Dalliance regretted not having paid closer attention to the rankings near the beginning of the year. He had seen himself near the top of the list and assumed everything was going to be fine. Then, discovering the importance of the Hunts and Hunt Contribution—and having done fairly well there—he had assumed he would be fine.

  But Mister Best had designed the course, in his own words, at the start of the semester, "as a supplement to attempt to make up for years of negligence by parents and society." He had said something like, "If I had my way, you would have years to learn all this, not months."

  Dalliance was starting to realize, without the advantages of being a [Pupil], that the timescale might not be inflated.

  Sterling, Effluvia, and Charity were at the top of the list for the third-quarter exams. Morality had an honorary fourth place, which Dalliance never would have expected. It was the ability to memorize things, and Dalliance didn’t have it, and being too young for the system, neither did she.

  So it didn't come as a huge surprise to see the final rankings: Effluvia, Sterling, Charity, Woebegone, then Earnest. But then Earnest's name was stricken with red ink and marked with a zero. Too bad.

  Then Dalliance.

  Circe simply didn’t fight quite as well as Charity. Of course, it had been Charity who had landed the killing blow on the third hunt. On the fourth, she had done very little. The same was true for Knot and Woebegone, who were both looking put out by the sheet.

  Fifth.

  It didn’t matter that he thought deeply and understood the subject matter. It didn’t matter if he could learn it faster than anyone by rights should be able to. What mattered was that he didn’t have five years to do it. And he had lost his answer sheet because it had fallen out of his sock before the exam began. It was truly frustrating.

  It had been spring for a while outside, but it was just starting to feel that way. Dalliance had been hearing the birds in the trees for months—since only a few months into winter, actually—but it was something about seeing their brightly colored fluttering that made it feel like spring had actually come.

  And with it, the next hunt.

  "It’s called an Ursae," Mister Best had told them. He couldn't give them a lot of specifics, though they asked in several classes with every iteration of the Hunt getting them closer. Dalliance suspected this was the minimum best practice for preparation.

  Dalliance wasn’t the only one with armor now, though there were only four of them like him: Effluvia now wore a strange collection of brass arm guards and plates over her upper back, arcing up to around her neck with a helmet, but with very little actual body armor as such. Dalliance didn’t know enough about magic and armor to really comment on its effectiveness, but it certainly looked very expensive.

  Her family could afford that, but couldn’t afford to get her into college? How expensive was the program? he wondered.

  Whatever the answer, Dalliance knew even her equipment would have been beyond his ability, or even his father's, even had the man deemed to contribute. And now, as an orphan at the Bests', if not for Sterling’s guilty generosity, he would have been completely bereft.

  Servility had been wearing his armor every day to school (and opening doors for the girls or Missus Best, and bowing a lot—he was taking this [Squire] thing seriously). As of the month before, Mister Best, Servility, and Sterling had often been seen after class out in the yard, swinging broom handles at each other in wide arcs and two-handed thrusts. Dalliance supposed even a fencing master might know something about other kinds of swordplay. And of course, that was assuming Mister Best had only ever used a rapier, as his daughter did.

  Dalliance had asked for and received the basics in sword tutorials, but even after months, his left hand was still sensitive to the slightest jar. While the spatha was in fact a one-handed weapon, it was an adult's one-handed weapon. Mister Best had suggested that he might want to utilize it using something called half-swording: gripping along the blade with a careful grip, so as not to take the sharp part to the palm, and guiding it along its thrust. Or else, putting the palm of his hand flat against the blade’s flat and likewise guiding its thrust to compensate for the wrist strength he wouldn’t have for another ten years, or another three levels of Might.

  But Dalliance had found it too painful, with his finger’s stumps still sensitive to hitting things, and had largely given up on the idea for the time being.

  Three levels of Might didn’t sound like much, but that would be six points of experience. And as it was now, he was only taking in one point at a time. So, one opportunity would add one point. That would leave one point banked. A second opportunity would add another point, and with the one he had banked, he could buy the first rank of Might. Now he'd be taking in two points at a time.

  Two opportunities like that would get him the second rank of Might. Since he was E tier, each rank was half again as effective—so, effectively 3 levels of F tier Might, so he could use the sword. And all of that sounded like a whole lot of effort to go through to use a sword, when he didn't even want to have to. Three fights. Three hunts? Too much.

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  Thinking of tiers and stats that way, he supposed he was now effectively Wit 12 by Tier F standards. The thought was ludicrous. He should be smart enough to do without a sword.

  Or pass school, or figure out aeromancy.

  Topaz hadn’t been any help at all. As had happened every spring since he could remember, upon the first day of the season, she had retreated into what he had come to think of as hibernation. She was sleepy, she said. It took time to acclimate oneself to the energy of one’s enemy’s arrival after spending time suffused in that of their departure. She was, after all, of Winter. And so, when he called for her, she didn’t come.

  He’d racked his brain for things he could do to prepare further. He’d cast [Locomotion] once a day, raising his proficiency notably, for all that the system didn’t give him a number. He’d brainstormed ideas for better preparedness with classmates, and convinced Circe to bring health potions, no matter that that wasn’t what they were properly called or what they contributed to the body when imbibed.

  And this time, they had bought a wagon, on which they would retreat with their wounded—at least, if Charity’s contribution to the communal efforts worked as planned. Seeing Charity driving it behind the trailing students had made them feel like a proper caravan for once, as they pulled up to the schoolyard.

  No mana potions. He’d asked, and discovered that that too was from chapbooks and not quite how it worked.

  They set off for the fifth hunt: the Ursae.

  Of course, it wasn’t as simple as “pile everyone up.” It hadn't been last time, either, with the mallets and such, but this time everyone was fully terrified.

  Bears. Dalliance knew about bears.

  “Nature’s perfect killing machine,” his father had said proudly, holding up the corpse of a black bear he’d found on their land. “Even the little buggers, with no help from the System at all, will kill you one time in two, and that’s just 'cause they get scared. The big ones, brown ones, they’ll just kill you. Best you can hope for is to get away by letting them think you’re dead. Best you can hope for is for them to wander off and forget what they were doing.”

  Of course, his father had also made a point of showing that he could blunt steel on his skin. For Cadence Rather, fighting a bear barehanded wasn’t actually a losing proposition, which would be how he’d survived fighting an ogre barehanded.

  For Dalliance, the adoption of a plan would have to be a little different. He could, if the worst-case happened, cast [Locomotion] on himself and move fifty feet up a wall or something. Get away, once a day. Or he could use [Werewind] instead to the same effect, except he could go as far as he could in wind-form for ten minutes, at whatever speed he felt like. He knew there were limits, but he didn’t know what they were or how to measure them in either case.

  Both plans amounted to one strategy: if you see it, run away. Which is not how Hunts were done.

  This time, in the frenzy of preparation, and with the addition of a wagon to bring anything they could possibly use, Dalliance had remembered to bring a short sword, a long sword, a bow, and a sling. More options, none of them necessarily useful.

  They had asked whether the shields would still be of any use, but had been assured that while Sterling’s father would be willing to lend them again, they would not prove effective. “If it’s close enough for you to need a shield,” Sterling had been told, “you’re about to die.”

  Well, Dalliance wasn’t convinced. There had to be another way.

  Ribs like armor plate. Muscle, hide, and sinew like the best mail backed by an oak tree. He himself, in practice mail, would still probably survive a slash, if it was claws, he was told, but not a bite. And if it actually hit him, it wouldn't be a slash; it would just collapse his ribs. It was good to know.

  “But what if you jump on top and stab it?”

  “What if you go outside,” Mister Best had suggested, “and stab that oak tree? Tell me how that turns out.”

  So, after repeated protests, Woebegone had given up the use of his spiked club in favor of Earnest’s old spear. Spears, he was told, could be shoved at the points that weren’t armored. The eyes, the mouth, the armpits, and such. Unarmored, or less armored. ‘Best’ options. And with his prodigious strength, he ought to be able to shove the blade home.

  Even should he land the spear somewhere less vulnerable, though, he might risk breaking it. Having seen Woebegone in action, Dalliance wasn’t so sure.

  Charity’s crossbow was on the shortlist of things which could actually penetrate the beast’s skull. Mister Best watched tolerantly as a cow skull—courtesy of Mister Big Cheese himself—underwent repeated fusillades from the ranged weapons available, with none of them successfully piercing deep enough for him to judge it a lethal strike on a bear.

  “It’s not that you’re devoid of options,” he’d said. “Miss Early’s lightning would bypass any armor. Every living thing that breathes air and is made of flesh fears fire,” he said. “The great beasts of history were first slain through the use of traps and falls.”

  He told them they would be fighting in a ruined hill fortress. There was no map, no floorplan, not even a known era of building to go off of. He couldn’t tell them; they would have to find out. “Both are options worthy of consideration for your purposes,” he’d assured them.

  Dalliance had also suggested collapsing things atop it, but it was agreed this was plan . . . F, after trying everything else.

  The good news was that they would be more maneuverable there than the multi-tonned furred nightmare they were facing. Some of the defenses might even hold it at bay. And there would be a time limit due to the tier of the thing; if they hadn’t returned in three days, an adult would be sent. Mister Best assured them that he would come himself as backup.

  That, more than anything else, terrified Dalliance. But nobody’d asked for his opinion.

  And so, in the early morning hours, off the wagon rolled: bearing the eleven frightened children to the lair of the beast.