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." 

"Alright." This is going to be gruelling, but her birthright will protect her. She steps up to the first obstacle and waits for the signal.

"Ah, ah, ah! You're not ready yet."

They pull out of the carriage's baggage compartment, a heavy looking suit of chainmail armor, shirt and pants and metal boots, gauntlets, and helmet. The tank smiles sunnily at her while holding up the helmet.

She just nods and accepts it. She had been thinking this was too easy.

They help her don the armor. It fits nicely over her battledress. They assure her it won't hurt her clothes and that they know what her Skills and stats are, so they know exactly what she is capable of and where that capability ends.

It is HEAVY. Even just walking is a bit of a strain like this, even if her strength has increased in solid jumps at least twice since she got here. The boots limit how she can step. It's hard to make a fist through the gauntlets. The helmet blocks her peripheral vision.

The first challenge is simply to climb onto a waist-high platform in the armor.

She can do this. Brace with her arms, lift her leg, get her knee up, follow with the second one -

She's up!

There are plenty more challenges. They leave her breathing hard and sweating, muscles straining. It would be lovely to just lie down and rest.

(She definitely gained a level in something somewhere in there. Possibly several. It's likely they made things harder when that happened, since she's still struggling just as much, but now she's jumping from platform to platform in armor and not falling into the mud more than twice.)

She's barely begun. She shoves down her exhaustion, covers it in a layer of anger, and keeps going. This reminds her of her first few rounds of sparring exercises, before she adapted and her birthright kicked in. She's stronger now, and been through more. She still remembers the tearing pain of her miscast, and she lived through that. She'll live through this.

The mercs aren't showing it, but they're impressed. They expected her to complain and give up long since.

Eventually, they give her a task that is, clearly, simply... Impossible. She cannot climb a sheer wall in armor without using the rope. It's just not going to happen.

She gamely attempts it, but she can't get a handhold on the slick wall. She gives it five or six attempts with no progress before she looks at the mercs with an expression that says really?

"Finally giving up, embers?"

"Might want to try it without the damned heavy armor, but as is this ain't gonna happen." She wipes sweat from her brow.

They look at each other.

The blue-scaled caster bursts out laughing.

The archer shakes his head. "Not one complaint out of you, the whole time. Your will is abundantly clear. Let's get you out of that and get a restorative in you. You can shower back at base too."

"Thank you," she says relievedly. She takes off her helmet, runs a hand through her hair, and starts in on the rest of her outfit.

"We all had to do the same thing. Scales here spent the whole time complaining that he was a wizard and he didn't need to be able to move in armor."

They help with the armor. The tank hands her a cup of something vibrant green that smells like the most aggressive pine-flavored air freshener she's ever smelled.

She drinks without complaint. This is not the hard part.