Chapter 54 - Long journey around the Wilds

Chapter 54: Chapter 54 - Long journey around the Wilds The following months were filled with those small conquests and explosive failures, as Lovelace would guide me and incentivize me to apply knowledge from Earth onto magic. Every time a misfire happened, Yaci would run to me. She even ditched any other duty she would have on the afternoons just to stand watch over my training. I thought that after learning about my real age, she would start treating me more like an adult. What happened, instead, was that she became even more overprotective of me. I wonder what’s going on inside that mind of hers. Lovelace also started teaching me the basic theoretical principles behind collars and behind the nullification of magic itself. The first time she nullified my magic, it felt... familiar. It was the first time feeling like that for my body, yet somehow it felt like I knew that feeling. Like I had experienced it before. Then it dawned on me. It was how my body used to feel back on Earth. A body without the flow of mana. Later that day, I wrote that observation in my notebook and then shelved the idea to examine it later. And kept focusing on training every little thing I learned to exhaustion. To make magic my actual second language. At some point, Lovelace switched to only speaking in Draconic during our lessons and told me to do the same. The goal of that was to become fluent in the usage of the language outside magic. She also explained that dragons use that language in their daily lives. "What defines what counts as an aria and what counts as normal speech is the will. If you focus your will on just communicating, the words won’t cause random magical effects." Her teachings often sounded like what that bald, fat guy from England would say about Will and the Law. ::: At some point, we parted ways with the wolf tribe and went to another oasis. Only, this time, the patrol teams had two additions: Lovelace and me. Even though they don’t know about my real age and still treat me as a child in daily life, nobody would look at me as a mere child on the battlefield. I’m a recognized warrior of the tribe at this point. Lovelace is obviously in a league of her own, but I don’t do so badly, if I say so myself. I must confess that watching her fight is absolutely thrilling. She’s wearing normal beastkin clothes, and yet her graceful movements make her stand out from miles away. She uses a combination of spear and dark elemental magic that’s like a macabre dance, obliterating everything that stands in her path. The way she moves and jumps as she keeps striking with her spear, spinning in mid-air, or doing a backflip as if those were the most natural things to do. And somehow, her hair always looks like she has just combed it. Every time, after a battle, she looks like she has just taken a little stroll in the park. She’s so effective in battle that we started to do something that would be considered insane in any other circumstances. When the tribe is traveling between oases, before nightfall, she would go backwards to a place some kilometers away from the tribe’s camp and create a big campfire. The campfire would then attract the monsters that roam the Barrens at night, gathering them all in a place that is safe for the rest of the tribe. Then she simply kills them all, one after another, until dawn, when the rest of the patrol would join, just to carry the carcasses away for butchering. The tribe never had so much meat to dry before, nor so many monster materials. ::: The way I fight is not nearly as captivating as Lovelace’s. I don’t use any melee attacks to begin with. My main combat spells are still the lightning-based ones. Now I can fully appreciate that elemental magic just feels good for combat purposes. Tweaking gravity is nice and all, but nothing beats the joy of just spamming lightning bolts around you. I love the smell of ozone in the morning. It smells like victory. ::: When we came to the west, we did mostly a straight line, in a path that is outside the normal migration cycles of the beastkin. But now, on the second leg of the journey, we’re doing a more normal route. Which means that we encounter other tribes more often. Every one of those meetings is celebrated with a feast, and some of those feasts end up with new couples and some male beastkin moving to one tribe or another. The more you go north on the Barrens, the more distant the oases are from each other, and the more the land looks like a proper desert. It looks like nobody knows what lies further north than that. They said that after some point, oases just stop existing altogether. They say that it’s the border of the world and that nobody who tried to go that way ever returned. According to Lovelace, the desert already existed back when the Barren Wilds were a jungle, more than a thousand years ago. To the east of the Barren Wilds there is a sea, so the Barren Wilds effectively serve as a bottleneck of the continent. To the south, there are the human nations, of which I only know the name of Wesgoth, the kingdom in which I was born. None of the beastkin know much more than that about the human world. And Lovelace... Well, let’s say that even if she had interest in human politics back in the day, her knowledge would be a thousand years out of date. So, in summary, we know absolutely nothing about the lands we’re supposed to rummage around in search for Lovelace’s memory fragments. We don’t even know where to start looking. For now, we decided that we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it. As in, for after we rescue the people in the slavers’ den. And that’s how the years passed, until we arrived back at Yrasema Oasis, where my life with the beastkin began. Exactly on the day of my tenth anniversary.