Chapter 2:
Muscle Magic is Amazingly Strong
“ALL RIGHT, looks good.”
We had rolled our clothes out over the small mossy cobblestones at the base of the waterfall just to make sure they were completely dry. Now we were ready to head off again, as while tumbling we’d happened to see a way out of the forest. While we got dressed, I heard Filia’s familiar sigh—which somehow cut through the intense pulsating of the waterfall behind us.
“I really thought I was going to die. If I hadn’t so cleverly—though unconsciously!—used wind magic just before we hit the water’s surface…things could have turned out quite dire.”
It was just as Filia said: she’d reduced the impact of our landing on the water’s surface with a skillful application of magic, even though she’d apparently been halfway to
passing out. Thanks to those incredible techniques of hers, we clambered out of the basin without a single scratch, and yet…
“Welp, guess that wasn’t quite enough thrills for me. Fall again?” I asked, giving the cliff a friendly smack. Didn’t seem right or satisfying to have such a chill landing, ya know?
It wouldn’t be hard to climb the sheer cliff again—a breeze, in fact! Besides, I could carry Filia on my back. From there, the waterfall bros could fly again.
“I absolutely, positively, definitively do not want to do that! And anyway,” she added, shaking her head sharply, “our clothes just dried. That would be terribly inconvenient.”
Hmm… Well, she had a point there. Before Filia lit a fire with her magic, her clothes had been sopping wet, so I hadn’t even been able to look at her until just then. But now Filia’s clothes seemed to be dry. More or less…
As my eyes tracked down, Filia broke into a grin. “Ooooh, Yuri, you perv! Not that I don’t understand your interest, what with my otherworldly cuteness. You’re utterly captivated, hmm?”
“Okay, if we’re not climbing back up the cliff, I think it’s about time we head out. How about we get going?”
“Excuse me, are you really going to ignore me?”
No matter how I reacted, she would tease me. Reacting at all, then, was a loss. Filia looked at me, taken aback, as I walked past her over to the path.
Something else was on my mind, honestly. It’d been over a decade since I came to the forest, huh? Weird. Any memory I had of my life before the forest was all faded and blurred now, too. I was leaving my home for a vast world teeming with possibilities and weirdness.
Hell yeah.