After a quick, but filling breakfast that was distinctly lacking a refreshing mug of coffee, Mia dragged Carmilla back into the privacy of the room they’d slept in and sat the girl down on the bed.

  Settling in with her legs crossed, seated across from her girlfriend, Mia put on a serious expression.

  “I think we need to have a talk,” she started, then squinted at the vampire. Carmilla looked to be remorseful, but there was a confusion in her eyes that seemed to be asking what exactly Mia was upset about. “First topic. How you almost made me watch you get brained by Amelia’s energy beam when you, without any warning whatsoever, flung yourself onto the back of the Rift Guardian.”

  “Ohh,” Carmilla managed to say, eyes firmly locked on the bed sheets they were seated on. “I’m, uh, sorry?”

  “Do you know how worried I was?” Mia said, feeling an edge of vexation seep into her voice as the memory replayed itself in her mind. “What if Amelia was a moment slower to avert her shot, what if you got hit and the Troll caught your incapacitated body? Would I’ve had to watch as it snacked on your corpse? Carmilla, you almost gave me a heart attack with that stunt.”

  “Sorry,” the vampire reiterated, but Mia now heard the words drip with newfound guilt. Still, she knew from her tone, she just knew that the girl didn’t even think twice about that. “I- I didn’t think-“

  Mia sighed, the panic and near tangible shame radiating off of the vampire soothing her own frustrations.

  “It’s fine,” Mia said, squinting at her girlfriend. “But try to think next time, okay? Think before you do something overly risky like that and at the very least notify the rest of us before you do it. Okay? We need to work on our teamwork if we want to streamline monster hunting and Rift delving.”

  Carmilla nodded, still not managing to look Mia in the eye.

  “Alright,” Mia said, shuffling over to give a quick hug to the vampire as she murmured. “Thank you for hearing me out, I was really worried you’d just brush me off.”

  “I- I’m sorry,” Carmilla said, returning Mia’s hug with much more force than she’d expected, almost clutching onto Mia like a woman drowning at sea who found a floating raft. “Thank you, my- I’m having trouble with the … changes. It’s- thank you for pointing it out and the thing yesterday too.”

  “What trouble?” Mia asked, anxiety gripping her by the gut. A pit formed in her stomach as she thought about all the unneeded new instincts a vampiric Bloodline might force onto someone.

  “Minor stuff … those are the ones that get by,” Carmilla said, her face still buried in Mia’s shoulder. “Like the urge to hunt down anyone who wronged me and mine, I thought it was just me when I ran off after those two yesterday … but I don’t know.”

  As Mia felt the redheaded girl tremble slightly in her arms, she recalled the scared and alone girl she found half-dead weeks prior. This was the real Carmilla, the one Mia wanted to help.

  Though she also liked the confident, aloof vampire that hardly ever let go of her apathy for others aside from when it concerned Mia. That was such a sweet caress to her ego that she’d grown to love it.

  “You’ll be fine,” Mia whispered soothingly, making calming circles on the girl’s back as she hugged her. “You’ve handled those instincts spectacularly up until now, some of them just slipped by, but now that you know of them I have little doubt you’ll trounce them. “

  Mia felt another tremble reverberate through the vampire’s body, then the girl squirmed a little and pulled back just enough to stare Mia in the eyes.

  She seemed to be searching for something in Mia’s eyes, to which Mia just smiled back gently.

  Carmilla teared up, her eyes watering as her lips trembled while she managed to croak out an answer. “T-thank you.”

  Mia smiled awkwardly, she still wasn’t any better at handling someone on the border of bawling their eyes out. The best she could do was to smile gently and pat Carmilla on the shoulder.

  “You’ve given me no reason to doubt you,” Mia said, speaking the words as they came to her. “I trust you, like I said, you’ve given me no reason not to.”

  “But I’ve been so close to,” Carmilla said, biting her lower lip until it bled. “So very close. You shouldn’t. I’m dangerous, I don’t know if-“

  “But you never did,” Mia said firmly. “No matter how close it was, you never did anything that’d give me cause to doubt you. Well, there was our first meeting, but I likely would have reacted just as violently — if not more so — than you did, had I been in your shoes. These two lapses in judgment we’ve talked about were just that, lapses in judgment. All I can ask is that you think before acting, maybe even consider how your actions would affect others, how it’ll make them- how it’ll make me feel. That’s all I ask, and what I trust you to do going forward.”

  Carmilla closed her eyes, a single whimpering sob escaping her thinly pressed lips before she took a shuddering breath. When she opened her eyes again, they were bloodshot and still misty, but Mia felt the girl was over the worst of it. She looked resolved, not the vulnerable, lonely little girl she’d been before.

  “I will, I promise and I’ll do my best to be worthy of that trust,” Carmilla said, her eyes steely as she stared into Mia’s eyes.

  Mia wanted to say that she was already worthy of it, that her actions up until now had more than made her so, but those glistening ruby eyes shining with resolve stole her breath away and she just stared.

  Her mouth opened, but she couldn’t form words so she just gave a demure nod.

  Carmilla held Mia’s gaze for a few moments, but grew increasingly awkward to be on the receiving end of Mia’s awed stare.

  “What?” The vampire finally asked, fidgeting under the weight of that stare as she averted her eyes.

  “Sorry,” Mia said, blushing up to the tips of her ears as she snapped out of her daze.

  “Was that everything you wanted to talk about?” Carmilla asked, trying to change the subject with the grace of a stumbling elephant. Clearly, the feline grace her vampiric nature allowed her didn’t extend to the girl’s social skills.

  “Well,” Mia started, halting to go over the mental list she’d compiled before. “I wanted to chew you out for leaving me after I got shot, but I don’t think there is a need for that anymore. I know it was probably the smart, logical thing to do to remove the threat to us post haste … but that was just not what I wanted in the moment.”

  “I did learn some stuff though,” Carmilla said, the excuse sounding hollow as she scratched her nose in embarrassment. “But yeah. Sorry, I should have stayed with you and made sure you were okay and safe.”

  “I wasn’t worried about my safety,” Mia said, gently taking Carmilla’s hand into her own as she explained. “I wanted a hug, and to know you’re next to me. I wanted a hug because I was terrified after nearly dying, I couldn’t have cared less about whichever lowlife shot me … even if I know that logically, you probably reacted in the optimal way, removing the threat to our lives was the practical thing to do, and I know I shouldn’t be angry with you for it, but I am. I just … can’t help it.”

  “Oh,” Carmilla said, looking even more ashamed for a moment. “Okay … “

  “But thank you,” Mia said, drawing little circles with her thumb on the back of Carmilla’s hand. “You got angry for me, and despite you getting shot too, you went to hunt them down. It … felt nice, even if it’s probably pretty wrong of me to … what did you do with them? Did you catch them?”

  Mia asked the last part with a bit of dread. She wasn’t sure what she’d feel if Carmilla killed her would-be assassins, but she was sure it wouldn’t be a nice feeling.

  “I left them alive,” Carmilla said, sounding unsure whether to be sour about that fact or proud of it for her show of restraint. “And I caught both. I left them with the army guys, but not before getting some information out of them.”

  Mia nodded slowly, thinking it over before she shrugged. She was relieved Carmilla hadn’t murdered them … but also felt strangely detached. Those were two people who tried to end her life, and yet she barely felt anything for them.

  No anger, no hate, no vindicated satisfaction that they were locked up. Just relief, that she didn’t have to worry about them again and another wave of relief that she didn’t have to wrestle her morals just yet.

  She didn’t know how she’d have handled her girlfriend murdering two people for her, but even the thought just made her feel cold. They would have deserved it, but it also made her feel dirty for thinking that. It was weird, a conflicting and complex mix of emotions she couldn’t untangle, and wasn’t even sure if she wanted to. Not yet.

  I’ll deal with it as it comes. Mia thought, knowing that if things continued as they were, she would sooner or later find herself standing above a corpse with its blood on her hands.

  Well, metaphorically that is. If she had to kill someone, she doubted she’d get anywhere close enough to ever get the actual blood on her hands. She was a mage after all, not a rogue.

  Speaking of rogues, I should check whether Chris is still around. Mia thought, her curiosity about why everyone with pointed ears reacted to her weirdly nagging at her.

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

  Well, everyone with ears longer and pointier than her own. Carmilla had a pair of slightly pointed ears too, and the girl didn’t show any sign of the same, and neither did the people Mia guessed were half-elves. Only the full, pureblooded elves seemed to have something strange going on with them.

  ”I also found out that they were just lackeys,” Carmilla said, her voice serious and dragging Mia’s wandering attention back to her. “The pair of idiots were given both the location of the best shooting spot and a safe house by some ‘benefactor’ of theirs.”

  “What?” Mia asked, an icy dread settling in her stomach like a physical weight.

  “The two didn’t know anything beyond that the man seemingly wanted every strong non-human fighter in Graz dead,” Carmilla said gravely. “And that they always wore a heavy coat along with a formless black mask. Even their gender is iffy, but the two described the guy’s voice and stature as masculine.”

  “Well fuck me sideways,” Mia said, chewing on her cheeks. “That’s … fuck. Why would anyone do that? The monsters will overrun the city if all of us are dead, and only the non-humans? That’s still fucking stupid, only a few of the strongest fighters I know are human. The city would be utterly fucked.”

  Carmilla shrugged, as if to say crazy people couldn’t be expected to make sane decisions. “What I’m worried about is the safe house, it had some weird runic Ward thingy in it that didn’t allow my senses to pierce it from the outside. Whoever that guy is, he knows or has someone with impressive magical knowledge.”

  “We should tell this to the others.”

  Carmilla nodded, and the two set off to gather up everyone to discuss the implications of the revelation. Mark, Mia, Carmilla, Helene and Christine could all be possible next assassination targets, and that was just out of the ten members of the delving party.

  And not everyone has my triple layered defences … fuck, with my Amulet turned to scrap, I don’t either.

  A single well-placed shot was all it’d take to kill her and almost anyone else.

  *****

  Mia only had half her mind on the conversation, the other, larger part focusing on the mana shaping exercises her new timetable said she was supposed to be doing at the moment.

  With her Cognition having shot up, she found it possible to do as much as four low-effort tasks at once, or one that would have once taken her entire focus to accomplish — like twisting a clump of mana in her pool into a string — and one smaller side task. The latter of which was, of course, taken up by the conversation happening around her.

  “So it was purely … pragmatic?” Brent asked, arms crossed and deep lines drawing a scowl across his bearded face. “Nothing personal?”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Carmilla said, her voice awkward enough that Mia subconsciously reached out to pat the girl’s knee under the table. “One of them was the guy who we stopped from beating up a fox beastkin a few days ago. It seems he took it quite personally. But I think whoever this benefactor of theirs is was just using them and their little revenge plot to take some of the strongest fighters in the city out.”

  “That’s worrying,” Brent said, arms crossed as he stared at the ceiling. “On both accounts.”

  “Three weeks,” Lina murmured, frowning. “And people are already hating people who’d been their neighbours just because they have pointed or furry ears?”

  “I think it has more to do with those changed by the awakening to have a much higher chance at a better Class,” Helene said, a hint of worry clear her voice. “Lina, you were lucky with your Class and Brent … well, he made do with what he had, but the rest of us only got our power because of our Bloodlines.”

  “That’s the same with me,” Lina said. “I have some weird Noble Human Bloodline that’s proficient in ’aeromancy’. That’s the only reason my Class is as good as it is.”

  Clive spoke up next, the only one out of the four extras they’d taken with them into the Rift. “Jealousy is hardly a good enough excuse to try and kill the people standing between you and a Rift spewing out man-eating monsters.”

  Mia was still unsure about what to feel about the attempt at her life. A part of her was irritated, wanting to go wherever that idiot who shot her was and kick him in the balls, but a larger part just wanted to put the matter behind her already.

  A pair of pathetic little men jealous of her power and Bloodline were not worth her time or even just a single moment spent worrying.

  Instead, she focused on the now three separate strings of mana in her mana pool. Her Control had improved by leaps and bounds, mostly because she now had her entire mana pool fully subdued and because, unlike before, she was trying to form shapes inside her mana pool.

  If she had to put numbers on it, her control over mana was at 100% only inside her pool. It went down to 60% in her energy channels and then down further to at best 5% outside of her body, with every single millimetre of distance exponentially increasing the difficulty from there on.

  It was the worst when she didn’t even have a thread of mana connecting her to an expelled clump of mana anymore. Hell, that was so damned hard that she only now realised that she actually had some control over her mana even after it was wholly separated from her body.

  A quick research into her various books on hand returned that it was a well-known phenomenon. Mana signature, a spiritual imprint branded onto every last speck of mana that enters a mage’s mana pool, was the reason and it was what distinguished personal mana from ambient mana.

  Said mana signature grants a mage varying degrees of control over their personal mana through some metaphysical link, though the signature didn’t last forever and faded quicker the weaker the mage was.

  Mia’s was supposedly stronger than average with her Arcane Mana Manipulation skill enhancing its strength, but she still only felt the metaphysical connection once severed after twenty or so tries.

  Mia was fascinated by it, and thinking back on her experiences realised that she’d made use of this ability more than once when she minutely influenced spells she’d already cast. Like when she made her Arcane Blast curve just a bit to hit the Ratman crawling out of the sewers dead centre. Like most things magic, desperation-fuelled bursts of willpower helped greatly in accomplishing what she couldn’t otherwise.

  Still, her training manual said one should always start new exercises in the mana pool to get used to them before introducing the added difficulty of trying to replicate them in the mana channels next, then outside the body.

  As she painstakingly pushed on, focusing with her whole mind, she managed to ever so slowly braid the three strings of mana together.

  The movements were jerky and more than once she had to backtrack when two strings melded together by accident, but she had a somewhat braid-like mana construct by the end of it. What was thrilling though, was that the strings were only as thick as some of the lines making up some of the larger, simpler runes in her runic-model. Soon, she might be able to start manually replicating those ones.

  “What do we do?” Mark asked, his grim face unable to hide his underlying fear. “I can’t keep my armour up all the time and I doubt it would hold up against any larger calibre rifle all that well. The rest of you are even worse off.”

  “I say we move with extreme care, always together to have the extra defence of Mia’s Wards combined with Lina’s air bubbles,” Brent said. “The only option I see, besides hiding under some rock, is getting stronger. We need to clear out the remaining three Rifts as fast as possible and Rank Up. Being level 20 instead of 10 should help, especially if we can upgrade our defences enough that no normal sniper can punch through them.”

  “Can’t we just leave it to that other bunch?” Clive asked, leaning back with his arms crossed with an affable air around him as he raised an eyebrow. “From what I managed to tease out of the guards out in the hallway, they blitzed through the rat Rift and one of their members already ran off towards the Bird Rift.”

  “A single one of them?” Helene asked. “Isn’t that … suicidal?”

  “Apparently the guy’s a savant with the bow and his arrows can go through even tanks.” When he finished, he gave a little grin. “From what I heard, the good general had been quite livid when the veracity of that claim had been tested on one of his tanks.”

  “The golden-haired elf guy, right?” Mia asked, speaking up as she let her strings of mana dissipate. “He felt strong, in a weird way.”

  “High Elf,” Carmilla said, nodding. “The Light equivalent of your Bloodline, originating from one ancient Avatar of the Seraph, from what I know. All of them have a stupidly high affinity for Light magic.”

  “Uhuh,” Mark nodded, in a way that clearly showed he was lost. “The fuck is a Seraph, or an Avatar for that matter?”

  “I know the first,” Mia said, sitting up straighter. She then quickly recapped what Carmilla had told her about the Seven Constellations. “I don’t know what an Avatar is though … ?”

  “Each Constellation can choose a single Avatar or Chosen,” Carmilla said, taking the clue that Mia was sending the ball over to her court. “Avatars usually gain much more potential and long-lasting powers from their Patrons, while Chosen get a quick and dirty power up. All seven get only one, and even after the one dies, it takes them sometimes centuries before they name another. Usually much more in case of an Avatar dying.”

  “Awesome,” Mark said dryly. “So we got some divine nepo-baby running around to clear up our Rifts? Great.”

  “This one is not the Avatar, or even the Chosen of the Seraph,” Carmilla said, just as dryly as Mark had. ”Just a very distant descendant of one. The Seraph hasn’t made any Avatars for the last twenty System Cycles, though my bloodline memories end a little over two thousand years ago, so I might be wrong and a new one has been named since.”

  “That’s twenty thousand years by the way,” Mia said, feeling the need to clarify at the group's collective confusion. "System Cycles, I mean."

  “How likely is that Elf to end up actually cleaning the Rifts?” Clive asked, rubbing his chin.

  “If he takes his time?” Carmilla asked, then shrugged. “Possible, though I don’t think he’ll be able to manage the Wolf Rift, not alone. That one was also level 10 like the Goblin one when it spawned … right?”

  Mia nodded.

  “We need to clear another Rift for our Quest,” Lina reminded everyone, breaking the thoughtful silence that ensued. “If the golden boy is heading for the Bird Rift, we really should aim to find and destroy the critter before he can and maybe leave the Wolf Rift to Jeff and his lackeys? That’d minimise risks and make sure we still get our rewards.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Mia said, shrugging as she launched into the second repetition of the mana shaping exercise.

  Once she was done with that, she’d also have to decide whether to go with Alert Ward or Mage Armour for her last spell, or if she wanted to remove another previous spell to fit both.

  One would make her sleep much more peacefully at night, adding a second line of defence beyond leaving her Familiar to stand guard, and the other would maybe get her enough defence to survive if another idiot tries their luck at shooting her.

  Without her Amulet, her magical defences were only half as strong after all. With the bullet drawing blood even with the Amulet, she was pretty reluctant to just head back out and hope no one else tried their luck after one failed attempt.

  I don’t like taking that gamble with my life on the line. Mia thought, a healthy sense of paranoia growing in her. Best would be if I got both. With Arcane Explosion being borderline useless, I can discard it without losing much. That spell would only be useful if I got attacked by a swarm of bees without Lina nearby to swat them away.

  Still, even as she felt herself come to a decision, it would take a while before she had both spells ready. Alert Ward was a pretty simple spell with only 24 runes in its spell circle, but Mage Armour was at 48. It’d take possibly as much as a week to absorb all the runes of both.

  And my runic-model will reach 100% before that, I think. Mia thought, glancing at the associated Subskill’s description which said it was at ‘88% towards Junior Mage Grade’.

  She didn’t know what reaching 100% would mean, but she hoped it wouldn’t prevent her from putting in more runes before she Ranked Up and subsequently upgraded her Arcane Mage Class from Tier 1 to Tier 2.

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