Chapter 3 — The Road Out
The gate of the royal city was bigger than Raj's entire apartment building back home.
He stood looking up at it for a moment, bag on his back, wind magic humming quietly at the edges of his senses out of habit. One year ago he had walked through this gate for the first time face down on a stone floor with no idea where he was. Now he was walking out of it with a sword at his hip, a mage's tome strapped to his back, and the vague understanding that somewhere out there a Demon King was waiting.
Strange how life worked.
"Stop staring at the gate," Christine said, walking past him. "It will still be large when we come back."
"If we come back," Rael added helpfully.
"When," Lily said firmly. She adjusted the strap of her healer's pack and smiled at Raj in that way she had — the smile that somehow made the world feel like a slightly more manageable place. "We are absolutely coming back."
Michal clapped his hands once. "Alright. Formation. Raj — take point, thirty meters ahead. Standard scout spread. Report anything that feels wrong."
"Defined as?" Christine asked.
"Anything Raj's instincts flag," Michal said simply.
Raj tried not to let that land on his face. After a year of training together Michal still talked about his instincts like they were a known reliable quantity. Like it was just a fact — Raj's instincts, dependable, end of sentence. Raj himself was not entirely convinced but he had learned that arguing with Michal about this specific topic was a waste of everyone's time.
He moved out ahead of the group and let the world open up around him.
Scout work was quiet work. That was the part nobody told you before you started.
It was not the dramatic sprinting through shadows that Raj had vaguely imagined during the first month of training. It was walking. Carefully. Slowly sometimes. Reading the ground for weight impressions. Reading the wind for scent signatures. Reading the tree line for birds that had gone too quiet.
The road from the royal city to the first waypoint was three days on foot through open farmland before it hit the forest belt. Demon territory started properly at the mountain range beyond that. For now the danger was scouts — demon advance parties that liked to set up ambushes along major roads.
Raj found the first one two hours out of the city.
Four of them. Low rank demons, the type that looked vaguely human until you noticed the wrong number of joints in their fingers. They had set up in a ditch beside the road, crouched under a canopy of woven branches that was genuinely good camouflage. Raj would not have caught it if he hadn't felt the displaced air current with his wind magic — something breathing in a place nothing should be breathing.
He stopped. Held up a closed fist — the signal for halt.
Thirty meters behind him the party stopped without a sound. A year of training had made them very good at reading his signals.
Raj crouched. Counted. Four heat signatures in the ditch. He pulled a small piece of red chalk from his belt — the color code for hostile contact — and drew a quick mark on the road stone, pointing at the ditch with a directional arrow.
Then he stepped back and let Michal take the front.
What followed lasted approximately eleven seconds. Raj counted.
Michal went through the ambush like weather goes through an open window — inevitable, total, and vaguely offended that anything had been in the way. Rael flanked left and was simply immovable when two of them tried to run. Christine fired one spell that Raj was fairly sure violated several laws of physics. Lily stayed back and watched with the calm expression of someone who had seen this enough times to find it only mildly interesting.
The road was clear. The whole thing had taken less time than it took Raj to make a cup of tea.
"Good catch," Michal said, walking back to him.
"They had decent cover," Raj said. "Wind current gave them away."
"See," Michal said, pointing at him. "Instincts."
Raj pushed his glasses up his nose and said nothing.
Camp on the first night was a clearing just off the road. Lily made tea from a small portable kit she carried with the dedication of someone who had decided that the apocalypse was no reason to have bad tea. Christine sat against a log annotating her spell index. Rael sharpened his blade with the methodical patience of a man who found the sound soothing.
Raj sat slightly apart doing a mana circulation exercise — a drill Christine had designed specifically for all-type users to keep each element from bleeding into the others. It was boring and it required complete focus and he did it every night without fail because the one time he had skipped it he had accidentally set his blanket on fire with passive fire mana leak.
"Raj."
He opened his eyes. Lily was holding out a cup of tea.
He took it. "Thank you."
She sat down beside him with her own cup. For a while neither of them said anything. In the distance Michal and Rael were having a quiet argument about optimal patrol rotation that had been going on in various forms for six months.
"Nervous?" Lily asked.
Raj thought about it honestly. "Not about the road," he said. "The road is just walking and paying attention. I can do that."
"And what you're nervous about?"
He looked at the treeline. Somewhere beyond it, beyond the farms and the forest belt and the mountains, was the thing they had been building toward for a year.
"I just want to be useful," he said quietly. "When it actually matters."
Lily looked at him for a moment. Then she said, very simply — "You already are, Raj. You caught those four today before any of us even knew they were there. That is useful. That matters."
He didn't have an answer for that. He just drank his tea.
Above them the sky was very wide and very dark and full of more stars than Raj had ever seen from his bedroom window back home.
He thought — not for the first time — that his old world had no idea what it was missing.
End of Chapter 3