IBTRFL Chapter 10

What Happened in the Forest

The priests of the orphanage devoted themselves to the children with great care. There were directives from a figure as significant as Valor Remisa, but their pity for the children ran deeper.

Children who had been born as people and treated worse than animals.

Once the care began, the children's health recovered quickly. The orphanage that had been full of death and violence filled with the high, innocent laughter particular to small children.

But there was no room for complacency. A child who burst into tears at any loud noise. A child who trembled and begged forgiveness at the smallest mistake. A child who was seized by nightmares each night.

The long and cruel abuse had pressed cruel scars into tender hearts.

The children of the orphanage killed their breath to cry. And so, when night came, the priests moved through the children's rooms by candlelight—in case some small lamb was enduring a hard hour alone and needed to be held.

Tonight, as if the goddess had looked kindly on them, every child had slipped into peaceful, deep sleep.

The priest carrying the candle opened the last door.

"My. This one too."

The child in the bed was asleep without a care in the world. No matter how mature, when sleeping—unmistakably a child.

The priest picked up the blanket that had fallen to the floor and tucked it in carefully. The gentle hand patted the child's chest a few times, then lifted away.

Measured footsteps receded, passed through the open door, and disappeared.

When the sound had completely faded, the eyes that had been peacefully closed snapped open. Aer slid down from the bed and picked up the paper she had thrown under the desk.

Shoved in hastily, it had crumpled badly.

Aer smoothed out the creases and checked the sentences she had written.

The ink, spread faintly, traced every foul word in the human lexicon. Murder. Arson. Sowing discord. Incitement. War. Massacre. Sadly, they were the things that would happen in this land in years to come.

There were events she had lived through directly and remembered clearly, but most of it was rumor or something caught at the edges of a conversation. Even that much was uncertain.

Asking a person who couldn't properly remember last Tuesday's dinner to recall an eventful stretch of many years—she might as well catch a wild monkey and teach it scripture.

Aer scratched her head, folded the paper neatly, and opened the drawer.

Inside were several letters, arranged in order. The letters Valor had sent in the weeks since he left.

Her gaze moved back and forth between the paper in her hand and the letters.

"……No."

Aer shook her head, tucked the paper beneath the letters, and closed the drawer. She crossed to the wardrobe and pulled out a heavy robe, shrugging it on. The texture against her skin was not particularly pleasant, but it held the cold out tolerably well.

She checked for any sound nearby, then climbed out through the window into the dark forest.

The most satisfying thing about living alone in a private room. Being able to do what needed to be done without worrying about anyone's eyes.

She ran for a long while, pushing against the cold wind. At the end of it stood a worn stone wall.

Carved into the wall: a small beast biting the hind leg of a lion. The emblem for recklessness—a friendly warning not to venture further.

Aer cleared the wall without breaking stride.

"Oh."

A startled syllable escaped her. She had come to hunt chaos beasts, but she hadn't expected to come face to face with one quite this immediately.

Rather than landing on the ground, Aer reached up, caught the branch above her head, and swung her legs to carry herself up into the tree.

"Toh? Toh!"

A living thing that looked like an acorn scaled up to the size of a human head. A chaos beast common in forests, called a glan.

Its offensive capability was low and its lethality nearly nonexistent, but every one encountered needed to be eliminated on sight. Even the smallest seed would become a great tree someday.

"Toh! Toh!"

The glan rolled around the base of the tree as if demanding she come down. Aer looked down at it with a dark expression.

Can I do it?

She disliked admitting it, but that greedy director had had some discernment.

The power held within his soul stones had exceeded her expectations, and her body and soul had managed to receive it whole. That was where the fatal problem arose.

Despite her dismal level of control, the power she had acquired was vast beyond managing.

Aer could define her situation simply enough. A child who had just learned to walk, now the owner of a legendary cursed blade.

She had no idea what level the power she now carried was. She simply swung it because it happened to be in her hand.

The one saving grace was that Aer was not, in fact, a snot-nosed little runt.

She had spent every dawn in considerable discomfort, trying by every means to adapt.

Twenty-six water drenchings. Three frozen ponds. Eleven burned trees. Seventeen fire vortexes. Ten days, and more failed attempts than she could count. If there were forest spirits, they would have been weeping tears of blood and sending curses down on the destroyer of their home.

In any case, the result was that Aer had naturally, obviously, and entirely as expected gotten no feel for it whatsoever.

She had met many people in her years as a mercenary, but only one of them had been a mage.

If even a wandering mercenary encountered mages so rarely, what were the odds for an ordinary person? About equal to the odds of getting your hands on the armor of the legendary Sword King.

For the first time in her life, she felt something approaching gratitude for the wretched profession of mercenary.

Without that one chance encounter, she would never have dreamed of using magic, however clumsily.

Unlike swordsmanship, which existed visibly around her as something to watch and copy, magic was a profoundly alien force.

Principles she could not make sense of, no matter how she tried. A level of mastery that showed no sign of improving.

Faced with a hopeless situation, Aer had reached for the last resort.

Combat. She had acquired swordsmanship by grinding herself into the ground anyway. There was no reason magic had to be any different.

"Toh!"

The glan bounced up and down, throwing a tantrum. Aer took a slow breath and focused her whole attention.

Delicate as handling a newborn. Careful as belling a sleeping lion.

A small flame that began at her fingertips grew in size and swallowed the glan.

Where the fire died, black ash remained. Aer stared at the pile of ash without remembering to breathe.

The surrounding fallen leaves were scorched, but no additional flame had caught. The fire she had made had burned only the glan and gone out.

She raised her clenched fist over her head.

Real combat. Just as she'd thought.

After so many crushing failures, this success was sweeter than a piece of precious sugar she had once tasted long ago.

"Toh? Toh?"

Another glan rolled out from between the tree trunks. It was tilting its head this way and that, searching for something—by the look of it, it had come looking for its friend. Drunk on success, Aer pulled on her power with a confident expression.

The air above the ground turned cold. White frost flowers bloomed across the surface of the glan, which blinked in apparent bewilderment.

The frost spread like something eating into the ground and then, in an instant, expanded explosively—and froze the chaos beast solid.

"I did it——"

Aer had been about to let out a shout when she snapped her mouth shut. The remaining cold was roaming in every direction, lowering the temperature around it.

An early frost settled across the clearing in the peaceful forest. The cold still had breath in it—the excess gathered and compressed into ice that spread over everything nearby.

"Oh no!"

Coming back to herself, Aer quickly grabbed a higher branch. Cold licked at her feet.

She looked down. The branch she'd been standing on a moment ago had been speared through with ice and shattered.

Cold sweat ran down her back.

Her breath scattered in the cold in white wisps. She dropped onto the ice below.

The ice sheet was unexpectedly slippery, and her worn-soled shoes failed at their job. She struggled not to fall, failed entirely, and went down hard.

Her tailbone announced itself in a long, ringing ache of protest. Aer hunched over, gripping her lower back, and let out a low sound.

"Damn."

She lurched upright and grabbed a tree trunk for support. Her legs on the ice shook like a water strider encountering a surface for the first time.

Aer looked at the destruction she had made, her expression bleak.

The ice made by magic—all of it—wouldn't melt even when spring came. If that happened, every tree around here would freeze to death.

Maybe even this could somehow count as practice. The half-deranged beginner mage extended her hand along with a futile hope.

Just melt the ice. Only the ice.

But what came in answer to that peaceable intention was a vicious fire that looked as though it would burn down the whole forest.

Aer flinched, shrank her shoulders, and drew her hand back.

The original goal—melting the ice—had been accomplished. Along with everything else nearby, which had all burned as if a forest fire had come through.

She touched the tip of a charred branch with one finger, timidly. The blackened chunk, still holding live embers, fell to the ground and broke apart.

"……"

Aer wanted to cry.