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Effectively, he had no real idea what this could be for. It could be an Empowerment Ritual, an oversized Hellfire Ritual like the ones he’d made, or one of any of the other Skills he hadn’t discovered yet. At the very least, it didn’t seem to have received a sacrifice yet, so it wouldn’t be capable of doing anything right now.

Zeth almost wanted to reach down and quickly erase the thing before he left. Destroying a circle this large would mean hours upon hours of progress down the drain for his enemy, and there was nothing he savored more than the opportunity to hurt someone he hated. But he resisted the urge. Now wasn’t the time.

This circle had been hidden somehow—he’d gotten a notification about passing an Awareness check before being able to see it, so it was likely a Skill that hid it from people with Stats below a certain threshold. Which meant if this was erased, the Blood Mage would know it couldn’t have been done by some random person passing through. Though, looking at his own Status, Zeth’s Awareness Stat was only at five. Surely that would mean anyone with a couple Levels with any Class that gave out the Stat would be able to see it too? How hadn’t it been discovered by anyone else yet?

He didn’t have time to think about it now, though. Zeth was already somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be, and now that fact was made double by this ritual circle. As much as he hated to admit it, he had no defenses currently, no rituals set up to protect him, and was standing in the middle of enemy territory, which he had just found proof had been set up with rituals to be activated at any moment. No matter how much he wanted answers, he needed to flee. Right now.

Zeth turned to open the door and leave the closet, but just as he reached for the handle, the door swung open on its own. Standing on the other side was a bald man with a stern face.

“Sir,” the man said, “are you authorized to be in here?”

Zeth stammered, unsure what to say.

“I don’t recognize you. What’s your name?”

“I, uh, I’m sorry. I was here to talk to Garon, and got turned around. Not used to these offices.”

“You don\'t work here?”

“No. Well, I used to work as a miner, but I was told to come here to talk to Garon about getting my last salary for leaving. So…”

Zeth was trying his hardest to not look down at the ritual on the floor in his peripheral vision. This guy obviously wouldn’t be able to see it, and some random person staring at a random point on a blank floor would clearly raise suspicion.

After a moment of silence where it seemed like the man was deciding on what to do about the situation, he finally spoke. “You were here to speak with Garon?”

“Yeah, I was.”

“And if I ask him, he’ll say he had a conversation with you?”

“Absolutely. I think I just went the wrong direction out of his office, so, y’know. My bad. I was looking for a map of the building in here, but couldn’t find one.”

The guy rubbed his eyes and muttered something beneath his breath about “stupid miners” and “good for nothing but their muscle,” then spoke more loudly, “Sir, don’t poke around in places you can’t be. These are classified documents. Things you shouldn’t see.”

“Right. Sorry.”

Then, for a split second, Zeth saw the man glance down at the floor—the floor that should have been totally blank from his perspective. His eyes lingered on the spot with the ritual circle for just a moment too long before snapping back up to Zeth’s face. “Come with me. I’ll escort you out.”

Zeth tried to keep his face from showing how absolutely flabbergasted he was as he left the office building and started heading back home. Was that random bald guy the Blood Mage? Zeth definitely could’ve just been imagining things, but it certainly looked like he’d stared right at the ritual circle for a couple seconds. Obviously, if he could see the thing and he wasn’t

the Blood Mage, he’d have said something, if not left the room right then to report it to the guards. Zeth had no idea if he’d just narrowly avoided death by the hands of his friends’ killer, or simply been a mild annoyance on some secretary’s run to grab an extra inkwell from the storage closet.

He hurried home, unwilling to spend a second longer than necessary out exposed like he was on the streets. Did they suspect him? Was the Blood Mage following him home, watching his every move? Was it Garon, who now knew Zeth was alive? Was it that man from the closet? Hell, it could’ve even been that random guy speaking with Garon in the office. He was acting pretty strange, too. Zeth had no idea, and he hated it.

When he got back home, he gave the money to his mom and went right to the window, gazing out. There was nobody coming after him. And, ironically, the guards’ suspicion of this house was a great help to his safety; if the Blood Mage did come after him out here, they’d be more than prepared to catch and subdue them.

It seemed like he hadn’t alerted any overt suspicion from his enemy. Or, at least, if he had, they weren’t taking any immediate action while he was in the protected area. At this point, it may have been best to stay in the house for a few days before going back out to the forest to finish his ritual, just to make sure he was safe. Finally seeing another ritual circle made by someone that wasn’t him…It freaked him out. It was the first real, solid confirmation he’d received that the Blood Mage was still here, ready to kill any who got in their way.

It took until deep into the evening for Zeth’s nerves to calm themselves. Holed up in the house, he had no choice but to rest. And, considering his wounds, taking some time to recover was probably a good idea, anyway.

His mom was in a good mood after receiving the coin infusion of Zeth’s last salary, so she didn’t make Sophie work any longer that day, and Zeth decided to celebrate with her with a game of Scrim. They sat in her room, cards lying between them, chatting as they played.

“I’m gonna use my firebomb card to kill your legion,” Sophie said, pointing at the only defensive card Zeth had left on his side of the board.

He groaned, moving it to the discard pile. “It feels like you always have the perfect card whenever you need it.”

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She pushed her own three unit cards forward. “I attack with my whole army. And you don’t have anything to block with, so…”

“So you get to destroy some of my buildings. Yeah, yeah.”

“My army actually has enough power to destroy all of your buildings.”

Zeth sighed. “I stand alone, a king of rubble.”

“You still have some cards left in your hand. Don’t give up yet!”

Zeth looked down at the cards in his hand, hidden from his opponent. None of them would save him from this onslaught.

“My turn’s over. Your turn!” she said.

Going through the motions of mounting what pitiful resistance he could, Zeth mocked a sigh. “I honestly have no idea how you seem to pull ahead every game.”

“I just use my cards when I need them, and don’t use them when I don’t.”

“Don’t I do that, too?”

“No.”

He chuckled at her matter-of-fact statement. “How could you know that?”

She straightened her back, taking a more authoritative tone. “Well, on your fourth turn, you used your assassinate card to kill my royal advisor. You shouldn’t have done that.”

“What? Why? It was letting you draw extra cards.”

“But I had this great general card in my hand that I played two turns later,” she said, pointing at the card that had been making trouble for Zeth all game long. “You should have saved your assassinate to kill that. Then you wouldn’t have lost all of those battles, and your army would have been way bigger right now.”

“How could I have known you’d been hiding a great general in your hand, though?”

“I played a recruit card on my second turn. It let me go through the deck and pick out any soldier I wanted to put into my hand. What did you think I got?”

Zeth frowned. When she put it like that, it did seem obvious to save his assassinate to use later. “I guess I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. Still, it’s not like you can expect me to always know every card you have hiding in your hand.”

“I know every card in your hand.”

Zeth looked at her. “Okay, tell me.”

“You have a great general of your own, a twelve-headed hydra, and some card that would draw extra cards for you. Probably a royal advisor, but it could also be a scholar or a library.”

He looked down at his three cards. Great general, twelve-headed hydra, and royal advisor. Then he looked back up at her, staring smugly at him. “How did you know that? Are you cheating?”

“I can tell from how you’ve been playing. You also played a recruit card earlier in the game, when you had two legions in your army, so you’d probably want to get a great general to increase their power. And you keep trying to increase your gold even though you already have a lot saved up, which means you must have a really expensive card in your hand, which is probably the hydra. And the last one…I don’t know. I can tell. It’s not a unit to add to your army or anything that can kill my units since you would have played those already. I just pay attention. If you’re good enough at the game, there’s no such thing as hidden information. You always at least know what they’re doing right now, which means you can always guess what they might be hiding.”

“...Huh.” Zeth frowned. Had he really been that predictable? “Well, you obviously know you’ve basically won by now, if you know what’s in my hand. Good game.”

“Yay!” she said with a giggle, instantly leaving her scholarly persona and going back to being a normal nine-year-old girl. “Can we play again?”

He chuckled. “We’d play all day if it was up to you. Why don’t you go read that book I got you?”

“I already did.”

Zeth blinked. “What? It was over two hundred pages long.”

“Yeah. After I finished working for mom I went to my room and read through it all. And once I finished, I asked you to play Scrim.”

“So it took you…what, four, five hours?”

She shrugged, picking up the cards from the floor. “I guess. Why?”

“I just didn’t realize you tore through books so quickly. I’ll have to find a way to get some extra coin so I can buy you more. Maybe I can convince mom to let me take you to the library for a day and you can pick some out for yourself.”

Her eyes widened. “Really?!”

“Yeah, yeah. Later on, though. I don’t know how I could get the money yet.”

“Can we just go there and I can read the books without taking them out?”

“They don’t let you read whole books there without buying them. It’s one thing to look up a specific piece of information. But reading them front to back isn’t allowed. Still, I guess if you read through the one I got you that enthusiastically, you liked it?”

She nodded. “It was really cool! It wasn’t like the other ones you got me.”

“That’s good,” Zeth said, relieved she ended up liking it. He hadn’t even skimmed through it himself, since he’d gotten it in such a panic. “Wait, it was different? How?”

“Well, the other magic book was about how to do magic, and all the different types of magic you can do, and that stuff.”

Zeth glanced at the book he’d given her, sitting on her bedside table—‘A Traveler’s Guide to Magic and Combat.’ It certainly seemed like it’d be about the same sort of thing. Maybe more focused on the combat applications of magic, but it still seemed like an educational type of book.

“The one you gave me,” she continued, “wasn’t about how to do magic, it was how to fight against magic. Like, if you get attacked by someone who can do magic, how can you kill them, and stuff.”

“Oh. And you liked that?”

She nodded fervently. “It was really cool! I got to learn about all kinds of magic that the other book didn’t talk about.”

“I thought the other book talked about every different type of magic.”

“That book said it wasn’t allowed to teach about magic that wasn’t legal,” she said. “But this book said it was, since it was just teaching about how to fight against it! I even read a chapter that was about that Class the guards were talking about yesterday! The Blood Mage Class!”

Zeth’s eyes widened, and he fought to keep a straight face as he nodded. “...Oh. That’s interesting.”

“Yeah, it talked all about their rituals and what you should be prepared for if you’re going to fight one. It even talked about that one ability the Blood Mage here used, where he caught the monster on fire! The book says you should always have a potion crafted by someone you trust with the Alchemist Class that can help you resist heat if you ever think you might fight a Blood Mage. I’m gonna tell mom that we should get some potions tomorrow.”

“Y’know what? It might actually not be that good of an idea to tell mom about that book. She may not appreciate you learning about that sort of thing.”

“Okay! Still, I learned about a lot of other illegal magic, too! Like explosion magic, and plague magic, and necromancy…I definitely want to get a magic Class soon.”

Zeth chuckled nervously. “Uh, not one of the illegal ones though, right?”

She silently shrugged, not meeting his eye.

“...Right. Well, you’re a really hard worker, kiddo. I’m sure that if you try, you’ll be able to get any Class you want. Just, be sure to really think about which one you want, alright? It’s super tough to get a second Class, so chances are, you’ll be stuck with what you choose for life. And you probably don’t want to stick yourself with an illegal Class unless you have a really good reason.”

“Why are some types of magic illegal?” she asked quietly.

“Some Classes can really hurt people if you’re not careful. The empire doesn’t care what your intentions are; if you get into something like plague magic, you can end up with the power to kill a whole city. They just wanna protect people, I guess.”

“But what if you don’t want to hurt people?”

Zeth didn’t know what to say. “They can’t know for sure what you want. Um, kiddo, did that book make you want to take an illegal Class?”

She looked away. “No.”

“...Uh-huh. Well, if you ever want to talk about that sort of thing, I’m here. I promise I won’t be mad at you, or whatever.”

“Okay.”

With one more lingering look at her, Zeth stood and turned to walk out of the room. It could\'ve just been a fleeting interest; she read some cool anecdote about someone who wielded explosion magic blowing up a forest or something, and she thought it was neat. Hopefully, she’d be over it in a week.

Though, he hadn’t ever known Sophie to be the fickle type when it came to aspirations.