Chapter 5: encroaching danger
When I woke up the following morning I heard my mother and father argue about something. The angry voice of my father was much louder than that of my mother “We cannot win this war Katheryne! They are far better equipped and trained! We are but archers!” A war? I thought to myself, losing attention for the conversation. From what I could heard they were professional soldiers so we, as a pre historic society, would stand no chance against them. Could it be that I was in a more modern age than I thought? No that chance would be low, we are in a good, open area. Perhaps it were some of the earliest forms of civilisations? That could be but that would be troublesome. It’d mean that it’d be for conquest but more importantly that there was a very good chance that they were not very nice to those they captured. I did not feel like becoming a slave or worse, dying once again. The best way to defend myself would probably be to train with my magic more but I had no idea how. At that point the yelling of my mother was loud enough to pull me from thought “We will not be running away like cowards and that is final!” I decided to put an end to the yelling and walked in sleepily “Mom, what are you yelling about?” “It’s nothing sweety, don’t worry about it” she said as her voice instantly turned soft again. My mother and father shared a look and turned away from each other. My father walked out to do something, who knows what, and my mother started to prepare breakfast for the two of us. I decided not to pursue the topic and took a seat. Once again spacing out I thought of how I could train my magic to be usable in combat and came to the conclusion that the cheapest thing I could think of was probably something akin to a bolt of fire. Thinking of a firebolt, how would I be able to use spells? Magic should have spells right? Something to think about later I supposed. Now the first experiment I should do after breakfast is to try and reformulate and see if it makes magic cheaper to use. Me and my mother talked very little during breakfast even though she tried to get me to hold a conversation I only really responded with short answers.
Once breakfast was over I quickly slipped out with the excuse of going to play with Hana. I quickly ran to a place I knew I would not be found and started my work. I first used ‘flame 0,5’ to save on Mana but more importantly to check how much Mana it would cost me to use. I denominated an amount to my Mana with the base of 100 points at my initial birth. Currently I had a maximum capacity of 311 points and summoning that flame cost me 18 points. Over the past years I had figured out that training with certain things did make me better at using them which reduced the cost of Mana. Moving on I tried reformulating it to ‘conjure a flame, half a cubical centimetre’ and this time it drained only 11 points. Pleased with my success I decided that this would be a good starting point to start trying to make something that could actually work in combat. The magic I decided on was a firebolt since that would be quite a powerful weapon. First I started thinking about what formulation could be good to use. Figuring that since a long cast apparently made spells cheaper, probably because of more focussed intent, I went with a very long description or cast. ‘Conjure a flaming ball, 300 degrees Celsius, one cubical centimetre, and have it fly for 20 metres in the direction I am pointing’ a flaming ball of fire appeared and flew towards the sky. The spell was a success but suddenly I felt very drained and dropped to my knees. Moving my perception inwards I realised that that single firebolt took a staggering 178 points of Mana. Now knowing that this spell would be completely useless in any combat situation I knew I had to try and figure out something else but before that, I needed to meet up with Hana as soon as possible to have an actual alibi, I could not use being grounded currently.
I rested for a moment before sneakily making my way to Hana’s house and knocked on the wall since there were no doors. Hana’s mother came out quickly and upon seeing me called for Hana “Hana, your friend is here!” “I’m coming mom” I heard her shout back. She quickly came running out and said to me “We should go play with the dolls I made last night” I gave her a short smile before coming with her to play with her dolls. This was one of the disadvantages of being reborn, I had to pretend to be a child. While Hana was quite a fun person to hang around with, I still am not a child and would much rather spend time with those more alike to me but alas.
Hana and I spend the rest of the day together before I went back to my house for dinner. I didn’t tell her about the war since she wouldn’t understand and if she would, it would only serve to scare her. The following day I thought about a spell that could serve to help me in a way more fitting for continues combat although I realised that whatever I do, it will still be problematic due to the long casting times but there is nothing I can do about that right now. My idea that I came up with after a couple of days was to use materials during the casting to see if that can reduce the cost of spells. My first idea was to go back to the flame spell and see if I can get a fire to transform into a fire bolt but I quickly realised that that would not work because I still needed a hand to write. Water could be used but I water wasn’t very lethal and probably not worth it because of that. The thing I settled on was earth magic since there was a lot of earth everywhere and a solid spike could still be lethal. The casting words that I wanted to use was ‘transform this dirt into a solid spike, 10 centimetres long and 4 centimetres wide, then have it fly for 20 metres in the direction I am pointing’
No sooner said than done I sneaked my way to my secret training spot and grabbed a nice handful of dirt. I wrote the cast in the air and the dirt transformed into an earthen spike that shot out with decent force and this one only took about 86 points, far less than the previous firebolt. I could cast this magic about three times before collapsing so while it wasn’t some super weapon, it was better than nothing and it should be powerful enough to disable an attacker so all I would now need to do is to train my aim. Since I did not know when the war was coming, I decided that I had no time to waste and started training instantly, forgoing playing with Hana.
At the end of the day I was able to aim the spike a bit more accurately although that was good enough since it flew out where I pointed anyway so I only needed very slight adjustments. Tired and low on energy, I went back home and luckily it seemed I was not discovered by my parents yet since they did not look at me differently nor did they bring it up. My father and mother had made up quite quickly after their fight although they still seemed to disagree about the approach towards the war that would most likely break out.
