Chapter 18: Elze is Strong, but I am Fast
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"Whatever she has been telling you are lies," I told the girls. I held Monika up to my face level so we were both looking at them. "This is the face of a liar. This is the /taste/ of a liar."
I licked the side of the phone casing. Linze gave out a scandalized squeal and hid her eyes. Elze just grimaced and looked away, though there was also a faint blush on her face.
"Ew," she said. "Do that on your own time…!"
/"P-player, I realize that I'm not exactly organic right now… but that's still sexual harassment, you know?"/
My expression remained firm in well justified indignation. "That is a JoJo reference, you philistine."
She shrugged noncommittally. /"I told you, manga was always more of Natsuki's thing."/
"I have the whole thing saved in there somewhere! It's a cultural classic!"
Monika just glared back. /"Fine. I'll read them, but from now on I will dock you Monika Points for every reference to Dante's Inferno you don't get."/
"… we're not getting into the middle of this. Let's go, Linze." Elze hurriedly dragged her sister out of the room.
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It took until mid-morning the next day before the twins could look at me (at us) without blushing. What the heck do you think could have happened after you left?
Elze hummed contentedly as we perused the job board. "Not as many subjugation quests that's open for Black level adventurers today."
"Babysitting? Deliveries? Really?" I remarked at the jobs available for entry-level adventurers. "This is Genin corps crap all over again. I don't feel up to doing that."
She posted at one flyer. "There's some herb gathering quests – this one is back at the forest we visited yesterday. But it doesn't pay so well. Four coppers we can't even divide evenly."
/"I think you should take it anyway. Get out of town, and we can speak more freely."/
"I think we should take it anyway. Get out of town, and we can speak more freely."
"Oh! That's a good point. We should really do that."
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It took some time to get back there, but since we had nothing important to do the rest of the day we packed lunch. I had wanted to hire a donkey and a card, but Monika and Elze vetoed the expense. I decided to buy some extra slivers of magic stones instead and went into the Eight Bears Weapon and Armor Shop for a bit.
We didn't even actually need to go very far, since Monika was able to guide us to the herbs we needed to pick. That was a bit too convenient, but as she explained, this was reasonable to expect from an [Amplification] of her [Search] function.
As we had some privacy again, Monika began to speak up, /"It's so good to finally be able to do this. Thank you again for choosing to stay with us."/
"It's our pleasure, Miss Monika," Linze replied.
"Okay then. The whole point of doing this is training. We need to know each other's strengths and weaknesses if we want to work together."
Elze looked around the clearing. "So… do you mean sparring?" She pointed to the long stick I was carrying.
I nodded. "Yes, that too. We need to figure out our limits," I said as I held up three fingers. "There are classic roles in a party, you know. One to hold the enemy's attention, another to attack from range, another to deal the finishing blow. We're nicely balanced that way."
"But… you have magic power too, Mister Zah," said Linze.
"You're going to have to teach me all the defensive and fast to cast spells that you know. Monika's aim guidance sounds like it would be awesome for bombardment, but it's much more useful to be an interceptor destroying threats before they can get into play. Elze is strong, but I am fast."
"Hoooh? How fast?" Elze crowed. "Are you sure about that? You're not just blowing hot air, are you?"
I grinned. "How odd that you would put it that way. Monika?"
/"All right. Let's go! [Amplification: Nerve Impulse] [Amplification: Musculature] [Amplification: Resilience] [Application: Force Jump]."/
I slammed my foot into the ground and shouted "Come forth, Wind!"
The problem was that while every force should have an equal and opposite reaction, magic created forces were non-Newtonian – no matter how vast the torrent of air or wind coming out of the magic stone, it didn't recoil against the caster any.
But there was an obvious loophole to that. If you aimed at the ground, the maintaining distance between the magic stone and the ground would counter the force of gravity trying to pull you down. The source from the magic stone might not exert recoil force, but air has pressure and if that pressure could not dissipate then it would pile onto itself!
The ground cracked and burst into a spray of loose soil as I pushed off, a powerful surge of air coming out of my boots. I had asked Barral to drill a hole into my boots and insert filed-off magic stones into the soles. Some glue to seal the edges did not give me confidence that my boots would remain watertight.
Only with Monika's amplification of my sense of balance could I manage to keep this under control. I flew past Elze and shifted my body to be able to kick off the rapidly approaching tree.
"Wind off!" My knees buckled as I slammed onto the trunk. "Wind on!" I blasted off from the tree again and this time towards Elze's back.
She turned around and held out her hand, a confident smirk on her face. She could catch me, I wasn't that much faster than monster beasts.
Then I pointed my palms down at the ground and shouted "Come forth, Wind!" to blast up instead. As Linze explained yesterday, the direction of the spell was largely automatic to the caster's intentions. So with my feet still boosting me up on the sheer pressure of a column of air, I began blasting at the ground with harmless but disorienting air pulses. "Wind! Wind! Wind!"
"[Boost!]"
Elze punched through the gusts of wind, applying [Boost] to her legs to follow me up into the air.
"Come forth, Water!"
"Blergh!"
Elze sputtered from the blast of water that hit her in the face.
"Wind off!"
As I tried to get back to a controlled landing with pulsing on and off the wind jets, Elze glared at me as she wiped off her face with her sleeves. "That's cheating. I also don't know if that will be very useful, moving too fast can also make you predictable."
"That's amazing, Mister Zah!"
/"It IS cheating. That's the sort of thing only someone with a cheatingly absurd amount of magic capacity can do,"/ Monika answered. /"Player wants to refine this into something that will allow him to skate on the ground."/
"Like an MS-09F Dom Tropen!"
Monika just sighed. /"Something like that. Because it needs to always push off the ground it can't really be used for flight."/
I raised a finger triumphantly. "Well you have to admit, some dude zipping around throwing blasts of wind and water all over the place would be massively distracting. We're not even talking actual spells yet."
Elze shrugged. "Maybe. If you can still react at that speed, I guess it would be like using my [Boost], only with sheer speed to add force to your blow. Your sword-spear would be more like a lance then."
"There's a spell for [Water Shield]," Linze advised. "I just use it to stop arrows and other attacks. I can usually do only one spell at a time, but if you can move while doing that just with small magic stones…"
"The edge of a shield can also be a weapon?" I responded. Like Captain America?
"Exactly!"
And so our theorycrafting continued.
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"I'm seeing a problem here," Elze said to me after a while.
"What?"
"Your strategies, your focus on disrupting terrain and forcing weak points to appear, using yourself to make openings that Linze and I can take advantage of – it's all about dealing with large groups of people, isn't it?"
I looked down at the scrawls and battle plans we drew on the ground. "Huh. Well you're right. I didn't notice that."
"I understand, it's probably what you're used to… but against monsters, you need stronger footing."
/"Thank you Elze. Please remember we're still very new to being adventurers, please remind us about what we're missing about what we feel is important."/
"Fighting large groups of people… I see…" Linze muttered, nodding to herself. "Of course… we should be prepared for that."
Uh, why?
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