For three nights after Dunnfield Farm, I didn't sleep.
I lay awake because of the phantom feeling in my chest.
At midnight, when the barracks were full of snoring Mercenaries, I sat in the dark courtyard by the training posts.
I extended two fingers. I pulled back sharply.
Nothing. No spark, no blinding light, no agonizing jolt of electricity. I wasn't drawing mana. I was just practicing the physical form. Over and over again. My combat memory had allowed me to perfectly copy Idris's gesture, but my body hadn't understood the underlying architecture of the spell. The energy had found no clear exit, so it had grounded itself through my own spine.
I needed to feel the flow. If I was going to use magic I hadn't properly learned, I had to understand how to guide it out.
I practiced the motion a hundred times. Then I went back to sleep.
The routine continued for two more days until Veyra finally threw a new contract at us.
"Lake lurkers," Renn explained, tightening the straps on his greaves as we walked down the cobblestones toward the eastern gate of Ashford. "Nasty bastards. Imagine a crocodile that decided crawling was for idiots and stood up on its hind legs."
"Why us?" I asked, checking the leather bindings on my hammer.
"Fishermen downriver complained," Kael's voice cut in.
I looked back. The Furiosa-lookalike from the Seventh Company was striding toward us, her massive two-handed axe slung casually over one shoulder. Idris was walking a few paces behind her, looking distinctly unimpressed by the early morning mud.
"They're nesting near the primary fishing docks," Kael continued, grinning her usual battle-hungry grin. "Too many for the Fourth Company to handle alone, apparently. So Veyra asked our Captain to lend a hand."
"The bounty is insulting," Idris murmured, sidestepping a puddle. "Thirty coppers for a nest-clearing operation."
"Which brings me to the real question," Renn said, looking perfectly smug. "If the bounty is thirty coppers, why did the mighty Seventh Company agree to split it?"
Kael winked. "Because of the loot, idiot."
"Loot?" I asked.
Renn sighed. "You really don't know anything, do you? Lurkers have submandibular glands right under their jaws. Alchemists in the city pay two silvers for an intact gland. The base contract is thirty coppers, sure, but if we drop ten lurkers and harvest them cleanly, we're walking away with twenty silver pieces."
I blinked. Twenty silvers. I had been fighting and bleeding for coppers. There was an entire secondary economy embedded in the monsters we killed, and I had been completely blind to it.
* * *
The riverbank.
Thick reeds, taller than a man, lined the muddy edge of the water. The four of us spread out, boots sinking into the muck.
The first lurker exploded from the reeds with a terrifying screech.
Renn hadn't exaggerated. It was easily six feet tall, covered in slick, mottled green-and-grey scales. It possessed powerful hind legs, a heavy balancing tail, and long, curved claws on its forelimbs. But the true danger was the jaw — wide, snapping shut with the force of a bear trap.
"Left flank!" Kael roared, swinging her axe in a massive arc that forced the first beast back.
Two more erupted from the water.
I didn't reach for magic.
Ignis
would burn the creature and ruin the precious glands Renn had mentioned. I needed a clean physical kill.
I stepped inside the arc of a lurker's lunging jaw, parried its claws with the heavy oak haft of my hammer, and brought the iron head down on its torso. Bone snapped. The beast shrieked, thrashing wildly. I pivoted, driving the spike of the hammer into the back of its neck, severing the spine. Clean. Efficient.
Off to my right, the air compressed with a familiar, high-pitched hum.
Idris raised his hand, two fingers extended. He pulled downward.
A jagged bolt of blue lightning cracked across the mud, striking a lurker square in the chest. The beast seized up, scales smoking, and collapsed instantly. The lighting didn't arc. It didn't backfire. Idris stood perfectly still, breathing evenly, his focus absolute.
We fought for ten minutes. The lurkers were fast and aggressive, but they were animals, not tacticians. Against the disciplined wall of Kael and Renn, supported by Idris's precision strikes and my blunt force, the nest was quickly broken.
When the last beast stopped twitching, the muddy bank was littered with eight dead lurkers.
I leaned against my hammer, catching my breath. My leg throbbed slightly, but the stitches held.
I looked over at Idris. He was meticulously wiping a spot of mud off his polished leather boot.
It didn't make sense.
I walked over to him. "You're a Third Circle mage, aren't you?" I asked him.
Idris looked up, his expression guarded. "Your powers of observation are staggering."
"If you can do that," I pointed to the smoking, perfectly intact lurker he had killed, "why are you standing in river mud for a share of thirty coppers and some lizard glands? Why aren't you in the Academy, sitting in a velvet chair and making gold?"
Idris stared at me for a long moment. Kael, standing a few feet away, stopped wiping her axe. She didn't say anything, but she watched Idris carefully.
"The Academy," Idris said quietly, his voice devoid of any academic arrogance, "has very little to do with the study of magic."
"What is it about, then?"
"Politics," Idris said flatly. "Bloodlines. Leverage. You don't get funding in the Academy. You don't get access to the higher archives or the upper circles unless you have a sponsor. And sponsors are always nobles." He looked down at the dead monster at his feet. "You kneel to a Duke, you swear your loyalty to his house, and you become his pet scholar or his pet artillery. You spend your life casting defensive wards over their wine cellars or intimidating their rivals."
He finally looked back at me, his eyes cold and defensive.
"I did not spend fifteen years mastering the mathematical architecture of the universe so I could be a parlor trick for an aristocrat," Idris said. "I didn't get along with the nobility. I refused the patronage. So, they made sure I had no place in their halls."
He gestured vaguely at the mud, the dead lizards, and Kael.
"I would rather take orders from a Mercenary captain than spend my life as a lapdog for a man who thinks mana is something you can buy."
I looked at him, really seeing him for the first time. Beneath the neatly trimmed hair and the precise posture was a man who had chosen absolute downward mobility just to keep his independence.
"I respect that," I said simply.
Idris blinked, seemingly surprised by the lack of mockery. He gave a stiff, formal nod. "Thank you."
"Right. Enough chit-chat," Renn interrupted, dropping to his knees next to a dead lurker. He pulled a specialized, short-bladed skinning knife from his belt. "Let's get paid."
I had killed three of the beasts. I walked over to the first one, pulling my standard issue hunting knife.
"Careful with the sac, Marshal," Kael called out without looking up. She was already expertly peeling back the scales under her beast's jaw. "If you puncture it, it burns the meat."
"Got it," I said.
I knelt by my first kill. I gripped the lower jaw and pulled it back, looking for the gland.
There was nothing but bruised, pulverized tissue.
I stared at it. During the chaos of the fight, I had brought my hammer down to crush the beast's throat to stop it from biting me. I had succeeded. I had also completely flattened the submandibular gland into absolute paste. It was worthless.
I cursed quietly and moved to the second carcass.
This one I had killed with a strike to the spine. The neck was intact. I found the slight bulge under the jawline. I pressed my knife against the tough hide and dragged it downward.
The scales were harder than I expected. The knife slipped.
With a sickening hiss, a yellowish, foul-smelling liquid burst from the incision. It splashed onto my leather glove, smoking instantly. I yanked my hand back, wiping it hurriedly in the mud. The acid ate through the jaw tissue of the lurker, melting the very gland I was trying to extract.
"Damn it," I muttered.
I moved to the third carcass. I was being too precise with a dull blade. This time, I made wide, deep cuts around the entire jaw area, intending to just pull the whole section out and let the alchemists sort it out.
I gripped the meat and ripped it backward.
The sac tore perfectly in half, spilling its contents into the mud.
I sat back on my heels, staring at the ruined, smoking mess.
"Need a hand there, Marshal?" Renn asked, walking over holding three pristine, pale-yellow glands wrapped in a cloth.
He looked down at my three ruined carcasses. Then he looked at the smoking hole in my glove.
"Well," Renn said, trying very hard not to smile. "At least you're good at the hitting part."
When we returned to Ashford, we handed in the completed contract. I received exactly seven and a half coppers for my share of the base bounty.
Renn, Kael, and Idris went straight to the alchemist's shop. They walked out twenty minutes later, idly tossing silver coins in their hands.
It was a cold, brutal lesson in the reality of this world. Being strong physically wasn't enough to make a living.
* * *
To celebrate the "windfall," Kael bought the first round at a loud, smoke-filled tavern near the Guildhall. Even Idris drank a half-mug of ale, looking deeply uncomfortable amidst the shouting mercenaries.
I stayed for one drink. The noise, the heat, the overwhelming smell of sweat — it didn't bother me, exactly, but it felt irrelevant. I felt no urge to celebrate making seven copper pieces.
I left around ten o'clock, navigating the dark, damp streets of Ashford toward the Fourth Company barracks. The magical stones lighting the main streets cast long, distorted shadows across the cobblestones.
As I passed an intersection, a sharp cry echoed from a narrow alleyway to my right.
I stopped.
Fifty feet down the alley, barely illuminated by the moonlight, three men were engaged in a violent struggle. Two of them had a third pressed against the brick wall. I heard the sickening thud of a fist hitting ribs, followed by a wet cough.
"I told you I'd have the silver by tomorrow!" the man against the wall gasped.
"You said that three days ago," one of the attackers spat. A switchblade clicked open, catching a sliver of light. "Now we're taking it out of your hide."
I stood at the mouth of the alley. I watched the scene unfold.
A year ago — or whatever constituted a "past life" in my blank memory — would I have rushed in? Would I have drawn my hammer, yelled a warning, and played the hero?
Now I felt no moral outrage watching the man get beaten.
To step into that alley would be forcing an emotion I simply didn't possess.
I gave a short, quiet nod to myself.
I turned away from the alley and continued walking down the street, leaving the sounds of the struggle to fade into the night behind me.