Elves were hailed as the masters of magic. Their mana veins grew at a fairly slow pace, but their period of growth spanned most of their life. That growth was actually believed to last their entire lifetime, although it eventually decreased to the point of being negligible.

Any average elf would someday attain a mana pool comparable to that of a high-ranking human noble, and greater than mine.

This gift of mana wasn’t even the greatest advantage elves held over other humanoid species. Given enough time, elves could gain access to one or even two more spells, letting them naturally use their magic type to their full potential. Or rather, they saw it as being recognized and rewarded by their “spirit”. To each their own.

To compete with elves, humans had engaged in selective breeding over many generations in order to increase the average mana pool in some groups that were the ancestors of today’s nobility. There likely was some inbreeding in the past as well, if only to stabilize and reinforce the genetic traits that gave individuals larger mana pools. Some might say that humans cheated to artificially compete with the naturally vast mana pool of elves, but I preferred to consider we had surpassed natural selection thanks to our wits. To me, the sole fact that we were able to get to these heights without any backlash meant that we must have had this potential in us to begin with.

In this world of magic, however, there were other natural rivals to the elves. They opted for a different evolutionary path, similar to how beastmen grew at a faster pace than their ancestors.

They were the ogres, and they grew their mana veins in a short amount of time at an unmatched intensity.

They were said to achieve a mana pool at full capacity at an age even younger than when I awakened. In comparison, elves only attained this maximum value much later, but that was about the only advantage ogres had over them.

At least, I had never heard or read about any unique magical traits from ogres. They most likely had a naturally high mana output due to their ripped mana veins, but they didn’t have anything as competitive as abstracting their element in different ways.

These were the essential thoughts that occupied my mind as I looked at Lune, a young girl with contradicting features. The most striking feature of this supposed elf was a red horn lodged in the middle of her forehead. This trait would make her by default an ogre but, at the same time, I was almost certain the ogres didn’t have such pointy ears.

Besides, she was traveling with someone who was definitely an elf through and through.

Are ogre horns even supposed to be curved like that?

It had been a couple of years since I was taught about humanoid physiology, so I wasn’t too confident.

In any case, based on these elements, determining her species with certainty was difficult. For all I knew, she could have been a regular elf with a congenital deformity. Since our common ancestor had a horn, it was conceivable that some kind of vestigial gene had remained and reactivated after a mutation.

That would be rather indelicate of me to assume she was an ogre because of that. If she wasn’t, things could get ugly.

Such a sensitive topic...

“Please say something,” Lune pleaded.

Crap, I spaced out, didn’t I?

Before me was the poor girl, elf or not, waiting for me to display an emotion that would let her gauge whether or not I was disgusted. I had been staring at her for a while, so she must have felt uncomfortable.

“I… I was just surprised, that’s all.”

Really, she had caught me off guard so suddenly that I didn’t know how to react.

I sort of found it cool, but I thought saying it might come out as if I were pitying her. I wanted to be considerate of her feelings if possible.

The first thing I needed to do was confirm if she had ogre blood, and there was a way to do so.

I smiled at her solemnly. “Can you turn around for a moment?”

“Um… Okay…?” Lune said as she hesitantly twisted her body on the carriage’s couch.

I examined her form once she turned, but I didn’t see a tail or even a slight bump because of the frills of her skirt. Seeing something like that would have greatly reduced the odds of the horn being a random mutation.

Maybe If I feel around a bit?

I was looking for perhaps an atrophied, non-functional tail. If I had to sacrifice a bit of inconspicuousness to get answers, so be it.

But Lune smacked my hands away as soon as I touched her anyway. “What do you think you’re doing?!”

“I just needed to check something…” I explained as I pulled back my arms, a bit startled by the intense reaction.

“Have I been looking for a deviant all this time?!”

“Wha—? D-deviant? You’re being unfair, I’m trying to be considerate, here!”

“In what world is groping someone considerate?!”

“Don’t put it like that! Would you prefer that I ask about your lineage directly? Explain that horn, then!”

She frowned at me and pointed at her forehead. “Isn’t it clear that I am half-ogre…?”

She admitted it?!

I had asked mainly to prove a point, but she readily opened up as soon as I tackled the topic.

What did I do it for, then…?

“If that’s what you were looking for,” she added, “I can show you my tail. You just have to ask…”

“... Please.”

“Can you close your eyes?”

I heard her slowly lifting the fabric and then she allowed me to have a look. It seemed alien on a non-beastfolk individual and especially on a girl who I thought was an elf, but she really had a tail.

Fluffy…

It wasn’t like the light fluff of Rina’s tail. Lune’s fur had a sinister color, as black as her hair, but the tail's shortness made it look harmless. I found that gap mesmerizing.

“You must find it disgraceful…” Lune mumbled.

“Not at all,” I tried to reassure her. “One of my friends is a beastfolk, and I don’t mind at all. If you want me to, I can brush your tail daily!”

“Sure?”

Mission accomplished!

I had suggested doing that to Rina twice or thrice already, but she refused on each occasion, saying it was particularly inappropriate in her culture.

Lune didn’t seem to be aware of those kinds of traditions, so she didn’t reject me.

I can’t wait to groom her.

Something felt a bit off when I thought that, but the excitement made me brush it off rather quickly.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Moreover, there was something else that was bugging me, something that was more concrete and that took priority.

Elves gained their high mana pools through a lengthy growth period that was far more important than their development was slow, whereas ogres were getting theirs by having the intensity of their mana development far outpace their short period of growth.

Naturally, my concern was how these two extremes mingled together.

It could go different ways. She might have inherited only the traits of one or the other because of some recessive traits, or some of these traits might have combined in a peculiar way. It may have done so in the worst possible way, giving her a laughable growth that had already ended years ago. That would put her at the level of a beastman mana-wise, but with a weak build.

Or…

She might have been engineered to surpass any elf or ogre by mixing intense and yet lengthy mana growth periods.

“You said you were the one they were after, right?”

“I did…”

If she’s being tracked by these people, it might just be the case.

At this instant, I needed to know how much mana her veins could contain. In a way, it was a bit strange for me to be so into it since I had a way to generate in a couple of minutes as much mana as a king could use. Still, I considered myself a fraud since I needed to use a trick. And now that my mana pendant was broken, I would need even more time to augment the mana at my disposal.

Thus, whether it was respect or envy, I was fascinated by the ones who could naturally achieve that.

“Can I hold your hand?” I asked.

“W-what now?”

Lune sounded suspicious of me, but she still extended her arm.

I can’t accurately gauge her mana pool, but I should be able to get an idea.

Measuring the rate at which my mana was rejected by her body might give me a general estimation of the mana density in her veins. It wasn’t more accurate than guessing the direction of the wind by moisturizing my finger and feeling on which side it evaporated faster, but that would at least tell me if it was similar to a beastfolk or orders of magnitude greater.

Or it should have, if I had been able to inject my mana in Lune’s hand.

I sighed internally when I looked outside the carriage and made out Clair’s silhouette in the dim light.

Of course she would show up right when things are getting interesting.

“What can I do for you?” I asked with a touch of irritation in my tone.

“Can you come down for a minute?”

“What a coincidence,” I let go of Lune’s hand and climbed down from the carriage. “I was just thinking we needed to talk.”

“... I guess we do.”

I believed it was time for Clair to finally come clean about what she truly expected of me.

While I could understand why she was reticent about giving me intel about her and her sister, I wasn’t fond of the way she was so open about it with remarks such as that I didn’t need to know this or that, or that I was free to take a guess.

I wasn’t sure whether it was disdain or suspicion that she constantly directed at me, but it was clear that I wasn’t a straight-up ally to her. I thought it was a fair position considering what she already knew about me, but the fact that she expected me to act as some sort of bodyguard for them at the same time bothered me.

She walked away, and I followed her silently. Probably because it was quite dark now, she stopped as soon as she was out of Lune’s hearing range.

I would have considered generating some light with my mana, but I couldn’t use it. “You were quick to seal my magic again.”

“Of course. You honestly freaked me out back there. Why didn’t you mention that you could do that?”

“You didn’t ask.”

“What kind of answer is that?”

“Enough about me,” I said. “I’m more interested in what you got me into.”

“Er…”

“For starters, who were these people? What happened with the elf guy?”

“I killed him,” she said casually. “And he wasn’t an elf.”

I was baffled. I wondered which statement to react to first. Still, her lack of emotion or remorse stood out more to me.

“Why did you do it?” I asked. “Was it because I revealed your card out loud?”

“I would have done it anyway, you just made it clearer,” she shrugged. “Even before you spoke up, he had realized something was off.”

“Is protecting your magic worth more than a life?”

“Is it wrong to value my sister’s life and mine more than theirs?”

“I didn’t say that. I’m just hinting at the fact that the world is not binary.”

“That’s naive,” she practically spat at me. “Why are you, of all people, telling me that?”

Here we go. That one was easy.

I had expected that she would bring up the contradiction.

Well, it probably was a bit naive, but I wasn’t suggesting that no one should kill each other for the sole reason that it was bad. The issue I had here was mainly that she coldly did so after the danger had subsided.

It wasn’t that I was being judgmental but rather that, as someone who usually hid most of my abilities too, I genuinely wondered what her reasoning was.

Personally, I couldn’t picture myself executing someone ill-willed who saw me deploy a near-infinite source of mana on command. I wasn’t sure if it was comparable to her situation though, as my spell looked more like a world-devouring darkness than a mana generator.

In contrast, I believed I had correctly and quickly inferred what her magic did without much explanation. If her enemies were betting everything on sending powerful mages, letting someone leak information about her spell would render her useless in the long run.

“I didn’t see you hesitate when you killed that girl,” Clair continued. “You know, if you had struck the guy instead, I might have spared her.”

“Would you have, really? I remember that you told me to get rid of both. And for the record, I didn’t aim for the girl.”

“... You didn’t?”

“Ah. I mean… I was targeting the other one, but I couldn’t move my arm freely because of the bandages, so…”

“Could I have been hit?”

“L-looks like the wound reopened…!” I exclaimed, expertly redirecting the conversation.

“You’re not denying it…?” she insisted nonetheless.

“... So you said that guy wasn’t an elf?”