LIGHTNOVELONLINE Volume 2 Chapter 14
The salty scent of the ocean had already long since perforated my nostrils before we reached Guerraway, but by the time we got to the city gate, I was questioning why anyone would willingly choose to live by the sea.
I’d never been one to lounge about on a beach for hours on end. My past self never could have found such a public setting relaxing, not unless I was the only one there, anyways. So, whenever I needed to wind down from the daily grind of the job I hated, I typically just pulled out a good book or video game, sat myself in a nice quiet room and lost myself in it.
Still, I had been dragged to the beach a time or two in my past life, so the fishy smell permeating the air was familiarly hard to deal with.
That being said, I had no idea how these two girls, whose noses were both several times more sensitive than my own, were able to carry such undaunted smiles on their lips as they gazed up at the long wall surrounding the city.
While the wall was not even half as obnoxiously tall as Amoranth’s, Mana was still unbelievably taken with them as she wrung the life out of my hand in the excitement.
“Wow! Human temples are so big!”
Mana’s tail wagged energetically as soon as she saw how tall the city wall was. Yua and I chuckled to each other a bit at her excited misunderstanding.
“That is not a temple. That is just a wall that surrounds the human city.”
“City? What’s that?”
“Think of it like a village, but a way bigger. And with a lot more people. The wall keeps them safe.”
“Ooooh.”
Looking like a little girl excitedly skipping through her first trip to an amusement park, Mana clung to our hands and pulled us towards the gate. Smirking to myself at how her curiosity had taken over and she had all but forgotten about the little dress we’d forced her to wear, I let her lead the way.
“Yua, were you this excited the first time you saw a city?”
“No,” she smiled embarrassedly and shook her head. “I was too scared to go in and ended up waiting in the forest for three days…”
“Really? I would have thought you’d take it head on like you would a fight.”
“Hehe… Well, I’d never seen so many people. So many humans… It was a little scary at the time.”
“Yea. I guess if your only interactions with humans had been through the occasional merchants passing through your village, seeing so many at once would have been a shock.”
I know I felt the same way after meeting her people, at least. Even if my shock was born of a completely different reason, one that made me grateful to myself for letting Mana borrow my cloak, as her excited movements would have already created a dozen wardrobe malfunctions since she first saw the city wall on the horizon.
“…”
Unmoved by Mana’s cuteness as I was, Yua drew in her chin when the gate guards’ eyes locked on us. Surely, as beautiful as she was, she’d never had a man look at her with such pure disinterested disgust in her life. When they saw her, they gripped their swords. I had almost forgotten Tama’s warning about their dislike for the cat-kin.
There was no fear in Yua’s eyes, but there was a heaping helping of regret when she belatedly tried to cover her ears with her cloak. Mana, however, missed all of this and continued letting her gaze wonder, completely missing the threat when her big blue eyes landed on the guards well-polished bronze armor.
Seeing that they were careful enough not to draw their swords yet, I refused my instinct to grab my own so they couldn’t assume us a threat. Pushing past their discomforting looks, we politely lined up with everyone else to get in. A couple of the guards made sure to keep an eye on us, but their harassment never went past that.
Thankfully, at least, as I watched the guard deal with farmer after farmer come to the city to sell their wares, I noticed that there was no entrance tax here. Guess Amoranth, the city of merchants, was just greedy. Surprise, surprise.
“Next.”
When it was our turn, the eyes of the man interviewing all who entered felt like they were burning with anger with the way his entire body seemed to focus on us, but beneath his helm, he looked tired. His friends, though, remained on guard.
“What’s your purpose for entering the city?” he asked, his tone strikingly calm.
“We’re Adventurers from Amoranth, here on a quest to collect some plants from the forest. We thought it best to save time by waiting to stock up on supplies here instead of carrying them ourselves the whole way.”
The guard noticed Yua, the only one of us carrying a backpack, and scoffed before he shook his head. Regardless of whether or not he’d noticed that Yua was a slave from this little fact, he surprisingly accepted my little half-lie without issue.
He did, however, glance down at the sword on my hip.
“Is there a law prohibiting weapons in the city?” I asked calmly.
“No. Just keep it in its sheath and nobody will bother you.”
At that, his gaze shifted back to the girls. He tapped the butt of his spear onto the ground with a loud clang to draw Mana’s attention off his armor and onto his eyes. Her ears wilted on the spot and she moved to hide behind me.
“As for you two,” he continued. “Keep your damn claws to yourselves. We’ve been having enough problems as is with that damn demon running around. Our people don’t need more.”
Demon? Shouldn’t the demon the King’s army is fighting be east of Amoranth? Is there another?
“… Yes, sir,” Yua said, suppressing the urge to clench her fist with a smile.
Seemingly pleased with her answer, the guard’s gaze shifted completely onto Mana, who bit her lip before stepping forward. Showing themselves to be on edge enough to worry over the actions of such a small girl, the guards around us all tensed, but remained still.
Tentatively pressing the tips of her fingers together, Mana asked, “Um… Is it true that most humans wear metal over their clothes?”
“No,” he said curtly, looking to me. “If these two are with you, hurry them along. They’re holding up the line.”
“R-Right. Come along, Mana.”
“Eh? But I wanted to talk about their metal clothes.”
Weren’t you scared of him like five seconds ago?
Then again, I suppose with the way Tama glares at everyone, she might just be used to uncomfortable looks being aimed at her.
“I’ll answer any questions you have about humans later,” I said, tugging her forwards and through the gate before they could change their minds. Yua hurried to follow us, happy to be freed of their accusing gazes.
A long sloping road of smooth stone ran straight from the gates towards the ocean on the horizon. From the top of the slight hill we stood atop, I could only see the beginning of the docks we were aiming for in the distance, but the spread of the ocean was so vast it seemed to bleed into the sky.
Mana was much too busy being awed by all the stone buildings sprawled out around the area to pay any attention to where she was walking, so I continued to guide her.
Unlike Amoranth with its straight, if not confusing streets, none of the roads but the one leading to the docks were uniformed in any way. It was as if each building were placed haphazardly wherever it was needed, leaving the roads a nightmare of a mess.
She sniffed the air and gazed almost longingly towards a large bundle of buildings to the right of the gate. Many were shops selling foods of an even greater variety than Amoranth’s merchant district, probably thanks to the ocean opening up trade wtih faraway lands.
Her big blue gaze, however, laid squarely on the butcher’s shop. Much to my surprise given her feline nature, she seemed to all but completely ignore the endless fish mongers in favor for whatever her nose caught at the butcher’s.
Meanwhile, Yua was looking at me uncomfortably.
“Sorry about the guards,” I said.
“It’s not your fault. Daddy did say they’d be rude, I just…. It’s weird. They looked like they were angry with us, but I couldn’t hear any actual hate in their hearts.”
“Well that’s… confusing. But it also sounds like a good thing.”
“Yea…”
Looking around, I felt many of the people that bothered to look our way, look at them, all met her with the same level of contempt, if they bothered to look at all. Most seemed to ignore us entirely, as would be expected of a city to packed with people.
“Hey, Big Bro!” Mana shouted, tugging my arm, her tail a flurry of excitement. “Can that gold you showed me get us meat? There’s a bunch over there I haven’t tried yet!”
“Pfft. What happened to asking about armor?”
“But there’s meat! Meat!”
Gripping my shirt with a huge, but pleasantly unexpectant grin, Mana pointed to the butcher’s shop. I had some idea of her habits after sharing both dinner and breakfast with her, but it’s starting to feel like Mana might be a bit of a glutton if that’s all she’s noticed about this place. At least, a glutton when it came to meat.
Wondering how it was that a person could hate this adorable girl just because of her pointed ears, I grabbed her hood and pulled it down over her head. I hated doing it, but if we wanted things to remain peaceful, this might be for the best.
“H-hey!”
“Mana, for as long as we’re here, I want you to wear that hood.”
“But, first you make me cover my tail and my special place, and now my ears? No fair. Look, the human females aren’t covering their heads! Why should I?”
“Because we’re drawing too much attention to ourselves,” I whispered close so only she could hear. “We’re here to see what the humans in the forest were doing, remember? We’ll get caught if we stand out.”
“Oh… But keeping my ears like this is uncomfortable.”
“Bear with it for now and I’ll get you as much meat as you can stomach.”
“… Promise?”
“Alex,” Yua chided. “You shouldn’t spoil her. Mana, the male you claim as your mate is asking for a favor. You should listen properly.”
“We shouldn’t be here for too long,” I added, discretely using Material Creation to seal up the ear holes I made in Yua’s hood. “We don’t want the humans from the forest to notice us.”
“Mhmmf…”
Puffing up her cheeks in a pout, Mana reluctantly nodded back.
I would have loved to pull out some big romantic gesture for the girls and force the people here to accept them for who they were, but with Guerraway being so close to the village, I was sure the thieves were bound to notice the presence of any cat-kin in the city. I could only guess what they’d do once they spotted the girls. I doubted that letting a bunch of criminals know we were on to them would end well.
“Let’s just be quick about this.”
Working our way through the crowd, we stopped only once to sample the local cuisine in buying, what else, but some grilled fish after both my cat-girls caught a whiff of it and their tails threatened to ruin their disguises. I then had to buy a second round when the little carnivore Mana hit me with a pleading look.
With our bellies full, and with Mana placated with an offering of a third serving all for herself and with a newfound worry that my purse wasn’t fat enough to keep her stomach happy, we headed straight down the main road towards the ocean.
Aside from the consistent smell assaulting my nose, Guerraway didn’t feel too different from Amoranth. The streets were lined with so many people that I felt the need to hold Mana’s hand to keep her from getting lost, but the streets were clogged the way the Great City usually was.
The only real difference that was readily apparent was the constant chill carried by the ocean breeze and how it rendered the girl’s disguises less effective than they would have been elsewhere.
As Mana happily munched away on her fish, her hood was blown off her head several times and each time her ears drew the ire of those around us. Thankfully, she seemed completely oblivious to their unearned glares and kept her pace casual. Yua and I scrambled to cover her each time.
And as for Yua, I am somewhat ashamed to say that I was causing her a bit of discomfort. Or rather, my past order was, as each time she sensed a gust of wind coming, she’d frightfully press down the front and back of her skirt to keep from showing what she had under it to the crowd.
Briefly considering how long it might take to teleport back to the cabin to let her change into something less daring, such thoughts were interrupted by a sight I was not prepared for.
A small contingent of knights were lined up in front of the archway leading to the docks, stopping everyone that tried to pass through. Each and every one of them were decked out in a near-full set of gleaming silver armor that was so overly ornate that they would have looked out of place in an art museum, let alone on a person. More worrying were the glares they shot at anyone that tried to pass by them without stopping to be checked.
The man doing said checking, the only one wearing a helmet, pressed a palm to the chest of a heavily sunburnt man, stopping him in his tracks. With an annoyed grunt and a few words I’d rather not repeat, the sunburnt man pulled a small scroll out of his shirt and handed it to the knight. The sunburnt man looked annoyed to have to go through this, but stayed put anyway.
The helmeted knight unfurled the scroll, looked it over and handed it back to the sunburnt man before letting him through.
Assuming him to be the knight’s leader, I checked his info box.
Sir Astore Lugano was a level 38 Swordsman whose presence would have normally meant that we’d have had no choice but to submit to his search, but before I could consider the feasibility of just teleporting around them, his second class stole my attention.
He was a Paladin.
Typical gaming sense suggested that this meant he was a knight whose power was amped by his faith in God, but that fact wasn’t what stopped me in my tracks.
Does he worship the Goddess?
As if he took notice of the mental image of the blonde beauty that sent me to this world, Sir Astore’s head swiveled in our direction. He lifted his chin briefly before he raised a hand and swiftly brought it down in a chopping motion in our direction.
In an instant, half of the knights behind him drew their weapons and ran at us.
Yua clenched her fists and readied her stance while Mana hid behind us. But before I could draw my sword, the knights all stopped, circling us in perfect unison just a few feet from us.
All looked ready and willing to fight even though Ser Astore spoke no orders, but none of them moved. The sudden rush and stop even put Yua off her game and her fierce love for the fight faltered.
And when Ser Astore himself stepped forward, she tensed. Drawing in a sharp breath through her nose, she unclenched her fists.
“Hold,” Ser Astore said to us, not his men. “The docks are currently off limits to civilians and non-essential workers. What is your purpose here?”
With his question aimed at me, I gulped a bit at the fact the other knights hadn’t lowered their weapons yet and answered.
“We just wanted to check if any recent ships brought in any building supplies. Figured it’d be cheaper to buy them before the merchants do and raise their prices. Is that not allowed?”
While that was not explicitly untrue, as part of my hopes for coming to this city was to gain materials to fix up our cabin, especially now that Mana would soon be joining us, I was still shot down instantly.
“I imagine it would normally be of no consequence, but I am under strict orders not to let anyone unaffiliated with the docks through this point,” Ser Astore said and turned to Yua. Then to Mana. “Besides, we’ve received reports from the locals that the cat-kin of the area are too violent to be trusted to keep the peace.”
“… How did you know they were cat-kin?”
Up until now, their cloaks had done wonders in proving that they’d were doing a poor job of hiding their more feline features, but I was sure he hadn’t seen anything that could have given it away. And yet, he spoke with an air of certainty that was so profound that I couldn’t help but admit the truth.
Sir Astore cocked his helmeted head slightly to the side before nodding. Bowing just his chin, he reached his hands behind his head, unclasped something and then grasped the crown of his helmet. He pulled the whole thing off in a smooth, practiced motion.
The first thing anyone could have noticed when he did this was the pair of large, fuzzy wolf’s ears resting atop his head that stretched beneath the daylight, happy to be free of their metal prison. The sight of them eased Mana’s worries some, enough for her to stop hiding.
Below the helmet was a fairly handsome man with short silvery hair and a pair of sharp and very alert eyes that alone denied any resistance to his assertion. He sniffed the air only once before looking at them again.
“They can cover their ears all they want, I can tell a cat-kin when I smell one.”
“We’re no more violent than you,” Yua said, matching his calm tone. “We only fight when defending someone we care for or when a mutual challenge is met.”
“And I don’t like fighting at all,” Mana added with a cute smile that made Sir Astore flinch.
“The people of Guerraway just misunderstand our ways.”
“Be that as it may,” Sir Astore said, but not before clearing his throat. “If you are as peaceable as you claim, then all the better. We care not for local squabbles, but we still cannot let you pass. We are here to protect our Lord and the Duke of Guerraway himself has allowed us to post up here.”
“Local squabbles?” I repeated and Yua grabbed my hand as if to stop me. “Are you not from Guerraway? Why are you guarding the docks?”
“There will be no more questions from you. Please clear the area. The Duke has permitted the use of force if necessary. Do us all a favor and don’t make it necessary.”
Likely hearing the truth in the girls by listening to their hearts, Astore shoved his head back into the helmet and left without another word. A quick wave of his hand had the rest of the knights all lowering their weapons as they returned to their posts.
He must have only approached in the first place because of that rumor about the cat-kin and because he caught their scent.
“Come on, Alex. Let’s leave.”
Not seeing a way to reopen negotiations after his curt rejection, I let Yua drag me away. Mana stopped to give the knights a little wave before running after us.
It wasn’t until she’d dragged me maybe a mile into the unorganized streets of Guerraway and pulled me into the safety of an empty alley that she spoke again.
“You need to be more careful.”
“I know, don’t worry. I noticed his level, too.”
Yua shook her head and, for some reason, Mana mimicked her behind her back.
“That’s not what I mean. He was clearly a knight. Like, an actual knight, not just a guard or a thug in armor. You shouldn’t go around questioning knights like that without considering their status. He could have had you arrested or killed if he decided you were annoying him. You were lucky he was nice.”
“Oh, I guess you’re right. Sorry, I just never had to deal with knights where I’m from.”
“Where you’re from…? You know, sometimes I feel like you are completely immune to common sense.”
With a resigned sigh, Yua thrust her hands onto her hips and, again, Mana copied her. And I really couldn’t blame either of them.
Guess my new actually-talking-to-people powers clouded my judgment a little. I’ve just been talking to people without too much regard for their status or how it compared to my own.
Wait. Don’t tell me I’ve become the sort of idiot that would mindlessly run his mouth at anyone and everyone. Did I somehow move straight past stuttering over every sentence and jump into talking like I personally knew everyone?
Goddess, the parts of my past self that were still buried inside me shuddered at the thought.
Actually, now that I think about it, I was pretty casual with Tama, too, and he’s the leader of their people. Was that part of why he was so cross with me, or was it just because of Yua?
I shook my head of the thought.
“Sorry. Sorry. I’ll be more careful next time. Anyways, I think things just got more complicated.”
“What do you mean?” Yua said, her ears twitching in search of danger. “Nobody followed us.”
“Maybe not, but didn’t you hear what he said? Nobody is allowed into the docks without permission. So, how are the thieves going to get in?”
“Oh…”
They couldn’t just waltz right up into the docks now. They were already thieves, so it was easy to believe they didn’t mind having to do a bit of smuggling, but we had no way of knowing how they’d manage that. More importantly, because Sir Astore was wolf-kin, sneaking past him would be all the more difficult, so they’d have to be extra sneaky about it.
And what’s worse, we’d have a hard time sitting and waiting for them like we had at the barrier thanks to Sir Astore’s wolf-like senses.
“Then what are we going to do?”
“Oh, oh, oh! I know,” Mana said, jumping into the conversation. “We can use that wolf-kin as a trap.”
“… What do you mean?”
“The humans might not know about the wolf-kin, right? So, they will have to show up to see that they can’t get in and when they leave, we can follow them. But if they do know he’s waiting there, they’ll ignore him and look for a way around him. Either way, we just have to wait and see how they react to him and then follow them!”
Having enlightened us, Mana proudly puffed out her chest. Yua and I, however, were a little dumbstruck. She’s known Mana for longer, but I don’t think either of us were expecting to hear such an answer come from her as if it were obvious.
To be honest, until now, I wasn’t one-hundred percent sure she was taking this all seriously.
“How did you come up with that?”
Giggling to herself before raising a confident finger, she explained, “Daddy taught me how to hunt and track animals, remember? This is the same thing. We just have to have the wolf-kin scare away the animal to make it run. That way, we can track it back to its den. Only, this time they’ll lead us around the wolf-kin either to their den, or to their boat.”
With a cutely smug grin, she shrugged, again, as if this were only obvious. Then she ruined the illusion of genius by adding, “Also… what’s a boat?”
“Well… We can definitely do that,” I said, patting her head. “Good idea, but how are we going to wait for the thieves to show up?”
Waiting and watching like we did earlier could cause us problems if Sir Astore noticed us lingering in the crowd. I can only imagine how he’d react to a couple of the cat-kin he’d been warned about staking him out.
“I think we’ll be okay as long as we’re far enough away from Sir Astore’s ears,” Yua said, pointing over Mana’s head to the top of the city walls.
“Right…”
I’d considered teleporting our way to the answer, but I was positive that none of the rooftops around the dock’s entrance could keep us out of ear’s reach of the knights. Jumping to the top of the wall may be a different story. It wasn’t as tall as Amoranth’s walls for certain, but it was by no means short.
“But would you be able to hear anything they say from up there?”
The main objective for now may be following Arthur so we can attempt to turn him to our side, but I’d still like to hear what they have to say on that boat. Knowing who they are selling to might help us somehow.
While I directed my question to the both of them, only Yua shook her head.
“I can’t know until we’re up there. The city noise might make it difficult, but being that high up means the wind could be a problem too.”
I exhaled loudly, not out of disappointment for Yua’s natural limitations, but because I thought of an easy fix for them. And said fix makes me wish I had trained my magic more extensively.
“Let’s just make our way up there for now and see how it goes.”
Teleporting here must have put us a fair bit ahead of the thieves, so we had time to work out exactly how to handle this. While we wait, we can work on plans B and C incase A fails. Past me might have been willing to stare at the problem until the solution presented itself so I could call myself a genius, or I could complain when it didn’t, but not this time.
This had become too complicated to just wing it while hoping for the best.
Leaving the girls for a moment, I stepped out of the alley to scan the wall. Unfortunately, as expected, there were no spaces along the vast stretch of brick and mortar that I could see well-enough to teleport onto directly, so we’d have to drop in.
I took a moment to memorize a part of the wall overlooking the docks that not only looked secluded, but that looked like it hadn’t been touched by the hands of a human or anyone else in decades. Satisfied and seeing this as our only option, I through open another portal, aiming it to exit just above the wall.
Carefully climbing through it first as a test, I dropped myself the roughly six-feet from the bottom of the portal, ignored the pain in my feet and turned to catch Yua as she jumped through next. Less than a second later, Mana came flying through the portal as if she’d taken a running start and barreled straight into me, knocking me on my ass.
“Ow…”
“Hehe.”
Mana grinned as she straddled my stomach, looking pleased with herself. With each swish of her tail ticking away the hour, I mentally counted the worrying number of times these girls had tackled me to the ground these last couple of days.
With a sigh boosting me back into a sitting position, I closed the portal before anyone could catch its light and Yua set about her work in attempting to listen to the docks.
Leaning over the side of the wall just enough to poke her eyes and ears out, I mimed for quiet and Mana playfully put a finger to her lips.
As I understood it, the cat-kin’s ears verified in sensitivity and in that one aspect, the girls agreed that Yua had Mana beat, so she helped me check our immediate surroundings in the meantime.
The section of wall I chose to teleport us to was not random. It was wide and sturdy, with tons of room for archers and various slings and rock-throwers to rain down death upon any invaders daring to attack the city.
This was great for us, since the wall looked thin from a distance, but it looked as though it had been a part of one of these battles at some point in the distant past as there was a large whole in the battlement. Likely the result of a catapult attack that had never been repaired for one reason or another, chance, or maybe luck, showed its hand in how the damage extended to the only staircase on this section of the wall.
Deciding that we’d be safe and unfound up here, I peered over the wall with Yua.
Being this high up made the people below look like a bunch of ants, but that was kind of the point. Nobody would notice us up here. It meant that the ants shining in their fancy armor wouldn’t find us, either.
A strong gust of wind struck us, just as Yua said it might, and ruffled her hair. Careful not to bother her, I pulled the stray locks out of her face as she strained her eyes and ears for us. She was silent for a long moment before ultimately sighing.
“I take it you can’t hear them?”
The shining ants were still stopping everyone trying to pass into the docks, so there was plenty of conversation to be heard, but she didn’t look too enthused about it.
“No,” Yua said, sliding down to sit against the wall. “I can hear lots of things, but from up here it sounds like it’s all coming in at once. It’s hard to tell who’s saying what… Do you think we could do what we did earlier and you open a portal to let my head through? Just so I can listen?”
“Maybe. I considered doing that too, but…”
While we had the benefit of the daylight snuffing out some of the portal’s light, we could further hide her presence by choosing a well-hidden spot to teleport her to. But that wasn’t what caused me to hesitate.
Deciding the test I had bene putting off would fare better with a live demonstration, I pulled an affle out of my item box and showed it to her. Her ears gave a curious flick, but she took the offered fruit.
“I’m not really hungry.”
“Just hold on.”
Casting Dimensional Step again, I opened a small portal in front of us, this time leaving its exit just above our heads. Once the lights formed and were steady, I pointed to the one in front of us.
“Toss the affle inside.”
With another curious flick of her ear, Yua did as I asked and we watched the affle soar through the air. One of its rounded edges quickly vanished through it, as if the lights were shaving it off before reforming it above us.
When the affle was about half-way through, I cut the spell. The moment the lights vanished, the affle split into two pieces as smoothly and cleanly as if a sharp, incorporeal blade had silently severed it. The half Yua threw continued forward to smack into the wall, while the other decapitated half dropped harmlessly into her hand.
“I was afraid of that…”
Such a simple test should have been done days ago, but this seemed the only logical outcome. If an object were allowed to exist in two spaces at once and the thing allowing it to do this suddenly vanished, the only sensible way to appease physics would be to split it in half. This wasn’t a video game where the coding would just blip the entire object onto one of the two sides.
Meaning that our earlier stunt searching for the barrier really could have turned my spell into a guillotine.
I touched a hand to my neck, but looked at Yua’s. She smirked and, when I opened my mouth to suggest a different idea, she shoved her half of the affle into it to shut me up.
“I trust that you won’t let that happen to me.”
“It’s not a matter of trust. All it takes is for me to lose my concentration and…”
“Then I’ll make sure you can’t see my boobs or my panties.”
“Yua, please, I’m serious.”
“So am I,” she said, taking my hand. “You did just fine this morning and we’ve used your spell countless times already. Why should it be different now?”
Because until now, most of the times we used that spell, we hurried through it before I even considered canceling it.
Because we’re in a strange city where something and anything could distract me completely at random. A drunken brawl spilling out of a tavern into the streets. A woman screaming that her baby’s been kidnapped. A couple ruffians that decided they didn’t need to listen to a bunch of knights only to try and force their way through. We weren’t so far away that something somewhere couldn’t distract me.
… Is what I’d like to say, but the main culprit behind my worry was up here with us.
Mana squat down over the other half of the apple to run a finger over its shorn side, testing the smoothness of the cut with an amused grin. After poking it a few times, she tossed it over the side of the wall leading back to the grassy plains.
“I think you worry about it too much. If you can use it in the middle of a fight with Daddy of all people, then you’re fine.”
“You say that, but your father could be walking around right now with only one arm if I messed up.”
“Hehe. I doubt it.”
“Again, being serious here.”
“And again,” she repeated with a giggle. “So am I. If that happened, Mother would have made you teleport back to the city for a potion to restore lost limbs. Assuming she doesn’t already have one.”
“She doesn’t…”
Though I was near completely distracted at the time, I remember her rummaging through her stash of potions and I don’t recall her having anything like that. And with that woman’s way of distracting being so simplistic, I felt that furthered my point.
I am but a simple man. I too must succumb to worldly happenings and prolonged use of the Dimensional Step spell like she was suggesting was too dangerous for a novice like myself.
“Then how about this. We’ll just wait and watch for the thieves and you will only have to worry about your magic once they get here. There’s not much point in using the spell when they aren’t here to listen to anyways.”
“True… Fine. We’ll do it your way. Mana, when we get started, you’ll have to… Mana?”
As we talked, Mana had hiked herself up onto her toes to peer over the side of the wall, presumably to watch the fruit fall. And that was where she froze.
Her once lively tail had gone completely limp, rigid even more than the rest of her. She was still. The only parts of her that showed any signs of life where her ears, which twitched erratically as if hearing some grating noise drilling directly into her ear drums.
“Mana? What’s wrong?”
Feeling something was off, I got up and circled around her. She didn’t appear to be in any pain, but her eyes were so wide where she looked over the wall’s edge that you would have thought she was staring at the hilt of a blade that had just pierced through her gut as her vision slowly faded into obscurity.
Only, she was awake. Awake and overly alert to something none but her could see.
Then her mouth fell open and, just as she began to scream, Yua dashed to forcefully clamp a hand over her mouth.
Her cries of terror muffled, Mana sobbed profusely into Yua’s hand and let herself be dragged to the ground and away from the edge of the wall.
Deeply confused by the sudden change, but feeling from her cries more than the sight of her tears that this was anything but a joke, I pulled her away from Yua and hugged her to my chest.
“No… No… No… I don’t wanna be here! I don’t wanna be here!”
Confused further, I looked to Yua, but she too needed a minute to calm herself before saying anything.
“I’m sorry. I completely forgot. But I should have remembered…”
“What? What’s wrong with her?”
“Nothing, it’s just… Mana’s deathly afraid of heights.”
Suddenly feeling the urge to fight off the sentence of “why didn’t she say so before coming up here,” I looked to Mana for an explanation, but got nothing. She clenched my shirt as tightly as if she thought one of us might actually try to throw her over the side.
Seeing her unable to fill in the details I was missing, Yua continued.
“It was a couple of years before I left for the dungeons…”
During one of her attempts to avoid doing her chores, Mana had run off into the forest and gotten lost. According to what little she managed to tell them through her sobs once she was found, she had been chasing an animal, playing and fooling around as usual. Only, she wasn’t paying attention to where she was going. The excitement of the chase had her following the speedy little critter blindly through the trees much further than was permitted. Paying no mind to how far she was from the village, she ultimately ended up at the top of the forest’s tallest mountain.
Naturally, for someone as adept to forest life as she was, this should have been nothing to her, but as fate would have it, it had bene raining the last few days and the ground was weak. A landslide had caused a tree and a good handful of large rocks, none of which she could have hoped to move herself, to fall onto her. Thankfully, she wasn’t too hurt, but she was pinned beneath them and couldn’t move. And as if that weren’t enough, she was stuck in a way that’d forced her to overlook the steep drop down to the bottom of the mountain.
Forced into the mind-numbing realization that just moving too much might cause her to plummet to her death where the thin layer of ground she covered were to crumble beneath her, Mana was left with no choice but to lay there and plead for help.
“She was all alone up there for two whole days before Daddy heard her crying when out searching for her,” Yua concluded. “She won’t even climb trees anymore if they’re too tall.”
Grinding her face into my chest like she thought doing so would expel the image of her past trauma from her mind, Mana managed a nod, confirming all that had been said.
So, heights are fun to look at, but not to experience.
Maybe I should have obeyed my instincts as I had my first time in Amoranth and found us an inn before getting involved in all of this. Once it was decided we’d teleport up here, we could have just left her there, wrapped up in a nice warm blanket and with a hot meal in front of her while we got to work.
“No,” she said, looking up at me as I suggested this. “I want to be with you.”
Hugging her tight, I look to Yua, who just shrugged back.
While I was flattered that she would attempt to brave her own phobias just to be with me, seeing her shake like this had instantly become the most unbearable sight I’d ever encountered.
Cupping her cheeks in my hands, I carefully lifted her eyes to mine. Making sure my body blocked her view of the wall’s edge, I helped her to focus only on me.
“I won’t force you to leave us and I won’t force you to stay, but if you don’t want to be here…”
“I-I’ll stay.”
“… Then just stay with me. Don’t go near the edge and everything will be fine. Look,” I thumped my fist on the flooring a good few times to show how sturdy it was. “As long as you focus on me and the floor beneath us, you’ll be fine. Trust me.”
“Alex can always use his magic to protect you,” Yua added. “And I can catch you before anything happens. So, there’s no reason to be scared.”
Sniffling, Mana managed a nod, but followed it up by wrapping her legs tightly around my back. She didn’t seem likely to let go anytime soon. Unwilling to do anything else, I held her right back, but looked to Yua.
“Do you think you could keep an eye out for the thieves? Just let me know when they show up.”
“Sure. Just leave it to me.”