Clara
I found a good spot about two miles out. A stone cliff face, solid, with a flat clearing in front of it. Perfect for target practice. Nobody around. Kiiro approved — she does this thing where she sits down and wraps her tail around her feet when she's settled, and she did that, so I took it as a good sign.
I practiced the compression field first the way Arthur told me to. Minimum settings. Worked up slowly. Honestly, it felt natural — like the spell already knew what it was doing and I was just telling it where to go. I could feel the difference from other magic immediately. Less drain. Aeryn was right.
Then I got to the gravity missile.
I launched the first one at the cliff and it hit and the rock just — cratered. A perfect concave dent, edges compressed smooth. I stared at it for a second.
I launched another one.
And another.
I was just starting to get the hang of the arc — you have to account for how the gravity field bends slightly toward the end of the trajectory — when I heard it. A low rumbling from inside the cliff itself. Then a crack appeared in the rock face, right where I'd been hitting it.
Then the crack got wider.
Then about forty hobgoblins came out of it.
I want to be clear: I did not know that was a cave. I genuinely thought it was a cliff. In my defense, it looked exactly like a cliff.
They saw me and immediately started moving to surround me and I thought: all right, I've trained for this. I've done the pit sessions. I've worked the dummies all winter. I know what I'm doing.
I dropped the compression field around myself and Kiiro and held it.
The first few goblins ran straight into it and went down immediately, which I will admit felt satisfying. The rest stopped. Looked at their friends. Looked at me. Decided the math still worked in their favour because there were now sixty of them coming out of the cave.
Goblins are not smart. They kept walking into the perimeter. They kept going down. New ones kept coming.
I held the field.
Ten minutes. Twenty. The mana was draining steadily, not catastrophically — the affinity was helping, Arthur was right about that — but I was alone and the cave kept producing more of them and Bella was covering my back and handling the ones who found angles I wasn't watching, and I was holding it together but the holding was taking everything I had.
And then I realized something.
Every time I've fought a monster, Arthur has been there. The Stone Boars in the pit sessions — Arthur is right there. The bandits on the road — Arthur protected me through it while I cast my spells. Even the dragon, I was in the tree line, Arthur was in the clearing. I have never been the person who has to hold the line alone until it's over. I've always known that if it goes badly, if I make a mistake, he's right there.
He was not right there.
The field was holding. I was doing everything correctly. And I was 12 years old and alone in a forest with what was now over a hundred goblins around me and my brother didn't know where I was.
My eyes got wet. I didn't decide that. It just happened.
I called his name. Not loudly, not dramatically. Just out loud, the way you say someone's name when you need them to exist near you.
And from behind me: hey sis, you okay?
I turned around.
He was standing fifteen feet away, coat slightly askew from the transit, Shadow beside him, looking at me the way he looked at things he was assessing — quick, complete, already forming a plan.
My legs stopped working.
I didn't decide that either. My body apparently made an executive decision that Arthur was present and therefore I was no longer required to hold everything together, and it acted on that decision before I had any input. He caught me as I went down, which I will not be discussing further.
I blinked.
There were daggers in the air. Several of them, moving through the clearing like a thought — fast, precise, no wasted motion. Goblins were falling. I could not tell you exactly what was happening because I was just realising how utterly exhausted I was and my mana was nearly gone and my face was wet and I was leaning against my brother's chest with my eyes closed holding myself with every fiber from completely breaking down into a sob, listening to the sounds of the forest going quiet around us.
He didn't say anything. I didn't say anything.
He just kept his arm around me while the daggers did what they did.
That was enough.
◆ ◆ ◆
It took four minutes.
When it was done he stood in the quiet of the cleared forest and felt the absorption arrive — not the single-event quality of a large monster but the cumulative effect of many small ones, dozens of lives worth of accumulated life energy and mana hitting the collection point simultaneously.
He opened Shadow's containment vessel and redirected the flow before he absorbed all of it. All of it — nothing wasted.
'That's a lot,' Clara said, reading his expression.
'Yes,' he said.
'How many pills.'
He did the rough calculation. The hobgoblins were individually weak but there had been a great many of them and the cumulative life energy of a large group was not trivial. 'Forty black pills,' he said. 'Probably more. Several gold ones.'
Clara looked at the cave entrance, which was now quiet.
'Mum and Dad are going to be even stronger and younger,' she said.
'Yes, that's the plan,' he said.
She was quiet for a moment. She was looking at the perimeter of dead hobgoblins — the ones who had walked into her compression field. She had held the spell under pressure, alone, for ninety minutes, and had not dropped it.
'You were scared,' Arthur said. Not a question.
'Mm,' she sounded, her eyes drifting to the ground.
'That was the right response,' he said. 'Being scared and holding the spell anyway is exactly what practice is supposed to produce.'
She looked at him
She looked at the compression field perimeter, which was still active. She dropped it. The remaining mana in the spell returned cleanly to her pool, the control crisp, the release intentional.
'That part I did right,' she said.
'Yes,' he said. 'That part you did very right.'
Kiiro appeared at his feet and looked up at him. Her expression communicated that the assignment had been unreasonable and that she had nonetheless performed it and expected this to be noted.
'Good work,' he said to Kiiro.
Kiiro looked at Clara.
'Thank you,' Clara said, quietly and sincerely.
Arthur looked at the cave, the cleared forest, the weight of forty-odd black pills worth of accumulated energy sitting in Shadow's containment vessel.
'Let's go home,' he said.
Arthur cast her wings, still holding the exhausted Clara in his arms and set off. They rose through the ironwood canopy and turned southwest toward the village, and he kept the passive monitoring spell running and made a note to check its sensitivity calibration when they got back, because ninety minutes was too long.
Thirty seconds would have been better.