"This is … " Mia started hesitantly, staring down at the glass of 'water' in her hand like it might jump out and bite her. "So weird."

"Do you have any better ideas?" Camie said, squirming uncomfortably to the side with a hint of frustration in her voice.

"Noooooo," Mia said, then closed her eyes and took a small sip of 'water'.

Almost instantly, she felt the strange sense of some alien energy trying to invade her energy channels through her tongue. It was faint, barely a tingle and more importantly, it was kinda slow too.

Her mana roused like a waking beast feeling some witless animal invading its territory and lashed out almost by itself. Mia let it, just trying to memorise the sensation as a tendril of her mana surge through her ethereal veins and crashed into the alien energy.

Just a second after Mia took the sip, the invading energy had been utterly annihilated without leaving any trace of its existence behind beyond leaving her tongue a bit tingly.

"Huh," Mia said intelligently, licking the roof of her mouth as she tugged her mana back into her pool before it started sinking into her body uselessly.

"So?" Camie asked.

"It … worked?" Mia said, glancing down at the glass before looking over at Camie. "What was it supposed to do to me anyway? If I failed to fight it off."

"Make you a bit dozy," the vampiress said with a shrug. "You'd have at worst taken a short, few minute long nap. I pushed as little power into it as I could and you only took a tiny sip. I doubt that much would have done anything even without you being an arcane mage."

Mia took another gulp, draining half the contents of the glass now that she was certain the price of failure wouldn't be anything nastier than a little nap. This time, not only did she pay close attention to how her mana roiled in response to the alien energy, but she also tried to nudge it to move faster, to banish the invading mana quicker.

It … worked. Probably.

The slightly quicker response might have been just in response to the larger quantities of invading energy and not because of anything Mia had done differently in particular. Or it might have just been her imagination playing off of her wistful thinking.

By the time the glass was empty, Mia was sure her own input was doing just about nothing. Not exactly nothing, but close enough for her focus not to really matter when it came to fighting off foreign influences. Yet.

Arcane Mana Manipulation had upgraded to Greater during her last fight, likely from her manually reinforcing her Arcane Shackles spell. According to Camie, that should help her in the future when her stats were higher.

For now though, all she could do was hope her mana was strong enough to keep her body free of all the nasty stuff that'd like to take it from her.

It was annoying that she could do nothing to train up that aspect of her defences, not if she couldn't decipher the instructions of that damned book, but with how many things Mia already had on her plate, she wasn't even sure when she would have gotten the time to do so.

Even this rushed need for developing something to counter mind magic had come from a spur of the moment near panic attack. Not a well thought out plan.

"Even if some enchantment lingers on you, your mana will fight it off in time." Carmilla said, trying to be consoling. "Someone would have to be several Ranks above you to fully suppress your natural resistance to such things as an Arcane mage. I think getting shot in the head is a much more pressing concern at the moment."

"I know you're right." Mia sighed, scuttling closer to her — maybe — girlfriend and snuggled in for comfort. "But I can't help but worry. As for getting shot, that should be much less of a concern pretty soon. If Nikki's ritual thingy works, we can both upgrade our runic-models to Junior grade and I can finish up adding the final dozen runes needed for the Mage Armour spell."

"What ritual?" Camie asked, half curious and half put off. "Wait, 'we'?"

"Yeah," Mia said, poking the vampire in the ribs and delighting in the little squeak it earned her. "You and me. If it works out, we can upgrade our runic-models before the System would do so during the Class Tier-Up. Nikki apparently already had hers at the Junior grade so we can use up the two Rank 1 Guardian monster cores we have."

"Oh … that would be," Camie started, pausing to search for an appropriate word. "Nice of her?"

"Yep," Mia chirped, glancing at the dimming light coming from outside. Dusk was quickly approaching, and so did the ritual's agreed upon time. "We should head on over, I think. It might take a while. Kinda exciting though! We're about to take part in a proper magical ritual … does that make us witches? It kinda does, doesn't it?"

"Wouldn't doing magic and casting spells do that already?" Camie asked, an eyebrow raised in confusion.

"It's not the same," Mia lamented, letting a tiny spell circle flicker above her fingertips for a short moment before she forced it to dissipate. There was no mana feeding it, just the few embers of it lingering in her body, so the price she had to pay for breaking the circle was just the painful sting that followed. "It's the vibe. What we're doing is so … I don't know. Direct? You snap your fingers and a spell bursts forth, always. It's predictable, almost scientific. But rituals are supposed to be mystical, esoteric and magical."

"I think you might be in for some disappointment," Camie said after a few seconds, which Mia spent daydreaming about mystical rituals done in dark stone rooms lit only by candlelight. "From what I know, rituals largely follow the same principles as spell circles. Just with the added benefit of not putting all the strain of casting on, well, the caster."

Mia's enthusiasm waned a little as she glanced up at the redhead with a raised eyebrow. Can't a girl dream anymore, especially when the world had been so glum and depressing lately? When she saw only some confusion tinged with a hint of guilt, Mia heaved a small sigh. The poor vampire could tell she'd messed up somehow, in some weird social sense, but she clearly couldn't tell how, or why.

"You're being a killjoy," Mia informed her, putting on a gentle smile to take any sting out of it. Sounding accusatory was the last thing she wanted.

"Sorry," Camie apologised, her face twitching into a small grimace that only went away when Mia gently patted her knee. " … we still have some time before the ritual … can I make it up to you?"

"You don't have to make anything up to me, you didn't do anything wrong." Mia shook her head, then glanced into a pair of beautiful ruby orbs shining with concern. "I won't say no to a back massage, though. Your fingers are magical."

Mia was reminiscing about the absolutely divine shoulder massage the vampire had given her just a few days ago when Camie coughed. Glancing over, Mia caught a tinge of redness on her cheeks that turned unnaturally pale a mere moment later.

Oh … Huh. Mia thought intelligently, the puzzle pieces falling into place. Who knew the innocent vampiress would have a dirtier mind than the lonely software dev who only had her toys and fingers to keep her company for the last half decade?

"Would you mind sharing what's going through that head of yours with the class?" Mia asked, trying to pull her lips into a stern frown but failing to keep the grin threatening to break out on her face fully in check. "Must be pretty interesting if you had to use your vampire magic to keep control of your expressions."

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"So a back massage?" Camie asked, her voice pitched maybe just a little higher than usual. "Yep, I can do that. No problem."

With that said, she swept Mia up into a princess carry and strode off towards the bedroom where she could lie down for a proper massage. Mia couldn't help it — even though she'd decided to keep flirting and the like on the low until Camie learned how to handle herself better — she giggled in delight at the feeling of being carried as butterflies fluttered in her stomach.

*****

"How bad is it?" someone asked, and looking over, Brent saw a mousy man frowning deeply at the projected map. "My team lost two members to the damned monsters, and we didn't even have to face a single Guardian. Those Iron Wolves were just … too much."

"We don't have the final headcount," Zeigler answered steadily, but took a short moment to glance up at the diagrams depicting the statistics projected right next to the map. "But I believe we've lost about five to ten percent of our volunteers and as much as fifteen percent of the attached military personnel. On a more positive note, we have managed to rescue another four thousand survivors from the newly reclaimed area in just these last two days."

Brent already knew the vague summary of the statistics, so he couldn't find it in himself to feel the same sense of satisfaction that many of the other team leaders wore on their faces. He knew that for every alive person they found, two more they would never be able to find. Not even the most generous predictions went above a mere one-third of the city's population having survived.

Hundreds of thousands of people who would never be buried, never really find rest and whose living relatives would never know for sure what happened to them. Was it a goblin that did them in? A murderous metallic bird? Starvation? Some regular infection? Or perhaps, other humans who thought there would be no reprisal for preying on the weak and less fortunate?

"That's … higher than I feared, but much lower than I hoped," Brent heard a younger man mutter with a grimace. "Actually, with the state most houses had been in, it's a miracle we could save even just that many people."

"We suspect it's largely due to the monsters' rapid growth in power," Kelvin, the Colonel's bookish aide, said. "They are endlessly hungry for mana, but the stronger they are, the deeper their hunger. At some point, the mana of a level 0 survivor huddling in a basement becomes much less appealing of a target than something more powerful. Or so the people going through the system-given monster associated books say."

"That makes no sense," Brent said, frowning as he looked over at the bookish man. "The monsters are well into Rank 1, they should be the biggest source of mana around. Why would they even be attacking us if what you are saying is true?"

"Monsters have what is referred to as 'broken mana' or 'miasma' instead of regular mana," Kelvin said. "Furthermore, most kinds of monsters don't hunt others of their own kind. But you are correct in that they would rather hunt monsters from other Rifts above much weaker humans. The ones researching this believe it had to do with how much mana the other monsters in question have already consumed."

So they pounce on whichever of their kind has eaten the most humans. Brent thought bitterly, seeing some dark sense of irony in that statement. Serves them right to die in the same way their victims did.

"Well, that means we will still be the tastiest meal around here," a grizzled older man said. "So be it. Better than the beasties going around looking for scraps and finding some poor sods still huddled up in their basements."

Brent nodded to himself, feeling the sentiment resonate with him deeply. The older man earned a few glares for his words from the people here more for the power than to help in the rescue efforts.

"Agreed," Brent said out loud, not willing to let the other man think himself alone in having a conscience.

"We will need to change something going forward," a woman said from just next to Brent in a stern voice. Glancing at her, Brent's eyes caught on her burst lip and the fact she favoured her right leg over the left. Injuries any two bit healer could have repaired, but either they were too swamped to bother with such non-lethal injuries or the woman thought her injured state would lend her words more weight and opted for healing the old way. "If there are any more of those escaped Guardian monsters out there, going back out without any of the heavy hitters nearby to help in case of an attack is just suicide with extra steps."

She glanced sideways at Brent, giving him a long look. He had reported his team killing not one, but two Guardians after all. Though he had conveniently left out the fact that they had also killed them at the same time.

These people were brave, willing to fight monsters to protect innocents or to further their newly gained magical powers. Still, he had come to learn most of them had a much harder time killing monsters than his team did, and they'd already been giving him dubious looks when he'd given his report. There was no need to push doubt to grow into disbelief. He needed these people to trust him, not think him some buffoon who embellished his accomplishments just to brag.

"I'm afraid that'll be logistically impossible," Zeigler said, holding up a hand to silence the outraged responses many of the team leaders were getting ready to throw at him. "Let me explain. Out of all of our volunteer teams, I would only trust three or four of them to fight a Guardian head on without suffering casualties. There are scores of you, all in all. Assigning the four strongest teams to run around like headless chicken to relieve team after team would slow our progress down to a crawl."

"So would half of us getting wiped out by another damned bird!" Someone shouted. "The majority of us are here to grow stronger, not to throw ourselves at monsters that'll rip us to shreds with little trouble."

"By our most pessimistic calculations, there could be another one or two Guardians out there at most," Kelvin said. "And taking the reported levels of all the felled Guardians, I suspect those would be the ones too weak to throw themselves at you."

"That only means they would much rather go for the weaker survivors or others in the reclaimed area," Brent said. "Is it possible to track them down to eliminate them?"

"It might be," Zeigler said, rubbing his beard with a thoughtful look. "But it wouldn't be quick, and destroying that Rift as soon as possible is paramount to the city's, and all of our continued survival. If any of you have someone with a tracker Class in your team who could accomplish the task, I wouldn't say no to hunting them down though."

He let his gaze pan out, roaming over the gathered men and women who'd been thrown onto the anvil that was this apocalypse and came out tougher for it. Brent knew more than a few of them had never taken up a weapon more dangerous than a cutlery knife before the monsters came knocking on their doors, but now most of them looked like hardened fighters that reminded him of some of the veteran soldiers he had met before.

Silence reigned in the room, though a few people looked thoughtful. Brent himself considered bringing up Mia's ability to sense powerful monsters, but dismissed the idea after recalling the range it had.

A hundred metres and some change was more than enough to sense an ambush coming your way, but far from useful when a whole city district needed to be searched. Especially when taking into account how those damned wolves had taken to using some of the subway tunnels to travel underground, outside of Mia's supposed range.

Maybe someone would have worked up the confidence to suggest a party member of their own, but they never got the chance. The door to the large meeting room slammed open and without even glancing at any of the gathered people, the young man who was responsible ran up to the Colonel with a relieved grin on his face.

"I found it, Sir!" He said breathlessly, deep dark circles under his eyes giving him a look of a man who hadn't slept in days. "I found the Rift!"

"Gunner Ferrik," Zeigler said, a hint of a grin showing on his own face beneath a carefully held mask of stoic professionalism. "Calm yourself and report."

"Yes, Sir!" the young man snapped into a salute. "I have finally found the location of the Rift known as the 'Forest of the Wolf King'. It is in a larger spot of woods in the Granbach district."

"Thank you, Gunner." Zeigler gave the young man a proud nod. "Excellent job. There is a room prepared for you just down the hallway with a bed and dinner ready. Take your much deserved rest and report to me tomorrow. You are hereby reassigned to my command. You are dismissed."

"Thank you, Sir!" Ferrik said, exhaustion weighing down his every word and move. Still, there was a pep in his steps as he left the room, only sending a single tired gaze towards the gathered team leaders looking on in fascination.

"With the news my diviner has given us in mind," Zeigler said with clear satisfaction in his voice. "I think we need to reconsider our next steps. Ladies and gentlemen, we have our target."

"What does that change?" The woman next to Brent asked, her arms crossed. "It doesn't help against the wandering Guardians."

"Oh, no, but it means we have a clear target and can push for it instead of going through each street," Zeigler said. "That means the advance will be led by the majority of you gathered here, in a single, cohesive force instead of spread out as you were. Also, I will be ordering Gunner Ferrik to try and divine the location of our missing Guardians so a strike force can take them out, now that he isn't preoccupied with looking for the Rift."

The Colonel's eyes came to rest upon Brent and in that moment, he knew who the man thought would take on the role of this 'strike force'.

A part of him was glad, it would allow him to face down and eliminate the greatest dangers in the city outside Rifts, saving others less fortunate with their Class selection from having to do so. On the other hand, he was here as the nominal leader of a team; he was representing them all and he knew most of them would be less than enthused about the idea of fighting such deadly monsters. Especially when they were stuck at level 10 either way.

They were good people, so he knew they would accept the role, but Brent was determined to make the army cough up a suitably large reward for their efforts.

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