“What are you doing?” Shia asked.

Back in the academy, my daily life consisted of me practicing magic to increase my mana (however little I could), drills to improve my knife use, and mostly just self-defense-related training… and lots of running.

Suffice to say that didn’t change much. What did change was the fact that my magic use differed by a mile now.

“Seriously, what are you doing?”

We were on the back end of the ship, just staring at the ocean. Still morning, but the sun rays were starting to sting a little.

“Trying to see if I can move the ocean.”

“Move the ocean? The hell is wrong with you?” She snorted. “You didn’t steal a sip from my wine, right?”

“No?”

“Huh… could have sworn it was you,” she mumbled to herself. “Well, do keep an eye out in that case. Someone’s stealing my wine.”

“Sure.”

“But seriously though, what are you doing? Have you finally gone mad?” She came close, starting inspecting my temperature with her hand as though that would tell her whether I’d gone mad or not.

“As I said, controlling the ocean. Or rather some of the waves to be specific. See that medium sized wave, I’m about to neutralize it.”

As I was speaking, the wave crumbled and disappeared.

“Woah!” Shia jumped once. “How?” Her eyes lit up.

“You see, I imagined another wave just below the wave with a peak and trough just like-” I was losing her apparently. “I imagined a similar wave beneath it and they fought each other, resulting in no victor.”

“Huh.”

“I can do the opposite too.”

This time I made another wave, but with troughs and peaks in different position, so they’d unite and form an even bigger wave- typical wave theory.

“Kind of cool… kind of lame,” Shia gawked. “Can I do that?”

“Probably better than me,” I said. I was managing that despite my little mana.

Mostly because I wasn’t forming water, I was just reshaping the water around me and using that (kind of like what I could do with the air). Shia didn’t have much mana but she still had more than me. So if I taught her well enough, she could probably do better than me.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

So I tried.

Long story short… she couldn’t manage it. Apparently, peaks and troughs were too much. Even after showing her diagrams of the stuff, she still didn’t get it. She managed to move actual droplets of water and make them float though, which I couldn’t.

Why am I not surprised?

Anyway, “Try combining the droplets.”

“I’m trying, I’m trying.”

Took her a minute, and a whole bucket of concentration but she managed it just fine. Our very own water ball.

“I did it!!” She jumped and the water ball flew over at my face.

Splash!

“Uh-huh…” sigh.

“Oops…” She cackled. And kept at it for about ten minutes before she ended up fainting without a word.

“Sometimes I really do wonder if you lose your mind when you’re having fun.” Rolling my eyes, I dragged her back to shade.

I gave my face a wipe, made sure the lady was breathing, and more or less just stayed put for the time being. Mana depletion wasn’t really all that deadly, unless you were on a battlefield where you’d die if you blinked for an extra second.

She was asleep and would be asleep for the next few hours.

Don’t you get a headache before you run out though? Meaning, she ignored that altogether. Well, that’s her problem.

I wonder if I can control the light? I tried. Nothing happened. Same for darkness. Because I didn’t understand them? No, I did understand light, and I understood what constituted darkness (the absence of light) so how come?

Maybe I need something else?

Well, all that aside, I did have a special thing with me that was helping me with magic. Namely a bracelet I got from Mrs. Barack. It had a mana stone in it and as long as I was careful, I could probably use it for years. Or for a super powerful magic to knockout something strong. Hopefully, the former.

***

A week passed by. Nothing really happened.

Our water supply was strong, we caught a lot of fish and rationed up our remaining food and for the time being, we had a surplus. If things stayed like this, we’d reach the shores of Moon port with a lot of our rations remaining.

I was missing some food though. Mostly in the forms of fresh fruits. All we had onboard was lemons. The sour kind. Good for spraying on a fillet, but not great for eating raw.

“Sol,” Alustur called out to me.

These days, I spent most of the time talking to the mermaid. She hardly ever spoke back but I was practicing my sea tongue rather than having a conversation, so it was all good.

“Yeah?” I yelled back, picking myself up.

Once outside, we locked the door and headed up. Most of the crew members were here along with the captain. Even Shia was here.

“Gentlemen, we’ve entered Hermon territory,” the captain said. “Some of us may not be familiar with it, so I’ll be brief: they are mermen hunters who would not hesitate to destroy us if we even attempted to steal their resources and that includes anything you see in the sea.” He paused for a minute. “Be sure to not stare into the water for the next three days.”

“Why?” I asked.

“They might take it as an act of aggression and attack us,” he said. “We wanted to avoid this territory and took precautions but the ocean often plays tricks… and let’s just say, we’re out of options. If we decide to head back, we’d lose weeks, and we’ll run out of water.”

I actually asked why we hadn’t brought more water and apparently it was a matter of ‘weight’ rather than availability.

“I see,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Good,” Alustur said. “That means you too, miss,” he said, eyeing Shia.

“I know, I know.”