Chapter 3

“And while it is a rare hair color, I have seen other people with it,” continued Terios. “Ah, there are people with the same hair color as me?!” “Yes, you do see them sometimes near the center of the continent,” said Terios like it was no big deal, despite Mira’s shock. She had only ever known this tiny village, while he’d seen so much of the world. White hair wasn’t unusual to him. “Oh, so there are other people with the same hair…,” said Mira with a tiny smile. While she was happy to learn there were others like her, she also felt embarrassed about being convinced she was the only different person. Terios gently continued, “And I know that you don’t necessarily like it, but not being normal, being special, is a wonderful thing.” “Is it?” “Yes. In fact, I was able to save everyone from the green rot because I’m special.” “Ah?!” As Terios scratched his cheekbone bashfully at his own arrogance, Mira went rigid like she’d been struck by lightning. That’s right. Normal isn’t good enough. Even though they hadn’t done anything wrong, every last one of the thoroughly average villagers had caught the green rot and died. And as an ordinary child, Mira hadn’t been able to do anything to ease their suffering; she had only managed to lie in bed and wait for death. It had taken the extraordinary magic user Terios to be saved. If I remain average, I’ll be powerless if the same thing happens again. She had hated lying there, begging for a mother who never returned, waiting to die. And she couldn’t bear to risk losing Torio and the other children, who had managed to survive despite it all. I hated this white hair for making me different. But what if it was actually the source of my abnormal power—? Of course, white hair was likely unrelated to magical talent. But to Mira, that white hair proved that she, too, could become exceptional and save people like Terios had. “Mister, please teach me magic!” “Gladly.” Terios nodded, smiling because Mira had proposed it. He held up a single finger before continuing, “Well, then, now that I’ll be teaching you magic on top of reading, writing, and arithmetic, please refer to me as Teacher instead of mister.” “Yes, Teacher!” replied Mira energetically. Suddenly, she had a thought. Maybe he doesn’t like being called mister… He seemed displeased when Torio had called him a bony old coot, so maybe he didn’t like being treated like he was old. Seeing such a humanlike facet of Terios made her break into a smile. Terios walked to the outskirts of the village to teach Mira magic through practice. It appeared the settlement had been in the process of clearing the surrounding forests to increase available farmland. Arriving in a clearing where logs and stumps still remained, he cast a spell and pulled a thin stick out of the air. “This magic wand will release a fireball if you apply mana to it and recite an incantation. Watch closely,” he said. “Okay.” Mira nodded energetically, and Terios raised the wand and chanted, “Fireball.” At that, a sphere of fire about the size of a fist shot out from the tip of the wand and struck a stump a short ways off with a small explosion. “Wow, magic really is amazing.” “All right, now you try.” He placed the wooden wand in her hand, and her eyes sparkled. “Huh, you want me to? Can I really do that, too?” “Yes, it’s a simple spell, so you should be able to do it as you are now.” Mira was perplexed, but Terios nodded emphatically. “It’s not difficult. Just form an image in your mind of a sphere of fire like the one I just shot, focus your concentration on the wand, and recite the incantation.” “O-okay!” She nodded nervously, took several deep breaths, then raised the wand in both hands and shouted, “Fireball!” A ball of fire that looked a lot like the one Terios had just made erupted from the tip of the wand and struck the stump with the same small explosion. “…I—I did it!” “Indeed, congratulations.” She had been frozen in disbelief for a moment, but she then jumped in joy while he brought his hands together in a rattling round of applause. “By the way, I must apologize for one thing,” he said. “What’s that?” “That wand is merely a stick. There’s no magic cast on it to make it capable of shooting a fireball.” “What?” It seemed she didn’t understand what he’d just said. She looked back and forth a number of times between the wand gripped in her hand and the burn mark left on the stump. “But it made a ball of fire when I said the word…” “That was all your own power, Mira. The wand had no effect on it.” “Huh? But…” “You must be wondering why, if magic is this easy to use, you haven’t been able to until now.” “Y-yeah.” Mira bobbed her head again and again, surprised that he so accurately guessed what was on her mind. Smiling at her cute mannerism, Terios explained, “You were able to cast the spell because you saw me do it first. You were cognizant that if you pointed the wand while saying the word, a ball of fire would come out.” “I was cognizant?” Mira was still confused, but the part that Terios emphasized was, in fact, the essence of all magic use. “There are two things you need to use magic. The first is the power that your soul produces: mana. Every human being has a soul, but only about one in two hundred have the ability to produce mana.” “Two hundred?” Mira couldn’t even wrap her mind around a number of that size. The village where she grew up had a population that didn’t even exceed one hundred. Smiling at the now thoroughly confused girl, Terios continued, “The other thing you need is cognizance. I suppose you could call that ‘a strong belief.’” “I can do magic if I believe?” “Put simply, yes.” To be more accurate, this world was actually the product of the cognitions of humans, monsters, and various other creatures, a vague— Well, that complicated explanation would only confuse Mira further, so Terios kept it to himself for now. “You hadn’t seen magic before this, right?” he asked. “Yeah, I’d heard people talk about it, though…” “As I suspected. Magic users are scarce, so most people rarely see magic unless they’re royalty, nobility, or in the military.” You might happen upon clergy using healing magic if you went to a church in a large city, but the average person would never have access to those services without a large sum of money. So Terios gently patted Mira’s head, ensuring she understood it wasn’t something to be embarrassed about. “Since you had never seen magic before, you thought it belonged to a different world entirely. Convinced that you were incapable of using it, you subconsciously sealed your own magic.” It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. Even people unaware of their high levels of mana could be influenced by the magically inept. By the time their mind and body would have grown enough to use that mana, they had already internalized that they couldn’t. Perhaps this phenomenon was the work of a subconscious preservation instinct. A part of them knew that if they used magic poorly, they could wind up severely persecuted or outright manipulated. “But you’ve seen me use magic, and you know that it really does exist. On top of that, you realized your potential for it when you witnessed the light of mana. You believed that you, too, could use magic if you had the wand. And that conviction is what brought forth the fireball.” Nevertheless, sometimes people who had only a small pool of mana or who were old and set in their ways would never be able to truly believe, no matter how much they practiced. Those people would never be able to cast spells. By contrast, Mira succeeded on her first attempt because she was young, innocent, and had a vast pool of mana. “Mira, you harbor a special talent. Please hold tight to your belief in yourself.” “…Okay.” Mira’s cheeks turned pink bashfully as Terios complimented her again. As if returning the favor, she complimented him back. “Teacher, you truly are smart. It was easy to understand how to read letters, and you’re really good at teaching magic, too.” “Even though my head is empty.” Terios laughed, poking his light, empty cranium. Out from his shadow crawled the black cat, a weary expression on her face. “Whoa, what happened to you?” asked Terios. “Those brats are annoying, so I decided to come see how things were going here,” she spat. Her fur was a mess, like the kids had been petting her every which way. “Ha-ha-ha, even you’re no match for kids.” “I’m just letting this slide one time ’cause they might prove interesting in the future,” she countered, utterly exasperated at Terios’s incessant chuckling. A moment later, the cat returned to her typical ill-natured grin. “By the way, did you know that little boy has noticed the girl is gone and is making a racket about a perverted skeleton doing something nasty to her?” “He’s quite distrustful,” said Terios. Was he really that suspicious? He sighed and decided it was likely an overreaction from an adolescent boy in love. He stretched out a hand to Mira, who was watching them with concern, and said, “I wanted to teach you a little more, but it’s almost noon. Shall we go back and have some lunch?” “Okay!” “Make me some meat. Best if it’s roast rabbit or squirrel,” said the cat. Mira nodded energetically and took Terios’s bony hand, and the black cat leaped lightly onto her head. As the three of them headed back to the village, Mira hesitantly asked, “Um, Teacher, is there a chance you’re…a pervert who likes kids?” “Why are you asking that all of a sudden?!” cried Terios, his jawbone close to detaching from the shock, but Mira rushed to explain. “You hold my hand like this, and you pat my head often, so I was wondering if you’re into kids.” “You’ve misunderstood,” said Terios flatly with a serious expression. “I do like children, but absolutely not in a perverted way.” To be perfectly honest, he had his motives. But it was only to console a brokenhearted little girl who’d lost her mother and build her trust in order to forge her into a promising, capable resource for the future. “Besides, didn’t we established that I don’t have those kinds of emotions because I don’t have that?” Terios opened the front of his robe again to reveal his featureless pelvis. For some reason, Mira blushed and looked away when he did. “Teacher, that’s shameless.” “But why?!” “Heh-heh-heh, this girl’s more talented than I thought,” the cat remarked with a laugh, wiggling her whiskers in a wry smile at Terios being wholly wrapped around Mira’s finger. And that, despite the wild misunderstandings, was how he gained his first apprentice in magic.