Karina: "Well don't do that ALL the time, duh! But I'm not gonna sit around my whole life dealing with trade deals or nobles or guard duty or something.
The sky's full of way too much interesting stuff to be worth living a static life like that! I want to see it, I want to live it!

Besides, I'm smart and I've got Frederic, I'll be fine."
You catch Frederic give a quick roll of his eyes.

Karina: "I-
Uhm.

Hm.
Has it, really been going that rough?"
Frederic: "Things have never quite been out of control, but a good team gets away with no damage regularly.

I'm not equipped ideally, but ideal or not Leon definitely shouldn't have gotten hurt against the birds like he did."

Karina: "Oh."

She stares at you intently for a bit, then turns and rests her chin on her hand while staring out at the passing landscape.

Karina: "Hm."


[Timeskip back to town]
[Talk]

Several hours later, you get back to town.
The carriage leaves you at the gates, and your group plus the leader of the surveyors goes to the guild hall to handle payment.
As promised, your pay is a healthy amount more than the original amount for covering the second grove. Not quite double, but about 80% more. With this you definitely have enough to get to Belus's capital in comfort, plus some extra for your own spending.
From there, work should be easy to find.

Leon: "Huh, back to the Capital. I wasn't expecting to be going home again after just a few months. How long have you been away Karina?"
Karina: "A few weeks. A month maybe? We went straight for Madosa to find people, and then I sent you that letter a bit after that."
Leon: "Not too long. I wonder how long I can be away before the Wizard Academy gets mad."
Karina: "Call it... field learning! A day of experience is worth a month of classes!"

Leon: "Well. Weeks maybe. I never got practical experience like this before. Or wounds. I don't think I'd ever imagined living the uh, adventurer life.
Classes at the mage academy are, really boring in comparison. A lot of repetition and practicing. It's supposed to get better after first year, when they start introducing metamagic and spell crafting.
None of that out in the real world so far, but I got to throw fireballs at monsters."

You yourself never took enough dedicated mage classes to dive into those, especially not with your healing magic. Healing magic and metamagic don't get along well. Healing magic doesn't get along with most kinds of other magic, really.

Frederic: "So. Ready to head to the capital?"

Map Added! Check post at start of thread!

Karina: "To hooome!"


~~~~~


The trip is fairly uneventful, though long and not terribly exciting. The major roads in Belus are well kept and patrolled, and away from the capital or the wind domain, there isn't much in the way of dangerous creatures.
Your group has bought tickets on an open carriage train to take you there, they depart every two weeks and one just so happens to be about to leave when you need it. The weather continues cooperating for most of the ride, with just one day of rain near the end.

Your time is mostly spent practicing magic and chatting with the others, especially Leon. Once he warms up, he's happy to dive into the particulars of magic and his time at the wizard academy.
The magic practice goes well, though without more spells to learn you can only do so much. You get very proficient at quickly raising your shield, and get the hang of forming it with either hand in a pinch, along with the ice bolt that Leon gave you. You also play with manipulating the size and shape a fair bit, though it seems the spell itself is stuck being circular. You can at least flex it concave or convex though, which should help minimize some attacks.

Leon seems to be a more powerful mage than you gave him credit for, too. It's happened each time you fought something so far, he's been able to summon a lot of spells in a short amount of time, barraging whatever his target is. Turns out, he's got a knack for forming a spell in the Step without binding it to the physical world as well. This lets him build up a small arsenal of spells ready to fire, all he needs to do is bridge them to our world and ignite the spell. Apparently this is a pretty common practice higher up in mage ranks, though it takes a lot of talent or a lot of practice to be able to maintain as many as Leon can.

The Wizard Academy, as he describes it, is apparently a part of a larger magical institution, the Institute of Spellcraft. You've heard of them before, sort of like a guild for all mages, though you think they kind of butt heads with the Church of the Lords.
His time there sounds a lot like your time at Madosa's Adventurer Academy. Lots of retired mages and adventurers as professors, more lectures and practice and less practical experience than the Madosa academy (not that you ended up with a ton due to your specialization). Sounds like he got a much more classical mage education than you did, with yours being half first aid and also interspersed with time at the range. He'll probably be a good source for magical facts going forward.


And with that, a week of travel passes. The distance is less than from Madosa to Belus, but a carriage is certainly slower as well. Finally though, you crest a hill and see in the distance a stone spire with a large pennant waving at the top, crowning a tall stone castle. A series of towers rises in the center of the castle, with the centermost being the tallest and bearer of Belus's flag. Sturdy walls surround the keep, giving from here an image of a sturdy stone sentinel standing watch over the land. Around the castle sprawls a large city, radiating out from the castle in all directions with the tallest buildings in the center and getting small and more plentiful as it goes. From here you think you can see 5 large main roads dividing the city, reaching all the way from outer edge of the city in to the walls of the castle; the main thoroughfares of the entire capital. The road you're on now leads right up the the mouth of the closest of these 5 roads.
But what really catches your eye is in the background. Miles beyond the capital, so distant that the air tinges it blue, yet visible even from this great distance, is a tree. An absolutely massive, enormous tree, reaching up past any mountain you've seen so far. A thick, straight, sturdy trunk reaches up for miles before bursting into an endless sea of shimmering silvery-green leaves.

Frederic: "Here we are. Home."

Karina: "Ol' Silver!"
Leon: "Gratchfeland, the great old silver oak."
One of the world trees. Enormous magical trees blessed by the lords that maintain a pseudo-domain around themselves, letting magical creatures and people survive and thrive without having to be in the real Lords' domains. Melgard is the only continent with only one world tree, but in exchange it's the biggest of them all.
You've heard about them before, but seeing one in person, you realize the scale is impossible to express in words.