"Er...Outsider-sensei?" Nozomi called for her teacher's attention.

"Yes, Nozomi?" Outsider acknowledged without turning to face her.

Nozomi bit her lip briefly. She hesitated to ask for fear of sounding dumb. Then she argued with herself that she was there to learn, and it was probably okay to ask. "What's...this supposed to be?" Nozomi asked as she raised her hand to point at what Outsider had just created with the liquid metal from his gloves in front of her. Although Nozomi didn't understand much about how Outsider's invention worked, she at least knew it would help keep Yoshino safe.

Outsider's creation was a collection of mirrors, the kind Nozomi saw in changing rooms when she and Yoshino went to the mall and tried on clothes. Even if they rarely bought anything, Nozomi still found it worthwhile. Especially that one time when Yoshino wore a suit. She looked so cool in it! Nozomi thought, wishing she hadn't spent all the charge on her phone so she could have taken a picture of such a rare sight.

The mirrors were all lined up in a right-left-right-left pattern, with a target for traditional archery placed far ahead in the middle between the right and left mirrors.

The mirrors were all lined up so they pointed diagonally from one to the next. When Nozomi tilted her head slightly, she saw how the rays from the afternoon sun reflected from one mirror to the next until the final left mirror ended the reflection path by directing the sunlight to the practice target.

"This..." Outsider raised a hand to present his creation while placing his other hand on Nozomi's back. "Is what we will be using for your training. Remember how your magic cut off Judai's arm when you and Yoshino first encountered him?"

Nozomi couldn't help but notice how Outsider had, intentionally or not, left out the part where she had almost accidentally killed her best friend. But she certainly wouldn't be the one to bring it up. "Yes," Nozomi pushed out, in a tone she hoped Outsider understood that she wanted to talk as little as possible about that moment, especially the events that led to it.

Outsider seemed to get the hint as his attention turned to the training mirrors. "Well, your training will be about practicing with your magic's reflecting properties so you can eventually learn to apply it in a real fight."

Nozomi tilted her head at that. "Will situations where I find reflective surfaces be common enough though?" Nozomi asked Outsider, as she didn't need to think for long to figure out how situational that could be.

"You say that, but think about it. Back in your first fight, you grabbed the lid of a galvanized trash can, something reflective. In Judai's house, there were windows, obviously reflective. And finally, on the wagon where you encountered Henry, there were a bunch of windows, not counting the ones that got broken, that could reflect light—your magic light," Outsider emphasized. "So, yeah, not as situational as you may think."

"Okay, but...what if I find myself in a dark barrier where reflective surfaces are nowhere to be seen?" Nozomi asked the obvious question.

Outsider shrugged. "Then just shoot the darkspawn. If there are no reflective surfaces to help you, it also means there are no reflective surfaces to hinder you and stop you from just dealing with the darkspawn trying to kill you with a well-placed shot at their center mass."

Nozomi couldn't help but frown at how Outsider had misunderstood her question. Outsider didn't allow her the chance to clear up the misunderstanding. "Alright! With all questions answered, let's start your training for good. Something simple to start should be good enough. Aim your shot at that mirror over there..." Outsider pointed at the closest mirror to Nozomi, which was also the first mirror on the right side, before making a zig-zag motion simulating how her light would get reflected on each mirror before landing his finger on the target. "In such a way that the light will reflect on all the mirrors before finally landing on the target. Got that?"

Nozomi slowly nodded. It sounded simple enough, even for her. The placement of the mirrors, ensuring that no one, not even she, would get hurt even if she missed, also helped her feel more at ease with Outsider's training.

"Alright! Easy does it, it ain't a race." Rudabaugh's voice caught Nozomi's attention. On reflex, Nozomi turned toward the direction of the voice, her eyes widening when they landed on Yoshino.

Yoshino stood a few feet away from Rudabaugh, clenching and opening her hands, looking intently at them while that same aura of darkness Nozomi had seen before back on the wagon enveloped her. Back then, Nozomi didn't know why she had those brief instincts to either run from Yoshino or fight her right then and there. At the time, Nozomi's mind was too occupied processing all the information that had dropped so suddenly on her that she forgot about it.

But now, as Nozomi looked into Yoshino's eyes, she reached a theory for why she felt like that towards the one person she never expected to. Those eyes weren't the same calm and caring eyes Yoshino usually looked at her with. Instead, they were akin to a predator: calculative, cold, but most importantly...dangerous.

"Nozomi?"

Nozomi snapped out of her thoughts and swiftly turned to face Outsider, who tilted his head at her. "Is...there something wrong?"

Nozomi blinked a few times at Outsider, remembering his words to Yoshino about how she could afford to fail here so she wouldn't in the future.

One would think it would take longer for her to forget that... But that would be expecting too much from the likes of me, wouldn't it? Nozomi thought to herself before shaking her head.

"S-sorry, It's nothing. I'm ready," Nozomi said, although it sounded more like she was trying to convince herself of that. Surely, it's nothing. Surely, I'm just imagining things, and Yoshino isn't a threat. Surely, Henry, Yoshino's uncle, wouldn't teach his niece something that would change her for the worse as a person, right? Yeah, I'm just worrying for nothing!

Nozomi forced a smile on her face. And besides, it's not like we have any choice in the matter considering how stupid, incompetent, and too much of a liability I am to the point that I almost got one of the people I most cared about killed with my own magic. Yeah, I should stop worrying about things I have no control over! Even if said things were harming the people I care about or...the people they cared about! It couldn't be helped, so I should focus on my training since, at least, there is a chance I will be less useless after it, even if it meant making a hopeless idiot out of myself here!

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Outsider took a few steps back to give Nozomi space. As he did, she took a deep breath before aiming at the closest mirror to her (which was also the first mirror on the right side) with her index finger, which soon glowed with her magic as she remembered the feeling of wanting to protect those she cared about, to protect Yoshino. Nozomi tried to calculate the trajectory for her shot to hit every mirror before the target.

But after a full minute of attempting to make calculations in her head, she settled with calculating the trajectory of the first and, barely, the second, hoping it would be enough to hit the final target. Why Math of all things...why? Nozomi mentally cursed the subject for inconveniencing her training, especially since her and Yoshino's lives depended on it.

The magic released was accompanied by a loud bang akin to when Yoshino shot with her revolver. Now that Nozomi thought about it, time stopped around her, with Nozomi's light projectile being the only thing that moved, showing it was so fast that even the boundaries of time couldn't contain it.

Nozomi watched as her magical projectile slowly traveled to the first mirror. When it made contact with the second mirror, the projectile, predictably, was reflected to the second closest mirror to Nozomi. If Nozomi's expression hadn't been frozen in time, she would have blinked a few times before raising an eyebrow at how she would swear her projectile's size had grown in size after going through the first mirror. I mean, I didn't really pay much attention to it when it happened the first and second time, but surely, that can't be it, right? Nozomi thought, deciding to focus her whole attention on the moving projectile to see if its size did, in fact, increase.

As she patiently watched the slow-moving projectile, Nozomi soon found out how monotonous it was to watch this slowly play out in front of her now that no one she cared about was about to get hurt by it. Not like she would complain about it; she would gladly take boring if it meant her friends weren't in immediate danger thanks to her clumsiness.

Unfortunately, Nozomi's aim proved off as her light projectile missed the third mirror and went straight into the woods. But not before Nozomi witnessed her light projectile growing bigger after it bounced off the second mirror. So I didn't see it wrong... Nozomi thought, not knowing how to feel about such a discovery.

Eventually, Nozomi lost sight of it, and the frozen world around her moved again, but not before she caught from the corner of her vision how the now larger projectile made a hole in a tree that was in its way, similar to that of a cannonball, instead of the usual bullet hole Nozomi expected.

Now able to move around again, Nozomi turned her head to properly look at the tree in the distance with a large hole in the middle. Nozomi felt concerned with the results. Nozomi hoped she had been wrong, but it looked to her like the light projectile hadn't just destroyed the center of the tree...but instead had completely vaporized it, the lack of tree bark or any signs the tree had been damaged beside the large hole reinforcing the idea that she had indeed just erased a part of that tree out of existence.

How powerful am I? Nozomi asked herself as she slowly moved her eyes away from the tree to look down at her missing index finger, which slowly regained its form as it absorbed the afternoon sun's light. Nozomi's thoughts were soon interrupted by Outsider's voice just as the image of her best friend with a hole the size of the one in the tree where once one of her eyes was located would have crossed her mind.

"Phew, that certainly was more power than I expected...and you got two mirrors on the first try, good job!" Outsider congratulated as he walked up to her side. "Hmm, say, before you released your magic, did you only calculate the path it would travel to the first and second mirror or did you calculate a path for each mirror?" Outsider asked as he eyeballed an imaginary path for Nozomi's magic to cross with his thumb.

Snapped out of her thoughts, Nozomi briefly mulled over Outsider's question before answering. "Er...only the first and second mirror..." Nozomi shrugged. "I tried doing all of them but...blah, if I hadn't settled with just the first two mirrors I feel like my brain would turn into mush before bursting into flames...sorry sensei." Nozomi apologized for both missing the target and getting distracted.

Outsider slowly nodded. "I guess that explains the smoke..." he muttered to himself.

"Hmm, what smoke?" Nozomi tilted her head at her mysterious teacher before looking around.

Outsider shook his head. "S-sorry, false alarm, I thought I had seen a small cloud of smoke." He quickly explained himself and Nozomi couldn't help but raise an eyebrow at that, but decided against pressing Outsider about it. The last thing Nozomi wanted was to be more of a bother to someone who had offered to help her.

After he (rather quickly for Nozomi) recovered, Outsider clasped his hands together similar to a prayer to get Nozomi's attention. "Ok, now that we have discussed why you failed to hit the target, what do you think we should do to improve it?" Outsider asked.

After Nozomi gave it some thought, an idea crossed her mind. "The slowdown..." Nozomi muttered.

"The what now?" Outsider tilted his head, not expecting that answer.

"T-the slowdown...every time I use my magic at a long enough distance, I think, two...or maybe three meters of distance? I don't know, anyway, what matters is that when I shoot at a far enough distance from my target, time around me kind of, stops? I don't know how to really explain it but...I think it will help me do this!" Nozomi said, nervous, but with a hint of confidence.

Outsider nodded slowly. "I see, very well, let's see if this theory of yours works," he said before giving her space to try it.

It took several attempts, much recalibration of her aim, entire hours (from her slowdown perspective), and almost giving up, but after the sixtieth try, Nozomi managed to get her projectile to reflect on the third mirror. The effect it had on her projectile's size was immediately visible as it became twice the size of her previous attempt.

Unfortunately, she didn't manage to get her magic to reflect on the fourth mirror, missing it by a few centimeters and going straight into another innocent tree. Nozomi's eyes widened like saucers as her magic not only made a hole in the tree's middle but outright erased a considerable section of its trunk. For a moment (that was translated into minutes due to the slowdown), Nozomi couldn't help but think of the upper portion of the tree floating in the air, as if it had forgotten how physics worked—a surreal sight.

When time started to move again, the upper part of the tree finally fell on top of what remained of the lower part before slowly falling to the ground.

"It worked?" Nozomi muttered in disbelief before she jumped in joy. "YES! Ah ah! It worked! Did you see that, sensei?" Nozomi turned her head to face her mentor with the brightest smile of happiness she could muster. The high of her success Nozomi felt at that moment made her forget about her previous grievances, even if it had been brief.

Outsider nodded. "Yes, although I couldn't see much of the projectile, I did see the third mirror flash for an instant before suddenly a tree fell. If this isn't a sign of progress, I don't know what is. Good job." Outsider raised his hand for a high five, which Nozomi instantly humored, but not before controlling her strength so it wouldn't break her teacher's hand.

Nozomi and Outsider ended up not managing to accomplish much more than that. However, the progress Nozomi made motivated her to continue further with her training. Occasionally, Nozomi turned short glances at Yoshino as she trained with her aura of dark magic before quickly turning her focus back to her training.