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The two of them had gotten into more than a few scraps during this trip. And worse still, despite being the chief instigator, Caster was frequently fine with standing by and watching Loren do all the fighting.

“Just trying to get a measure of you, lad,” he’d said. “I hope you’re not planning on complaining. You need the experience.”

Thankfully, Caster did step in whenever the situation began to look truly dire.

And while he had yet to see the Marauder ever get serious during a fight, it was now quite obvious to Loren that this man was far more powerful than he’d expected. And he’d already expected a lot.

The guy could lay opponents out without even moving a muscle. Somehow, he could just look at them, and they’d crumple like paper--and not always in the same manner, either. Sometimes, they would just fall over and stay down, seemingly passed out cold.

Other times, it was less pretty.

One guy ended up looking as if almost every bone in his body had been snapped in two and folded together, like he’d been crammed into an invisible box. And for all Loren knew, maybe he had. Loren still wasn’t sure how Caster’s powers worked. Rezolo said that Caster was supposed to be a destruction user, but none of the stuff he’d seen so far had looked like destruction to Loren.

All in all, though, Loren couldn’t say he was hating his time with the Marauder. This gig was definitely strange, but he knew from personal experience that there were far, far worse ones in Abolish.

It’d be nice if Caster could pick up the pace a bit, though.

This “communing with the land” business would’ve been a lot better if it didn’t mean Loren had to stand around so much. And it was unpredictable, too. Caster could be done in a few minutes or a few hours.

On this occasion, it was the latter.

The man’s reaper, Kalikos, was even stranger. Whenever Loren tried asking for elaboration or clarification on something from Kalikos, the reaper usually gave him some weird non-answer--or even a total non sequitur.

The oddest things that the reaper said, however, were the things that arrived out of nowhere, unprompted.

‘I should like a puppy of my own, someday,’ he said.

Loren’s foot stopped tapping as he looked over at the reaper, hovering around the Marauder’s short, motionless figure.