Tessamine nods expressionlessly and picks up a book from her desk, apparently dismissing her.

She goes back the way she came, and goes directly to her advisor and cancels everything but her morning sparring practice for the next day.

She doesn't get a refund if she cancels midway through a class with no notice, she could just miss a class and let her teachers know, but if she insists?

Oh, she'll just miss a class. Sorry. Got carried away there.

Student Services is here to help!

She goes and informs her teachers, then goes to the library and looks up the Wall Club.

They're a fully accredited mercenary group with an only slightly spotty reputation. They have about 300 members who generally get honed up to at least C-rank levels of threat, and three suspected A-rank fighters, one who might manage to edge into S-rank, making them fairly legendary. They'll abandon the job to save their own skins, but wouldn't everyone do that, really? Liscor hires them sometimes, farming out mercenary contracts. The human polities to the north hire them sometimes, usually to either to stand around looking menacing to a rival, or go clear out a specific problematic monster. Drake nations even hire them sometimes.

She reads up on more of the details, but relatively little of it is relevant to the immediate question of how to pass her test tomorrow. Still, it's something.

She goes to bed and sleeps. In the morning she'll do her sword class, then head over to her test.

When she arrives the same doorman as before tells her the first part of the test takes place outside of city limits, and shows her to a carriage. She is supposed to stay inside until they reach the testing area, please.

... Alright then. She gets in the carriage.

Several mercenaries greet her with waves and smiles before settling into an escort position ahead and behind the carriage. Lindley Harlane, human, Foreguard, tank. Nox Matiren, human, Back-mid, archer. Zalgyn Gerrit, winged drake, support, wizard.

Zalgyn's pale blue scales and white teeth glitter in the sun as she asks, "You nervous, embers?"

"Who wouldn't be? But I've got the bit in my teeth now."

"That's the spirit!"

The doorman acts as the driver, no horses are apparently needed. The three mercs all keep up with a pace well above jogging without apparent effort.

It's a peaceful ride through the city and then the single road through the mire of lakes and streams and swamp outside.

Until there's a warning shout, two loud thunks, and the carriage jerks to the side and crashes into a ditch. The little window showing the front is splattered with mud and blood.

She can hear Zalgyn screaming outside. Possibly in pain, possibly in rage. There's a loud screaming whine, and an explosion.

Oh really?

She rights herself in the fallen cabin. 

Okay, assume this is a genuine attack. Then she can't fight what's coming at her and she shouldn't try. Her job is to 1: not die and 2: not make the others come rescue her. 

Should she stay in the cab? She was asked to stay in the cab. But those are stupid orders when there are explosions flying around. 

She calls up Aqshy's Aegis and gets the door with it leading. 

There is a horrible black and ichorous monstrosity, like a cross between a scorpion, centipede, and dragon. The tank is holding it to the ground by one leg and fighting off three other limbs trying to kill her. The archer is firing arrows so fast his hands are blurs. The winged drake is circling up above and constructing something that stings in her windsight and is saturating the air with magic.

She can't fight that alone, but she can help. Aqshy's Aegis for the tank, quick scan of the area for anything else trying to kill them. She has to trust that the winged drake's spell will do some serious damage.

The Winds of Magic are tumultuous and hard to grasp; She's forced to cast from the aqshy that has come to accumulate within her. For a moment it looks like it's going to twist away from her, but that passes.

Nothing else appears to be trying to kill them. The wizard's spell is a searingly bright meteor of a thing, and makes the same scream-then-explosion as before. If she's looking at it she will probably be temporarily blinded.

Yep, she's looking at it.

There's more shouting and noise.

By the time her vision recovers, there is no longer any sign of the monster and the three mercs plus the driver are standing nearby.

"Liath? You are safe. We were never under attack."

She shakes her head to clear the last of it, nods. "I expected that, but. Risk was too great. Had to take it seriously."

"Yes," the tank says softly. "I think you did one thing right, one thing questionably, and one thing wrong. Can you tell me about it?"

She thinks for a moment. "I think it was wrong to get involved in the fight. I didn't know how to interface with your party and it ended up blinding me and making me worse than useless. It would have been better to stay in the carriage than that. It was questionable to cast spells because of the risk of a miscast in the difficult conditions that could potentially outright kill me. Anything Aqshy's Aegis could hold off, you could hold off, but if there were a bunch of smaller threats I wanted to be sure. And I think it was right for me to get out of the carriage, even against orders, because I had to know if those orders still made sense and it was my own skin at risk. I think. I'm less confident than I sound, here. I'm worrying that I've failed the whole thing just by getting out of the carriage."

"Actually, I think your big mistake was watching something you knew was a high-powered attack. Blind and confused is not a good state to be in. Getting out of the carriage to check the situation was reasonable - casting at all was mostly reasonable, and casting something to help me without getting directly involved was a bit questionable. In a real fight, it could have confused me and made me hesitate. Just remember that 'do nothing' is an option in a fight."

"Call it 'biding your time' if it makes you feel better. Casting buffs and otherwise staying out of it is a good instinct," the archer says, "And we can deal with surprises, I'd say, actually." The tank shrugs.

"You haven't failed the whole thing," the winged drake says. "The point here was to see how you react in a legitimate-seeming deadly situation. We're going to make detailed reports, and combine it with the rest of the test."

She nods. "Back into the carriage, then?"

"Back into the carriage."

It's not even in the ditch. That must have been one powerful illusion.

They come to a large hill sticking out of the general mire before too long. There are a variety of wooden obstacles set up, like something you'd see in military training courses, or possibly overly dramatic gameshows. A wall with rope, monkey bars, raised platforms with gaps, rope nets, and the like. Nobody else is here except the doorman and the three mercs.

"Right! You'll be going through this course until we're satisfied. This is the second part. After this we'll have a nice lunch and a break as we go back to the city, for a theoretical exercise and final interview."