After some more preparation, the seven moved out with the intent to meet up with the Colonel and ask him for an update.

  Aiden and Amelia noped out of it, saying they’d much rather split off and … not really be called on again for another Rift delve either. The greenskin rift had them both properly freaked out, and they wanted no part in anything of the like, or at least that’s what Mia got from the few murmured words from Amelia and the near-frantic cavalcade of words streaming out of Aiden’s mouth like vomit.

  With Christine still being up in the wind, only Clive was left as the sole addition to the base team and he at least seemed quite willing to stick around too.

  As they walked through the halls, Mia idly listened to Lina and Mark bicker about some inane stuff. Something about how it didn’t make sense for Lina’s Air magic to be actually creating air.

  Mark reasoned that out of Light, Fire and Air, only the last made new matter with real atoms and stuff while the others were just temporary mana constructs.

  Lina countered — quite brilliantly, if you asked Mia — that it was magic and it didn’t have to make sense with their dated understanding of science.

  In the end, Mark seemed to convince himself that the Air Lina made was also just some type of mana construct that’d fade away once it ran out of mana just like Aiden’s spell flames or Mia’s summoned Spectral Blade or Familiar.

  Lina disagreed, strongly, and smacked Mark’s hypothesis into tiny bits by covering both her mouth and nose for ten minutes straight.

  Mia could feel her mana constantly expelling a bit of air from her fingertips and right into her mouth. Through it all, the blonde Air mage was keeping the dwarf’s increasingly irritated gaze with a growing self-satisfied smirk of her own.

  “What if the oxygen your lungs broke that fake air down into fades away once it's already inside your bloodstream?” Mark mused darkly. “From one second to the next - Bam! Gone! And you’d have every bit of oxygen fuelling your muscles and brain turn to nothing.”

  Lina glared at him, then made him stumble with a tendril of invisible air placed right in front of his foot.

  Mia smiled, it was good to see her teammates actually becoming friends with each other and squabbling like that. She’d been somewhat worried that since most people in the team were only there because she’d asked them to, they would all just … be lonely or something.

  When they reached the front door of the building, Mia’s jaw almost dropped to the floor. One of those military car-things with six wheels on them and a wrist-thick camo-painted metal armour covering it stood parked right outside with its back opened up.

  For a moment Mia didn’t know what was going on, but then one of the soldiers respectfully asked them to board the ‘armoured personnel carrier’.

  Mia stiffened for a moment, catching a glint of a handgun on the waist of the soldier and she unthinkingly readied to defend herself. Her mind was already playing out how the woman would draw the pistol and shoot Mia in the head point blank.

  Her only options would be to let her Familiar — currently sitting on her shoulder after recharging over breakfast. — loose on the woman. She just couldn’t cast spells faster than a trained soldier could quickdraw a sidearm just yet.

  Helene gently squeezed Mia’s arm, and the girl snapped back to reality, noticing the soldier's hand hovering only centimetres away from her holstered weapon as she warily watched Mia.

  That did not help her nerves, but Mia forced her body to unwind a bit, if only on the outside. She still had enough mana in her fingers to cast the currently active Bolt spell.

  There was no need though, as the woman didn’t as much as twitch as the party clambered into the vehicle. Once they were all settled in, they asked to speak with the Colonel. The driver just nodded and stepped on the gas.

  Mia and the rest couldn’t see much, if anything, from the back and just had to trust the driver was taking them to where they’d asked to be taken.

  If they wanted us dead, they’d have bombed our rooms. Mia thought, gently soothing her paranoia with cold reasoning. Or swarmed us while we were separated and asleep. Taking us into an ambush now would be … suboptimal.

  Even if Mia felt little for the two would-be assassins of hers, especially now that they were in custody and weren’t any danger to her, their attempts at her life opened her eyes to a whole new world of possibility.

  Two days ago, she knew that it was technically possible that other humans and ex-humans would want her dead, but she didn’t really believe it until she had that bloody bullet in her hand.

  Suddenly, everyone she didn’t explicitly trust not to kill her looked like a threat, like a possible attacker. There was danger everywhere.

  It had planted a seed of doubt, making her suspicious of everyone she didn’t know. It made her tense up when the vehicle came to a stop and made her mana twitch towards her fingers when her gaze flickered by the visible handgun holstered on the hips of the soldiers that opened up the carrier.

  The woman didn’t reach for her gun, of course, she’d seemingly learned from the previous altercation and she merely asked them to follow her to the Colonel’s office. Mia let out a self-deprecating sigh of relief when she turned around. Fuck. Almost dying affected me more than I thought, what a shocker.

  The worst part was, Mia felt this was a good thing. Paranoia would keep her alive, keep her expecting the worst and have her always ready for everything her mind can think up.

  She knew it wasn’t healthy, but neither was walking into an ambush, blissfully ignorant until the last moment, and getting shot.

  How many times could Zeigler have had me killed by now? Dozens? Hundreds? That was the question that occupied her thoughts as she followed after the soldier lady with the rest of her team forming up around her like they had back in the Rift.

  That, if nothing else, calmed her. It was reassuring to have Clive, Brent, and Mark between her and the rest of the world, and Carmilla’s relaxing scent beside her was even more so.

  Of course, Lina would have been the most helpful in an actual firefight, but Mia couldn’t help her subconscious cave-woman brain thinking that having three men twice as large as she was protecting her was what made her safe.

  Despite herself, she couldn’t quite internalize all the changes magic and the System had brought to Earth and society as a whole.

  Carmilla helped move that along though quite nicely, watching the vampire in action would put any strongman or MMA fighter to shame.

  The office they were led to was down in the basement, raising Mia’s hackles even further, but when she laid eyes on Zeigler, she calmed down. If the Colonel was meeting them in person, Mia severely doubted he’d double cross them. He was well within quick-murdering range after all, a flick of Lina’s wrist or a thought from Mia to her Familiar and he’d be dead before he knew what happened.

  “Welcome,” the Colonel said, rising from his chair and motioning them over to a more spacious set of sofas that seemed to have been placed in a hurry. “Take a seat. We have much to talk about.”

  Mia tilted her head, looking over to one corner of the room and squinted. She trusted her ears, but she still found herself amazed at how easily her eyes could have slid right off the blurry section of space.

  She heard the clear heartbeat coming from that spot spike, then a minute sigh as the blurry cloak of pseudo invisibility dissipated and Christine ambled over to the sofa and sat down next to the Colonel with a defeated air about her.

  “Let's start right away,” Zeigler said, leaning back in his seat and letting out a tired sigh. “There is too much to do and far too little time to do it. Firstly, we have interrogated the pair Miss Carmilla had brought us through the night and can confidently say that they were indeed the assassins from yesterday.”

  "That much was obvious," the vampire cut in, with a near-audible roll of her eyes. “Did you find out anything about their ‘benefactor’? The one that actually planned the attack?”

  “Nothing concrete,” Zeigler said, but despite his words there was a slight grin on his face. It was dark and grim, almost self-deprecating. “But I can make a conjecture, connect the strings, if you will. But I want to have your promise that these words I’m about to speak don’t leave the confines of this room. Am I understood?”

  “Why?” Brent asked simply, his tone and face not betraying any emotion, but Mia caught his eyes narrowing almost imperceptibly in suspicion.

  “Keeping the civilians in any semblance of calm has been a … challenge,” Zeigler said, his moustached lip twitching in apparent annoyance. “If this got out, I’d likely have to pull out our short supply of anti-riot gear and take more forceful measures to keep them from disrupting our ability to fight the monsters.”

  Brent glanced at them, and one after the other the six of them nodded. Some reluctantly, some offhandedly, and Mia with what she could only describe as a rising anxiety. The suspense was doing no favours to her already frayed nerves.

  “Good,” Zeigler said, nodding slowly as he made eye contact with each of them in turn before continuing. ”We caught four people skulking about the outskirts of the city a few days ago. All level ten, wearing Rank 1 enchanted gear and speaking a language none of us could understand … well, until they were asked to write down their answers. Then my aide recognised the strange script they wrote in as ‘Imperial Common’ from one of the System-given books. The four of them were scouts, a survey team from the Kingdom of Starhaven.”

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  It took the seven of them a few seconds to construct a reply, and Mia even more as she tried to remember why that sounded so familiar.

  The Plane we’d been merged with, it was called Starhaven something-something. Right? Mia blinked in confusion, a dozen new questions popping up in her head, but most important of which was: “They just told you that?”

  Zeigler took in her dumbfounded look and disbelieving tone before shrugging, clearly just as confused as they were. “Yes. Weird bunch, working for some strange mercenary company from what little we understood of their words, and no, before you ask, we did not use any mind magic or heavy-handed interrogation to get it out of them. They seemed … almost too happy to share.”

  “Aaaaand that tells us what exactly about the assassins?” Mark asked leadingly.

  “I think that ‘benefactor’ of theirs is a covert operative of this Kingdom,” Zeigler said. “A saboteur. I don’t know why, but they want us to be weak and vulnerable. Possibly all dead even, considering the consequences of how crippling our efforts to destroy Rifts could end up working out.”

  “Wasn’t that the language you were trying to learn Mia?” Lina asked, breaking the momentary silence that followed that statement. “I mean, I’ve seen you nose-deep in those dictionaries almost as much as in the magical books lately. Maybe you’d understand them better?”

  “Truly?” Zeigler asked, sounding interested as he turned to Mia, who in turn squirmed under the man’s intense stare. “We are having a few of our support personnel trying to learn the language at the moment, but if you could get us clearer answers now … that could be invaluable.”

  “I guess I could try?” Mia said, subconsciously leaning into Carmilla who was sitting next to her for comfort. “They aren’t … dangerous right? You took away their weapons and at least shackled their arms behind their backs, right?”

  “We have removed their gear, yes,” Zeigler said, raising an eyebrow. “But not the second, since they had been quite cooperative. Why do you ask?”

  “99% of Rank 0 mages can only cast spells through their hands,” Mia said, her paranoia spiking at the thought of four born and bred mages from a Kingdom that had existed with magic influencing its society for possibly aeons. “I don't know how safe getting into a room with them would be.”

  Carmilla awkwardly, but soothingly placed her hand on Mia’s knees and squeezed a little. “You can feel when they activate magic, and I can disable them before they try anything. If you want to do this … we can do it with minimal risk involved.”

  “Alright.” Mia let out a deep sigh. “I’ll see how it goes I guess … but before that, I wanted to ask Christine a question, if you don’t mind?”

  The elven woman looked up, the same mix of confused emotions dancing in her forest green eyes. Discomfort and awe, then confusion and irritation. Chris glanced over at the Colonel, who just nodded and then just let out a soft sigh. “Ask away.”

  “I’ve noticed that elves react to seeing me … strangely,” Mia said, leaning forward to look the brunette in the eyes. “Do you know why that is, or can you at least tell me what weird feeling you're getting? I’m assuming it’s got something to do with your new Bloodline, or most likely how it interacts with mine. But I can’t be sure.”

  “Probably,” Christine said, shifting uncomfortably. “It’s weird, and faint. Like I know I should be disgusted with you, but can’t for the life of me tell why, then that disgust turns to this even weirder … adoration? It’s like I know you’re important, like a celebrity or politician but I can’t remember why or who exactly you are.”

  “Huh.” Mia slumped back into the sofa, gazing at the shifting woman in confusion. “Do you feel the same way when you look at half-elves?”

  “Half-elves?” Chris asked, raising an eyebrow. “Don’t think so, no. At most I … get a flare of narcissism. Like I know I’m better than them. It’s weirding me out … do you feel the same? I’m guessing you’re some kind of an elf too, right?”

  “Oh, she’s not.” Mark snorted. “You should have heard how instinctively offended she was when I called her something as ‘lowly’ as an elf.”

  Mia glared at him, then huffed as she turned back to Chris. “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” Chris said, shrugging uncomfortably. “I get it, more than anyone else likely. My friends from before all this remained human and I just … feel dirty talking to them now. This damned change is messing with my mind, all of our minds. I’m somewhat jealous of those who remained human.”

  “Well, I can safely say all of us who remained human are just as jealous of everyone who’s changed,” Zeigler said, an easygoing smile taking out any edge that might have been in his words. “I suppose the neighbour’s grass is always greener, some things remain the same despite all these changes to our world.”

  “I’d like to see how you like being a dwarf,” Mark said, grumbling. “I gotta use a damned stool to get onto the loo. I have to walk around with a ladder if I want to reach the cupboards and walking up the stairs is a damned slog.”

  “You could have been turned into one of those rock people,” Lina patted his shoulder consolingly.

  “Or a mole-man. Though I guess you’re that, just without the furry bits.” Mia added, pouring salt onto the wound and making the dwarf glare at her. She just smirked, which earned her a rather mean jab at her having knife-ears.

  He likely would have joked about her ancestry involving a pile of moss or a shapely oak, but with Helene sitting just meters away, he held himself back. Well, so did Mia, so they were even.

  Not wanting to forget, she turned back to Christine and thanked her. “Thanks for answering my questions. I have … absolutely no idea what to do with that information, but it’s good to know nonetheless.”

  “Sure,” Christine said with an awkward smile.

  “So,” Zeigler interrupted whatever follow-up squabbling might have broken out. “Would you like to meet our ‘guests’ now, or after we finished talking about what measures we’re going to take to make sure any follow-up attacks, or new attempts on your lives fail?”

  *****

  Nikki was bored, their shared room was suitably comfortable and well furnished, but that didn’t change the fact that they couldn’t leave it.

  With juicy Rifts overflowing with monsters and Rewards in equal measure within walking distance, it brought her pain to be locked in a damned basement.

  “Should we break out?” Neil asked for what felt like the thousandth time and all the answer Nikki graced him with was a breeze of chilly air washing over his nape.

  Gilbert just glared half-heartedly, halting the meditative battle-dance thing he’d been so involved in.

  “You remember what the Guildmaster said, right?” Krea, the last member of the adventurer team Nikki had accidentally attached herself to, asked, looking up from her notebook. “We want to have a half-way decent relationship with the locals. That means diplomacy, and diplomacy involves not blasting our way out of the comfortable room our downright terrified hosts had put us in.”

  “He also said that diplomacy is likely to be a pipedream with a society unfamiliar with the System and magic,” Neil whined. “Our job is to scout, explore and map out the place for Rifts and Dungeons. We shouldn’t even have made contact with the locals!”

  "The Guildmaster assumed we’d be meeting a new race, you numbskull," Krea said, rubbing her temples. "Talking spiders or something, not regular humans. We know we can communicate with humans, so we will at least give it a try. Understood?”

  Neil looked over at Gilbert, looking for someone to help him stand against Krea’s tyrannical rule but found only disinterest.

  “We are level 10,” the Ki warrior who acted as their frontliner said gruffly. “No Obelisks near anywhere either. We ought to train our Skills up a bit before continuing. No use in breaking out.”

  “Nikki?” Neil asked, looking over at her like she was his last line of hope. “I’m sure someone as smart and beautiful as you can see my point.”

  Nikki rolled her eyes, holding back the retort loaded and ready to be fired right back at him. Instead, she just shrugged. She’d been subjected to ass-kissing and flirting from men both more handsome and leagues ahead of Neil in skills before, so his brown-nosing didn’t faze her even a little.

  “I’m with Krea,” Nikki said, halfheartedly returning to her fake mana shaping exercise.

  Nikki had been bending mana to her will and shaping it before she could walk, even if the System Artefact returned her level to 1 and removed all of her Gained Attributes, her pure skill and experience with moulding mana remained as they were.

  Still, she put up a show so her new party members didn’t get too suspicious. They likely assumed she was the runaway daughter of some rich merchant, trying her luck by joining the exploration teams in scouting beyond the mother Continent. She’d like to keep it that way, and giving away the fact that she’d gotten her hands on a Restart Orb would be extremely counterproductive to that end.

  Those things cost an arm and a leg, and she only had one because she … nabbed it in the chaos of the merging from her father’s treasury.

  She felt a bit guilty about that, just a tiny bit, but this was her only chance at breaking down the woman her father was building her up to be and starting again. With this start, she was going to be the woman she wanted to be. Not some pretty wallflower, smiling demurely to lure in noble lordlings to her father’s cause and eventually sold off to the highest bidder.

  No, she was going to be a mage, an adventurer and the mistress of Ice that she was always meant to be. This merging was her chance, her one chance. She wasn’t going to waste it.

  Neil was about to open his mouth again and Nikki had to hold back an irritated sigh, but before she could tell him to leave the matter alone already, she heard a knock on the door.

  They turned as one, their gazes turning sharp as they eyed the entrance.

  “Yes?” Krea asked, in Imperial Common of course. None of them were willing to waste memory space learning a new language when the locals would sooner or later get theirs beaten into their heads by the System.

  The door opened, and in walked the man they knew to be the commanding military officer of this settlement, but the people behind him drew their attention almost immediately.

  Neil looked on in interest, his gaze jumping between the two pretty girls walking just behind the officer while Krea and Gilbert looked on in wary interest.

  Nikki went cold, her heart shooting up into her throat with a thundering drumming she couldn’t hope to soothe. Lessons she’d learned ages ago, while growing up as a prim and proper noble girl, ones she never thought she’d ever have any use of jumped to the forefront of her panicked mind.

  Pink hair, gem-like azure eyes shining with power.

  Vampire, blood red hair, glowing crimson eyes.

  Those were distinct traits, exceptionally so. Both are the signs of a Bloodline in the big bad book of people never to mess with, listed under the identifying features of the Royal Dragon Clan’s human forms.

  What in the ever-living fuck is a Royal Fae from the Astral Court doing here? And with a pureblood Nightshade Vampire, no less?!

  When the pink-haired girl turned to Nikki, and she caught a glimpse of her smaller triangular ears, Nikki almost got a heart attack.

  Then came the doubt. Fae had ears as long and elegant as the purest of elven bloodlines. But this girl had half-elf sized ears. But she fit the description.

  Nikki dug up a tiny piece of information, an offhand remark by her erstwhile tutor.

  ‘A Half-Blood Fae is what we call a Halvyr.’

  Nikki would have much rather stumbled across a dragon hatchling, that would have been less problematic. Maybe less dangerous too.

  She glanced over at the other three, blissful ignorance clear on their features as they took in the newcomers. Seeing that, Nikki decided to play dumb. What Halvyr? She wasn’t seeing one anywhere. Must have been the wind.

  Then she made eye contact with an ethereal pink cat that had the exact same type of eyes as the girl. Fuck me sideways, I just wanted to delve Rifts and hunt monsters in peace, not get entangled in whatever bullshit this is going to turn out to be.

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