Japan had always been on my list of places to travel to someday.

I’d always loved travel, seeing new places, new people, and new foods. Some of my happiest childhood memories were from holidays with my parents. We’d been to places like France, Greece, and Madagascar. Maybe that was why I liked it. I associated holidays abroad with the great times I’d had with my family back then when I was still been getting used to being part of a real family.

After my big gap year trip, I’d been planning to start saving for another one, maybe for after I finished university. Then, along came the Black Sun, and that was goodbye to university, and any plans that I’d been making.

There were many reasons that I wanted to go and see the country of the Rising Sun. Not least was the chance to see the infamous Tokyo Tower which was seemingly destroyed in every single Godzilla film. But at the top of my list, I wanted to see the famed Cherry Blossoms. Maybe I’d watched too many samurai films, but I really wanted to see entire small forests of cherry trees in bloom, the petals falling in small blizzards with every little gust of wind.

Of late the thought of the places I’d once planned to visit was . . . niggling at me. An itch that I couldn’t scratch!

I’d been stuck inside the Hallowed Sanctuary for too long. Massive as it was, it seemed to be growing smaller by the day. I was beginning to feel shut in.

At first, it hadn’t been that bad. There was lots of stuff to do, so I hadn’t had time to think about anything other than the challenge of getting my magic under control. But, as the days rolled by, I’d found myself wanting other things, new things.

I’d been to every bit of space available in the Sanctuary, and over the last few days, I’d taken to running a lap around the inner edge of the perimeter. It was actually a pretty massive area, but my new body had loads of stamina and was pretty fast, so it made for a good workout.

The problem was that before long the route had become familiar, stale, and generally uninteresting. So, to liven things up I’d decided to combine that with further practice in the use of my magic.

The first thing I’d done was try to use my control over earth and stone to raise a whole bunch of outcroppings and boulders along my path. That gave me an improvised parkour course to practice, Then I improvised ponds with steppingstones, frozen puddles to slide along and more parkour obstacles. They’d all been fun enough to start with, but I soon needed something else.

At first, I’d tried reshaping the earth to form statues of stuff like cheerleaders egging me on, just for a laugh. But I quickly found that my control wasn’t fine enough to manage that successfully. I could create human-shaped statues, but they ended up looking more like semi-melted mannequins than anything else. I tried other stuff, making rock formations, pyramids, stairs, but none of it stayed interesting.

Now plant manipulation was something I knew I could do, although I hadn’t practised much. Using various shades of ‘green’ magic did seem to tie into the nature of trees and other plants, but it was much harder to work with than things like sand or fire, that weren’t alive. It wasn’t impossible, but it was hard.

I’d figured that was the problem, they were living beings with their own life force, I couldn’t just seize control of them like I did loose pebbles. I was sure that in time I’d be able to do more, but there were two things I could do. Firstly I could manipulate dead leaves telekinetically, whipping them around me as I ran. The second was to enhance growth in any plant I wished, and that was the big one, the fun one.

It had been one of the first things I’d managed with my uncontrolled magic, and it hadn’t taken me that long to work out how to do it at will. I could see a lot of future potential for this magic, especially if I could learn to shape and direct the growth. Games and books were rife with examples of elves and druids of growing fields and orchards to feed the hungry, or literal treehouses to give them homes.

On the combat side of things . . . well, I couldn’t grow a tree so fast that it would act as a catapult and send someone flying, but if I was clever about it I could use the growth to create things like hedges of thorny vines and the like. Still, I needed more practice, so I had an idea.

It started at breakfast when I’d given into my . . . mental hunger and taken a bite out of an apple. I’d known that there’d be no taste, and even though I wasn’t physically hungry I was starting to really miss any sort of food.

I think it was a sort of almost morbid curiosity that led to me taking a second bite of the tasteless apple, then a third, each bite going deeper until I’d bitten out the core. As anyone who’s tried to eat a core can say, it isn’t a pleasant experience. It is tough, the seed pods are ridged enough to cut your mouth if you chew them wrong, and the seeds themselves are extremely bitter when you crush them. It was only when I felt one between my teeth that I stopped, and the idea occurred to me.

That morning I planted the apple seed next to my running path and focused my magic into it. The task wasn’t difficult, and soon a sprout shot forth. It grew fast enough that I could watch it with ease like some recording being played at accelerated speed.

It only took me about ten minutes to grow the seed from a tiny shoot into a full-grown tree, one that flowered and bore fruit before I withdrew my magic from it and allowed it to return to a more normal existence. It was . . . satisfying, to sit there under the tree I had grown, smelling the scent of apples just coming to ripeness. Sure, I couldn’t eat them, but just the smell was relaxing.

So, I plucked an apple from the tree, buried it in the ground and made another tree grow,

Then I did it again.

And again.

And again.

It became almost a sort of relaxing repetition and I was doing my best to improve my time on each tree, but after a bit, I was able to let my thoughts drift as the process became familiar to me. The next thing I knew I was surrounded by more than two dozen apple trees, all of which were in the later stages of fruiting. It was interesting, and it did make my next run around the perimeter of the Sanctuary a lot more interesting, so I decided to see what else I could manage.

After raiding the kitchen for every form of fruit seed I could find I ended up with some interesting results. A ten-metre-long stone frame that supported a massive grapevine, the bunches of fat white grapes full and juicy, ready to be eaten. Joan was happy about that since it turned out that she was quite fond of grapes and made it a habit to pick some each day. Then there were some orange trees as well, displaying an eye-catching contrast between green and orange as their fruits ripened.

My latest project though, was a bit more ambitious, and given that I couldn’t eat any of the fruit my motivation was purely based on how good the result would look. While hunting for more seeds to work with I stumbled across an open and half-empty bag of frozen cherries hiding behind a rack of ribs in the farmhouse freezer.

Honestly, my private theory was that it was something left behind by one of the workers who had helped renovate the place, that was the only reason I could think of for them to be there. At first, I’d been ready to just throw them away, but then a thought occurred to me and I let a few of the cherries thaw out. To my delight, I found that the pips were still inside.

Getting them to grow had not been easy. Being frozen might have preserved them, but it had also damaged the seeds. The magic I pushed into them didn’t want to cooperate. The first seed I tried to coax back to life ended up bursting into flames on me. The second didn’t burn, but it did crumble to powder after I pushed it too far. The third, at least stayed in one piece, but shrivelled up as though it was months old. It was the fourth one that I finally made a breakthrough on. A tiny green shoot poking forth from the pip after I had spent more than ten painstaking minutes feeding green into it. Soon enough I had a fully-grown tree, and from there I got more cherries and then more seeds. And, of course, the famed cherry blossoms.

After that, I might have been a bit overenthusiastic.

I’d been thinking about the trip I wanted to take to Japan, and also how I felt increasingly closed in. So if I couldn’t go to Japan, then I might as well try and make here a bit more like there.

Japan had fared quite well regarding the return of its native pantheon. It seemed that the Imperial family really did have some sort of blood link to their gods. They weren’t demigods, but apparently, there was something to their ancestral claims to the Mandate of Heaven. With China having been taken over by their gods, the deities of Japan had decided to take steps to secure their homeland against potential invasion and an accord had been reached, one that ensured Japan’s safety. That was for the future though.

In the present my efforts turned a portion of a farmstead in France into something from a Japanese tourist brochure. My runs had grown much more interesting, and I’d gotten loads of practice with my magic into the bargain.

“Adam, we need to speak.”

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The sudden call broke me out of my happy contemplation.

It was Hadriel who had spoken, the image of the half-naked warrior angel clashed with that of the tranquil background of the Japanese sakura. It was as though someone had prepared a Japanese tearoom to perfection, and had then let in two Mexican wrestlers to fight.

“What’s up?”

“Could you please return to the homestead, myself and Lady Joan wish to speak to you upon a serious matter.”

Okay, that didn’t sound good.

“Should I be worried?”

I asked the question mostly in jest, but the warrior angel looked at me with very serious eyes.

“That would depend upon your point of view.”

I almost gave in to the urge to sigh but managed to hold it back. Hadriel was someone that I respected a great deal.

The red-winged angel knew that she was beautiful, and she knew I found her beautiful, given how she’d caught me staring at her in the past, but she didn’t seem to place much value upon it. She was . . . comfortable with herself. And I think she would have been had she had a broken nose, wart-covered skin, and sagging features, looks were just unimportant to her.

Yes, I respected her a great deal, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t be exasperating at times.

Hadriel seemed incapable of either informality or relaxation. She was all business, treating me as a combination of a charge to protect, a student to educate, and a subordinate to command, all the time. Even Joan, pious and dedicated as she was, would let go of some of her formality at the table, talking to me as a companion rather than as a responsibility. The angel, though, never let up, it was as though she had just one setting. As far as I could tell the only time that she came even close to thawing was when we were sparring. She seemed to enjoy it, though I was still nowhere near the level needed to give her a good challenge. I got the impression that battle was where she really shone, where I had a chance to make an impression.

Though that was still quite a ways off, I think.

Joan was waiting for us out on the white lawn near the back door. Her expression was complicated, a mixture of resolve and trepidation that put me slightly on edge. There was no fear there though, so I guessed that it wasn’t something like an imminent attack.

As we drew closer I opened my arms, smiling in an attempt to lighten the mood a bit.

“Okay, don’t keep me in suspense, what’s going on?”

The French saint and the divine soldier exchanged brief glances, then turned back to face me.

“Adam, as you know the Hallowed Sanctuary shall soon be expiring, it is only a few days until its protection shall end.”

I’ll be honest, Joan’s words caught me a bit by surprise. Had it really been that long? I realized she was right. There had to be less than a week left of the Sanctuary’s protection.

“Okay, so what’s the plan then? Are we going to move somewhere else? Do you think I’m ready to head home?” I asked, half joking.

“Not yet, Adam,” She replied, her voice sympathetic. “I know you wish to, but until your powers are greater you shall be able to do little there, save for drawing dangers to your home.”

I didn’t like that but I understood it. So . . .

“Okay, so what did you want to talk to me about? Do you have something else planned?”

“Indeed,” Hadriel stated, floating over to hover next to Joan. “We feel that you require experience that cannot be provided by simple training. Experience with foes that are genuinely dangerous and who seek to do you harm.”

All I could do was blink at her, my brain freezing as it tried to understand what it had been told, but I was unable to process it.

“. . . What?”

“Adam, as matters stand you are more powerful than you realize,” Joan spoke up, her arms and hands spread in a gesture of openness. “You have been granted great power, and even though you cannot yet use it to the full strength you possess, you are still a power to be reckoned with.”

I could feel the scepticism that spread across my face. I knew how I stacked up against my two guardians. Still, I didn’t say anything, I just waited.

“Consider this to be a trial by fire,” Joan explained. “We intend to send you against a danger that has appeared in a nearby area. A danger that seems to be based upon some form of monster, rather than a demonic agent, or a divine influence. As far as can be determined something is warping the local animals into monstrous versions of themselves. Thus far the beasts have largely stayed within the forest, but some have ventured out, resulting in several grave injuries, and at least three deaths. As matters stand these encounters have only taken place near the edge of the forest, but unless something is done then the situation will grow worse.”

Hadriel flicked one wrist, and the gem on the bracelet encircling it lit up, lines of light extending to form an image in mid-air. At first, it was just a lot of outlines, but then the light started to fill them in, and what had been a sort of wireframe image became a magnificent holographic map of a large area. The sight of it was enough to send the sci-fi fan in me into a squealing fit of joy at the sight of an actual holographic display. Internally I chalked it up as one of my goals to achieve in light mastery, something I definitely wanted to be able to do.

“This is our current location.”

As she stated this, a small round portion of the map lit up. It was an area I was damned familiar with now, and I knew just how big it was, encompassing the farmhouse, the fields, and the edge of the forest. Yet on the map, it was almost tiny, barely larger than a thumbnail. Then the map rotated, bringing a new area closer to me, an area that was considerably larger than that of the Sanctuary and lit up in red.

“This is the affected area that the scrying of my fellow angels has been able to confirm. We do not know what the cause of the twisting is. Some power keeps it hidden from us, but we know it is somewhere within this area.”

“You can’t find it?”

I didn’t mean to interrupt, but the question kind of came out on its own due to my surprise. Angels were well known to be powerful. If something was able to block them, then how exactly were they hoping that I could go up against it?

“It is not a matter of power,” the warrior angel assured me. “Rather it is a simple matter of camouflage. Whatever the source of this aberration of the natural world is, it can hide itself perfectly within the influence it is spreading. The nature of that influence makes it opaque to the normal spells and castings that my brethren would normally employ. There are greater works that could be brought to bear, but such are not to be used lightly, and are normally held in reserve for dire circumstances.”

That made sense. It was a bit worrying that I might be going after some sort of stealthy . . . was it even an opponent? The way they described this it might be something like a cursed spring that was causing the trouble, so I might not even need to fight. On the other hand, it might mean that I was going to have to face off against something like an assassin, something that could hide, and then strike. And there was the most obvious problem as well.

“So how am I meant to find it? I mean, if angels can’t, then how am I meant to?”

“In that regard, you need not worry,” Hadriel assured me. “The influence that keeps any magical attempts to see within is akin to a large bubble covering the area. Once you are within this protection your own magical senses should make it a simple task for you to track down the source of warping power. Our tests on your sensitivity to fluctuations or manifestation of power have confirmed this.”

That was true, it had been boring, but they had determined that as far as sensing the manipulation of various types of energy went I had a pretty massive range and decent sensitivity. Sadly, it wasn’t a talent that was applicable in midbattle, due to the state of concentration needed for it being pretty fragile. But for scouting or tracking it would be easy enough. If I could get to that area and start looking, then I’d be able to search through it easily.

Of course, that left the other, and in my opinion more important, issue to address.

“Look, I get what you’re saying, but . . . but am I ready for this? I know that I’ve got power, but I . . . I don’t know if I can properly use it in a fight, y’know? I mean, what . . . what if I get scared and screw up?”

Admitting that was hard, especially in the face of these two, but it had to be said. In many ways it was among my greatest fears, proving myself unworthy of the attention and effort they had invested in me.

But, at the same time, I didn’t want to die because I’d let my emotions overwhelm my reason. Yes, I was scared, and that was something I desperately wanted to overcome, but by the same sentiment, I didn’t want to rush into a hopeless situation due to recklessness or some blind need to prove myself. It was a tightrope, a balancing act as I tried to avoid falling to either side.

“Adam, fear is nothing to be ashamed of,” Joan assured me. “We hope that this mission will be a chance for you to gain combat experience against some enemies that not only are of a level you can deal with but are also little more than maddened beasts that need to be put down. However, we do not intend to throw you into the fray without any sort of guarantee, such would be foolish and cruel.”

As she spoke she handed me what looked like a small glass bottle, one small enough to fit into the palm of my hand. The liquid it contained looked wrong though, the glowing blue substance moving strangely within the glass, as though it were slightly out of tune with gravity. Still, strange though it was I could feel a certain power radiating from it, a power that felt oddly comforting.

“This is a spell container made by honoured Hadriel,” She explained. “It has a simple function. All you need do is break it and we shall immediately know to come to your aid with all the speed we possess. However, please do not use it carelessly, this task has not been given to you lightly, so do not take it as such.”

Ah, so a safety net of sorts. Sure, I hoped I wouldn’t have to use the spell, but just having the option was enough to make me feel a bit more secure. Something I could fall back on if everything went to hell. I knew just how fast the two of them could move when they needed to, enough so that they could both be at my side in a few seconds.

“Okay, I think I understand. So . . . is it alright if I ask you for some more info before I go?”

“Do not think we are dispatching you this very minute,” Hadriel assured me. “You shall leave upon the morrow. Tonight, I shall inform you as to all the details that my fellow angels have been able to gather.”

Well, that was a relief. Knowing I wasn’t just being sent off without some sort of briefing made me feel a bit better about this mission . . . wait, hold on one minute.

It was at that moment that exactly what was happening finally clicked into place. I was getting a quest, a real honest to gods ‘find this and slay that’ quest! I could just imagine it in my mind, one of those quests you get in MMORPGs. Complete with an electronic yet female voice reading it out loud.

You have received a quest from [Joan of Arc] and [Angel Soldier Hadriel]!

Cleanse the Twisted Forest!

Objectives:

Slay twisted beasts! (Optional)

Find and Cleanse/Destroy the source of the warped energy twisting the local wildlife!

Save any civilians trapped by twisted beasts! (Optional)

Find Hidden Treasure! (Optional)

Rewards:

Increased Reputation with [Joan of Arc] and [Angel Soldier Hadriel]!

Experience!

Increased Reputation with [Local Civilians]!

Hidden Treasure! (Optional)

Failure Conditions:

Fail to locate the source of the warped energy twisting the local wildlife!

Excessive death toll upon local civilians!

Die!

I couldn’t help but wonder if thinking about video games was my coping mechanism. Why else would my mind go straight there after hearing something so serious.

Shaking my head, I saw that the red-winged angel was gesturing for me to follow her into the farmstead, hopefully, to start showing me the info that she’d just mentioned. Something told me that if I wanted to get through what was coming then I was going to need it.