The moon hung high and cold.

  A carriage crept along a winding mountain road in the dead of night. Wheels ground against loose stone, punctuated by the occasional crack of a whip — steady, dull, rhythmic, as though the entire world had been pressed flat under a great, indifferent silence.

  I was turning the ring on my middle finger, eyes closed.

  Then I opened them.

  Something is wrong.

  Something in the air had shifted.

  Not sound. Not vibration.

  Magic.

  A vast, turbulent wave of mana was rolling in from deep down the mountain road ahead — powerful enough that even a common person might feel it as a sudden, inexplicable chill crawling up the spine.

  "Stop the carriage."

  The coachman hadn't fully pulled the reins before I was already pushing the door open and stepping out.

  The night air was stifling. October in these mountains, and it still felt like a furnace.

  Far ahead, deep in the darkness, a blinding column of white light detonated — as though someone had seized the night sky and torn it straight down the middle.

  Lightning affinity. Master-rank.

  Good.

  Tonight's ride home won't be completely boring after all.

  I shoved the knight beside me aside, grabbed his horse's reins, and prepared to mount.

  Then — the carriage door opened again.

  A slender figure stepped down from the carriage. She glanced first toward the direction of the explosion, brow faintly creased, then turned to look at me.

  "Young master. Be careful." Her voice was calm and measured. "That mana signature... whatever is fighting up there, it isn't simple."

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  I couldn't help but laugh.

  "Ha — I am Marvin, Battlemage."

  "I may despise trouble. But I've never once played deaf when trouble comes knocking."

  I swung up into the saddle.

  "Everyone, keep up. I want to see exactly which stray cats and dogs think they can fire off spells in my territory."

  The horse surged forward before I'd finished speaking.

  The woman's name was Emis.

  My assistant. Secretary. Intelligence officer. Someone the family had hand-selected from an orphanage and spent years grooming specifically for me. She had followed me for five years — and to this day, she was the only person who could fully keep pace with how I worked.

  The more inconvenient fact was this: she was absurdly, unreasonably beautiful.

  Neat golden hair cut short. A composed, elegant face. A fitted blue formal coat that never seemed to have a single wrinkle out of place.

  Of course, anyone who dismissed her as ornamental would be dead within three days.

  She had graduated from the same Imperial academy I had. She was a High Mage in her own right. Which meant she'd felt that surge of mana the same moment I did — except her first instinct had been to warn me to be careful, while mine had been to find it interesting.

  We had always differed on that particular point.

  I pressed my knees into the horse's flanks and pushed to a gallop.

  Wind roared past. My mind ran faster.

  My name is Marvin Radell. Third son of House Radell of the Empire.

  By any standard measure, I should have been the type to graduate from a military academy, inherit a generalship, and spend my career looking decorative at court functions. I didn't take that path. I studied Summoning. And Alchemy. The two least fashionable specializations in the entire school.

  Then the family's political enemies arranged to have me thrown at the northern frontier — a crumbling backwater called Feyburn City.

  Five thousand irregular troops. One hundred fifty thousand beastkin on the other side.

  They expected me to die.

  I didn't.

  The beastkin retreated instead.

  So I became a lord. And in passing, I turned that crumbling backwater into the Empire's third-largest commercial city.

  The reason wasn't complicated: a little business sense, a little alchemy, and —

  — some extraordinarily profitable alchemical side products.

  Like a small pill that helped middle-aged nobles rediscover their confidence.

  The demand was so enormous I sometimes wondered whether the nocturnal lives of the Imperial nobility were suffering from some fundamental, widespread systemic failure.

  "Hm."

  I surged ahead, cutting clean out of the escort formation like a gust of wind.

  Swordsmanship wasn't my strongest suit. Riding, on the other hand — I was rather confident. I'd put considerably more hours into horsemanship than into swordplay, for reasons that had at least some tangential connection to those little pills. I won't elaborate.

  In the next instant, a figure came hurtling out of the treeline —

  — trailing blood.

  It hit the roadside and tumbled, barely moving. Clearly near death.

  An elf. Female.

  Just as I was about to reach her —

  A blinding arc of lightning shot again from the depths of the forest. Aimed straight at the elf on the ground.

  They're still coming?

  They say you can tell a master from the first move. I'd sensed from the mana fluctuations alone that whoever was out here wasn't ordinary. But the moment of actual contact made clear I'd still underestimated them.

  That casting speed.

  That output.

  There's a decent chance the opponent isn't even human.

  I raised my hand without hesitation.

  "Tier-One Earth Magic — Stone Wall!"

  BOOM.

  The ground cracked apart. A massive wall of packed earth — twenty feet tall and thick as a garrison rampart — erupted from the road and planted itself between the lightning and the elf. The arc struck it dead-on. Current raced through wet soil, frantic and searing, then sank into the earth and vanished.

  The dust hadn't settled yet.

  From the treeline, five figures walked out slowly.

  I saw their build. I saw their gear.

  A moment of silence.

  Tonight's trouble might be considerably larger than one hundred fifty thousand beastkin.