Despite her protests, Great Girl was the sort who I could guarantee would show up to help with training. Even though it wasn’t her job to help out newbies, she showed up right on schedule.
“Listen here, Barbro,” I said to our new barbarian. “We’ve got an expert here to help whip you into shape. At some point we’ll get to advice on how to deal with larger opponents, but first you should see it for yourself.”
“So you’re going to spar with her?” he asked.
“No, you are,” I said.
“But-”
I reached out towards Great Girl, at first feeling a resistance to my spell before she properly shrank. “That’ll last about ten minutes,” I said as she ended up between two and three feet tall.
Barbro or whatever his angry animal name was readied his padded long staff. Maybe bear? It was something related to bears or bees or whatever.
He was a bit timid with his first attack, but as Great Girl continued to avoid his prods and swings he grew more desperate. She managed to slip inside his guard in only a few moves, grabbing his waist and tossing him. He activated Rage when he was tumbling across the floor of the training room, but the additional power didn’t help.
Even when he managed to swing his weapon faster, Great Girl avoided his attacks- or deflected them, even at her size. She never engaged in direct contests of strength. To me… it was like watching her replicate everything she thought was most annoying about some of her opponents. She had a lot of experience fighting from the larger side, but she also understood being smaller- especially with my recent assistance Enlarging other members of the Brigade.
Barbro’s staff smacked into the ground, and she stepped on the end. He struggled to lift it, his muscles bulging as he lifted her off the ground- her position greatly increasing her effective weight. However, the maneuver was pointless as she simply slid down the staff and stomped on his fingers.
I had to admit the fact that his fingers either didn’t break or he continued fighting regardless impressed me. He ditched the staff to the side, crouching low and trying to catch Great Girl. His attempt to adapt was good, but that didn’t mean he’d suddenly win. He still got tossed around whenever he went in for a strike or a grab.
At some point during the battle Great Girl picked up his staff, striking at his knees and shoulders, constantly knocking him back. He finally caught the staff in one hand, tightening his grip and stopping the motion. His second hand reached forward to get a better grip, and he swung the staff with all of his might. If Great Girl had continued to hold on she likely would have gone flying- instead he overextended and left her an opportunity to rush him while he was trying to wrangle the staff back in front of him.
She slid low between his legs, grabbing one shin while twisting around to kick the back of his other knee, toppling him for the last time. His Rage faded, his mana drained and his stamina depleted. He just lay there on his back breathing heavily.
“Not too bad, newbie,” Great Girl said. “I’ll send you a review of the video with my notes on my strategy. You’ve got potential.”
“Uuuuugh,” he groaned. Well, he’d be fine later. His physical fitness was on par, but he needed more levels to maintain his class abilities properly.
“Mage, can we talk for a moment?” Great Girl gestured. I nodded and followed her out of the training room, down the hall into a small meeting room. “What the heck did you do to my power?”
I tilted my head. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“Why am I like this,” she gestured to herself. Still small, obviously. “You said it would only last ten minutes!”
“Approximately ten minutes,” I said. “It’s only been, uh… hmm. Like half an hour. That’s odd.”
“Odd?” She fumed. “If you’ve turned me into Micro Girl I’m going to throw you off the roof!”
“You could just bite me,” I pointed out. “I assume you can still grow sharp teeth.”
“Well I-” she grumbled for a moment as I saw her begin to shift, then shift back. “Sure but that’s unrelated to my power, you know?”
I tapped one of my tusks. “I don’t know what to say. The spell’s over. No more magic. The only power active is yours.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“How do you feel right now?”
“Uncomfortably small!” she replied. “You know how I feel about that.”
“Have you tried growing larger?” I asked.
“And doom myself to having to constantly push myself to be my normal size? You need to fix this!”
I nodded seriously. “Have you just tried… no longer concentrating on your power?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, let yourself shift back to your natural size. You know, like when going home from work.”
She grimaced, but closed her eyes. Then, slowly, she grew in size… until she was a clean five feet tall. When she opened her eyes she was still glaring at me. “This better not have screwed anything up.”
I shrugged, “Hey, nothing I do is permanent. I have a simple question for you, though. Have you ever tried to be smaller before?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Like, smaller than your natural size.”
“My power is to grow larger.”
“Is it?” I asked.
“... what do you mean? Obviously. I’ve literally done it my whole career. You’ve seen it.” She grew taller, matching my height briefly before stopping just short of her head brushing the ceiling of the meeting room. “What else would you call this?” she asked.
“No, that’s definitely growing larger, but that’s not the only thing your power does is it?” I pointed out. “Your muscles grow more than a proportional increase in strength.”
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“Well, sure,” she admitted. “I also have that. But that’s still basically just size increases,” she said, flexing.
“If you could return to your natural size for a moment…”
“Give me a moment, I spent too long small.” She took a deep breath, spreading her arms towards either side of the room. Then she shrunk again. “Is there a point to this? Maintaining larger sizes is work, but growing also is.”
“Right,” I said. “Now that you’re here, try to be smaller.”
“Don’t you get it?” Great Girl asked. “My power doesn’t work like that.”
“Have you literally ever tried? Even once?”
She folded her arms in front of her. Then, slowly, she began to shrink once more. She walked out from behind the table so she could see me. “I hate this.” She pointed directly at me. “You can’t tell anyone! I’ll probably get a new stupid moniker! Also, it will ruin my cover identity if people realize I’m not always tall.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” I said. “But the Brigade will definitely find out. They’re constantly monitoring oddities in HQ. Better to tell them first. And you do have legitimate reasons to not display these abilities.” I shrugged, “But like, couldn’t it be useful for some things?”
“What, like if I’m trying to work under my kitchen sink and… I can’t reach stuff. Or if I drop a book behind the bookshelf. But I can always just move the bookshelf so it doesn’t matter!”
“It should probably be secured to the wall. Because of earthquakes and stuff,” I reminded her.
“Ugh, you’re right.”
“Also unless you’re planning to rip apart the sink, that part still matters right?”
“Shut up! I don’t want to hear it!”
“I just don’t get what’s bad about being able to control your size more completely. Also, if you hate being small that much, why stay like that?”
Great Girl instantly returned to her slightly over six foot form. “I just forgot, okay? It’s way easier to hold a small form. Ugh.”
“That’s weird,” I admitted. “It’s still just as unnatural… but I guess you’re manipulating a smaller amount of matter? At most, the difference would be as much as you have in your normal body, and you go over twice your volume and mass literally all the time.”
“If it was equally difficult then wouldn’t I be able to…?” she shook her head. “Ugh, this is too much to think about. I’m going to head out.”
“Alright,” I said. “Enjoy your new power upgrades!”
She grunted in response. Rude.
-----
I still hadn’t determined whether Scrying could find portals or not. It definitely found areas of active power, but it was dangerous to poke around both in New Bay and directed towards my former world. The latter was also more difficult due to being cross dimensions.
That meant my investigations were going nowhere. I was fairly certain there were still permanent portals connected to New Bay considering the ambient mana was high, but it was also possible someone found a different way to permanently increase the quantity. Maybe Doctor Doomsday figured it out, which would explain where there hadn’t been any portal incidents lately.
Or maybe I’d missed one while I was away and nobody bothered to bring it up. Though that one was pretty easy to figure out. The Brigade database would have more details, but ultimately the portal incidents were very public. Yep, there hadn’t been another one… which meant either we were past that, or Doomsday was just taking his time.
“Neither option is good,” I muttered.
“What options?” Midnight asked, lifting his head from the couch next to me.
I explained what I had been thinking about. “So I’m kind of worried there will be another portal incident.”
“I thought you were the chill one,” Midnight said. “We can’t control it and we can only react when it happens. But maybe we could patrol around looking for proto-portals? He definitely has set something up, it’s not like he goes around making portals with people rushing after him. Or not just that I mean. Many appear simultaneously, which means there could be something to pick up.”
“Hmm. Could be,” I admitted. “I suppose we could try to look for such things when out on patrol. Arcane Sight might tell us something, but that’s another spell to keep active. Even if our mana recovery is over one and a half, it’s still too much,” I shook my head. “I don’t know if we’re training the right things, either.”
“Think about it this way,” Midnight pointed out. “You didn’t expect to be able to train at all before. All of that is extra. And we’re making decent progress. Honestly, I think our repertoire is wide enough at the moment, focusing on depth is useful here. We do need to think about Blizzard, though.”
“Because it can take down Bunvorixian ships?” I asked.
“Isn’t that a good enough reason?” he asked. “It’s pretty much inevitable we fight them again. Because of my homeworld or because of Spot or… any number of things.”
“Do you think it will work on bigger ones?” I asked.
“How should I say this… it would be effective, but not necessarily enough to take them out? The ships get really big,” Midnight said. “Though most of those get intercepted outside of the system and they never make it near Celmoth itself.”
“I wonder if we can freeze bad guys without uh… breaking any rules,” I commented.
“As long as there aren’t any delicate people among them, it’s no worse than blasting people with lightning, right?” Midnight pointed out.
“Yeah, but Chain Lightning can avoid individual targets. Then again, people usually survive Ice Guy. We wouldn’t be able to remove the ice but surely someone could.” My phone beeped. I looked down to see a text from an unknown number. That wasn’t supposed to happen, due to Brigade precautions. “Weird,” I said. What was worse, it looked like spam.
“What?” Midnight asked, poking his head up to look at the screen.
“Just a dumb message,” I shrugged.
We know where you live “hero”
We have your girl friend
Come to the creek district or she gets the axe
“That’s, uh, pretty ominous,” Midnight said. “Shouldn’t we look into that?”
“Hmm, should we?” I tilted my head. “I’m not a hero, I don’t have a girlfriend, and the creek district isn’t like, a specific location.”
“Well it does say girl friend not girlfriend. You could at least text your female friends asking if they are okay? ”
“If they were captured, then villains probably have their phone,” I pointed out. “And all of them are both of our friends. Still, I suppose we can’t just let a threat like this go since it’s abnormal. I’ll call Calculator to talk about it.” A few moments later, my phone made a weird noise. “Hmm, the call won’t go through.”
“... pretty sure that’s not possible unless the whole network is down,” Midnight said. “We have the best service in the city.”
“Try your phone,” I said. A moment later, I got another text.
Nice try.
Come to the creek
Bring your cat
“Mine isn’t working either,” Midnight said. “One sec, getting my suit.” he said, dashing across the hall to his room.
I pretty much always wore my outfit, even lounging around, since Francois had updated it with stealth capabilities. I could look ‘normal’ but have the necessary protection.
Midnight was rushing back into the hallway with a silvery sheen covering him by the time I had locked up. “So do you want the bad news or the good news?” Midnight asked.
“Just say it in the most useful order.”
“Right. Bad news, I’m pretty sure a Bunvorixian jamming algorithm has targeted our phones. Good news, with direct access my suit can suppress that.” His phone rang, and he pressed a button with a silver finger formed from his suit. “Hello?” He looked up at me, “It’s Calculator. Yes, I understand. It’s Bunvorixians. They said something about the creek district. We haven’t confirmed a hostage yet.”
My phone beeped again, and there was a photo. Izzy with her hands tied behind her back, right next to a creek. “Take a picture of this and send it to Calculator,” I told Midnight. “Also, tell him to call Extra. They’re gonna want to talk to these guys.”