Sadie opened the door wider, and unhooked her staff from the handle. “Sorry, we all slept in a lot today,” she told Cassy.

  “I almost forgot it was Sunday,” Danielle admitted, sitting up again on her bed. “I do still want to do it though. Are you coming, Akari? Maybe we can go out to that path around the building and build a fire there on the concrete, and it can burn down while we pray and then we can cook dinner on the coals.”

  “Oh, that’s actually a good idea,” Akari said. “Let me get stuff together, just a minute.”

  “You can’t tempt me out there today, even with a campfire,” Sadie said. “I’m warm enough anyway, I need the rest and the water, and I swapped my career so I could study, and I’m going to study.”

  “All right, you can have Useful Crafts first, then, while I’m out,” Danielle said, pulling on socks.

  “OK, sure, we’ll do it that way,” Sadie agreed. She stood guard by the door while Danielle continued pulling on her jeans and boots, put her filled canteens into her Decision Day satchel, and got her sword belted on. Akari stomped into her boots, belted on her own sword, and picked up the bundle of firewood.

  “Don’t forget your water,” Danielle reminded her. “Do you need me to carry the rabbit pot?”

  “Could you please?” Akari got her own water bottles and tossed them into her school satchel.

  Danielle got the pot of boiled rabbit out of the cold box, picked up her staff in her other hand, and activated her Sense Mana Source Skill as she approached the door. There was no one ahead of her except Cassy, so she stepped out and casually glanced down the building, almost but not quite as if she was looking down the walkway. There were quite a lot of glows on this end of the building; apparently the SHAD Party weren’t the only ones staying in. For all it was past 1pm, Danielle couldn’t help wondering if other people might even still be sleeping in – after all, they’d all had a stressful day and a long hike on Friday, and then been awakened at the crack of dawn Saturday, and at least some people had gone out to set snares or try to hunt like she and her friends had. Probably not many of them had hiked a mile out and back four times, but there were plenty of other ways to overdo it on the first day of chasing down wild food, she was sure.

  Akari joined the two of them in the walkway after a few moments, firewood under one arm and staff in hand, and Sadie stepped back in with a nod and closed the door.

  “No weapons for you?” Akari asked Cassy. Danielle turned back to her and noticed that she was wearing the tool belt with the knife and hatchet in their sheaths, but no sword or bow, and she didn’t seem to have her staff with her either.

  “I didn’t think I’d need them for praying,” Cassy said, sounding a bit intimidated.

  “For praying, you won’t,” Danielle assured her. “We brought them in case someone comes after our dinner or something crazy like that.”

  “Ah, I guess you’ve heard the rumors then,” Cassy said, and started leading the way around to the stairs.

  “Rumors? I don’t think we have, actually,” Danielle admitted. “We went pretty far out yesterday, looking for plants, and picking a spot for snares that people weren’t already having fistfights over.”

  “Oh. Well, the rumor is that people ended up fighting with more than fists,” Cassy reported miserably. “There are supposedly at least three people dead already, maybe more – the wilder rumors say a dozen. There’s supposedly a group of boys who made a system org called the Wolf Pack, and supposedly they’re all level three already. Or one of them is, depending on who you hear it from.”

  “Oh, what a creative name,” Akari deadpanned.

  “What, Wolf Pack? I don’t know, I don’t think creativity is their thing, really,” Cassy said. “Violence seems to be their thing.”

  “Are they out in the woods, or holed up in their rooms for the next three days?” Danielle asked. She turned her eyes back to the building, scanning the mana sources in her Skill-vision, trying to see if any of them looked different. She wasn’t familiar enough with the Skill to be sure, but she didn’t think any of the mana-blobs in range were particularly different. What would it look like – would they be brighter? A different color? Something else? She was starting to notice small variations in shape and movement, but it was like looking at a very out-of-focus photograph; details were certainly there, but she couldn’t see them properly. Meanwhile, Cassy and Akari were still talking.

  “Almost everyone says they got chased into their rooms,” Cassy said. “There are some people stalking a couple of rooms in building seven in hope they come out early. I’d be worried about them getting the wrong room, but my roommates say they saw the murder tag, or I think they actually meant the Outlaw Trait, and they say you can’t mistake it.”

  “If they’re all holed up in building seven, at least we’re not too close,” Akari said, leaning on her staff a bit as they went up the stairs. Danielle shamelessly leaned on her own staff, too; her arms were sore, but less sore than her legs.

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  “The Wolf Pack boys might all be in building seven, I’m not sure; but there are definitely a couple of girls with Outlaw already, too,” Cassy reported. “My roommates saw them running up the stairs of our building yesterday evening. That’s where they actually saw what it, you know, does.”

  “Oh. That’s definitely too close for comfort,” Akari said.

  “I know,” Cassy said seriously, leading the trio back around towards the back of building six. “So as much as I don’t want to have to go armed everywhere, well, I can’t blame you for doing it. Even I have the hatchet. I keep telling myself it’s just for the wood, but if someone snuck up and startled me, I don’t know what I’d have done.”

  “Oh, were you expecting to chop wood for the fire on the spot?” Danielle asked.

  “Not exactly. I, um, kind of got on my roommates’ nerves, and they sorta kicked me out of the room and told me to get some firewood. So I did that for a while, and I’ve got a big pile over there,” she gestured towards a further stretch of the boundary walkway, down across from her own room, where a substantial pile of roughly sectioned branches was stacked amid a litter of wood chips, twigs, and dry leaves. “I got tired of chopping wood, but I’m kind of afraid to go back to my room, so I came and knocked on your door instead,” she admitted.

  “Afraid as in, awkward and you haven’t figured out how you want to deal with it?” Danielle asked. “Or afraid as in, afraid for your life?”

  “Both,” Cassy said grimly. “Like I said yesterday, my roommates are all close to each other, and they resent me for being an outsider in their room, and a rich kid and a tutoring student and so on. They didn’t like me trying to get them to tell me about themselves, and I’m afraid they’ll decide life would be easier if they took my mana and my emergency rations and had a three-person room.”

  “Oh, that’s rough,” Akari said. “I don’t even know what I’d do in a room like that. I was afraid I would be, too – that’s why I’m so grateful Danielle thought to ask for me to fill in the fourth spot with her other friends. It never even occurred to me that we could ask to room with people from other grades.”

  “You two aren’t in the same grade?” Cassy asked.

  “No, Akari’s half a year older than me,” Danielle said. “And it’s not a bigger gap than between me and some of the younger people in my grade, but we have the summer break between our birthdays, so she lands in the grade above me.”

  “Yeah, Danielle’s an older kid for her grade, and I’m one of the younger kids in my grade” Akari said.

  “Well, I guess we’re all adults now,” Cassy said. “But for the record, I’m 14.”

  “Closer to my age, then,” Danielle said with a nod.

  “This is good enough,” Akari said, stopping. “We don’t need to put our fire right next to Cassy’s wood pile – we’re close to our room here, in case we need to jump down into the walkway and grab stuff. Would you be OK with giving us some of your chips and leaves to help start the fire, though?”

  “Oh, sure,” Cassy said. “You can have some logs too. It’s not like I think my roommates actually want me to bring a huge pile of wood into the room.” She jogged down the walkway while Akari and Danielle got busy arranging the wood Akari had brought. When she came back, she put a pile of dry and half-dry leaves and small twigs and wood chips at the base, and Akari added a couple of pieces of torn cardboard and what Danielle recognized with some amusement as her tea bag wrapper.

  “Is that tea wrapper even dry?” Danielle asked.

  “The corners are, and the rest will dry up and burn off soon enough,” Akari said. “It’s less there for tinder than to get rid of it.” So saying, she pulled her tinder box out of its designated pouch in her Decision Day satchel. “Get out yours too,” she told Danielle, “and we’ll both try – it’ll be good practice, and maybe get the fire going faster.”

  They each took a few bits of cardboard and started trying to get a spark to land near the torn edges where it would catch easily. Akari got hers going in about five minutes; Danielle needed another five minutes to get enough flame to light a twig, by which time Akari had moved her own into the hollow in the wood pile and started feeding in larger twigs and the drier leaves. Danielle stuck her twig under another stick, just a bit off to one side.

  “Good job,” Akari said.

  “You were a lot faster,” Danielle said with a sigh.

  “Sure, but my parents took me camping more,” Akari reminded her.

  “Yeah, my parents both hated camping for some reason,” Danielle said. “I went with your family more than mine.”

  “So you practiced, and you succeeded,” Akari said. “And the fire is going. Flawless victory!”

  Cassy laughed. “Should I bring my tinder box too, next time?”

  “Sure, why not?” Akari asked. “Did you camp much, before this?”

  “Depends on what you call ‘much’ I guess, but my parents started as soon as I got my youth level, and took me three times a year; once in late spring, once in midsummer, and once in early fall. This would’ve been the fourth year, but you know.” Cassy stared morosely into the fire.

  “You’re going to be busy at midsummer this year,” Danielle supplied.

  “Yeah. That.” Cassy poked another stick into the fire from an odd angle. “At least it’s not pouring rain on us, like it did at this year’s spring campout. Today’s a little cloudy, but we had dry weather for our first big hike and the outdoor breakfast yesterday, and people’s first day of hunting and everything.”

  “It’s a good thing, or this would be a lot harder,” Akari said. “It might really be worth bringing some wood inside, or at least stacking it against the building where it’ll be out of the rain.”

  Soon they had the fire burning bright, if rather smokey. They all sat around it quietly for a while. They jumped when a door slammed somewhere nearby and above them, but after a few long anxious minutes it was clear that whichever door it had been, no one was coming in their direction. Danielle silently activated Sense Mana Source again, and tried to see if she could detect mana sources that weren’t in her field of vision, but the Skill seemed stubbornly determined to use her eyes, even though the ”lights” were clearly an artifact of the Skill and not really light at all. They ignored walls, but not her own eyelids, or even her hands. She supposed that meant she could “shade her eyes” if she accidentally ended up looking at a very bright mana source – like all those Rangers! – so it wasn’t all bad, but she did wish she had a better Skill for preventing people from sneaking up on her. With the woods on one side, and the Rooms on the other, there wasn’t really a direction she could face that didn’t make her feel like there was danger at her back.

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