Greta walked at the front of our group, steady and sharp, the kind of presence that made the forest feel less dangerous simply because she existed in it. She never stumbled, never hesitated, never allowed the forest to dictate the pace of our progress. Each step she took gave us a path to follow. Winnie and I stayed close behind her, letting her confidence carry us forward. My shield was clumsy, swinging in front of me whenever I adjusted my grip on the straps. Winnie carried hers strapped easily to her arm, as if the thing had been crafted to fit her perfectly. Myrda took the rear, her steps silent and her eyes always watching the rest of the class.

  We made our way through the Copper Zone first. Strange sounds echoed from deep within the trees. Low growls and sudden cracks of branches reminded us that danger lived only a short distance away, even if it kept itself hidden. Every time I heard something shift in the distance, my arms tensed around my shield. Winnie cracked her knuckles once, more excited than afraid. Myrda occasionally told someone to keep close or stop drifting toward the edges of the path.

  When we crossed the boundary back into the Tin Zone, everything softened. The tension in the air loosened. The colors warmed and brightened. Bird shaped monsters chirped, leaves rustled, and the forest felt almost welcoming again. Even the ground had a calmer rhythm beneath our feet. The Tin Zone was meant to be kinder, safer, and more forgiving.

  That sense of safety lasted only until we reached the Hammer Turtle grounds.

  Chaos filled the clearing.

  Children ran in every direction, shouting the incantations of their spells with no rhythm, control, or awareness, each incantation louder than the last. Bursts of magic shot out at random. Sparks crackled and flashed. Bright flashes lit up the trees. Small explosions shook the ground like someone had tossed rocks into a pond.

  One turtle lay scorched black; its shell curled like burnt paper. Another was frozen stiff, an ice spike run clean through its midsection. A third had its shell shattered by a blast that had left fragments scattered across the dirt. One of the trainees pressed a hand toward the ground, and the soil rose and folded around a turtle, crushing it slowly and painfully.

  I thought about how wasteful it was, but maybe they were doing some kind of training that I did not know about. Maybe this was how magic users learned in this day and age. Maybe destroying things was part of the adventures guild process for trainee wizards.

  Then I looked closer.

  The corpses were ruined. Scorched, shattered, mutilated. Burnt beyond use. Frozen solid. Crushed into sludge. Not a single one could be used for the first quest. Not a single one would teach them anything about careful work.

  "That seems unnecessary," I said aloud.

  Greta answered instantly. "That is because it is. Let me guess. I bet that’s Randalls class." She spoke his name like she had stepped in something she wished she had not.

  Under a wide, older tree, a man lounged with his back pressed against the trunk. His hat was floppy and broad-brimmed, large enough to hide half his face. A purple robe covered in stitched stars draped over him, and a pipe hung loosely from the corner of his mouth. His staff leaned lazily against the tree as if even it refused to stand upright without support.

  "Yes, yes, use the third form of angular refraction," he mumbled.

  I frowned at that. There is no third form of angular refraction. What was he even talking about?

  Greta stepped forward. "Randall."

  Her voice cracked across the clearing like a slap.

  The man jolted so hard his pipe fell out of his mouth and landed on his robe. He scrambled to catch it before it burned a hole in the fabric. "Oh. Hello, Greta. Fancy seeing you here."

  "Randall, what is your class doing?" Greta asked. Her voice was almost calm, which somehow felt far more dangerous than shouting.

  He waved a hand lazily. "First day monster slaying. What your group did yesterday."

  Greta pointed at a flattened turtle and another scorched one. "And how exactly are they supposed to gather materials from these corpses?"

  "Oh, that is fine," Randall said with a shrug. "I will get them some turtles afterward. Easy enough. Let them have fun."

  "This is not about fun," Greta said. Her voice sharpened like a blade. "We train them to do the work correctly. To survive."

  Randall sighed heavily, rubbing his forehead as if sunlight itself was too much of a burden. "Alright, alright. Brats, get over here. We are going to try this again."

  He pushed himself upright, nearly wobbling. He looked hungover. Badly.

  "When you kill the turtles," he said, waving his hand lazily in a circle, "do not damage the skull or the shell. They are part of a quest and you will need them later. There. Instruction given."

  He turned and began lowering himself back toward the tree, already aiming to return to sleep.

  "Randall," Greta snapped.

  He froze mid-bend.

  "Our job is to make sure none of them get hurt," she said. "And what I see here will get someone hurt. Maybe not you. Maybe not your class today. But they do not have control."

  Under his breath he muttered, "What do you know about controlling magic, meathead."

  Greta stopped moving.

  "What did you just call me?" she asked quietly.

  Randall flinched so hard he nearly tripped over his own feet. "Nothing. Nothing at all."

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  He rushed to gather his class. "Children, come along. We are going to a different area. Let us give the brute squad space to train."

  Greta narrowed her eyes, but he refused to meet her gaze.

  Randall lifted his staff with a dramatic flourish that fooled nobody. "You teach your class your way, Greta, and I will teach mine my way."

  He marched off with his trainees, still muttering under his breath as they scattered toward a distant part of the Tin Zone. They continued swinging their wands in chaotic arcs, sparks trailing behind them.

  Greta watched them leave, exhaling slowly once they had passed out of sight.

  "Stay close," she said to us. "We are getting nowhere near that mess again."

  We gathered ourselves after the spectacle, letting the dust and scattered bits of shell settle around us. The clearing felt different without the shrieks of magic misfires and the chaotic flashes of uncontrolled spells. For a moment, the forest seemed to breathe again.

  Winnie let out a long exhale and muttered, "If that is how magic folk train, I am glad to be hitting things with my hands instead." She tapped her shield once, checking the strap, then looked around with a sharper eye. "Turtles are slow beasts, but they are not meant to die like that. My clan would have words about such waste. Loud words. With thrown mugs."

  I nodded, still staring at a half-frozen turtle corpse. The ice had splintered its shell clean through, the patterns sharp and jagged like cracked glass. "It feels wrong. They do not even look like they know what they are doing. They were just… blasting things for fun."

  Myrda stepped up beside us and rested her hands lightly on her hips. She looked tired, but not physically; it was more the quiet disappointment of a teacher watching another instructor fail their students. "Magic is a tool," she said calmly. "A powerful one, yes, but still only a tool. Young casters often mistake force for mastery. They think loud spells mean control. They think destruction means progress. It does not."

  Greta grunted. "Progress is staying alive long enough to learn something." She pointed her chin toward a patch of flattened grass. "Hammer turtles are stubborn. Thick-shelled. Good for learning precision. You do not learn much when you turn them into paste."

  Shawn, who had been as silent as a shadow behind us, piped up. "Do you think their parents know he teaches like that?" His voice cracked halfway, and he flushed, but nobody laughed at him.

  Greta let out a quiet breath. "Their parents definitely know he teaches like that," she said. "They probably spent a lot of money to get their kids into the magic class. It usually happens this way. Nobles push and push until the Guild lets their children join. So, they'll take any random magic user and make them a teacher just to make sure there are openings." She stepped over a cracked shell and continued, "Just be glad you are probably not going to have to deal with any of them. They are very unlikely to go anywhere you lot will end up going."

  She gave us a sharp look over her shoulder. "They will most likely be city adventurers by the end of this. Cushy work, high rank on paper, and never really doing the job. Not truly. They will sit in safe districts and take assignments that could not hurt a child."

  I found myself staring up at the branches again, but my thoughts drifted somewhere else entirely. Watching those noble kids fling spells with no care stirred something old inside me. Memories. Lessons. Long hours spent teaching apprentices who had wanted power more than understanding.

  In my old life, I had trained dozens of apprentices, and every single one of them had started the same way. With control. With the weakest spells. With exercises so boring that half of them tried to quit in the first week. I drilled stability into them before anything else, because control was more important than power. Control was the foundation of magic. When you lost control, you lost everything.

  Looking at the nobles now, I saw none of that. No structure. No discipline. No awareness of consequence. They were firing spells that should have been far above their abilities. Some of those blasts were mana intensive enough that even a grown caster would need time to recover. Others were so wasteful and flashy that they would exhaust someone long before they learned anything useful.

  "It feels dangerous," I said quietly. "It feels like they are trying to look impressive instead of learning anything."

  Greta snorted a short laugh. "Magic is always dangerous. That is why I do not use it. Fists are simpler. If I swing wrong, I break my hand. If a caster fires a spell off wrong, someone dies.

  Before we moved on, the clearing echoed with sharp shouts as the nobles fired off more spells. Every spell, even the weakest, ended with a verbal incantation. A final word spoken with force. A breath pushed out with intent. The last component always came from the lungs.

  Greta noticed me watching them. "There is one thing you can actually learn from them, Runt." She tapped my shield lightly. "Yesterday, when your punches bounced off that turtle, I saw what you did wrong. You held your breath. You kept everything tight. You did not let the force out."

  I blinked at her, surprised she had paid that much attention.

  She pointed toward the magic trainees. "Look at them when they cast. That shout at the end, the last word they bark out, that is not for style. That is how magic works. Wizards push their intent out with their lungs. It is the final release. The breath carries the power."

  I looked again. A noble boy thrust his wand forward and shouted the last syllable of a spell, and the blast snapped out instantly.

  "Your body works the same way," Greta said. "If you want force, you breathe out when you hit. A sharp breath. A shout if you need it. Anything that forces your body to release the power instead of trapping it inside."

  I thought of real terms from my old life. Controlled exhalation. Focused release. Even martial masters had used that principle. Exhaling on the strike made every movement sharper, faster, stronger.

  Greta shrugged. "Call it whatever you want. If you breathe out, your punches will land harder. It is simple. You breathe out, you hit harder."

  We continued moving toward the far end of the clearing, giving Randall's abandoned battlefield a wide berth. A few turtles, still alive, peeked out from behind rocks, eyeballing us suspiciously before retreating back inside their shells. They had probably been hiding since the first explosion.

  The forest grew calmer the farther we moved. The air cooled. I felt my shoulders relax a little.

  Myrda spoke softly to the entire group. "Remember what you saw. Not as entertainment and not as a joke. Remember it as a lesson in what not to do. Recklessness does not make you strong. Recklessness gets you killed. And it gets others killed with you."

  Winnie leaned closer to me and muttered, "I like her. She says things the way dwarves do, just without the insults."

  I smiled a little. My hand tightened around the straps of my shield. "I do not want to end up like them. Not thinking. Not learning anything."

  Greta overheard and grunted in approval. "Good. Thinking is more important than hitting something. Even when hitting something is fun."

  The orcish boy walked beside us, glancing nervously between trees. "Do you think we will ever train with the magic kids? Like… together?"

  Greta shook her head. "Not unless every instructor in this guild loses their mind at once. Classes mix only when the quest demands it. Your class is martial. Direct. Hands-on. Their class is magic. Wild. Unpredictable. You mix those two too early and someone ends up blind or missing eyebrows."

  Myrda added, "Some classes mix later, when everyone is older and trained. But not at Tin rank. Not during their first real lessons. They need discipline before they need partners."

  We reached a quieter path at the edge of the clearing, and Greta gestured for us to follow. "Come along. The rest of the forest waits. We cannot spend all day watching Randall nap his way through disaster."

  As we walked away, I glanced back once. The last thing I saw was a lone turtle dragging itself across the ground, leaving a faint trail behind it. It was still alive, somehow, despite the chaos.

  I made a silent promise in my chest. My class was going to do better than that.

  Winnie nudged me with her elbow. "Come on, runt. Snails are not going to catch themselves."

  I straightened, adjusted my shield, and nodded. Today was supposed to be about our quests. Not about Randall, not about nobles, not about chaos.