“Some people are just born different.” - Saying attributed to the Silver Maiden.

“Most impressive,” praised the Bone Lord as he watched Kino “juggle” around a dozen void orbs the size of a grape with her hands while at the same time maintaining a sheet of paper-thin coating of void around the bodies of a pair of skeletal minions conjured by the Bone Lord which were running around wildly all over the courtyard. “I have taught thousands of students in magic over my lifetime, but ones like you, I can count on the fingers of one hand.”

“Surely you overpraise me, Sir,” replied Kino humbly. The girl had not thought of her feats as anything special. They just came very naturally to her after some practice, though certainly nobody in the group had expected her to reach this level of control after only a month of practice.

Neadric and Laine, the two void mages assigned to tutor her, had already returned to their previous postings after bouts of severe depression and inferiority complex. Nobody blamed them, as everyone could sympathize with what it must have felt like to see skills they took years to master properly so easily acquired by the girl in mere days.

“Grandpa isn’t exaggerating, Kino,” confirmed Aideen from the side. She herself had been one of the few that Grandpa Aarin mentioned, though in her case, her talent only bloomed later on after her death and rise to unlife. Aideen was somewhat ashamed to admit, but when she was alive, she had been rather lazy with practicing her magic, as it always came to her easily. It was only after she became an unliving that her outlook changed and she truly wrenched out every little bit of potential she could out of her natural talent for magic. “He’d be one of the most qualified people in the world to make that claim.”

Aideen’s own talent for fine manipulation of mana had grown in leaps and bounds since she focused herself on healing others. Feats that would have been impossible for her in her youth became simple ones that only required some care once she got used to the degree of fine manipulation required. That was with the caveat that Aideen’s mortality affinity – like most healing-focused affinities – were one of the easier ones to work with.

Kino’s void affinity on the other hand was the polar opposite. It was well known and acknowledged to be the most difficult affinity for any mage to handle, which was the reason so many people who could have grown up into a void mage perished during their awakening instead. That Kino showed such a great degree of conscious fine control over her void workings was something beyond Aideen’s expectations, and she had already set her expectations for the girl very high upon learning that she was a late awakener.

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If anything, the only thing Kino lacked as a mage at the moment was mana. Her soul was still immature, and her mana pool was similarly small in size. That was something that would grow with time and experience, however. At the moment, Kino would need some rest and food to refill her depleted mana pool after around half an hour or so of exercising, or less if she used her void workings to annihilate things.

Given the girl’s unliving nature, Aideen wondered just what sort of aberration would walk the world after she had several centuries more to mature and grow. Void mages were amongst the most feared of mages because of their unparalleled destructive power, and the common understanding is that to stop a void mage, the only real way to do so is to kill or disable them from outside their typically limited range.

Kino was unliving, however, so that approach lost a lot of its value against her. Even Aideen felt some worries if letting the girl loose would be a wise thing to do once she learned of her monstrous potential, as an unkillable void mage of Kino’s talent would definitely be able to wreak great havoc upon the world should she wish to do so.

Fortunately, the girl, while rather naive and lacking a lot of common knowledge from her years of being sequestered in the basement dungeon, was of a kind and caring disposition. Neither Aideen nor the Bone Lord doubted that Kino would use lethal force to defend people she cared about, but they were satisfied enough to know that she was unlikely to go wild on a mad rampage of carnage and destruction.

With Mimia and Èirynn’s approval, after a month and a half of training to control her magic, Kino joined Áine, Rhys, and Eilonwy in the classes they were taking. Fortunately, the children quickly grew friendly with their new “classmate”, and the four became good friends before long. In fact, Kino could often be found helping demonstrate magic for the other three to draw examples from, as while they were all relatively recently awakened to it, her familiarity with magic was the greatest by far.

While the four made for a somewhat odd sight – Kino being a good decade older than the other three and naturally physically more mature – they got along just fine. The studies and the three children helped Kino to fill in the knowledge typical children would have been taught by her parents, and once she caught up with them, she proved to be just as quick a study in scholarly fields as she was in magic.

If anything, Kino was a lot like her affinity once she got into studying. She devoured the subject materials presented before her with a nearly endless and utterly voracious appetite. The tutors appreciated her eagerness to learn and greatly approved of her hardworking nature, and the naive girl pretty soon learned all she could wish to know about the world around her.

That said, even as she understood things better and clearer as she studied, she couldn’t help but think back about her past, and the sights she had witnessed when Aideen had brought her out from Elmaiya at the time. Her studies only further confirmed her observations, that those without power would often be at the mercies of those with power, and that those supposed to keep those with power in check were at times, or even often, slack in their work.

Those thoughts became the seed that would manifest itself into the world centuries later by way of the appearance of the Bounty Hunter.