Kene and I didn’t spend a lot of time in the forest after that. We did what we could with Dusk to help quell the wildfires, then left, and I said my goodbyes to Kene, in order to fly back to Ed’s lightwatch station. Pretending that I’d used a combination of Burn Future and Create Spatial Pocket, alongside some of the materials from the Idyll-Flume, to create and aspect a demiplane that could hold her had required some creativity, but thankfully, the assassin also called it a demiplane, which meant the lightwatch didn’t push much.

  Having her processed, and turning over her growth item, defensive artifact, and spatial ring, hurt a little bit. A part of me couldn’t help but feel that I’d earned the spoils of war, so to speak. I knew for a fact that she had a gate-crawler, an arcanist level enchanted glove that let her forcibly open portals after someone else had made them. That would have been an excellent addition to my arsenal of tools.

  The bounty did a pretty good job of soothing that sting, though.

  “Bounty?” I asked.

  “We don’t publicize it much, in an attempt to stop unqualified individuals from making deadly mistakes, but many criminals have outstanding bounties,” the lieutenant, a stern looking middle aged woman with her hair in a tight bun, said. “Especially since the Lightwatch, unlike the Wildwatch or Spiritwatch, doesn’t use auxiliary members. It takes much more training to deal with the legal system and people than a plant that’s causing trouble. Typically, we disseminate out to guilds who specialize in that sort of thing. But yes, there is a bounty, as well as this.”

  She placed a thin black card down on the table, alongside a small, cheap cardboard box.

  “Give that card to the doctor or alchemist treating your arm, and they can send the billing to us, instead of you, alongside the card, for injuries incurred within combat. The box has your reward. Across her seven different identities, she managed to wrack up quite a number of crimes.”

  I was made to give multiple more written statements, discuss my experiences, and several other things, but at the end of the night, I was finally able to settle into my room and open the box.

  Within, there were neatly stacked rows of silver coins, as well as a case of three potions, each neatly labeled. I counted out the silver, then moved on to the potions.

  The first was a swirling red and green vial, labeled ‘breath of the ideal dragon’. A bit of an ostentatious name, especially since its mana was too simplistic to be from an actual dragon, but rather, felt like a threefold blend of death, creation, and desolation. The description attached stated that it was an advancement potion, one that could either be focused onto a specific offensive spell to give it a large surge of growth, or it could be more generally spread around multiple offensive spells.

  I popped it open and drained it, directing the power to Mantle Dragonfyre. Despite the fact that I was definitely a combat mage, at least in large part, I didn’t actually have that many offensive spells. Briarthreads was offensive, but also defensive, and Pinpoint Boneshard was both currently useless, since the assassin had turned the bones to ash, and wasn’t as overwhelming as the dragon’s breath attack.

  Not to mention, I’d been training Mantle Dragonfyre for long enough that it was right on the edge of being mastered, and using it in the fight against the assassin had given me a pretty big boost in understanding its use in a real world situation, which was how spells became ingrained.

  As the potion flowed into the spell, I felt it splinter up, before transforming into a vast obsidian tree that glowed with an internal fire. Its branches reached into the sky, and it burrowed down into the dirt, spreading its power deeper into my spirit and ingraining itself.

  I opened my eyes and began cycling the spell. All spells grew stronger when ingrained, and this did too. Many combat spells doubled down on this, making the spell much more powerful without improving other effects. This felt somewhat similar but it also felt somewhat… different. Spinning the magic throughout my body in order to build up power came easier, requiring less exacting control and effort to maintain. Slowing down or speeding up the cycle seemed to require less concentration and focus.

  I let the spell fade, since I didn’t especially want to release a blast of Mantle Dragonfyre in my bedroom, then looked at the next two potions. Between the treatment for my arm and the one I’d just taken, I couldn’t take another potion today, but I wanted to at least figure out what they were. I picked up a gray and blue potion with an unpleasant sludgy texture first. It was called ‘true shield of the titan’, and acted similarly to the offensive one, but instead working to improve defensive spells.

  “What is with these names?” I asked. “The offensive potion was good, quite potent, but nowhere near what its name suggested.”

  Ah, well. At least it would pair quite well with Fungal Armor and probably Foxarmor. Speaking of Fungal Armor, I still needed to track down an abyssal shambler and figure out the array for the spell. Being attacked had been a rather inconvenient detour.

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  I glanced at the final potion, which was called ‘alacrity of instantly quick movement which causes even the heavens to tremble in fear of your divine movement skills that help you be both swift and quick when you move via spellcraft to get from one place to another’.

  I squinted at it.

  “That’s… It’s literally just a potion to enhance movement spells,” I muttered. “It does not need to be called that. Nor does it need to use so much repetitive language.”

  The description said it was capable of empowering a wide variety of movement spells – flight, speed enhancement, haste, teleportation, and more – so I decided I’d use it on Seven League Step in the morning. I didn’t have nearly as much practice or understanding of the Seven League Step, so it probably wouldn’t bring it to ingrained, but maybe it could bump it to mastered?

  I placed both vials on one of the shelves in the alchemy room, thinking about them.

  The rewards were a little bit general, but I supposed that was to be expected. If the bounties were set by the government based on the crimes and wanted rates of the people being brought in, it would tend to gravitate towards generally useful things for bounty hunters. Still, it was markedly different from the Wyldwatch and Spiritwatch rewards, which were often posted by locals looking for help, or from less rigid organizations, and thus often had rather random rewards.

  Generic or not, they were useful, and I wasn’t going to turn down a nice pile of silver as well. I stood and walked outside to where Dusk and Dawn were sitting in front of an older fungal folk. The old man was stroking his beard and reading out loud to them, while both of my bonded partners listened with rapt attention. Once the small folk had finished his story – a rather odd rendition of the classic children’s tale involving a goose that laid telluric mana eggs – I patted both of them on the head. They turned around, and Dusk waved a hello. Dawn tilted her head curiously, as if asking if I needed something.

  “I’m here to ask both of you that,” I informed them. “I got some potions that will be useful to me, but I wanted to ask if you all wanted anything. Your crystal replenished my hudau mana, Dawn, and Dusk… I don’t even know where to begin, because you helped me a ton during the fight. Is there anything I can do for you two?”

  Dusk thought about it for a second, then shook her head. With the sound of waves lapping against the shore of a lake, she told me that she was already making good progress with both her combat spells and her out of combat spells meant to work with her dominion. She was having some trouble with Enforce Reality, the spell she’d learned from the World-Mammoths, but she thought that it wasn’t really the kind of thing that forcing with a potion would be a good idea. It was more a matter of her nature as a spirit being antithesis to the spell.

  “Makes sense,” I agreed. “It’d be like me trying to learn to cast a ‘repel humans’ spell or something.”

  I paused. Would that even work on me now? I supposed it depended on how the spell was designed to define ‘human’. My tail twitched, as if reminding me that it was there, and making an argument that I wasn’t.

  “What about you, Dawn?” I asked, rather than dwelling on the philosophical argument on the nature of humanity and my place within it.

  She looked up at me, and I suddenly got the overwhelming desire to eat rocks.

  I blinked and squinted at her.

  “Come again?”

  She flicked her tail a few times, seemingly irritated, then projected the desire again. This time, it was accompanied by the mental image of the burning-bright chunks of solar mana, and ink-black lunar mana that had fallen to Ddeaer in the meteor shower, then… Rocks. Plain, ordinary rocks. Plus the wind, and the presence of other things that she had around her.

  Through the link to Dawn’s mind, I got the sense that an ordinary rock was every bit as strange and intense to her as the overwhelming mana sources had been to me.

  “I’m not sure I can get any of those specifically,” I cautioned. “But I can definitely go pick up some solar and lunar mana sources.”

  Dusk whistled that if Dawn wanted to eat a few rocks, she could. Dawn couldn’t exactly eat enough to make a serious dent into her reserves of rock, after all. Dawn dipped her nose in thanks to both of us, then shot through the air and sunk her teeth into the nearest rock. I watched with some fascination as the stone turned to gold, then began to dissolve away into motes of energy that were in turn sucked into Dawn.

  “Huh,” I said, then slapped my thighs. “Well, I’m about to go out to the ghost market. Anyone want to come?”

  There was a general sense of disinterest, so I headed out, walking through the dark streets until I slipped into the Ghost Market.

  Since most of what was sold here was done to avoid the need for a license, or to dodge taxes, there were a good selection of enchanted goods.

  I wandered from stall to stall, spreading my mana senses out around me in a net. I wasn’t a good, or even competent, enchanter, but I was good with spell arrays and getting the general feel for magic.

  One stall caught my attention, though. Probably because of the absolutely enormous spider that was standing in it.

  I wandered over, sensing the power of a fourth gate lunar mage, but one with a deeply strange aspect to it, which might have come from the spider’s webs – they had long running threads of abnegation, creation, physical, lunar, and telluric energy running through them – but also might have come from a legacy. I couldn’t tell.

  The woman wore a tight black dress that seemed to soak up the shadows around her, and when I approached her, I realized she was younger than most of the people here – about my age, maybe a year or two older, like Kene. She had several long racks of clothes behind her, almost all of which were black, and sang to a part of my heart that I’d mostly left behind in highschool… though not entirely. Her eyeliner did as well – I’d worn very similar eyeliner at one point.

  I focused my senses a little more, and I was content with my choice. Her power was shadowy, yet dense, enough that I could tell she’d definitely gone through the trouble of digging out her steps. The clothes had a solidity to their enchantments that gave me the impression they were built to last, like my suit, but they were all of much higher densities of mana. She looked up as I approached, and gave me a calm nod.

  “Welcome to Slice of Shadows,” she said. “Here to strike a bargain?”

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