as a curved wall, cutting off the other students even as over a dozen writhing tentacles appeared amongst the recovering group of goblins on the opposite hillside, grabbing goblins and flinging them into each other. Shouts of surprise and panic erupted from the group as goblins were grabbed and shoved into each other. The more disciplined amongst the goblins began hacking at her tentacles to free their comrades, while others fled her spells in a panic, desperately dodging the swiping and grasping snares.

  But that was just the beginning. Before the other students could do more than turn to start heading for Keira, Aya began to cast, her spells arcing out in a trail of flames to fall amongst the flanking force. The first spell was the largest, shredding a pair of trees as it hit the stand covering the goblins from view. With a blast, the force of Aya's spell sent wooden shrapnel lancing through the flankers and bouncing off Jun's barrier!

  Months of practice with Aya told her how powerful her friend's spells were, but the damage she felt the shrapnel do to her spell was more than expected, one of the layers dangerously close to shattering. With a start, she realized that there was much less mana in the spell than there should have been. Manifesting the spell so far away must have taken more mana than she expected, weakening her barrier.

  It was a good thing she maintained the link to her barrier. With a though, Jun pushed more of her mana down the link, dropping her below half for a moment before her regeneration popped her back up. As her mana moved across the link, she felt some of it wisp away, failing to reach the spell. It was the first time she noticed mana loss from her spell, but she shouldn't have been surprised. Still, the loss wasn't as bad as she feared, and most of the mana she sent flooded into the barrier, repairing and strengthening it just in time for the second of Aya's spells to land amongst the trees, sending another wave of splinters scything through the air, cutting down even more goblins and pinging off Jun's shield.

  As Melody's team joined with Keira, redirecting up the hill, Jun pulled her barrier back behind them, blocking more jagged shards of wood from Aya's bombardment. However, Jun and Aya weren't able to just cast without notice. Even as Jun defended the other team, Cian defended them, metallic ringing filling the air as he deflected arrow after arrow with the large slab of metal he called a shield.

  Just a couple minutes after they joined the fight, Melody's team was already ducking back over the crest of the hill with Michael and Keira as Aya, Jun, and Cian brought up the rear. Aya's bombardment seemed to do immense damage to the goblins, with over a dozen splinter riddled and burnt corpses lying out in the open, the rest of the flanking force dug into the snow, while the group Jun delayed was still struggling to finish off the last of her flailing snares. Just before they ducked back behind the crest of the hill, Aya cast one more spell, lobbing an explosive spell into the middle of the first group of goblins as they rallied to free the last of their comrades from Jun's snares.

  Jun felt her snares snap under the magical onslaught, but before they could see the results of Aya's last attack the three turned and ran, Jun supporting Aya as she sagged with mana exhaustion. It was a few tense minutes before they caught up with the others, finding Michael treating the other team's wounds while the rest stood guard. As Jun set Aya down to rest and catch her breath, she saw Melody and Emily approaching. Emily seemed to ignore her existence, but Melody seemed to fix her with a look of poorly disguised hate, one that Jun returned.

  "Emily, student leader under Paladin Brava," the warrior said, sticking a gauntleted hand out to Aya.

  Aya looked at the girl's hand for a moment, her face impassive as she sagged against a tree, recovering. Taking Emily's hand, she shook it. "Aya, student leader for Advisor Arwen's team," she said neutrally. "We can't stay here long, the goblins will catch up eventually. What happened?"

  As Jun and Melody traded glares, Emily gave a summary of the ambush they walked into and how they were planning to get back to the Forest and head back towards the city.

  "We're doing the same. This region is beyond the Iron rank we were told to expect. It's not safe to stay."

  Emily's eyes flickered to Jun, a dark look crossing her face for a moment before the warrior schooled her expression and looked back at Aya. "Moving in numbers might be safer with the amount of goblins we saw," she said neutrally.

  "You're welcome to join us," Aya offered in a carefully neutral tone, though Jun could tell that her friend was irritated making the offer. It wasn't a secret among their team that Jun wasn't the most well liked person at the Academy, with rumors floating around about her since the very beginning of her time there, but they hadn't been much of an issue before. Jun kept to herself and her small group of friends, doing her best to stay unnoticed where she could. It helped minimize attention, but it didn't do anything to stop the irrational hatred pointed at her. As much as there was safety in numbers, Jun couldn't feel excited by the idea of traveling with a bunch of people that hated her.

  Samuel's eyes widened in surprise as he overheard the girl Aya invite his team to travel with them. Subtly as he could, he started to walk a slow circle around where they stopped, his ears tuned to listen to the two team leaders talk. It technically wasn't eavesdropping, he reasoned. The girls were talking openly, and whatever they discussed wouldn't remain secret long. Still, he couldn't help but indulge in his curiosity, especially with Melody and Jun standing there glaring at each other.

  The girls on his team certainly didn't have kind things to say about the dark purple-haired mage, and her reputation on campus was questionable to say the least. That stupid trial hadn't done her any favors either, with people still whispering that she destroyed an entire family to save herself. Still, rumors were rumors, and he hadn't actually had a chance to meet the person beyond the gossip before, only seeing her in passing. Up close, she was just as pretty as people said, her pale skin contrasting with her dark hair and surprisingly bright blue eyes. It was also clear from the way she looked at Melody that she really didn't care for his fellow archer. A part of him wanted to pull his teammates aside and find out what the source of this bad blood was, but the smarter side of him said it'd be better to stay uninvolved.

  If their teams traveled together, someone might let something slip, but he wasn't about to go injecting himself into whatever nonsensical drama was going on. He just wanted to get back to the city.

  https://www.patreon.com/NekoSaigai