The week after the duel, Gale was the happiest she had been in a long time. She finally had a girlfriend! She could barely believe she was dating Sofia, specially after almost giving up on her, thinking her feelings were not reciprocated. But after the surprise kiss right after winning the duel, everything was great for Gale.
They now spent most of their free time together. They decided to take cooking duties together, they ate by each other, they walked around holding hands… Gale was over the moon. It was really Gale’s first relationship, and she was not really sure what to expect, but was loving every second of it. On her part, since Sofia was 2 years older than her (a year and a half, Gale often retorted jokingly), she had been on a relationship before. Still, never with another girl, so it was also quite new for her. They talked about it the first night, and decided to just go with the flow at the beginning, and do whatever it felt right at the moment.
The boys, specially the twins, jokingly teased them about being together during the whole week, but it was all in good fun. In a similar manner, Saku always kinda looked aside when they kissed in public. The most embarrassing reaction to them dating, though, came from Professor Aberyth himself. While he didn’t care about them being together, and was in fact happy for them, he reminded them as their teacher that the walls were not exactly soundproof and Saku was still an impressionable child, so they should “keep that in mind at night”. Gale had never blushed so intensely in her life, while Sofia just giggled and said they would be careful, winking at Gale before going about their training.
At night, they started trying out new things with each other. The first night, right after the duel, they just kissed goodnight and went to sleep cuddling on the same bed. Gale was really happy for this, but both were so tired they just fell asleep immediately. The rest of the nights, though, they wanted to have some fun together. Still, Gale was quite concerned and terribly embarrassed of the the rest possibly hearing something from their room, specially after the friendly warning from Professor Aberyth.
Sofia had an idea to test out whether they could actually hear them. At a moment when Gale had her back to her, she just started tickling her quite a bit. Gale laughed loudly while trying to squirm away from her, and after a few seconds they could notice some creaking sounds from the boys’ room. They had clearly heard them. Thus, they had to keep as quiet as possible.
They tried making out while reducing their noise to a minimum, which wasn’t too hard when it came to just kissing. But, as they tried to go further, they found that they couldn’t properly avoid making any sound without feeling quite uncomfortable. Once again, Sofia had an idea.
During the week, sometimes Gale thinks back to these night activities, and laughs to herself at how its true that water muffles sound quite a bit. Its also funny to her finding out that she finds having her hands stuck to the bed frame while doing things with Sofia to be quite exciting...
As for their training, the first thing Professor Aberyth did the day after the duel was talking to the two of them.
“Sofia, I have to say, even if you lost the duel, your magical control is really impressive, congratulations.”, he said with a smile. “In your case, Gale, well… you did win the duel, but I’m not sure if that was really good magical control or really bad magical control. I’ve never seen anyone overload an object on purpose as an attack before. It was both creative and reckless at the same time, which actually fits your style. You might be ready for the next step of your training, infusing magical aura into your equipment”, he finished. A moment later he added “...and not making it explode”. Sofia tried to contain a small laugh at his comment, while Gale just avoided looking at him.
For this training, the only safe item would be her magical sword, which could contain an enormous amount of her magical aura without breaking (unlike a regular sword). This would ensure that even if she lost control or overdid it, there would be no incidents. The idea was simple: she needed to send her magical aura, which she already knew how to send to her limbs, away into covering her weapon. The difficulty of this training was that, without any feedback from the sword (she could feel the aura in her body), she could easily overdo it, or send too little or not cover the weapon completely. Professor Aberyth intended to help her with his vision, but these was little he could tell her apart from how well she was doing.
Sofia, on her part, was going to start on her final type of training: the shield spell. Gale was also quite interested in this, and while it was still too soon for her, Professor Aberyth didn’t mind if she wanted to listen to his explanation too. The idea of the spell was quite straightforward: one created a thin sphere of magical aura centered on themselves, which by itself was quite useless. Then, this sphere would be infused with elemental magical energy, giving it different properties that made it an useful defense. In this case, since Sofia mainly used Water element, the shield would have the ability to be reinforced by adding the enemy spell elements to its own composition, increasing its resistance to them.
Noticing that Gale wanted to know more, he went on to explain the effect of the rest of the elements: Earth made it much more resistant, but made it quite difficult to move; Lightning allowed the user to bounce back any attack, provided they had the magical energy to do so; Fire made the shield set whatever it touched in flames, and create small fiery projectiles; and finally, Wind allowed the shield to change shape freely, and repel small items it touched by spending magical energy on it. Seeing as Gale seemed to think that the Wind shield wasn’t that useful, he reminded her that this meant that the shield could be concentrated in specific parts, making it much more effective with adequate foresight.
While Sofia trained on her shield, Gale tried to infuse her magical sword with magical energy. As she unsheathed it, she once again remembered the horror of the village, and did her best to just try to focus on the training. With Professor Aberyth’s overseeing, she was able to obtain feedback on how to improve her results by modifying the aura she was sending forward. “Longer”, “Less”, “Way shorter”, he would tell her, and she would correct in kind. It was frustrating for her, though, since even when she properly covered her sword with her aura, she could not properly tell.
On her second day, she could already do it consistently, since she remembered how much she had to send forward and how far. It was still quite unstable according to Professor Aberyth, but it was good enough. She spent that full day trying to feel why this amount of aura was the appropriate one, but was making little progress.
The next day, she got fed up of trying to feel it, and knowing that the sword was properly covered in her own magical aura, she tried to cast her wind spell on it. She closed her eyes, and focused her will on the sword. But, just like with the aura, she was having a lot of difficulty feeling the spell too. She started getting angry and frustrated, but at some point she started feeling something, the sword was receiving her power.
“Gale, what are you doing??”, Professor Aberyth shouted alarmed. At that moment, she opened her eyes, which broke her concentration and dissipated the teal and red magical circle that had appeared unintentionally on her sword’s handle. This sent a strong shockwave around, making her sword fly away from her hands, and pushed her back a small distance. As she picked her sword up, noticing that it was unharmed, and hurried to apologize to Professor Aberyth profusely, he decided to keep to himself that Gale’s magical burst had created a slashing mark on the ceiling of the room.
As the week ended, Professor Aberyth had an important announcement to make. He gathered everyone inside, and started talking. “Everyone, I have fantastic news”, he started with a smile. “The traveling fair is coming to this town, tomorrow! So, no classes for the day, and try to enjoy the festival as much as you can!”
The room filled with enthusiasm, everyone loved the fair. Gale had never attended one, but she could tell it was going to be fun. She then decided to get serious for a moment, and faced Sofia.
“Sofia, dear, I was thinking… Since we started dating we never had a proper ‘date’, so, uh… how about we go together and consider this our first official date?”, she said blushing.
Sofia accepted with a smile, and they both shared a loving kiss. This was going to be fun, Gale thought with a wide smile of her own.
