The room was quiet for longer than Mike expected.

  He'd used the room with the big table. The one that still had the town council nameplate holders along the edge, most of them empty now, a few still carrying names of people who hadn't been in the town when it came through. Nobody had bothered to move them.

  He'd talked for nearly an hour. He hadn't rushed it.

  He looked down at the papers in front of him while the silence settled. His notes from the past hour, half crossed out and rewritten. Next to them, a single sheet he'd put together over the last two days.

  Frank Hobson. Army, twenty five years, worked his way up from nothing. Knows how to keep people alive, how to train recruits, general fitness.

  Gary Kowalski. Civil engineer. Already identified half a dozen problems with how the town is set up and started making a list.

  Diane Fletcher. Head of science department. Sharpest mind in the room for working out how things actually function.

  Margaret Donnelly. Thirty years in A&E. Seen everything. Won't panic.

  Terry Walsh. Food logistics his whole career. Already worried about winter on day three.

  He put the sheet down and looked up.

  Frank had sat back slowly, arms folding, eyes somewhere above Mike's left shoulder. Already restructuring.

  Gary had both elbows on the table, hands clasped, staring at the wood grain. His knee was going underneath it.

  Diane hadn't moved. Very still yet not at all calm.

  Mags had her arms folded and was looking directly at Mike.

  Terry was looking at his hands.

  John, to Mike's right, said nothing, turning it over, not ready yet. Janet sat quietly to his left, watching the room.

  Terry broke it.

  "What are they eating?"

  Mike blinked. "Sorry?"

  "The village." Terry looked up. "What do they grow, what do they farm. Do they fish. Livestock." He paused. "Only asking cos if we're going to be working with these people we need to know if they can feed themselves or if that's going to be a conversation."

  Gary made a sound that might have been a laugh.

  "That's your first question," Mags said.

  "Someone's got to ask it." Terry shrugged. "Whatever they are, whatever's out there, people need feeding."

  "Fair point," John said. "Though for the record — beast-kin, half-orcs, a few humans from what we know. Elves and dragons exist apparently but not locally. Don't want anyone walking into that meeting expecting the wrong thing."

  "Still need feeding," Terry said.

  Frank unfolded his arms. "The border. How far are we talking. From the town to where things start coming out of the Wilds."

  "Close enough that we've already had one incident," Mike said.

  Frank nodded. "And the village has been managing that border how long?"

  "Generations."

  Frank nodded again.

  "The girl," Mags said. "The one who helped with the goblin. She's their guard captain?"

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  "One of them. Yes."

  "How old is she?"

  Mike thought about it. "I don't actually know."

  Mags looked at him a moment. "But she's been doing it a while."

  "Looks like it."

  She put her hands flat on the table. "I want to talk to their healers before anything else happens. Whatever they know about what's out there we need to know too."

  "That can be arranged."

  Diane hadn't spoken. Mike glanced at her.

  "Diane."

  "Yes." She looked up. "Sorry. Who exactly is coming to this meeting."

  "Village elders, their guard captain, a couple of others."

  "And they're—" she stopped. "The others. What races are we talking."

  "Beast-kin mostly. Half-orc."

  She made a sound. Not a word exactly. She covered it immediately with a cough, picked up her pen and wrote something in her notebook with great focus and deliberation.

  Janet leaned over slightly, read it, and shook her head with a grin.

  Diane clicked the pen shut and looked at Mike with an expression of complete professional composure. "That's fine. Good. Useful for research purposes."

  She looked up at the people staring at her. "What? Did I say something weird?"

  "Right," Terry said. "About the food situation."

  Mike looked around the table. Seven people. All of them still here, still thinking. Outside the civic centre windows the town went about its morning. People who didn't know yet.

  One thing at a time.

  ***

  The beer garden at Lloyd's had three walls and a locked pub behind them, which was the point. Mike had sorted the keys out the day before. No pint at the end of it but at least nobody could wander past and watch.

  Paul had something to say about that when they arrived. Lee caught the word criminal and left it there.

  They'd been at it for over an hour.

  Lee tried again. The lightning came easily enough now, a short controlled burst, clean off the palm. Could work if he wanted to slap someone with it but the moment he pushed it further it scattered. He reset and cast again. Shorter. It held.

  Behind him he could hear Liam muttering, still trying to pull his shield into a dome and not getting anywhere near it. Ste had fog pooling low across the flagstone to his left, thicker in the middle, and was losing the edges every time he tried to push them out. Each attempt collapsed a little slower than the last. Lee tracked Paul without meaning to — he was at the far end, fire building across his knuckles, and he'd already gone pale once this session.

  Parmo hadn't said much in a while, just standing at the back wall, each cast quiet.

  Lee had spotted the change maybe twenty minutes in. The ice leaving Parmo's hand had shape to it now. Not much but it was there. Where before it had flopped and sprayed water across his legs, this travelled. Hit the wall and cracked apart instead of splashing, and the next one was tighter.

  "Parmo," Ste said, not looking up from his fog.

  "Yeah."

  "Your ice looks different."

  "Yeah I know. It's improving quickly now."

  Lee watched him cast again. The projectile left his palm compact, edges catching the afternoon light over the garden wall. It hit the stone and shattered cleanly. The sound it made was different. Across the garden Ste's fog collapsed and stayed there.

  "That's not a snowball," Liam said.

  Parmo cast again. This one faster off the hand, flatter trajectory, hit the wall and broke into fragments rather than slush.

  Then he dropped his arm and looked at his UI. His eyebrows rose as his eyes scanned left to right.

  "It's saying Enhanced Snow Burst."

  Lee lowered his hand. "Enhanced how."

  "There's a breakdown. Total casts, rate of progression, control threshold." He kept reading. "Volume of use. It advanced because I kept casting the same thing, not cos I changed owt. Apparently casting the same shit mindlessly works out in the end."

  Ste looked up properly. "So it's not really about trying to change the spell. It's about repeating it."

  "That's what it's saying."

  "So it's more Elder Scrolls than anything else. Constant repetition?"

  "Apparently, yeah."

  At the far end of the garden Paul had his hand flat against the wall, head down.

  Lee walked over. "You alright man?"

  "Give me a sec."

  "You've gone pale as fuck."

  Paul didn't look up. His hand stayed flat against the wall. "Yeah I know. Two seconds."

  Lee stood next to him and said nothing. After a moment Paul straightened, waved him off, and pushed back toward the group. Lee fell in beside him.

  "There's more," Parmo said when they got back. "It's like a diagram. There's my spell in a box with faint lines going off it. I can't follow them yet but I imagine it leads to other spells. Maybe the more control we get the more we reveal from the spells associated with the one we have. Like a hint of what to do to get a new one in the same category. Ice for example."

  "Does the spell feel harder to cast at all? Like, Paul's clearly takes more out of him per cast than yours. Maybe that's mana cost or a different size mana bar?" Ste said.

  "Has to be." Parmo lowered his hand. "Which means there's a bar somewhere we haven't seen. Wouldn't it make more sense to have it on the stat screen all the time so we can actually track it?"

  The UI flickered.

  Lee felt it before he saw it — the same small pulse as a new tab unlocking. He glanced up. In the corner of his stat screen, where there'd been nothing, a bar sat. A number next to it. Current and maximum.

  He hadn't asked for it. Parmo had.

  Liam had gone still. "Did everyone just—"

  "Yeah," Ste said.

  Paul stared at his own screen. "It heard him."

  Lee looked at his own bar. Current and maximum. Just sitting there.

  Parmo turned back to the wall, raised his hand, and cast again. The ice left his palm clean and sharp, caught the light for half a second before it hit the stone and shattered.

  I've caught up to my backlog and caught the flu in the same day.

  Lovely, I know...

  So I'm going to be posting one chapter a day, down from my usual two.

  I'm hoping this is only for a few days while I get back to 100% and can build up more of a buffer again.

  Thanks for understanding.