Needless to say, Valar did not sleep well that night. In fact, he spent the entire evening and night just thinking about Viktor’s words about his fire, dragons and the consequences of discovery.

  The situation had been bad enough when the risk was that he could be kidnapped by a greedy noble or taken into the church of light. Showing his fire to anyone had been risky, and that’s why only Elaine and Viktor knew about it. Well, Thomas Dremen found out about it too. He isn’t alive anymore though…

  Valar shivered under his heavy blanket. His mind was overwhelmed by thoughts of death, imprisonment and mighty beasts.

  However, those mighty beasts had become a new source of grief for Valar. Not just any mighty beasts either, but the mightiest around: Dragons.

  To give context to his worries about Valar’s fire, Viktor had explained some basic facts about dragons to the boy. Each of his sentences only inspired more anxiousness, and Valar was starting to understand Elaine’s manic reaction to the news much better now that the situation had been somewhat explained to him.

  Dragons were the guardian beasts of the realm of Aldun. They were not unique in their role, as each of the other realms had similar guardians. For a quick example, devils were the guardians of the abyss, while fae lords were the guardians of the wildwood. These beings did not share a lot of commonalities, but they were united by two things: The desire to protect and their rank.

  A guardian of a realm needed to be able to protect it from any threats—external or internal. That meant that they needed to exist at the absolute peak of that realm, which of course was diamond rank. That meant that if the dragons found out about Valar’s fire, Viktor could not protect him from them. Even the king couldn’t protect him!

  That was only if the dragons found out about his fire… How likely was that? Could they sense the similarity, or were they as blind to it as everyone else? Even if they could, what was the actual chance of Valar ever encountering a dragon and being forced to use his fire in front of it?

  So, the probability was infinitesimally low. Everyone recognized that, but they still couldn’t shake the panic and fear coming from the revelation. Sure, the chances were low, but the consequences could be massive.

  They could all die. The entirety of Leoria could be razed to the ground if the dragons deemed it necessary…

  But was that enough for Valar to stop using his fire entirely?

  In some ways, Valar would be a good citizen if he never used his fire again. The risks were simply too large. But could he really promise to never use his fire again? To forsake that strength? To give up something that was comparable to dragonfire?

  No. The resounding answer was no.

  Valar could lie and tell the adults that he would never use his fire again. He could tell them that he would never draw upon it again, never chase that potential, but that would be a lie.

  His soul held fire that had almost the same signature as dragonfire, but it was much weaker. That was obvious, as Valar could never hold or even draw upon the amounts of power required to match dragons. His fire was like a candle to their inferno. It was lesser in both power and quality, but not in nature.

  Valar didn’t know if his ability to draw upon his fire would improve as his rank increased. If he was unlucky, he would never be able to draw upon more than the meager amount he could right now. If he was lucky instead…

  The temptation to progress and find out was too tantalizing. He could never completely abandon it, but he could promise to be careful. That wasn’t much of a change from what he had been doing already, but now he knew that discovery could risk much more than his own safety. His attitude on the fire was unchanged. I only use it when it’s absolutely necessary. If I need to train with it somehow, I’ll do it it somewhere private…

  Elaine’s and Viktor’s earlier efforts to protect Elaine’s office from prying eyes raised a question. What even was a private place? Could Valar actually ever find a place that was private enough?

  The deep forest could probably be fine... Would it?

  Population centers weren’t an option due to a simple reason: Dragons had visages. They could blend in within any city and occasionally did just that. They were guardian beasts after all, so they went and checked what they were guarding. Viktor couldn’t say how often they visited, as no one ever found out about their visits, but he was pretty sure that the visits to human cities were rare. Dragons lived for at least millennia, so they wouldn’t be visiting often. Probably. Hopefully.

  Humanity’s approach to dragons was to basically ignore their existence in the hopes of not angering them. That hadn’t always been the case, but those who challenged them learned the error of their ways quickly and brutally. Humanity, not just Leoria, would let the dragons reign. Because what else could they even do?

  These thoughts bounced around in Valar’s mind for many hours, but he did eventually fall asleep. The issue wasn’t something the boy could really change in any way, so the thoughts fell away as he fell into a restless slumber full of terrifying beasts, fire and burning cities.

  The next morning was just more of the usual. Valar washed himself, ate breakfast with Zeke and the prince, attended the lecture and studied life magic in Elaine’s class. The only difference to the norm was Arwen’s presence, but that didn’t affect his morning routine that much. He did make breakfast conversations a bit more reserved, but Zeke didn’t seem to care so Valar didn’t either.

  Arwen had already told him that he would not use his position to punish Valar for his insolence. Twice. Still, Valar couldn’t fully shake off his nervousness around the prince like Zeke did. For him, that would come with time.

  The day’s lesson after life magic was not on unconventional uses of magic like Viktor’s class, but beastlore. It wasn’t Valar’s first class on the subject, but he tended to like the classes more and more each time they were held.

  Diverging from basically every other class, the beastlore class was not taught by a mage, but a physical fighter. And not just any physical fighter, but a Desmond Carter, a gold rank ex-adventurer from Kilras.

  The man was of average height but that was where everything average about him ended. His left eye had been slashed off and replaced by a jagged scar, while the remaining one was bright blue, bordering on azure. The man was almost too muscular for his frame, and Valar was pretty sure that his arms were thicker than his head was wide. His bald head and strong jaw completed the look of a veteran. If there ever was a stereotype for an ex-adventurer, Desmond matched it perfectly.

  Every prior class that the man had held had been enlightening to say the least. He had started from iron rank beasts common to the area, progressing through and cataloguing their strengths, weaknesses, threat levels and possible valuable parts. The man mainly focused on species that were native to the area, but he did use some other beasts as examples when talking about specific threats or the like.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  He had already told about the infernal lycans Valar’s caravan had encountered on the way from Lyndale. Apparently they were beasts that could be born all the way at iron rank, and fire wasn’t the only possible affinity that they could be. Glacial, umbral, voltaic and many other kinds of lycans existed across the world. Just like many other beasts, lycans took on magic from their environment and formed packs based on that affinity.

  Basically, beasts like the infernal lycans were one of the most common beasts an adventuring party could encounter in the wild. Other types like swarms or solitary hunters were much more rare and generally considered much more dangerous.

  “Has anyone here heard of a behemoth ursa?” Desmond asked. “Soaring death? Umbral terror?

  Valar’s eyes went wide and he raised his hand. The ex-adventurer smiled. “I’m guessing you’ve heard of an umbral terror based on your reaction. What do you know of them?”

  The boy shrugged. “They are big black cats that can blend into their surroundings using dark magic. The one that attacked me-”

  “What?” Desmond butted in. “You’ve been attacked by an umbral terror? You’re still at iron rank and alive?”

  “Well… I killed it,” Valar muttered. “That’s why I awakened so young.”

  The gold ranker looked at Valar with squinted eyes. After a small moment, a massive grin grew on his face. “Holy shit, boy! You actually killed one before awakening? The adventurer’s guild is always hiring, you know…”

  “Honestly, what’s so amazing about that?” a student of wind magic asked from the back of the class. “If he killed it while unawakened, the beast can’t be that bad!”

  “Zero,” Desmond uttered the word like it was a grand spell.

  “What?”

  “Zero. That’s the amount of students that would come out of this room alive if I was an umbral terror. Every single one of you would be a simple meal for the beast. Your spells would glance off its fur, every attack meaningless in the face of its sheer physical might. This young man killed an umbral terror and awakened from that kill… It’s a feat worthy of praise. That feat doesn’t become null and void just because you weren’t the one to achieve it, brat.”

  “What did you just-?”

  “I called you a brat, because that’s how you are acting. Go tell your house that Desmond Carter hurt your feelings, and see what they make of it!”

  That shut up the young wind magic student. The grizzled adventurer stared him down for a second or two, but eventually moved on. The man had a class to teach, and as fun as it was to intimidate young nobles, his work needed to take priority.

  “The description of an umbral terror was accurate to say the least. Any beast that can hunt others of its own rank is highly dangerous and should be avoided without prior preparation. To make this easier to understand, I’ll be explaining a little bit about the behemoth ursa, but do remember that every solitary hunter is dangerous in their own way. Never, and I mean never, try to hunt one without being absolutely sure of victory. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong, believe me.”

  The man moved to the front of the class and opened his book on beastlore. The class had an artifact to project the image onto the wall, so all the students could see what Desmond was talking about.

  The book on beastlore had a drawn image depicting a gigantic bear, comparable in height to a tree of middling size. Its rough fur was grey and scars speckled its side, showing that the beast had fought up to its rank instead of being born to it. Its eyes were the color of the sunset, a deep orange, and its teeth… Each one was like the head of an axe.

  “What you are looking at is the adventurer’s guild’s depiction of a behemoth ursa,” Desmond said. “This one was drawn to portray a silver rank one, but I can tell you that they are big regardless of rank. They are obviously stronger than most beasts, but some adventurers tend to overlook their toughness. Behemoth ursae are a total nightmare to put down precisely because they don’t really care what hits them. Fights against them can last for tens of minutes or even hours, and the biggest issue is making up a strategy that lets the party survive for the entire fight. As you can probably expect, getting hit isn’t a good idea if you don’t want to turn into a red paste.”

  “What can you even do?” a water magic student asked. “That beast feels too strong to even take on!”

  “If it's a rank lower than your party, you can probably take it in an extended fight. If it's the same rank, run,” Desmond deadpanned. “The behemoth ursa is one of the rare cases where the adventurer’s guild doesn’t allow teams of the same rank to take contracts on them. They are often the strongest beast of their rank in the area, and should be avoided at all costs if you don’t outrank them.”

  “How rare are beasts like that? I haven’t heard of any,” the same water magic student questioned.

  “Extremely. Even the umbral terror doesn’t warrant that rule, although I tend to disagree on that matter. The guild’s reasoning for making that ruling on the behemoth ursa is that an extended fight is all but guaranteed. If your team is the same rank as the ursa, a single mistake will be your end. The longer the fight, the bigger that issue becomes. Needless to say, fights against the behemoth ursa are long.”

  “Have you ever killed one?”

  Desmond grinned. “Yeah, while in silver rank. Our team fought a bronze rank ursa and we almost died even though we were elites. Those fuckers are no joke!”

  “You mentioned that both swarm monsters and solitary hunters are big threats,” a student of earth magic said. “What makes the swarm monsters that bad? Aren’t they pretty weak?”

  “If you face only one of them, sure,” Desmond said, a grin growing on his grizzled face. “But when you see a solitary southern blood wasp, is it ever truly alone?”

  The earth magic student shrugged. “Maybe?”

  The gold rank ex-adventurer turned to the page telling about the wasp in question, and pointed at its picture. “Here comes the first rule of encountering a swarm type beast, so listen up! They. Are. Never. Alone!”

  The wasp depicted in the picture was the size of a small mundane wasp, its stinger comparable to a large needle used to sew broken clothing. The insect itself was nearly black with thin red lines crossing its body. The stinger was dripping blood, and Valar suspected that it wasn’t the beast’s own.

  “This is a southern blood wasp. It lives everywhere on the continent’s southern coastline, and can be encountered all the way in southwestern Khatesh. If you ever go south, you will encounter a blood wasp. And as the first rule of encountering swarm type beasts suggests, it is never alone,” Desmond sighed. “A singular wasp is quite easy to kill and is considered to be one of the weakest beasts for its rank. Its sting makes your blood thinner, so you bleed profusely from the wound the puncture causes, so it is by no means useless offensively, but its weakness originates from its slow movement and weak body. To be frank, any of you could walk up to a southern blood wasp and swat it with a stick. That would be that. Wasp dead, you unharmed, yay. But in a swarm…”

  Desmond started pacing and tapping the scabbard hanging off his belt with his fingers. “Avoiding a single wasp is easy. They are slow moving relatively large targets that are hard to miss. The unfortunate thing is that a single colony of southern blood wasps can range between one hundred and ten thousand beasts. Most are iron rankers, about one fifth are bronze rankers and the rest are hopefully at silver rank. If the queen is a gold ranker or even stronger, the colony becomes an existential threat to the nearest city. Why is that?”

  Valar pondered on it for a while, but eventually he spoke up in the silence of the classroom. “If a single sting can be dangerous and there are that many of them, dodging them would be really difficult, wouldn’t it? They could overwhelm most adventurers pretty easily.”

  Desmond clapped once, the sound coming from his movement registering around the same time his hands moved together in Valar’s eyes. The whole class flinched, but the ex-adventurer didn’t seem to care. “Your answer is right but incomplete. Indeed, dodging or blocking their stings becomes a feat that is hard for even veteran adventurers, but part of the issue is that no matter how many you kill, more take their place. Since the creatures fly, their dead kin don’t block their movements in any meaningful way, so killing them becomes useless as long as there are more of them. And there always are… If you ever visit the south, go check the ruins of Kalmor near the coast. If my speech didn’t convince you, that will.”

  “The ruins of Kalmor…” the water magic student muttered. “Wasn’t Kalmor-”

  “A large city that fell a couple of decades ago to a beast attack,” Desmond finished the young woman’s words. “The attack had beasts of all varieties, but the biggest contributor to the city’s destruction was a southern blood wasp hive with an onyx rank queen. The hive was destroyed after the city was razed to the ground, but needless to say, that was too late for most of the citizens.”

  Some beasts could be scary indeed…