Three Days Later, Xyrtahn North

Sweat dripped from Alec’s chin as he hopped back from Olivia, a click of her tongue reaching his ears as she shot out of her defensive stance, having tried to catch the blue-haired teen in a regular Glancing Scale. Their blades met three times in quick succession, a cut along Alec’s shoulder stained the very real blade in his opponent’s hands.

Taking a step left, the teen forced Olivia to take a step in the opposite direction to keep her distancing for a proper strike, only for her knee to make contact with his shin as he quickly stepped back in the opposing direction.

With wide eyes, the young woman stumbled back, thrown off-center by the sudden and unexpected twist and jerk of her own leg. Alec, quick to capitalize on the opening that he had created, took a heavy step forward his blade trailing behind him as he tunnel-visioned on closing in on Olivia before she could get back up.

The sound of metal on earth reached his ears almost at the exact same time as the sensation of her foot kicking his weight-baring leg and making it buckle just as hers had.

With a startled yelp, Alec crashed into Olivia, the both of them sent tumbling to the ground in a tangle of limbs, hair, and cloth; both of their blades dropped on instinct.

‘What the hell…?’ Alec stared blankly into the ground as he felt Olivia squeeze his neck between her arm and ribcage while his left hand held her right knee and his right hand clasped her face.

As he breathed heavily, he thought over the last few seconds of their spar, replaying it in his mind to try and figure out how everything had gone so wrong.

The answer, for once, lay not in his own failing but rather came from the quick thinking and sheer skill of Olivia. In the moment between her transition from stumbling to hitting the ground back-first, she had stabbed her blade into the ground to use it as a stabilizer and struck out at his leg with her own.

The kick had been weak and done barely, if any, damage to him but had been just enough to break his stance and destabilize him entirely, something he hadn’t even thought about in his eagerness to outright win the spar as quickly as possible.

With an especially loud pant, the teen took his hand off Olivia’s face and placed it on the ground beside her head, taking the time to finally begin freeing himself from the tangled mess that the two of them had become. Something that Olivia herself was all too eager to join in on, the both of them breathing heavily as they rolled away from each other and stumbled to their feet.

He was surprised that Olivia wasn’t saying anything about him keeping his hand on her face for as long as he had but based on the fact that her breathing was just as heavy as his, and she seemed to be pretty deep in thought as well, she most likely didn’t even notice all that much.

It was actually a refreshing change of pace for the Kairahlian, being able to spar with Olivia without some kind of barbed comment or dirty look. In fact, she had almost looked excited at the opportunity.

Alec reckoned, in the privacy of his own mind, that it was due to the fact that not only were there not really any other options, but also because if she wasn’t doing something with him, she’d have no excuse to avoid her sister.

“You two done?” Alec sighed and turned around to look at Noelle as she asked her question, just barely missing the twitch of Olivia’s eye at her sister’s apathetic tone.

The woman was sitting on the back of a constructed horse and seemed to be checking her nails for something, utterly uncaring of the spar that the two of them had been having and had just finished.

There was one part of Alec that felt disappointed that his spar had apparently been so boring that an onlooker couldn’t even find it somewhat interesting. There was another part of him that rolled its eyes and said of course she wouldn’t be interested; she was a mage through and through and there was no point getting hung up over it.

“Yes.” Olivia ground out, stomping forward and ripping her blade out of the ground, flicking Alec’s blade off the ground with her foot, grabbing it with her free hand, and throwing it back at him.

The startled sound that he made has he tried to grab his blade without being cut or punctured got a small giggle from the elder Kio sibling though. So at least his panicked attempt at survival was amusing to their [Gold-rank] keeper…?

XXXxxxXXX

Later that day

Alec wobbled unsteadily atop the constructed horse that he had been forced to ride by the other two Kio siblings.

Noelle had at least been merciful enough to summon it with appropriate riding gear and taught him the barebones basics of how to ride a horse, but that was it. Meaning that the poor teen had to actually work on gaining some kind of proficiency all by himself as the other two, clearly far more experienced and trained than a country hick like him, continued to keep a pace that genuinely had Alec worried for his ability to keep up at times.

‘How the hell do the two of them make it look so smooth? Do they even have spines?’ He grouched internally, wincing as he shifted wrong by accident and hit the saddle quite a bit rougher than he was intending or expecting.

“So, Alec.” Noelle suddenly called out, twisting her back and neck to look back at him.

“Ah! Uh, yeah?” He blinked in surprise, having not expected the elder sister to suddenly call out to him.

Honestly even having Olivia suddenly strike up a conversation would have been less surprising than this.

“Tell me a bit about yourself. It’s super boring just travelling in silence and you seem like a pretty interesting young man~” She smiled, her expression just a touch too sharp and her eyes a hair too half-lidded for him to take her statement as something innocent, however.

“Ah, well I wouldn’t say I’m very interesting.” He shook his head, memories of his past flashing through his mind as he thought about what to say next. “I grew up in a small town in the south of Kairahl in an orphanage.”

His expression took on something far more melancholic as he spoke, his gaze wandering to something that neither of the two women could ever hope to see.

“I grew up in that orphanage, I never knew my parents and neither did anyone else in town, I just appeared one day on the doorstep and was taken in.”

“Ooooh! A mystery!” Noelle gasped in excitement, one of her hands leaving the stirrup to cover her mouth with her fingers.

“Heh, not quite. As far as any of us have been able to figure out, they were most likely just a random couple that couldn’t or wouldn’t raise a child.” He chuckled and shook his head.

“Awwww! Phooey. What else?”

“Hmmm, I was raised alongside my three best friends in the entire world, Peter, Angelica, and Felicia. Peter and Angelica are siblings who appeared in a pretty similar way to me while Felicia was the daughter of the town’s bishop. But when he died during a beast attack no one stepped up to take care of her, so she ended up in the orphanage.”

“Jeez, were there any children that still had parents in your town?” Noelle half-joked with a raised eyebrow and a teasing grin.

“Of course there were.” He huffed, giving her a dry gaze before he continued. “The four of us had to share a room in the orphanage, which is how we all met and got closer. It's also how we discovered the dangers of children with access to magic.”

The teen shivered a little at the memory, missing the excited and curious gaze of the woman that seemed to almost bore into him.

“Oh? Magic? Do tell.”

“Angelica, she’s a [High-Sorcerer]. Which also meant that when she was younger, she had a habit of accidentally casting spells.” He said, not really willing to go too much further in detail.

As much as he found some of those stories funny, he also wasn’t exactly in a mood to go exploring through the hundreds of dangerous or embarrassing mishaps to find the more innocent stories, so he just decided not to.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Oh? How fascinating~ And where would she be now? Some magic academy I assume?” Noelle purred, clearly interested in the fate of Angelica now that she had been brought to her attention.

“No.” He shook his head, still surprised by the feeling of his hair swishing around in slight lag-step to the rest of his head.

He had never had hair this long before and he still found it weird and a little bit difficult to adjust to.

“The four of us created an adventuring party together when we were fourteen.”

Both sisters startled at this knowledge, getting even Olivia’s gaze to snap onto Alec with raised eyebrows and a slightly slackened jaw. He could hardly blame them; the Guild didn’t officially have any minimum age for joining as an adventurer, but it was a pretty open secret that anyone below sixteen would be found ‘not skilled enough’ to be an official adventurer by any sort of entrance proctor.

On some days he almost wished that that had happened to the four of them, just so that he wouldn’t have had to realize exactly how useless his ‘talent’ with blades actually was. But that was an unfair wish, especially on the part of his friends, so he never let the thought linger for long, usually by trying to find something to distract himself.

“Fourteen? How in the Twin-Continents did you manage that?” Noelle asked, too surprised to even try and tease him as she normally would have done.

“Peter was the one that convinced us all to give it a try after a small beast attack on our village. He practically dragged us onto a merchant cart heading towards Kret and wouldn’t let us get a word in edgewise.” He explained, staring at the neck of his horse as his thumb ran idly over the stirrup in his hands. “The moment we got there we didn’t even have time to look around before he was shoving us towards the Guild Hall. When we got in they tried to turn us away but he was insistent that we had the skill and strength to handle at least the lowest-ranking quests and beasts, so they humoured us and had us do a test.”

“And you all actually managed to pass?” Olivia asked, fully dragged into his conversation now; the young woman no longer able to pretend to ignore it while secretly listening in as she had been beforehand.

“We did, believe it or not.” He chuckled, scratching the back of his head for a moment, his gaze never rising. “As a party, we were able to handle the [Copper-rank] construct that they created for us without any serious injuries, so they didn’t really have any kind of leg to stand on, especially when Angelica began to recite their own rules back at them.”

“Ohhhh~ Well how interesting, that makes you the youngest party in decades then, wouldn’t it?~”

Alec stiffened slightly at her wording, his jaw clenching just a little as he gripped the stirrup tighter.

“Yeah, it did. At least a hundred years if records are to be believed.”

“Fascinating. To think that sweet little Olivia would meet someone so interesting.” Noelle giggled, turning to look at her sister who very deliberately turned away from her and huffed quietly.

‘They’re the interesting ones, not me.’ Alec wanted to say aloud but didn’t, confining such words to only the privacy of his mind. ‘I’m just an idiot who thought he could coast by, by his friends’ side and ended up dragging them down and holding them back.’

The rest of the conversation Alec let wash past him, silently listening to Noelle bugging Olivia until she snapped back and the two of them started to bicker and argue.

It was almost refreshing to see her anger directed at someone that wasn’t him, after over seven and a half weeks of having to deal with it, but even then, the anger that she showed to Noelle seemed a lot more…visceral. As if the anger that he had seen from her so far was just a fractured shard of the real thing that was now rearing its head.

It had Alec, in all honesty, rather worried about how this quest was going to go if that was actually the case. But whatever issue(s) they had between them wasn’t something that he was qualified to, or should, look into and get between.

So, he silently just hunkered down, trying not to fall off his horse as he accepted his role of playing background interference and watchdog to try and make sure this quest ended well. That position, if absolutely nothing else, was something that he was pretty comfortable in doing.

XXXxxxXXX

Two Days Later

“Alright you two, let’s go over the plan for when we get to the Water Spirit’s abode tomorrow, kay?~” Noelle grinned, winking at the both of them as she twisted back to look at the both of them.

Currently, both Olivia and Alec were side by side as they rode through the unpathed wilderness of Xyrtah, both of them looking miserable for entirely separate reasons.

A particularly deep deformation in the ground, enough to make the horse he was riding jolt but not stumble or fall over, bounced Alec in his saddle and caused his entire body to seize up for a moment as the shock went through the horse and straight into him. His expression, somehow, falling even further as he very lightly bit his bottom lip to stop himself from saying something he may regret later.

Olivia, meanwhile, very purposefully kept her gaze straight ahead of her, moving languidly with the horse she rode but specifically avoided looking in the direction of her sister.

To her credit, Noelle didn’t let either of their misery slow her down. Her mouth opened and an explanation spilled forth as if they were all in a comfortable living room with snacks and drinks on the coffee table between them.

“The quest is a pretty simple one to go after a Great Water Spirit before it can accumulate and condense more mana and become a Lord Water Spirit.” Noelle explained, not unlike a lecturer or professor in Alec’s mind, not that he had very much experience with those things himself.

The threat that this Water Spirit could become a Lord was worrying though, for more reasons than one. If regular creatures used the ancient threat scale that title may not have sent as many shivers down the teen’s spine, but unfortunately that scale was kept and solely used only by the biggest and baddest creatures across the Twin-Continents. Its reputation was well-earned and stained with blood even to this day.

The scale, from weakest to strongest, went from [Lesser] to [Regular] –or just unmarked for ease of description– to [Great] or [Greater] then up to [Lord], and finally to [Grand]. A scale branded to dragons, leviathans, elementals, and a few other creatures that humanity dare not take lightly. A Great elemental was already a tough task to take down but if it became a Lord, they had absolutely no hope of dealing with it even if all three of them laid their lives down to do so.

Idly, he wondered how The Lady of the Tides: Serephene Varthni had managed to take down a Grand Leviathan all by herself and whether that rumour actually had any truth behind it or if the entire thing was fabricated. On the one hand, she was a [Platinum-rank] adventurer and if anyone could do something as monstrous as that it would be one of them. On the other hand, a Grand Leviathan was a [Platinum-rank] threat in its own right and usually required active military responses from kingdoms and empires to deal with. So, Alec wasn’t quite sure what to believe and how far in either direction to lean; he hadn’t been as a late child when he had first heard the rumours and he still didn’t.

“If it's that close that it’s a legitimate worry, wouldn’t a [Tungsten-rank] be a better choice?” Alec questioned, wobbling unsteadily as he tilted his head to the side and unconsciously leaned in that same direction.

“Awww, don’t you worry about that. It’s close but not that close.” Noelle cooed at his worry, “Besides until it actually gets to that rank it's not really worth it for a [Tungsten-rank] to come all the way out here just to disintegrate it in a couple attacks.”

“Their job is to deal with these kinds of threats before people are put in danger. Turning down easy money due to pride is asinine.” Olivia scoffed, proving that she had indeed been listening to her sister’s words even if she hadn’t been reacting.

“I’m sure that there are definitely some of them that would be willing to help, but a lot of them just can’t do anything. I mean what is a swordsman meant to do against an elemental? It’s a hopeless battle no matter how you look at it.” Noelle giggled with an uncaring shrug.

Behind her both Alec and Olivia glared at her back with twitching eyes, more than a little annoyed at yet another flippant comment about melee-based fighters like them.

“Game plan. What is it?” Olivia ground out, clutching the stirrup in her hands so tight that Alec was worried for a moment she was shatter it entirely.

“Oh! Thank you, dear sister~” Noelle gasped in realization that she’d gotten off-topic and smiled brightly at her.

Olivia, on the other hand, suppressed the urge to flip her sister off.

“So, you two are going to sit on the side because this really isn’t something for [Iron-rank]’s to be handling but make sure that you aren’t anywhere behind me, kay?”

“Easy enough.” Alec nodded.

“I knew you’d get it Alec~” She purred, seeming to take a small amount of delight in the very light shade of red that dusted his cheeks, “You two just watch and make sure not to get too close since water spirits are pretty well known for their wide-spanning attacks. Try to learn a thing or two while watching and leave it all to me.”

“That’s it?” Olivia asked dryly, one eyebrow raised, and her posture slouched forward ever so slightly.

“Of course not. It’s going to be in a lake where it can use that water for greater attacks than it can regularly pull off so I’m going to use my summons to herd it away from the water and hopefully get its core while I’m at it, which is why I need you two to keep a distance. I don’t know what direction I’m going to need to herd it.”

“At least you’ve thought it through.” The younger Kio sister huffed, clearly not having the highest opinion of her sister’s strategic skill.

After having watched her nearly get in trouble with the Guild Guards twice, Alec was pretty inclined to agree with his fellow trainee on that front. Not that he’d ever admit as such to Noelle’s face.

Nice and teasing she may have been, but he highly doubted that she would take to –essentially– being called an idiot very well, especially with the emphasis and pride she put in her magic.

“Thank you! Now let’s keep going so that we can set up camp and get to the water spirit nice and early.”

Alec, having spent five days travelling with her by now, was more than aware that despite her words, she would be the last of the three of them to actually wake up and get ready by a good hour, if not two. He opened his mouth to try and suggest not speeding up and only ended up spluttering as Noelle took off with Olivia shortly after, leaving him to try and catch up with a scant five days of horse-riding practice.

When he caught up to them an hour later with dirt all over his face and shirt, and a twig sticking out of his frazzled and tangled hair, he didn’t think he would ever hear someone laugh quite as hard as Olivia did.

Though at least that made her fall off her own horse in response, silver linings.