39. Steps

“So have you thought of a name?”

“No… Not yet. But wouldn’t it be fine to just add a Ka to the end and then wait?”

The incredulous look Nadi got from chief was so striking it made her feel disappointed by proxy.

“There’s no helping it if you do not know better, but what exactly do you think a name is? Do you think we place so much importance in it for no reason?”

Nadi wasn’t sure how to answer that. To her, a name was just something you were called by others. Sure having a longer name was better, but did it really matter?

“A name is what other people call you.”

“Yes, but it’s so much more than that. It’s the crystallisation of everything you are and everything you want to be. Your parents provide the foundation of who you are then your elders guide you towards the future they think is best for you. And finally, once you are recognised by Eidri, you decide how to complete your name; you decide who you will be.

“Wasting that chance on filler is something you will dearly regret.”

The passion in his voice shook her in a way she couldn’t clearly describe, if made her want to actually pick her nizilor with caution and care.

Though she still wasn’t sure what to pick, she now had a better idea.

Alice knew she had been lying there for far too long. She definitely had to do something about the splinters in her, even if her finger was a lost cause.

She felt like laughing at herself. She knew it was a bad idea. The dice knew this was a bad idea. The entire Forest probably knew it was a bad idea! But no. She just had to see what would happen.

Even then it’s not like it hurt anymore. She just felt numb, definitely a bit angry, and even more like she needed sleep more than medical care. The last one especially when she realised she would be filled with splinters for weeks, probably dying of an infection, if she didn’t take the time to painstakingly remove every single shard of wood.

After somewhere between a few minutes and a few hours of waiting in her stupor, Alice finally scrounged up enough motivation to fix her numerous mistakes.

The first thing she did was immediately transfer all her stats to an equal distribution, vowing to never ever do something like this ever again. After using the wait time to acknowledge just how disappointed she was in herself, she then tried to focus her thoughts on getting to decide where any new stats went in future. If Alice had any say in it this would never happen again. Once she was done with the wait, she now had two more issues to try and solve: Removing her splinters, and figuring out her finger.

Removing the splinters manually probably wouldn’t end well. For one she was liable to push them even deeper considering their density, not to mention moving in any way hurt. Maybe [Flames of Vengeance] could just burn them out? Though that might not work since there wasn’t really anything to take vengeance on in the first place. It was probably still worth a shot she reasoned.

At first everything seemed fine but as the flames burned, they started burning her. It was all things considered quite minor, but still! That was the one thing they were not meant to do! Not to mention it felt like the splinters were being pushed deeper instead of being burned out. Seeing this as a dead end, Alice immediately cancelled the skill. But somehow, that didn’t extinguish them. The flames got weaker but stayed lit.

Beginning to panic, she tried gathering water with her magic to put them out. Unfortunately, Alice’s skill was a lot less forgiving than she had previously assumed. When she first released her mana, it instantly caught flame and left her control at the exact same moment. Maybe if it weren’t for the panic she felt at her flame’s betrayal, she would have instead been focused on how cool the blast of flames was. Instead, despite the fact the flames had stopped directly harming her long ago, she still tried to roll out of the way in case the flames came back down. If the flames weren’t harming her then the dense mat of splinters being pushed deeper within her did.

In her frantic haze, she somehow managed to realise that since the flames seemed to eat her mana she could try flushing them out by just releasing mana fast enough to keep them burning away from her. Normally this is what she would call a “bad idea”. After all she had essentially suggested putting out a fire with oil… But maybe because of the same desperation which caused her to even think of the idea, she held on to the thought tighter than a drowning man did to reeds.

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Thankfully the theory behind it was sound enough that she managed to extricate herself from the fires cloying grasp. She still had to crawl out from under the now hovering flames before the just reignited her. Then she had to ensure she was well and truly free of the fire before she lowered the pressure of her mana. Once that was done, she took off without so much as a glance behind her.

Now that she had successfully solved exactly none of her problems and had made one of them worse, she decided she absolutely was not going to try solving it herself. This time all that happened was she nearly killed herself. Maybe next time she actually would. That also applied to unsupervised magic experiments. All three times she had done so had left her much worse than she started. She had to remember that she wasn’t alone anymore. Even if she had very little love for them, there was in fact someone who could help.

She just really wished she didn’t need his help.

Chief seemed really passionate about teaching Nadi everything he knew about everything. Not that she wasn’t interested; It’s just that he had to have been there for hours at this point. At first the discussion on Eidri and her will was interesting, and so was the lesson on the different ways magic would be cast, but once he began describing the difference in mana and essence or identity and elements, she was really tempted to let him know how little she cared. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that he gave actually useful information hidden within the fluff he exposited.

For example, when he told her of divine skills and their fuels, something she definitely wasn’t paying attention to, he brought up how a goblins name gave them a powerful, upgradeable divine skill by default! That really made her want to relisten to the entire lesson.

Maybe she could ask him to repeat all of it later?

Before Nadi could start mostly ignoring the lesson again, there was a knock at the door. Normally she would have assumed Kani was here but she could tell from the knock that it definitely wasn’t him.

“Come in Alice.”

How chief could tell who was outside before they came in, she had no clue. But she did know he probably did it to help with his ‘image’, whatever that was worth.

After a longer than expected delay, the door swung open and a haggard being walked through. If Nadi thought Alice’s skin was ordinarily unhealthily pale, now she worried that the girl had already died. But despite how ethereal she looked, there was an offensively vibrant red blooming around her arms and abdomen. The victim in question was almost definitely dying. She could barely even stand as it was!

Nadi rushed over to her and tried to support her while avoiding every spot of… whatever that red stuff was. It seemed whatever gossamer threads had been keeping Alice conscious had finally given way, leaving Nadi entirely overwhelmed by the sudden weight she was faced with. Thankfully, Chief helped her carry Alice into Nadi’s bed. Or more accurately, Karandi took over and did it all himself.

Nadi watched as he looked over her wounds and couldn’t help but wonder:

“Why don’t you just heal her like you do for us?”

There was none of that green light that he normally used when someone got injured, nor did he look like he was planning to use it in the first place.

“I would if I could, but my healing only works on people from a village off mine. Alice has made it abundantly clear that she does not plan to or want to stay longer than necessary.”

“So what will you do?”

“The best I can.”

That seemed to be the end of the conversation and chief continued looking over her. Occasionally he muttered something after Alice twitched too violently for him to be unrelated. At some point Kani had barged in before seeing just how important chiefs work was and standing there quietly like she was.

This continued even longer before suddenly and abruptly, a miniature forest of tiny plants rose out of Alices red spots. They grew and coiled around each other, forming a much larger tree with a singular green fruit at its top. The small fruit had the diameter of a thumb, and once the fruit was plucked from the strangely ethereal tree, the plant evaporated. The wooden fruit was placed to the side as the unconscious girl’s wounds began closing.”

“That’s all I can do for now. I think its best if we give her some space.”

“Why couldn’t you just use your healing on her? That would have been much quicker right?” Kani repeated the question Nadi had asked.

“I can only use my healing on people from my village. Alice is not, and does not want to be part of this village.”

“Then that was probably conjuration you used right? Is there a reason you did that or does it not matter how you did it?”

“It was conjuration. I used it because of the way it has little effect on anything not already saturated with similar mana. That made it especially simple to remove the wood inside her without disturbing her excessively.”

Being as lost as she was, Nadi felt the need to stop the conversation from travelling any deeper into technical detail.

“Do you know how she got hurt though? Do we have to be worried about some new monster nearby?”

With his disappointment at being dragged away from the clearly interesting discussion clear on his face he chuckled lightly as he answered.

“There’s probably no need to worry. This was probably a self-inflicted wound. If it were anything else I have no… very little doubt she would not have come back.”

“How!?” “What.”

Nadi and Kani both found themselves shocked at what they heard.

“How could she have done this to herself! Surely it makes more sense for this to have been a monster, right? They are becoming more active.”

“Yeah! Kani’s right! How on Eidri could that,” Nadi pointed at Alices still red and bumpy skin, “be done by her?”

Karandi seemed to hold back a chuckle at what was obviously an incredibly funny joke.

“You fail. To understand something very important. Alice is at minimum ten years old. Not to mention at least somewhat competent in magic and survival. Add to that her being huma—giant spawn, with enough of Eidri’s blessings to be at least 20 times stronger than she should be… Her power is a lot more than many goblins will ever see more than once. Of course, she does still lack the maturity needed to be trusted with that power unattended, hence the current situation.”

“How did she even get to that point… If she’s been an elder for under a year, then how?”

Nadi muttered this shocked at just how dangerous the person in front of her was.

“Honestly, its impossible to know for sure. What I do know however, was that it wasn’t through hard work and dedication. Similar to how you became an elder, it she could have been taken along to witness the death of some powerful monster. She could have been a farmer’s child, or maybe she was just present for the death of her particularly powerful parents. Either way, these are the heights I hope both of you can one day look down upon.”

No matter how she thought of it… That just seemed impossible.