Ranthia was left largely unsure of what to do with herself as the final days ahead of Ranger Team 6’s departure progressed. Outside of team meetings Ranthia was helping Vert slowly improve her reading capabilities and—gradually—introducing her disciple to writing. …But there was only so much she could do to help; the duo had already found that sometimes the best thing Ranthia could do was to leave Vert to it.

  Except Ranthia had quickly found she absolutely couldn’t be left alone with her thoughts.

  Lysia showed up again at the morning meetings a day later.

  “Shelly gets even more of a boost now, and I can even gradually heal her now!” Lysia explained, almost vibrating in her seat. How she managed to speak through a grin that broad was one of life’s greatest mysteries.

  “Wow! So, is that why those scratches are gone?” Pyra enthused right along with Lysia.

  Once again they were gathered upstairs from Green’s impressive shop. The Garden—as most seemed to refer to it—was a shop that sold herbs to [Alchemists] and [Chefs] and the like, as well as entire young plants to anyone that wanted a bit more green in their life. The shop was surprisingly massive, and over half a dozen young women worked in it at any given time.

  Ranthia was, as usual, grazing on the food quietly while she watched the others talk. She knew as second-in-command she should be more proactive, but… It was hard to find the energy to keep up with the young rookies that were nominally under her command. Green seemed to handle them so effortlessly. Besides, the grilled vegetables were kind of amazingly tasty. She’d thought the prior morning’s roasted ones were great, but the abundant seasonings on these were a delight on her tongue.

  It wasn’t like she was the only one that stayed quiet. Art, Abillo, and Juvenae all seemed to prefer to keep quiet when someone wasn’t directly engaging them in conversation. Not that Ranthia had spoken to Art since she made such a godsforsaken ass of herself when she had all-but-accused him of impropriety just for the misfortune of being born a man. What could she even say to begin to make up for that?

  “Oh, right, before I forget!” Lysia had cut herself off mid-brag and pointed dramatically at Ranthia. “Eyes! You promised!”

  Ranthia considered protesting—she certainly hadn’t made a promise—but she shrugged and reached up and tugged her blindfold up, opening her eyes a moment later. She wasn’t sure why she had gotten in the habit of closing them when she messed with her blindfold; it wasn’t like the change in light that reached them bothered her.

  “Wow! That is weird. Can I touch one?” Lysia asked.

  “You just asked her if you can poke her eyeball.” Tertia quipped before Ranthia could figure out how to respond to that.

  “Oh! Yeah, good point, that would be weird. Sorry!” Lysia apologized, complete with a quick Remus salute.

  Ranthia was oddly relieved that nobody seemed to be actively repulsed by her appearance. Lysia, Pyra, and—more oddly—Juvenae looked interested. Abillo had glanced Ranthia’s way before she shrugged and went back to staring out the open window. Green had a thoughtful expression and Tertia was completely unfazed. Art shot her a thumbs up after a few seconds, which was beyond Ranthia’s ability to figure out. Still, their acceptance meant a lot.

  “Okay, while we’re indulging curiosity, how come she gets three names? I’m just Pyra, daughter of Pyranus. But I’m kind of jealous! I could have been Defirius Pyra Pyrenae! Or maybe—” Pyra was plainly lost in her tangent when Juvenae gently bonked her on the nose.

  “Leave my name out of it, get your own.” The older young woman grumbled.

  “Actually, I was just Sinna, named after my father for most of my life. About eight years ago now, father decided to have me get my own citizenship and named me as a potential heir to the Hyrria business and family, at which point I was ‘gifted’ with his family name and renamed to Tertia since I was the third born. I kept my old name too, of course. My brothers are both screwups with no work ethic, so I signed on with the legion after I was done with my tutors, aiming to become a Ranger. I figure having some titles and merits behind me will make my future business dealings easier.” Tertia explained with a wry smile.

  “What does the Hyrrina family do, anyway?” Ranthia asked before she managed to stop herself. She also failed to notice her mistake on the name, not that it seemed to bother Tertia.

  Ranthia was working hard to memorize the names of her teammates; she had even written them all down in secret during the last meeting. The study aid helped her tremendously, but she still had hiccups.

  “Business-to-Business acquisitions. …I’ll try and simplify it: basically, when a shop or business needs something, they come to us. Say a restaurant comes to us with a need for something, like fresh milk, and needs it within a certain budget. Then we figure out which farmers have excess milk and figure out how to get it to them within their budget. We take care of everything, from acquisition to transit, using a network of contacts my family established over generations. Sure, you could go out and try to figure this out yourself, but it takes precious time and you’re unlikely to find anything cheaper than what we can establish, even with our fees.” The woman replied with a proud smile.

  Well, Ranthia could only blame herself for asking. She fell quiet again while the others chattered—the cooling food was still a solid distraction. Eventually, the morning meeting came to an end and the girls filed out in ones and twos. Ranthia and Art had started collecting plates and cleaning up, but Art suddenly nodded and made his own exit.

  “So, young Flower, what do you think of your new team?” Green prompted almost the moment he left.

  Ranthia froze briefly, before she resumed stacking plates.

  “It’s hard to get a feel for them until we start training together and see how the group functions on the field.” Ranthia answered after a few moments. The answer felt safe.

  Yet Green continued to look at her.

  “I… Pyra seems to struggle to focus, we’ll have to watch her closely to see if that happens on the field too. Jul—er, Juvenae seems more reliable, at least, though I have concerns about how proactive she might be. Abillo and Pyra are both strangely low in level even for fresh Academy graduates and it suggests a certain degree of inexperience we’ll need to carefully watch. Tentatively I believe that Tertia seems to be roughly as competent as she believes herself to be, though I doubt she experienced direct combat against the shimagu given her level, despite her legion experience. I wish Lysie had another forty levels or so under her belt, but her skills suggest a high amount of potential as a frontline defender. That said, she’s overly attached to her shield, and I know better than most that equipment inevitably must be parted with, no matter how good your Skills may be.” Ranthia elaborated. It was uncomfortable to give raw speculation off so little information, but she was—somehow—second-in-command.

  The memory of her original knives—their handles consigned to the Nostrum Sea after her Void effectively destroyed the blades—did not help her mood.

  “If you had that much insight, why did you claim it was hard to get a feel for them?” Green prompted. It was hard to read her tone.

  “I don’t like sharing speculation without a solid foundation.” Ranthia replied honestly.

  The woman smiled.

  “For your duties as my second, for now let us leave it at this. I trust your judgment and I hope you come to trust my own. If I have not given orders to our buds, please always feel free to do so. There are times I may, or even must, defer to you. Your primary objective should be to help keep the buds safe, so long as it does not come at a terrible cost.” The moss-haired woman instructed.

  Ranthia considered, then nodded and offered her team captain a salute.

  “Oh, and if you ever believe I have made an unfortunate call, I do hope you will let me know.” Green added, as if it was an afterthought.

  Ranthia grimaced openly. The sentiment was appreciated, but it was… surprisingly hard to hear the words. How had she even known…?

  “Mm, I think I can finish the cleaning from here. You should probably check on the young lady you’ve recommended to the Academy.” Green finally spoke into the awkward silence.

  Ranthia nodded and bade the woman farewell, before she turned to leave.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “Oh, and sweet Flower?”

  Ranthia paused when Green called out to her and turned back.

  “One thing I want you to think on after you leave. I never actually asked you what you thought of the combat potential of our team, yet that was how you answered.” Green added, before she waved Ranthia off.

  …Ranthia could only cringe as she made her exit.

  The next morning, their assigned [Healer] was introduced. Hylla—a name that existed in Ranthia’s notes but hadn’t stuck in her head. Though, to be fair, Ranthia was more distracted by the discovery that the young woman was bound by an asinine [Oath] that she insisted was becoming popular amongst [Healers]. Do no harm? And she was required to heal anyone she saw that was in need? The kid was a liability!

  Ranthia tuned out the ongoing conversations while she considered it. Yes, she was perfectly willing to admit she was slightly hypocritical—she was bound by her own [Covenant] and she had yet to even mention it to anyone. Though she really needed to tell Green at some point. But hers wasn’t quite so… stringent. Setting aside that she would have been forced to let the rebels run amok had they been less violent and prolific with their murder, the [Healer]’s [Oath] was outright hostile to many of the duties of a Ranger.

  Yet everyone else seemed excited…

  Ranthia’s own training hadn’t been going very well. [Pure Reflections] conceptually seemed like it should have been dramatically easier to use than [Reflective Motility]. Her images finally did exactly what she wanted under the guidance of the newly evolved skill. And yes, Ranthia had to admit, Hunting had been completely right: [Reflective Motility] had never been very lifelike; the difference between what she could do with it and what she could do with [Pure Reflections] were as different as night and day. …Er, before she had gained [Vision of the Void], at least; she supposed that metaphor had lost some meaning.

  With a single image she could make it behave so realistically that it almost caught her off-guard. She was no longer controlling a puppet: she was willing a true reflection of herself to move and act. Life was remarkably easy to reflect with the newly evolved skill, and yet… making them do exactly what she wanted was remarkably fiddly. With a single image she could manage—though [Ideal Reflectance] added yet another wrinkle as she struggled to incorporate serious attacks with her images.

  With a single image, she was fine.

  With two, things went poorly. While she practiced with the straw training dummy she had purchased, even getting her images to reliably strike it when she had two up was… surprisingly complex. Then when she attempted it while she also attacked alongside them, she messed up so badly that one of her images stabbed her in the upper arm!

  Fortunately, 1% of her strength at its disposal—she hadn’t been having them using [Void Edge], thankfully—meant that the image’s blade only left an itchy scratch on her, but it still proved just how big a problem she had developed. This wasn’t good enough—it couldn’t be.

  The problem plagued Ranthia as their departure date drew ever nearer. The more images she added, the worse it got: with four she struggled to even have them walk without tripping and breaking. She didn’t seek outside counsel though, she was confident that she could figure the problem out. The only issue was her Mirror class was actively using mana now. Even without shifting—which still worked the same as always—her Mirror class was draining her mana for the first time while she trained. It limited how long she could train before she was forced to stop and allow her mana to regenerate.

  Which left her with unwanted time to think. She wished that she could find something to occupy her time. If she was a better person, she would have faced Hexara to apologize for running away and to wish her the best, but Ranthia just… couldn’t. The idea just brought her pain, a pain that was far different than the physical pain she had adapted to.

  Sunrise had briefly been another potential distraction. Initially Ranthia worried that the woman might mention Hexara—they were friends as well, after all—but she soon discovered a larger reason to avoid the seductive prostitute. …It was more than a bit surprising, but Ranthia absolutely didn’t want to be touched. The idea of a massage—or more—from Sunrise was almost outright repellant. Yes, she had noticed during the Convocation that she had really disliked Statia’s hug, but she hadn’t quite realized just how bad it had gotten.

  The realization, of course, made her regrettably aware of it. Even just brushing past Vert in a hallway was suddenly a minor agony.

  It was just further proof that something had broken severely inside of her.

  It would be fine, she reassured herself.

  Instead, Ranthia occupied her downtime while her mana regenerated by writing a series of scrolls that she planned to leave for Hunting. If he had left her a message, she completely failed to find it anywhere in the villa, but she could leave her own for him. …Assuming that he ever actually saw it. She was all too aware that there had been at least four new Sentinels in the short time since she first became a Ranger, yet she could only hope that he was alive and would someday return. In the scrolls she detailed her life since the Academy. …Well, the parts of her life she wanted to share with a mentor, at least. There was quite a bit that she left out, no matter how much unwanted downtime she had.

  Some small part of her believed that it helped her process what she had been through, but her nightmares were no less intense. And her skin still crawled when someone touched her.

  Late afternoon of the final day before her departure, Ranthia finally stumbled upon a partial solution. The problem stemmed from the fact that there was no intelligence behind her images; they did exactly what her instructions commanded with absolute disregard for circumstances or obstacles that even the stupidest beast would notice. So, the solution was to handle her orders to her images in waves when she had more than one image active. If she gave a mirror image orders that carried it through the next several moments, she had enough time to provide a different mirror image its own set of orders. It made them unable to react to changes and she’d struggle to make her images evade all but the most intensely telegraphed attacks… but it was a start. Doing that she was able to handle three images!

  The thought was heralded by a crash, and she amended that to almost being able to handle three images. She was still stuck with two, but that was obviously an improvement over just one. Maybe as she got more used to the timing, she’d be able to increase the number she could handle. She had struggled with [Reflective Motility] at first too, after all.

  Boundless optimism was better than the alternative.

  Once her mana was exhausted, she returned to the villa and picked up her new personal chest (for some strange reason hammering nails into and through the old one without really knowing what she was doing had ruined it). Everything that she planned to bring—including better than twice the coin she brought last time—was already packed, except for what she was about to pick up at her next stop.

  It had cost her a pile of rods, but her personal armor looked as good as new after the leatherworker had finished with its restorations. Ranthia had thanked him only to receive “Rather have coin than words,” in response. Fair enough, another three rods was easily worth the quality the man created. He had even restored her vest—not that he could replace the lost arcanite, but at least she could wear it again.

  With her beloved leather armor added to her storage chest, she was ready to deliver it to Green’s shop. How the woman planned to get all of their luggage from The Garden to the docks ahead of their departure time was beyond her, but Green had waved off the concern. The only response was that she would handle it.

  It wasn’t like it was Green’s first time. The woman had been a Ranger for “more than a few” years and had led teams for quite some time, apparently. Ranthia had to assume she knew what she was talking about, even as she added yet another burden to the pile.

  The next morning, Ranthia locked Hunting’s villa and handed the key to Vert. Her disciple had her belongings crammed into a backpack and was going to stay at a tavern until her time at the Academy started up. Since Ranthia had no better instructions on what to do with the key, she figured Vert could return it to Ocean for her.

  “You’ll do great. I know it. See you in two years, Vert.”

  Ranthia smiled at her disciple and—no matter how little she wanted to—she linked her arm with Vert’s proffered arm and shook it. Ranthia could tolerate that much for the younger woman.

  “Stay safe out there. If yer not at my graduation, I’ll be madder than an ornithocheirus in a pottery shop.” Vert vowed with a surprisingly serious glare.

  Ranthia giggled in spite of her best efforts. It had only been a few days since Vert relaxed enough to start using her strange, yet evocative comparisons around Ranthia. And, frankly, each was a delight.

  “Don’t forget to show up on time for the Academy!” Ranthia responded, not quite able to get the smile off her face or out of her voice.

  Vert saluted in response, just as they had practiced. Then, not one for prolonged goodbyes, the kid set off for the city gates. A moment later, Ranthia began her own sprint to the docks to meet the rest of Ranger Team 6.

  “She’ll be fine.” Ranthia assured herself as she jogged and completed a final check of her own equipment while on the move. Gods and goddesses, how embarrassing would it have been had she realized she left something in Hunting’s villa and had to chase Vert down for the key?

  Thank Xaoc, that wasn’t the case.

  Ranthia arrived at the docks, just in time to watch Art guide their wagon onto the ship that was going to take them to Western Remus to begin their route.

  And it was impossible to miss Ranger Team 6’s wagon. Green had turned the roof of the wagon into a literal garden where numerous different flowers, herbs, and vines grew. Even more striking, the vines hung down the sides of the Ranger wagon—the effect seemed vaguely otherworldly to Ranthia, not that she could explain why. It was a stark contrast to the standard Ranger wagon.

  A short time later Juvenae and Pyra arrived, bringing their group up to full.

  “And we are all aboard! Shrub, kindly inform the Captain that we’re ready to get underway. Anyone who has issues with their sea legs can wait in the wagon with sweet Hylla, it does help in my experience. Please rest and take it easy until we arrive. On arrival, we’ll begin our first duties of the round.” Green announced.

  And a short time later they were underway. Not that Ranthia even remotely enjoyed being on the water. Logically, she knew that the Nostrum Sea was largely safe—so long as they avoided the depths at its heart—and large monsters in it were all but unheard of. …And yet her experience at The Ocean made it impossible to relax.

  Oh well, a little vigilance never hurt anyone.

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  Nozomi Matsuoka.

  Sarah "Neila" Elkins.