Lina nodded. It must be pretty frustrating living in a world where everyone had some kind of innate magic ability when your own was so… useless, but she soon remembered what those people had done to her and felt her sympathy waning. Being unlucky didn’t give you the right to be an ass, although many people seemed to think it did.

“So, what now? Can I get my sword back?” She asked hopefully.

“It was never your sword. Those bastards stole it from me, so I am going to keep it, thank you very much.” Konrad said, leaving no room to argue.

Lina nodded slowly, annoyed, that she had lost her only weapon already. She didn’t have it for long, but it had already grown on her and it had given her at least some sense of safety, losing it felt just wrong.

Sayu sighed, “We should probably get you out of the weald. It is far too dangerous for people who can’t fight and even for us staying here can be lethal if we aren’t careful.” She glanced at her brother, whose injuries caused him to stand hunched over like a retiree.

“I might be able to help with that.” Lina said tentatively.

“Really? How? Do you have a healing skill?” Sayu asked, surprise apparent.

“Well, no? I found this magic stone in the cave I talked about, I think it was called condensed magic or something? It is supposed to give me the ability to use life magic, and I have used that to heal myself. I should be able to heal you too.” As Lina explained, she saw Sayu wince and Konrad donning a wry smile.

“What?” Lina asked, unsure what she was supposed to make of those reactions.

“Uhhh, it’s nothing, don’t worry about it, but if it isn’t too much trouble, please do go ahead and heal us, Konrad first, if you would.” Sayu masterfully avoided giving a straight answer.

“Uh huh.” Lina nodded slowly, her eyes thinning in suspicion.

She wasn’t sure she was content with that explanation - or lack thereof - but as they agreed to let her use her magic on them, she didn’t pry. She would come back to that after she healed them. With that, she walked toward Konrad and began healing him, one wound at a time.

“Why aren’t you just healing everything at once?” They had seen healers at work before, and they always just flooded the bodies with healing magic and called it a day, so Sayu’s question was more than warranted.

“I don’t have a lot of mana and don’t want to heal everything just a bit. I think completely healing the bad wounds and ignoring the mundane ones does more good than closing every small scratch.” Lina stated her reasoning.

After she was done healing the two siblings’ important injuries, she healed the less severe ones until her mana began running low.

“That’s all I can do for the time being.” She was more exhausted than when she healed herself, and it had been a lot more difficult to speed up the natural regeneration process. She didn’t know why, but now that she had two knowledgeable people next to her, who didn’t seem bad and probably wouldn’t just run away when they became tired of her interrogation, she would find out soon enough. At least that was what she thought as she smiled at them.

Being fit and battle ready again, the two siblings thanked Lina for the healing and stashed away the alarm runes. After that, all three began making their way out of the forest, but just as they began walking, Lina remembered her bare feet and generally less-than-optimal attire.

“Do you by chance have some spare clothing I could borrow? Some boots at least?” Lina asked.

“No, sorry, our equipment slowly mends itself, so we don’t usually carry extra clothes. I was wondering why you were dressed like this in the middle of the forest, but I guess it has something to do with you not knowing how you got here.”

She nodded in affirmative at Sayu’s guess.

“When I woke up, I only had that dress and nothing else.” Sayu smiled wryly.

“Why didn’t you take the clothes of those guys you mentioned?”

“Well… I just couldn’t. Killing them in self-defence was one thing, but looting them just felt so… wrong, I couldn’t do it.” Lina answered, a bit embarrassed at her irrational behaviour and apparently not without reason, as the two siblings looked at her weirdly, as if she was a bit slow.

“Well, that’s a waste it’s not like they would have missed them, now they are just going to rot away.” Konrad mumbled, netting him an elbow to the ribs from Sayu.

“Don’t be mean, she clearly isn’t used to that kind of stuff. Although you aren’t wrong, it was a bit stupid.” his sister whispered back.

“Do you mind? I am right here. I can hear you, you know?” Lina asked indignantly, which caused the two to avert their gazes like children when they were caught lying as they both mumbled an obviously insincere apology.

“Whatever.” Lina snorted.

And just like that, the three carried on walking through the forest, Lina more focused on not stepping on stones and branches than she had ever been. After quite some time of walking in weird silence, nobody knowing what to say, Lina remembered something.

“Hey, by the way, why was healing you so much harder than healing myself and why did you react so weirdly when I mentioned my healing magic?” She had almost forgotten about that, but the sibling did seem oddly apprehensive towards her awesome new ability.

“Because it is useless.” Konrad said, which caused Sayu to glare at him.

“What? You know I am right, for the last centuries nobody in their right mind would even think about using those condensed magic stones.”

Lina’s heart dropped as Sayu chided Konrad for his brutal honesty, but didn’t seem to disagree with him.

“W-what is wrong with it?” Lina inquired, fear apparent in her voice.

“Nothing really, but… I guess you don’t know about skills, do you?” Sayu began to explain.

Lina nodded. “i have no idea what you are talking about. Can you eat skills?” She asked jokingly, which made all of them chuckle.

“Well, no, you can’t eat them. In the old days, as Konrad said, a few centuries ago, how long exactly nobody knows, well maybe the church, but I sure don’t and most people don’t care anyway, condensed magic was the only way for people to use magic. The problem was, that those things are and were rare, and difficult to use, and you need the right magic attunement to use them at all. You were lucky you could actually use the one you found, it could just as easily have burned your mana pathways, stopping you from ever using any kind of magic. And that is if you survived.”

Lina paled at that explanation, had she known about that, she wouldn’t even have considered absorbing the condensed magic.

“But I could use it, so what’s the problem?”

“As I said, there were some… issues, only a few people found one they could absorb and only some of them were smart and dedicated enough to actually use them. Those geniuses were what we call ‘the old mages’ today. They lived secluded, spending all day trying to find new ways to use their mana. Eventually, they came very far, the knowledge of generations accumulating, and they used that knowledge to help everyone around them, but they knew, that what they could do was fairly limited. So, they tried finding a way to let anyone use magic and after some time, created the skill system, that practically everyone uses today. When you are old enough, which is different for everyone, the priests determine your attunement. The most common ones are fire, water, air and earth, but there are some more ethereal ones like plant, wisdom, light or even the absence of things, which we call void. They then draw a complicated pattern, devised by the old mages, on your body, the knowledge of how it works has been lost as far as I know, but doing that stabilizes the magic in your body and modifies your pathways. After that, you can get skills, that have also been devised by the old mages, by buying them from the church, and you can even get some just by growing stronger. The number of skills you can have is limited and varies, but for most, it’s about 10, so more than enough. The problem is, that the condensed magic already has stabilized the magic in your body, so the ritual the church uses wouldn’t work on you, it would even be harmful, thus you can’t use skills.”

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Lina was stumped. She had been so happy with her magic and now Sayu told her, that it was essentially just worse than what everyone else had? With a heavy heart, she asked:

“What exactly are skills?”

This time Konrad answered. “They are premade magic formations, that allow you to cast magic without needing to understand it. As far as I know, you really have to understand what you are doing, right? Well, with skills, you only have to remember a pattern and sometimes a chant and there you go. I think nobody knows how exactly they were made anymore, but we don’t need to, they work really well and are easy enough to learn, just a bit expensive, but there is a reason why we ditched the old system.”

“It’s not that easy, you still have to train your skills, slightly adjust the pattern to your pathways over time, and make them your own so to say, otherwise your mighty fireball won’t be much bigger than a fist and cooler than a stovetop.” Sayu added.

Lina thought about what they had told her. When she compared what she had learned with her programming knowledge, It sounded like her magic gave her direct processor access and a list of machine code instructions, but no explanation for the syntax and semantics, something, that she really needed. This skill system on the other hand was essentially an operating system and apps you could choose from. Lina could understand why they thought her magic was useless. Even on earth, most people wouldn’t even consider learning how to program when you could just buy programs like Excel and be done. You still had to learn how to use them efficiently, but that wasn’t too difficult.

That realization made her feel much better. She couldn’t use skills, but so what? She was a programmer after all, learning a new low-level system would be difficult and annoying, but it should be doable. With new conviction, Lina smiled a bit, which confused her companions.

“Are you alright?” Sayu asked tentatively.

“Yup, I just thought, that this whole thing could be very interesting. You said there were different things one could be attuned to. I absorbed a life-attuned condensed magic, so am I life attuned?” Lina inquired further.

“Uh, alright, yeah, that’s right. There aren’t many life-attuned skills, there is general healing, which you can already do it seems, and then there is detoxification and some skills that let you grow plants faster. It isn’t the most common attunement, but there are enough people, that many villages can have at least one healer. Which injuries can be healed and to what degree it is possible is fairly limited, though, and nobody knows why.” Sayu elaborated.

“Thanks, you are a good teacher.” Lina smiled. “I am glad not everyone in this world is a dick, it’s 3 to 2 now though, so I hope I meet more people like you.”

“I don’t know about that. I don’t think I am a better teacher than others, and you shouldn’t expect everyone to be so nice. People don’t like foreigners too much. This forest is actually the border between us and the Red Sand, the neighbouring kingdom, that is primarily inhabited by your kind. There has always been some… contention. We aren’t currently at war per se, but the relations aren’t peaceful either. There are some fringe groups attacking travellers or sometimes even villages once in a while, but at least large battles don't take place, the last one taking place almost ten years ago, so yeah, I think you can see why people around here aren’t too enthusiastic about outsiders coming to their village. Only in the bigger settlements are people less prejudiced.”

“Oh… then why are you so nice?”

“Well, for one, we felt a bit guilty for tying you to that tree, and we are thankful for the healing. Moreover, we are adventurers, which means we take contracts to kill monsters or do other things the guards don’t have time for or that are too dangerous. People respect us for our strength, but they also fear us, so they generally avoid adventurers and some are just jealous and will disrespect us just so we might do something stupid while guards are around. There are a lot of rules adventurers have to adhere to, that normal people don’t. When a civilian attacks an adventurer and the adventurer hurts them, the adventurer gets charged with a crime and the civilian is good to go. It’s one of the measures to make sure we don’t become a threat to the people in power. So, we like meeting people, who just treat us like normal people instead of monsters or tools.” Sayu explained with a little frustration in her voice. It was clear, that she didn’t fully agree with those rules.

“Well, and we actually have been to the Red Sand before and know that we aren’t too different. There are assholes everywhere and I hate those, not the whole population of a country.”

Thinking about the rules Sayu had talked about Lina frowned.

“That sounds easily exploitable.” She noted.

“What if the civilian is stronger than the adventurer?”

“That’s highly unlikely.” Sayu smiled.

“To become stronger, you need to increase your mana and the only feasible way to do that is by killing stronger and stronger monsters. You can increase your mana supply in the early stages by just using it, but only a tiny bit. It’s negligible.”

“So to become stronger, you need to kill monsters?” Lina grimaced at that thought. She wanted to get stronger, but fighting monsters sounded like a dangerous proposition.

Konrad snorted. “There is a bit more to it.” he said.

“You kill monsters to steal their mana and a piece of their soul, you then need to meditate to use it to increase your mana pool, if you don’t, it is just going to dissipate, and that is not all. You need to strengthen your body, otherwise, it won’t be able to hold the mana and burn you up from the inside.”

That was interesting, but also not really good news. Having to work out regularly sounded like a pain in the ass. But there was something odd with what he said. alright, there were many things odd about what he said, but Lina chose to deliberately ignore the “stealing a piece of the soul”-part.

“So, what about the healers you talked about? Do they go out killing monsters?”

“Of course not.” Sayu said bemused. “Well, maybe some, those who are adventurers, but it’s not common. Most like to stay safe. The ones in big towns usually pay adventurers to capture monsters for them, so they can kill them without danger, and some small villages provide them for free until the healer is strong enough to heal severe injuries, the kind that would normally kill a man.” She lectured.

“Huh, I guess that makes sense. Sounds dangerous for the adventurers, though.” Lina mused.

“Danger is what we do.” Sayu said grinning. It was obvious, that she didn’t see it as a detriment. She even seemed to like the danger.

“You are an odd woman, Sayu.” Lina mumbled while shaking her head and raising an eyebrow, which made her look a bit like an old woman who didn’t understand today’s youth.

“Just think about it. I say you should try it. Even if you can’t have skills, strong healers are always in demand and there aren’t enough of us as it is, most people are too scared to protect others and those who are, mostly join the guard, doing mundane tasks like lounging around at a village gate or organizing the monster notices.”

To Lina, Sayu’s thoughts about guards and what they did sounded a bit simplistic, but not knowing anything about the situation she didn’t comment on it.