Shia yawned, rolling over with a smile on her face as she realized the dream she’d been having about sleeping on a cloud had been entirely real. She’d been waiting for a chance to try out her master’s fancy shiverwing mattress ever since he’d first bragged about it to her.

  She had to admit, it was pretty great.

  Not in any rush to leave her own personal paradise, Shia stared up at the interwoven trees making up the ceiling. Her master has always loved shimmer trees, and the sheer quantity he’d used for his ceilings when growing his house created a dazzling effect when the dim morning light came in through the window. Admiring the quiet display, Shia let her mind wander not for the first time toward her master’s disappearance.

  The two of them had been in the middle of one of his strange lessons when an alarm had gone out. The roving monster hordes had been growing in both frequency and strength, so it was no surprise that her master was being summoned during his down time. As he always did, he’d grabbed his Ancient Staff, a unique object of power crafted from a piece of the Tree of Ancients and gifted to him by the dryads themselves, before rushing out to find the largest, most dangerous monster among the invading pack. Shia had been right behind him at first, but she’d ended up splitting off to join the rest of the Druids defending the civilians.

  They’d managed to fight off the wave of monsters, but while recovering from the attack, the unthinkable had happened.

  Their levels had been ripped from their grasps.

  Shia shuddered, remembering the sensation of years of her life’s experiences suddenly vanishing, leaving her a hollow husk of her former self. All of a sudden, she was no stronger than an adolescent accessing the System for the first time. Without her mana, she could no longer cast all the spells she’d worked so hard to learn.

  It hadn’t taken her long to realize the same was true of everyone else, and mass panic had spread all throughout their village. Thankfully, the seemingly unending waves of monsters steadily growing in strength that had plagued them the past few years had vanished along with their levels, otherwise they would have been overrun in an instant.

  Knowing he’d had more levels to lose than anyone, Shia had then tried to find her master and ensure he was okay.

  But he was gone.

  There was no sign of her master anywhere. No note informing her he’d gone off on a fruit picking journey and would return in six months’ time, and no sign he’d left on some erratic personal quest that would see him returning with the hide of some unheard-of beast. She even checked with the Ancient Ones, and they confirmed they had no idea what had happened to the strongest elf in the village. It wasn’t the first time he’d vanished unexpectedly, but it was the first time he’d managed to do so without the Ancient Ones noticing.

  Without a master and starting again at level 1, Shia had thrown herself into her studies and the forest over the past three months with near reckless abandon. She’d worked harder than ever before in an attempt to work her way back up to even a portion of her former power, and while she still had a long way to go, she was at least nearing her first prestige. What scared her was not knowing if the System was going to offer her the same choices it had last time. What if it didn’t offer up the same prestige class she’d selected the first time she’d hit level 20?

  Clicking her tongue, Shia rolled out of the luxurious bed, anxious to take her mind off her worrying. She knew if she went down that spiral of negative thought there’d be no talking herself out of it and she’d waste another day that could have been spent training and retrieving her old strength. She’d never be able to figure out what happened to her master if she didn’t get stronger after all.

  Tossing her clothes back on and casting a quick Cleanse to rid herself of any morning breath, Shia fixed her pointed grin on her face, double checking to make sure nearly all her teeth were showing. Her master’s voice flickered through her mind as she recalled one of his many strange lessons.

  ‘Remember Shia, most of the other races find our pointy teeth unsettling. When dealing with them, be sure to smile as widely as possible. An unnerved opponent is a weakened opponent after all!’

  She had asked him just how many other races he’d interacted with during his excursions outside the Sacred Forest, but he’d acted like he hadn’t heard her and made her do smiling exercises until he deemed her look ‘sufficiently unhinged.’

  Satisfied that she looked like a deranged lunatic that could take a bite out of someone at any moment, Shia left the bedroom and walked back to where she’d left the strange tasting human.

  Her odd sense of taste was one of the things that had actually drawn her master’s attention back when she was younger. For most people, increasing their focus attribute improved their vision and hearing on top of their mental focus. But for some reason, when it came to Shia, her focus attribute seemed more tied to her sense of taste. At first, she’d thought this was a useless defect that would stunt her growth, but she’d quickly realized that as she improved her focus and magic attributes, she was actually able to taste magic itself. Anyone with the magic attribute could naturally detect magic, but she seemed able to taste it.

  It was a skill she’d still been developing even before they’d had their levels stripped of them, and if anything, her experiences had only made it develop faster this second go around. It was thanks to this strange sense that she’d detected the human approaching their hunting party long before anyone else had.

  Unlike elven magic which was almost exclusively nature or life based, the human had brought a few foreign magics with him. She’d first picked up the taste of general, pure magic, followed quickly by what had to be earth magic. The weirdest one was the overwhelming taste of death magic radiating off his person of all things. She’d quickly identified that the pure magic and stone magic had been coming from his two objects of power, but the death magic seemed to emanate from his very being.

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  She still hadn’t figured that one out.

  Shaking her head, Shia walked into the central room, pausing at the sight before her. She’d expected to find the human passed out on one of the couches, exhausted from spending most of the night trying to learn the Sense Life spell she’d left up for him.

  Instead, she found him sitting cross legged on the very table they’d sat on either side of last night, seemingly in some sort of trance with his head bowed down. Not even the sound of her approaching and leaning toward him to more thoroughly examine him seemed to shake his concentration.

  The Explorer wasn’t the first human she’d seen of course, but he was certainly the first one she’d actually interacted with. All the other humans she’d ‘met’ hadn’t lived much longer than it took to shoot them with a few arrows after all.

  This one, Vin, she reminded herself, was definitely unusual. Most humans that invaded their forest and gave her the luxury of hunting them were large and brawny; trusting their physical prowess to keep them safe from anything the elves could dish out. Vin was the first human she’d met that didn’t have some form of combat class.

  Not that that seemed to stop him much apparently.

  She’d been unconscious for the actual moment, but when she asked Smohl about what happened between the Trunkback’s scream knocking her out and her coming to, the man had simply shivered and did his best to retell what he’d seen.

  According to him, the seemingly weak and frail human sitting before her underwent some sort of transformation during the fight. Smohl swore the man’s bright blue eyes had suddenly turned a blazing green, and his movements morphed from those of a wandering Explorer to those of a Swordmaster. Apparently, he’d held his blade almost lazily, like the Trunkback wasn’t even a real fight, and Smohl had expected him to get crushed into paste when the beast leapt at him. That was of course right before the human ended up dispatching the monster effortlessly, as though the act was as trivial as dicing up an onion.

  Shia leaned in closer, staring at the face of the human Explorer from mere inches away. Try as she might, she just couldn’t imagine the seemingly happy-go-lucky man in front of her who was perhaps a bit over eager to learn magic as the monster slaying combat maniac that Smohl had described.

  Of course, it was during this investigation that Vin finally woke from his strange trance, discovering her face and accompanying manic grin mere inches from his own. Letting out a startled cry, Vin fell backwards off the table, banging his head on the ground. Chuckling, Shia shook her head.

  How in the forest was this man supposed to have slain a Trunkback?

  “What the hell?” Vin asked, getting to his feet and rubbing the back of his head. “Do you make a habit of waking people up like that?”

  “Only humans,” she replied, making sure to smile wider than she normally would; her master’s lessons always echoing in the back of her mind. “So, you were sleeping then? Is sleeping in a sitting position on a wooden table when there are plenty of more comfortable spots some sort of strange human custom?”

  Almost as though a spark had been lit, Vin’s own eyes lit up, and his face broke into a big grin. “Not sleeping! Meditating! I picked up the Meditation skill last night because I figured it would help with my concentration, and it did! It even helps replenish mana faster while using it as well. Check it out!”

  Raising a palm toward her, Vin spoke, the strange warping of his words quite familiar to Shia. “Sense Life.”

  Flicking her tongue out, Shia could easily taste the life magic emanating from the human standing before her as he cast his first successful life aligned spell. Granted, it was a little hard to pick out with the practical veil of death magic he was exuding, but it was distinctly there.

  “You managed to pick up the spell in a single night,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “Not bad.” Not bad is an understatement. He’s no prodigy, but he’s definitely got the knack for magic. Shia’s own master, assuming any of his stories were true, had apparently learned to manipulate his mana all on his own within days of just seeing the technique, and formed his first runic formation mere minutes after having it shown to him for the first time. She didn’t know if any of it was true, but the Gods had to have chosen him for some reason after all.

  “Thanks,” Vin said, his grin only growing wider. “It took me a couple of hours, but once I got the runic formation down and the System awarded me the spell, I spent the rest of the night using my Spellcraft and Meditation skills to analyze this.”

  Reaching behind him, Vin pulled out his object of power that tasted of pure magic and placed it on the table between them. “The sword is enchanted to interact with and better kill things that rely on magical defenses, so I figured the root of its runic structure had to be different from life or earth magic, right?”

  “Makes sense,” Shia said, slowly nodding. All artifacts had their runic structures making up their spellforms ingrained deeply within their physical forms. Anyone with the Spellcraft skill and high enough magic and focus attributes could read them if they so choose, but few people bothered learning spells this way due to the risks. If he was going where she thought he was…

  “It took me the entire night, but I finally did it!” He laughed, slapping the hilt of the sword and grinning like a maniac, his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep. “I managed to sift through the runic structure and isolate the first building block, just like how you explained. It was close enough to the two I already knew that I was able to find it, but different enough to still be a challenge to learn.” Raising a hand yet again, Vin took in a deep breath, focusing on the sword in front of him. “Sense Magic.”

  Naturally, Shia didn’t see whatever the spell showed him, but she could certainly taste the magic coming off of him. A simple, sweet taste that she always thought of as pure, unaligned magic itself drifted off the human as his new spell was cast. While Vin practically danced around, pumping his fist in the air, she simply stared at him, her usual smile pulled taut.

  “Let me get this straight… After my explicit warning not to experiment without an instructor present, you not only dove into the runic structure of an obviously complicated object of power, but then worked on replicating a portion of that structure within your own mana, that you thought, might possibly, be the root spell?”

  “Yes!” Vin said, seemingly tired enough to not notice the frown growing on her face. “I can’t believe it worked!”

  Me neither, Shia sighed, eyeing the ridiculously lucky human that didn’t even realize how close he’d come to blowing himself up as he celebrated.

  Ancient Ones give me strength…

  I have my work cut out for me.