Adventuring – doing missions as the locals call it – is really…uhh…really boring.
Getting a team together sounds like a really exciting thing to do – almost like I’m the lead in a heist movie or something. In reality, all I did was awkwardly ask Cana to hang out and drink together like we normally do. Then we sat at the guild bar awkwardly and ignored Mira’s amusement as we steadily got more drunk and less awkward. Alcohol is miraculous like that.
Unfortunately, alcohol is not miraculous enough to be a permanent solution, and the next morning found me with a headache and an only slightly-less-awkward-than-before relationship with Cana. Which I suppose is better than nothing because that day we had to prepare for a trip that could last multiple months. Which meant planning what to buy, then shopping, then planning some more, and then shopping again.
It was a bit like planning for a vacation in my old life, except you didn’t have the assurance that you could buy whatever you forgot once you got there. There were no convenient camping supply shops in the middle of the wilderness after all, and unless your name was Natsu, more was required to not be miserable on the road than a bed roll and a frying pan.
The road from Magnolia to the Sabretooth Mountains was fortunately pretty straightforward. We would walk from Magnolia to Crocus which would take around a month, and then from Crocus it was a couple days of walking to the Sabretooth Mountains.
It wouldn’t have been anywhere near as simple just a couple decades ago, but Gildarts almost singlehandedly built Fiore’s roads. Gildarts’ poor control over his magic meant that whenever there was an obstacle in his path, he didn’t walk around it, he walked through it. Makarov, brilliant as he is, saw this and set Gildarts on a trip across Fiore, following a straight line from city to city. This resulted on perfectly flat and perfectly straight lines of cleared ground leading from each city to every other city. It took a little work from some Earth Magic users to turn these into proper roads, but within a couple years of Makarov having the idea, Fiore had the best roadway system in the continent.
The feat was technically possible for a team of Earth Mages on their own too, but it would take a lot longer and would require a massive contingent of guards since the wildlife in Fiore was dangerous (or a small contingent of powerful mages, but that’s even more expensive). Evolution is a thing here on Earthland too, and it quickly ensured that any creature without some moderately powerful innate magical capabilities went extinct. As a result, without Gildarts, building a roadway system of that quality would take far more resources and money than Fiore’s government could spare at any one time.
The more immediately relevant consequence of Fiore’s wildlife, however, was that it meant that humans lived in fairly heavily fortified cities that had a mage guild of some sort guarding them. Anything less would result in the settlement being destroyed and the residents eaten by packs of flaming or freezing or shocking wolves or tigers or rats or ants or… I could go on, but the point is that there is a lot of things out in the wild that’ll kill you. It’s only when you’re lucky that all you have to deal with is a normal animal with some sort of elemental enhancement.
Heavily fortified cities with powerful mages, as one would expect, are in fairly short supply. This meant that there was only one stop between Magnolia and Crocus – Ghareon. It was a small outpost, inhabited only by a couple of hard-ass monster hunters, their families, and the Southern Wolves Guild. All it would really provide on our journey was a somewhat safe place to sleep and a replacement tent if you lost yours.
All that served as a brief explanation of why Cana and I were currently tired and frustrated as we looked over the supplies we’d bought for the gazillionth time. Utensils, plates, pots, pans, tent, sleep rolls, rope, waterskin, tinder, torches. Some of those were redundant with magic, but according to Cana, they wouldn’t be feeling so redundant when there was a magic-sniffing chimera.
“Salt” Cana said.
“What?” I asked.
“We forgot to get salt.”
I froze for a second, then swore. Loudly and at length.
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The one bright side of preparing for my first mission was getting enchanted equipment. Juvia never had any because enchanted equipment – the kind that was both portable and not specific to Holder-type mages – required magic to power it. Specifically neutral magic from the user. Being a Thrice-Bonded mage, Juvia could only produce Water magic, which would power Water based enchantments perfectly, but would also be completely useless to her because she could do those things herself.
My second lattice though, was young and didn’t even have a Bond yet. Using it to power some heavy-duty enchantments would give it a good workout, encouraging its growth so that by the time I’d decided on what my second magic would be, the lattice would have developed enough to be useful.
Levy was our guild’s resident enchanter and was more than happy to enchant my clothes for me. She was positively ecstatic when I told her that I was planning to devote my entire second lattice to powering the enchantments. After all, one of the main difficulties of enchanting is power management – getting the enchantment useful without consuming so much of the user’s power that it becomes detrimental.
I swapped out my dress for an ocean blue hooded robe. It reached down to my ankles but had slits going up the front of each leg so that it didn’t interfere with movement. I had Levy enchant it with some general durability and self-repair enchantments (being a Water Mage who can control the temperature of water made temperature regulation and self-cleaning enchantments redundant). The real might of Levy’s skill was put into a Rejection Field. It was a complicated and power hungry enchantment – not to mention expensive – but the ability to reduce the effect of any incoming magic by an amount proportional to the amount of power I could channel into it is just too useful to go without.
I also got a black belt to cinch the robe at my waist and to hold a few Pouches of Holding – an absolutely necessary tool for adventuring.
Black tights enchanted with durability, self-repair, and Muscle Maintaining (an enchantment that acted a lot like a constant massage, keeping muscles in the best condition they could be in), and black boots enchanted similarly but with the Muscle Maintaining swapped for a stability enchantment. Neither was particularly glamorous, but I would be spending most of my foreseeable future hiking. Cana, exhibitionist that she is, only wore pants because the Muscle Maintaining enchantment didn’t fit on bikini bottoms.
Later, in my room, I tried on all of the new equipment. I channeled power into them, but poorly, so that a lot of it ended up being wasted as an aura of multi-hued light as each enchantment lit up with power. I also let some of my own power leak, surrounding the glow of the enchantments in ocean colored magic.
‘Yep’ I thought, as I examined myself in the mirror, ‘I look magical as fuck’.
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Two days later, found Cana and I relieved and standing at the gates of Magnolia. The road to Crocus stretched before us, almost perfectly straight and made of a single piece of slightly raised stone that was the tell-tale sign of an Earth mage’s work.
My equipment was all stored in the pouches on my belt, and I could feel a strain on my second lattice as it worked to keep my new enchantments running. It wasn’t quite enough to be uncomfortable, and the Muscle Maintainer and stability enchantments more than made up for any magical strain.
The day was bright, the prep work was done, and I shot a small smile towards Cana’s resigned face as we started out journey. I was feeling optimistic about my first journey and excited to pit my magic against the challenge of a real mission.
…Those feelings were a mistake.
Traveling is, in its own special little way, just as horrible as the preparation. Perhaps worse, since the walking takes so much longer.
Back in my old life, I enjoyed hiking, even went on some trips to around the world with my dad specifically to hike in interesting places. Those excursions, however, usually ended at the end of the day, maybe extending to three or four days for the occasional canoe trip. They were also completely safe, barring idiocy like dancing at the edge of a cliff or something.
Traveling through Fiore though, was entirely miserable. The views were nice, but they were also mostly unchanging. Forests of varying thickness, plains of varying flatness, hills of varying heights. It all starts to blend together when it’s all you see all day every day.
The issue could’ve been mitigated slightly if we had horses or a carriage or a wagon or anything else that would mean we didn’t have to walk all day. Unfortunately, beasts of burden or Lacrima powered enchantments (what you’d need to power a vehicle) were not only extremely expensive, they also attracted all wildlife towards them for a free dinner. Erza was powerful and wealthy enough to afford her mini-car thing (not to mention willing to put up with constant attacks). Cana and I were maybe powerful enough and definitely not rich enough. Thus, walking.
“So,” Cana started “Have you thought about what other magic you want to learn?”
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It was the eighth day since we left Magnolia. We were currently walking through Sparsely Forested Plain Number Five.
“Thought about it!? I’ve done little but think about it.”
It was a beautiful Sparsely Forested Plain, the grass was much greener than that of Sparsely Forested Plain Numbers Two and Three and the trees ever so slightly shorter than those in Plain Four. I couldn’t compare it to Number One since that one was at the beginning of the journey, and I hadn’t been paying as much attention yet.
“And?” Cana said, stretching the ‘a’.
I took a moment to compose my thoughts. I had a lot of them, and I wanted this talk to last as long as possible. Cana, with her greater travel experience, decided that we would be rationing conversations. Didn’t want to run out of things to talk about a couple days in and spend the following month in silence after all.
“Well, initially I was thinking of going for something like Ice Magic or some variant of Plant Magic.”
“But?”
“I did some reading and experimenting, and it turns out that to use my Water Magic to enhance my second magic or vice versa, would essentially require me to master multitasking to an absurd level.” I lapsed into silence, hinting to Cana to ask questions. Both of us knew damn well what the questions were going to be, but they made this talk last longer.
“Since when can you not use one magic to enhance another? And even if you can’t, why not practice until you can? Or maybe get a Mind Splitting enchantment if you really don’t want to do the practice?”
“Turns out that using one magic to enhance another is usually a fantastic idea…unless off course, the two magics are in two separate lattices. Then I have to essentially perform both parts of a Unison Raid by myself. Getting to the point of multitasking that well without Bonding a magic specifically designed for it would require an absurd amount of effort” I lectured. “It’s much easier to just get better at Water magic than it is to get that good at using two magics at once.”
“And the Mind Splitter?”
I snorted. “One of those would drain the guild master dry in minutes, let alone me. Unless I found a Lacrima powered one but then I would face the problem of carrying something the size of my room around all the time.”
“Huh. Bag of Holding?”
“Even more enchanted items? Sure, but I do want to have some energy left over for actual magic. And that’s without getting into the problems of relying on that many magic items or that a Bag of Holding that big would drain me just as fast.”
I paused. “More importantly than all of that though, is that I can accomplish most of Ice and Plant magic can do with my Water magic.”
‘Please ask, please ask, please ask’ I thought. What? I practiced a lot and want to show off.
Cana shot me a surprised look “Really?”
I nodded, trying my best to not let my eagerness show.
“You can make solid constructs out of water?”
I raised my hand, palm up, and conjured a ball of water over it in response.
“Touch it.”
She seemed hesitant for a second, before a mischievous look crossed her face, and she suddenly threw a full force punch into the ball. I barely had time to process before her fist crashed into the sphere – and stopped, barely a ripple marring the surface.
Cana froze for a second before –
“OW!” she cried, shaking her hand in obvious pain.
I smirked.
She glared at me.
We had a little staring contest.
“I’m gonna get you for this.”
“Of course you will” I affected my most condescending tone.
Keeping up appearances is important, no matter how much the thought of her revenge worried me. It was a lesson I’d learned in my last life with my younger brother.
Cana interrupted that line of thought before the inevitable melancholy it brought could set in. Apparently, she was content to contemplate her revenge quietly, as she willfully veered away from the coming bickering – boredom is bad, but frustration is worse.
“So…how?”
“It’s honestly pretty simple, I just force the water to stay in place and put it under really high pressure to keep it from flowing around anything that tries to go through it.”
Cana whistled “That’s really all there is to it?”
“Well, that, and the finesse of being Thrice-Bonded. It takes more power than Ice Magic or something since I have to actively keep it solid, but it’s easier to mold” I said. “You want to know the best part though?”
It was a clearly rhetorical question, but Cana nodded along anyway.
“Making the water effectively solid isn’t even by best trick” I focused for a second and changed the sphere into something considerably more deadly, though the change wasn’t visible.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, poke it.”
Cana, far more cautiously this time, reached over with a finger –
“Wait!” I jerked the sphere out of her reach.
“What?”
“With a stick. Poke it with a stick, not your finger.”
Cana reached down and grabbed one of the sticks littering the sides of the path and reached it towards the sphere.
It exploded into a cloud of sawdust with a loud grinding sound, and Cana jumped.
“What the hell was that!?”
“Lots and lots of microscopic streams of water all flowing next to each other in different directions” I said smugly. This was decently difficult to get working after all.
Cana cradled the finger she’d almost poked into the death-ball. “Huh. So how long can you keep it going?”
“As long as I need to really.” I said, spinning the sphere around me idly. “It takes more concentration than power to keep it going.”
Cana startled again when I sent the sphere through a tree, creating another explosion of sound and sawdust. The hole it left in the tree was very satisfying too, perfectly circular and sanded – watered – smooth.
Following that demonstration of magical prowess, we spent the next couple hours of the hike simply playing around with my magic. Twisting it into sculptures, coloring the water by dissolving various bits of dirt and plant matter in it, and then using those sculptures to expound on various stories from Earth. We were constrained a bit by the fact that we had to keep walking and had to keep the displays fairly small to avoid attracting the attention of the various monsters roaming the wilderness, but I found the challenge made things a little more entertaining. Lots of fun all around (except the moment where I realized that I could’ve gained far more popularity at the guild if I’d thought of that last bit earlier).
Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and eventually I ran out of stories I could think of off the top of my head (or that I was willing to leave to spur of the moment telling, The Wheel of Time deserves better). We lapsed back into companionable silence, Cana presumably thinking about the stories I’d told, and I reflected on how to tell them better next time.
It was evening by that point, and setting up camp was about as exciting as it was every other time I’d done it. That is to say, not at all.
Find a relatively flat place among the trees and away from the road, find a bit with no roots, pitch a tent, set up a fire pit… its tedious as hell even with magic since neither Cana’s Card Magic nor my Water Magic are particularly suited for construction.
I was in the middle of preparing the firewood for the night (practicing my Water Slicer as I like to call it) when things took a turn for the…interesting.
I barely registered a choked grunt before Cana’s limp form rocketed past me, back first into a tree and a red streak extending from her chest.
I hadn’t even managed to track the red streak back to its source when another streak went through my back and erupted out my chest.
I stared down in incomprehension. The bit I could see was slimy. Almost like a tongue.
‘No wait, it’s exactly like a t – ‘
My world went white and what little of me could still think identified the numbing knives and pokers of electricity flowing through my body.
An eternity later, the flow stopped and I flopped to the floor, almost insensate.
Almost.
With the last remnants of my consciousness, I turned myself to water.
Instantly, my mind cleared and the pain stopped – sentient masses of water don’t have to deal with electrical burns and nerve damage after all. Unfortunately, sentient masses of water also don’t have eyes or ears or any sense besides proprioception. A problem I’d have to deal with quickly, before whatever attacked us can finish Cana –
‘If it hasn’t al – ‘
Nope not going there – and before they start trying to evaporate me.
I gathered myself into a sphere of water, the outer layers of which I sent spinning in the same way I did the death balls I’d shown Cana earlier today.
‘God I hope the attackers try to punch the sphere and kill themselves in the process.’
The center of the sphere I kept calm and still, using the water there to begin reforming just my eyes, which hopefully hadn’t suffered too much from the attack. This kind of partial reformation wasn’t something I’d ever attempted before, but it stood to reason that if I could partially turn to water, I should be able to partially turn to flesh.
The process wasn’t the fastest, but luckily I finished before Cana could be eaten by a fucking floating fang filled tunnel WHAT THE FUCK!?
I snapped back to focus when my eyes started turning back in to water, and reflexively sent out a stream of pressurized water straight into the mouth.
This, both surprisingly and unsurprisingly, worked exactly as expected. The water disappeared into the maw, then reappeared and bore a hole in the tree behind the mouth and two more for good measure before wearing itself out.
Slowly, the body of the lamprey mouthed chameleon thing that was dragging Cana faded into view and toppled from the tree it was clinging to. The hole I put in it oozing blood and viscera onto Cana.
I grimaced in disgust. Luckily, though Water magic wasn’t the best for setting up camp sites, it is very good at cleaning up this sort of thing.
I turned myself fully human again…and immediately collapsed, choking on blood.
‘Right, yeah, hole in my chest’
I turned my torso back to water and marveled for a moment at how the pain immediately disappeared as water somehow performed all the necessary biological functions.
A golden blur rocketing a hairsbreadth from my ear shocked me out of my musings. Cana stood in front of me, one hand extended, the other holding a pulsing red card. A squelching sound prompted me to look back where another of the monstrosities lay, missing a head.
We stood there and processed for a moment.
“What the hell was that!?” Cana’s shout snapped my attention back to her.
“A, uh, a monster attack?” was this a trick question or something?
“Not that you idiot, I’ve ran into llysanwe before, I mean how did you forget that there were two!?”
I thought over the fight.
“Uh…well…you see…it was all very fast and then I got skewered and then…” I rambled a little before trailing off.
Cana ran a hand through her hair in frustration. “The injury could be distracting, but it should be a reason to pay more attention! I saw you relax after killing the first one! You didn’t even look around!”
On one hand, I wanted to shout back that I had a literal hole in my chest and that should excuse a lot. On the other, she had a good point, I did demonstrate a distinct lack of survival instinct (not to mention that I was dealing with the hole just fine).
“That’s what teammates are for?” I tried.
Cana was not impressed. I sighed.
“I’m sorry, I’ll do better next time.”
Cana made a sort if strangled choking noise. “Wha- That’s it!? Aren’t you going to mention your injury? Accuse me of passing out or not noticing them? Argue!?”
What.
What is this one eighty? Did I miss something?
“Am I supposed to?”
“Ye – No – Argh!” she spun around and started setting our camp back in order.
I just stood there and let her sort herself out. Or well, that’s what I ended up doing as I tried to think of a way to calm her down.
Eventually, when it was clear Cana wasn’t going to be talking, I settled on moving the corpses of the monsters (what did Cana call them again?) out of the camp and burying them, wrapping my wound with a couple watertight bandages to seal the water in it once I stopped actively controlling it, and going to sleep.