Lightchaser leaned against the doorframe.
"What, bringing this to pay tribute to your master?"
Rita blinked, then raised the glass even higher. Her eyes still sparkled with pure delight as she said, entirely naturally,
"Sure, of course I am. This is the first glass of Wrong Season I ever brewed. It’s for you."
She really was a walking contradiction.
In daily life, she valued fair trade and equal exchange, but toward people she truly cared about—friends, mentors—she was incredibly generous.
Lightchaser’s steel-blue eyes locked onto the little owlet for a few silent seconds.
Then she took the drink and downed it in one gulp.
It was a strange, nostalgic kind of drink.
It brought back memories Lightchaser didn’t want to dwell on, didn’t want to face, and certainly didn’t want to admit to having.
She tossed the empty glass back to Rita.
"Good drink. Get some sleep."
With that, she closed the door.
But the cold reaction didn’t upset Rita at all.
She hadn’t shared it for praise or gratitude. She just wanted to share something good.
She hugged the empty glass to her chest and dashed off, eager to split the remaining two drinks with Mistblade.
She barely made it a few steps before the door behind her creaked open again.
Lightchaser’s voice called out,
Rita obediently ran back, muttering under her breath,
"What am I, a puppy?"
Lightchaser responded flatly,
"There’s no dog on this planet that noisy."
She tossed over a pin—no bigger than Rita’s pinky finger—a tiny arrow carved from pure white.
"A gift for the start of school. In an emergency, break this arrow."
Rita clutched the little thing in her palm, eyes bright with anticipation.
"And then you’ll come flying down from the sky to rescue me?"
Lightchaser said coolly,
"If I’m not busy, sure."
"Can I get a few more of these? Seven or eight would be great. A hundred wouldn’t hurt either!"
The only reply was the sound of a door slamming shut.
From outside came the cub’s voice,
"If someone bullies me, can I tell them I’m your apprentice?"
There was a pause, then a chuckle from within.
On the first day of school, the happiest one in the house wasn’t the two cubs—it was Lightchaser.
She’d been smiling since breakfast.
Actually smiling. A real smile.
Rita swore it was the first time since meeting her that she’d seen that many teeth.
She said so out loud—got smacked on the back of the head for it.
Mistblade, who was sitting on a stool putting on her boots, didn’t even blink.
Thanks to the backpacks Moonlight Marsh had provided, the two girls had everything they needed—neatly packed and ready to go.
Most of the supplies were actually from Lightchaser: food, clothes, potions, gear.
Of course, that meant their debt ledger had grown by another half meter.
Rita had made peace with it.
Whatever. She wasn’t going to live that long anyway.
At this rate, her bill would outlast her life.
And really, that meant Lightchaser would be the one panicking when Rita hit eighty.
Rita loved that image. It made her feel zen.
There were far fewer people outside Moonlight Marsh today than during registration.
Every student was now wearing their school-issued uniform.
The design was identical for everyone: robes, cloaks, boots—embroidered in golden thread with the school’s crest.
A pair of interwoven magical symbols: Lightchaser said they stood for Ambition and Resilience. Together, they symbolized Excellence.
But the colors differed.
Rita’s uniform was mostly white with gold trim.
Mistblade’s was primarily red with white accents.
And around them, there were more students in uniforms of other colors—some in blue and white, and a few in black and deep gray.
No one knew if those ones were even students.
Rita and Mistblade both turned to Lightchaser, silently begging for answers.
"Moonlight Marsh uniforms are sorted by divine gift type," she explained.
"They don’t indicate your main combat focus."
She pointed at Rita’s white-and-gold uniform.
"Support or Special Types."
Then at Mistblade’s red-and-white.
Her finger tapped on the transport’s window, gesturing toward the blue-and-white.
Finally, she pointed toward the black and gray.
She locked eyes with Rita.
In that moment, Rita understood something.
Lightchaser was telling her that she used to wear that black and gray uniform.
At 7 a.m., there was a knock at the treehouse door.
Rita opened her eyes, rolled out of bed, pulled on her summer combat uniform, and tossed a handful of peanuts out the window to the squirrel who’d come to wake her.
While brushing her teeth, she started prepping for today’s combat class.
As she passed the bar, she casually used Wrong Season three times and brewed three new drinks for the day.
She got two bottles of Wrong Season today.
The skill didn’t have a fixed recipe.
Each drink was a random mutation. Most of the time, she only got one Wrong Season per day. Two was rare.
She’d been enrolled for a month now, and on average, she was gaining about one free stat point a day.
And even with that kind of cheat?
She still hadn’t pulled ahead of her classmates.
Most S-tier divine gifts had their own ways of boosting stats.
Even Mistblade had one.
Rita corked the three drinks and tucked them into her backpack, planning to dilute them with juice before bed.
Wrong Season wasn’t strong—more juice than booze—but for an eleven-year-old, even two in a row would mess up class focus.
She tied up her now-longer hair into a small bun, looped her tiny white arrow pendant around her neck, strapped on her academy pack, and slid two daggers—one new, one old—into her belt.
This enormous tree, nearly a kilometer tall, was filled with thousands of treehouses.
They were the Moonlight Marsh dorms—known to everyone as the Tree Towers.
Bridges stretched between them, connecting to shared public platforms.
To Rita, they always looked like oversized cat towers—one giant trunk with little houses jutting out at intervals, and bridges between them for "cats" to roam.
It was wake-up time. One by one, the dorms lit up as sleepy cubs stumbled out of their homes.
Rita flew a semicircle around the hundred-meter-wide trunk and landed at another treehouse about three hundred meters off the ground.
Just as she landed, the door opened.
Maple Syrup burst out wearing her black-and-gray uniform, still pulling on her boots with one hand while holding her bag in the other.
Once she was ready, they both began their descent from the high platform.
When a treehouse’s resident left, the door auto-locked.
Only someone with the right magical signature could open it again.
At fifty meters above the ground, the two owlets hovered in place.
Rita shouted, "You’ve got two minutes! Hurry up!"
Just as she finished, the doors to two more treehouses popped open—one to the southeast, and one at the eleven o’clock position.
"Took you long enough!"
"You guys are always early!"
Fat Goose, dressed in a blue-and-white uniform, leapt downward from a knotted ridge on the tree trunk.
Mistblade, in red and white, scrambled down like a cat—four limbs gripping the bark, tail balancing behind her.
With the student dorms already shaped like a giant cat playground, the scene looked more accurate than ever.