-=Still Ronnie POV=
“I told you I was going to teach you a martial art right? That is why you have those clothes you know.”
Master’s husband started using magic when I wasn’t looking and changed the ground where we stood, a large circle area around us had become completely flat with a few indentations as markings for something here and there.
Or maybe it was for aesthetic purposes, either way master takes off her shoulder bag and puts it next to her husband and their pet crawls out of the bag and sits next to him.
“Alright Ronnie, when we bought you the slave dealer said you had experience in hand-to-hand combat, could you show me a bit?”
“Show you? How?”
“Attack me.”
“What!? But ma-”
“No buts. Do it.”
Despite my refusal it seems I wasn’t given a choice, so while preparing myself for the inevitable backlash from hurting my master that the slave contract would give me I took my stance and prepared myself.
‘Though I have to say I can’t really take this seriously when master is a third of my size…”
“Well? What are you waiting for?”
I sigh, both internally and externally, and throw a punch at master, trying to hit the air next to her head instead of her and maybe make her change her mind.
Master smirks.
While my fist was in the empty air next to master’s face she didn’t get shocked or anything of the sort like what I’d hoped, but instead she smiled.
Master turned her body and faced away from me, and then before I had the chance to pull back my balled up paw she somehow grabbed my arm with her wings and pulled, and she must have used magic or something because I was sent flying several meters before I finally crashed into a tree and fell to the ground.
“Ugh…”
I groan in pain as I get up and walk back to master, less surprised by what she did and more focused on how to avoid it happening again.
Master hadn’t told me to stop attacking, so I couldn’t, and yet if I ever actually hit her the slave contract will cause me intense pain.
I pretended to try and hit her again, this time much closer to her then before, and much faster as well.
Yet just like last time she’s not fazed by it in the slightest, instead she performs the same trick as last time.
I thought I would have been able to pull back my arm this time, however as though she had expected me to do that she grabbed me faster than before and threw me again.
*SLAM*
This time however, instead of throwing me into the forest she slams me into the ground, and all the momentum I had put into my punch transferred into me as I fell on the back on the magically hardened ground.
“Are you even trying to hit me Ronnie?”
“...”
“Answer me Ronnie.”
“... Yes.”
“Ronnie, I order you to be honest.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“The contract punishes me if I harm master.”
“Punishes? How?”
“If I harm master I feel intense pain.”
“... I see… Then this will be tricky…”
Master seems to go into deep thought for a while, however her face soon lights up and she calls out to her husband.
“Plush, you wouldn’t happen to have anything about slave contracts or slave magic in that magic book of yours?”
“... I’m not sure, but I’ll take a look.”
Master’s husband then takes out a small book from his backpack and starts skimming through it, eventually stopping at a page as he reads through it more carefully.
“This should be it… Could you both come here please?”
Master and I walk up to master’s husband and wait while he holds one hand in the air while he holds the book with the other.
A blue circle then appears above his hand, and inside the circle is the all too familiar slave magic symbol.
“It says in the book that this spell will take out the slave contract if I use it on you Ronnie.”
Master’s husband then brought the magic circle closer to me, and once it touched my leg a rolled up parchment started manifesting in the centre of the spell.
As for the reason he touched my leg with it instead of anywhere else, he’s only half as tall as master and master is already only a third of how tall I am.
Master’s husband then unrolls the slave contract and starts alternating between reading the contract and his magic book.
“Alright, this should be… No wait, this should work better…”
Master’s husband then creates another magic circle, however rather than the first one he made this one is made of five circles attached to each other by lines, each filled with a different symbol and the only one I recognised was the slave magic one, however unlike the one he used before which was a chain with four links in it this one had eight links.
He holds the slave contract in the middle of the five circled spell and activates it, and then with a *fwoosh* the contract starts glowing.
“There we go, now the ‘Can’t hurt her master’ part has been changed so that you can do it if they ask you to.”
Though I’m thankful I’ll be able to actually try properly, I still kind of wished he hadn’t succeeded so that I wouldn’t have to fight master.
“Alright, then let’s continue.”
And for the next hour we continued, every time I tried to hit her, be it with punches, kicks, tackles, or even head-butts, she kept throwing me just the same as the first time.
Even when I finally snapped and punched right at her head she easily dodged it, grabbed my arm, and then swiped at my legs using her digitigrade talons, causing me to fall over in just one of the many ways she’d shown since we started.
However at this point I’d long since stopped caring and just kept barrelling on, throwing everything I had, even trying to mix in faints, however not even once did she do anything than just stand there and counter attack, she never launched any attack on her own.
* * * *
“Food’s ready.”
“You heard him Ronnie, come on.”
*gasp* “Y-yes”” *gasp* “master…” *gasp*
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I lowly shuffle my way over to the blanket that master’s husband had prepared and sit down.
“Here.”
Looking at master’s husband I see he’s holding a number of the energy restoring blue jellies.
*chomp*
*munch munch*
*gulp*
“Haa…”
I had grabbed all the ones he’d held out and eaten them all at once, and only after that was I able to sit straight and eat.
‘This is so goooood!’
While I’m eating the food that Master has prepared I relish every bite as I feel like I’m ready to take on the world.
“Master’s husband, what is this by the way?” I ask him.
“Master’s husband? Just call me Plush. As for the food it’s french fries and dragon steak.”
*spfff!* *hack!* *cough*
“Hey! Are you alright Ronnie!?”
“I’m.. *cough* I’m fine, I just wasn’t expecting that…”
“Alright, just, take care okay? It would be no joke if you died from something like this you know?”
“Yeah, thanks…” *cough*
After we finish our meals Master, Plush and I keep walking along the paths after Plush turned our little arena back to normal.
Looking up into the sky I see that it’s now midday.
“Well what did you think Ronnie? About the martial art I mean.”
“It… It was impressive master… I couldn’t land a single hit on you yet you always struck true…”
“Right, and I will keep hammering it into you until you learn it yourself.”
“... Yes master.”
This was the first time of many where I found myself wishing to have been bought by a more normal master.
At least they wouldn’t do all kinds of unexpected stuff like these two...
-=Plush POV=-
A while later and we’ve already walked quite a distance since Shiona and Ronnie had their little bout, and just like Ronnie warned us our path had been filled with monster encounters.
*fwoosh*
*SHRIEK*
Though luckily they were all just frenzied jumbo-sized animals, so it wasn’t anything too dangerous.
“Shiona, you seem to be able to handle this just fine, mind if I go work on something?”
“What, in the book or?”
“Yeah, we still haven’t done anything with the magic crystals we got from the dragons.”
“Oh yeah… Sure, I think I’ve got this. But make sure it’s something we’ll use a lot okay? With how much trouble those two caused us back then we’ll have to have them pay us back in kind.”
Though I agreed with Shiona’s opinion, I was still a bit frightened by the sinister expressions she was making, however even I realize that this is not a good time to delve deeper so I let Lizz out and I start looking through the magic guide to see what fun things I could make with the gems.
‘Let’s see… It seems that water magic is more developed than… than whatever it is the other one is, so let’s start with that…”
While I was flipping through the pages of the book I remembered how Cy had been curious about how magic had developed since she became bound to the book, so I raise my voice and ask:
“Cy?”
[Yes.]
I turn towards the voice and see that Cy had decided to sneak up and sit on my shoulder while I wasn’t paying attention.
And she had grown bigger.
To the size of a watermelon.
So, seeing a watermelon sized black spider suddenly sit atop my shoulder I let out a cream unbefitting of any normal human being, and after a minute or so I run out of breath and finally calm down.
[Sorry.]
“Please… I’ve already asked you to stop doing that… Why were you even melon sized!?”
[To have bigger eyes so I could read more easily.]
*sigh* “If you wanted to read it so badly then couldn’t you have done it while I was outside!?”
[No, you kept the book with you all the time.]
“... But I bought two books though?”
[That aside-]
“Don’t ‘that aside’ me!”
[-it seems the language outside has changed since my time...]
*sigh* “... And that means?”
[I don’t understand what it says.]
“...”
[Read.]
“You’re being very commanding for someone who drank herself drunk and tried to kill me a month ago.”
[...]
*sigh* “Alright, fine.”
So because of this I ended up having to teach and explain everything that was in the book that had to do with magic.
Which meant the whole book.
* * * *
[I see...]
“You do? So that means I can stop reading this thing out loud and start looking for what I came here for?”
[Go ahead.]
Cy then jumps off of my shoulder and I sigh in relief, she then scuttles off to somewhere else, most likely to practise what I just told her, and I finally start looking up what to do with the dragons’ magic gems.
‘Before I was told that they could be used to make trinkets that just strengthens any magic or skills that shares the gems element, but I wonder what other spells they could be used for…’
Before I look at all the water spells that exist I first look for a way to identify how good of a quality the gems I have are.
‘ ‘Pour energy into the magic crystals without assembling a magic circuit and they will glow with a symbol showing how much they can handle’ is it?’
I do as the book says, I take out the blue and purple crystals and hold one in each hand and channel energy into them, and on their surface appeared a circle with a pattern inside.
‘A sea with… seven waves, and an eyeball… I think?’
The water one had a symbol which I was already familiar with, however the purple one had one I hadn’t seen yet, so I had to look it up in the book.
The symbol was a biconvex lens-like shape with a bunch of circles inside.
‘Here it is… ‘Unknown use’ it says… Well that’s useful…’
It seems that the people that made the book had actually left a lot of the elements and commands as unknown, though it makes sense since apparently they only started putting the book together a few months ago, and since they even gave me a discount if I want to go and buy a newer updated book in the future I’ll forgive them.
‘But even if I forgive them, right now I need to know what I can use this thing for, however it doesn’t say in the book how this eye symbol gets stronger… or maybe…?’
Looking at the eye-like symbol in the book and comparing it to the one that appeared above my hand there was a very distinct difference, namely the number of circles within the eye.
The one in the book only had one circle, making it look like an eye that only had a pupil, while the one that appeared over my hand had six of them.
‘Well, all the other have been pretty simple, so maybe it’s just one level for every ring?’
If my hypothesis was right it meant that this was a grade six crystal, which meant it could have an extra five commands, so thinking this to be true I started looking through the book to see what commands I might be able to borrow from other elements to experiment on since there wasn’t any list of compatible commands for this element.
Or rather, I could have done that, but feeling like whoever is writing these magic books probably has a lot more time and resources on their hands than me I decide to just make a safe bet and make it into an element boosting trinket instead, leave the trial and error to the professionals.
I look at the last couple of pages of the book where they had an incredibly bare-bones explanation of magic trinkets.
Although I call it an explanation it was more of a ‘Don’t do this’ where it just said that if I create the magic circuit a certain way it won’t make any spells anymore and instead be a trinket.
‘Guess they’ve got something against trinkets…’
I follow the ‘Don’t do this’ instructions and create a bangle to attach the gem to and enchant it to work as a simple element boosting trinket.
‘The next time I go outside I’ll swap the telepathy bangle with this one since now that I learned how to use it myself I don’t need it anymore. And as for the water crystal...’
The only kind of trinket they covered in the book was the element boosting one, the others were simply swept under the rug with a feeling of ‘Why would you make trinkets when you can make wands?’, truly showing the author’s contempt for trinkets.
‘In that case it’s probably best if I wait with this one until I get a proper enchanting book, maybe they’ll have on in the capital?’
Feeling like I was finished with what I could do for now I put the book and the blue water gem back on a shelf and prepare to head back outside, however then I realise that since Ronnie joined our group just yesterday she’s never eaten any really good food other than the steaks and pancakes, so I head to the kitchen and prepare a few goodies, both foods, pastries and any other kinds of snacks, and then headed back outside-
*thud*
-while Lizz was still flying.
‘... No deserts.’
<...Ah?>
‘...’
Feeling better again I get up from the ground and start catching up with Shiona and Ronnie, turns out Lizz had been lagging behind due to grumbling to much over her interrupted nap,, so none of them saw my embarrassing display.
When I reach them they greet me with a relieved expression, guess they were getting tired of hearing Lizz complain all the time.
“Welcome back.” x2
After walking for bit more the sky starts getting darker and we decide to set up camp for the night.
“We’re going a lot slower when we can’t fly.” States Shiona.
“... I’m sorry master.” Responds Ronnie while looking at the ground.
“Don’t worry about it, it was my decision to buy you so it’s on me if I didn’t think about this.”
“...Shiona?”
“Yeah?”
“I just remembered, but when I was at the wandless magic class I met an elf.”
“Oh god, don’t tell me it was the archer from Vartan?”
“Gods no, it was someone new, but they told me that things have calmed down in their town and asked when and where we could meet up...”
“Yeah? Carry on.”
“I-... I sort of told them we could meet in Logholm in a week from then?”
“Why are you saying it like a question!? And also couldn’t you have told me a bit earlier!?”
“Well, I sort forgot? You were so excited about going to the black market it slipped my mind…”
*sigh* “Fine, fine… Actually we should still make it in time, according to the map it should be one more day to get to Gavely, then one to get to Uphalla and another for Logholm, so we should get to Logholm with three days to spare.”
“Okay, good. I was getting worried…”
Feeling relieved of my worries I take out tonight’s dinner.
“What’s this?” Asks Ronnie.
“It’s pizza.”
Shiona and I actually ate pizza right before we bought Ronnie so we probably shouldn’t eat so much of it again so soon, but now we had the excuse of letting someone who’s never eaten it before have some so our consciences were clear.
* * * *
Waking up the next day Shiona and Ronnie had another sparring session while I cleaned up where we slept, and after they finished their skirmish we had breakfast and started walking again.
This time it seemed that Shiona was actually trying to teach Ronnie rather than just try to get Ronnie to think judo was cool, whenever we encountered a monster she would always take care of it herself, keeping her motions slow enough for Ronnie to see it and ask questions when she didn’t understand but still fast enough for the monsters to take major damage, and after continuing like that for half a day we arrived at Gavely.