Magic Scavenger Part 1 Chapter 4

 Chapter 4: Everyone's First Step Is Slow

Two days later, sooner than he'd expected, Griare summoned Kanata again. After days of being called in like this, the other battlefield scavengers had taken to giving him pitying looks but Kanata couldn't stop grinning. If it meant someone was finally going to teach him about mana, losing a little break time was nothing to complain about.

On the stairs leading to Griare's room, he was so caught up daydreaming about becoming a mage that he nearly missed a step. That was how excited he was.

"Alright, hold out a finger. I'm going to cut it a little."

"Hiiiiiiiiii!? Whyyyy!?"

The instant he stepped into the room, the quiet hiss of a blade being drawn drained the blood from Kanata's face. He'd come to learn how to control his mana and yet here was a veteran swordswoman drawing her blade, seemingly about to take off one of his fingers for reasons Kanata couldn't fathom. If he hadn't already used the bathroom right before, he was fairly sure he'd have left an embarrassing stain on his trousers.

"Why? I told you I'd teach you to control your mana, didn't I?"

"That's not an explanation, Vice-Captain Griare! Why would you need to cut off my finger!?"

"Huh? I'm not going to cut it off. I need the blood. The blood."

Griare's tone made it sound like Kanata was the one being unreasonable and it made him shudder. Still, wanting so badly to learn about mana, he held out his index finger while trembling in fear.

"That's good, good boy."

Griare cupped a hand gently around the finger and turned the tip of the blade toward it.

Kanata squeezed his eyes shut without meaning to. It made no difference whether they were open or closed; the fear was the same either way. There was a light prick as the blade touched his finger... and then she let him go.

"Open your eyes, Kanata. I told you I was going to train you."

"Huh...?"

When Kanata opened his eyes, he found a small cut on his index finger, blood welling slowly from it. It was smaller than he'd expected, smaller even than the wounds he usually picked up scavenging the battlefield.

"This is the method I used myself. The nobles probably have something more efficient... but I wouldn't know anything about that."

"Um, so what do I do with this?"

"Picture it. Picture that flowing blood as mana."

"Huh?"

No matter how suddenly he was told that, the blood leaking from his finger was still just blood. If anything, growing up close to battlefields made it feel too familiar to pass for something as grand as mana.

"I picked up this trick of using blood as a substitute so I could learn to feel the mana flowing inside me. For something flowing through your own body, blood's about the closest match there is. A little blood like this will clot and stop no matter how you picture it but mana won't stop as long as you can still picture it moving.

"Once you can sense it, that's your real first step."

"Picture it, huh... isn't there anything more to it than that...?"

It came out sounding more like a complaint than he meant it to. This wasn't quite the training he'd pictured. He'd be lying if he said some part of him hadn't hoped for something more like what the spellbooks described, practicing incantations or handling magic tools.

Griare studied him for a moment, looking faintly surprised.

"That's unusual. I took you for an obedient sort of kid... heh. Maybe learning that you could study mana brought out a little selfishness in you?"

"Ah... s-sorry..."

What was he even thinking, misunderstanding things like that? Kanata caught himself and quickly bowed his head. Griare was the vice-captain... Kanata understood well enough that she ranked among the most important people in the Karejasu Mercenary Company.

That someone in her position would bother teaching a mere battlefield scavenger at all was already more than he deserved and the regret of having sounded so full of himself in front of her was what had pushed the apology out of him. Battlefield scavengers were just errand kids for the company, ranked below even the lowest mercenary. Being a child was no excuse to get comfortable.

"It's fine. If anything, it's a relief to know you had that side to you too. As compared to how you usually carry yourself, you're every bit a child... but you always meet your quota, listen well and outside of anything to do with Rubbish, you're almost too well-behaved. Wanting something for yourself is a good thing. Afterall there's nothing sadder than a child who's lost his dreams."

"...? Um, thank you...?"

To his relief, nothing worse came of it than that. At the same time, he couldn't help wondering what she'd meant by "too well-behaved".

(If I *don't want to die*... isn't it only natural to stay *quiet and obedient*...?)

All he was now, was someone the mercenary company had picked up and allowed to live. With that perception of himself, Griare's words left him tilting his head, confused.

"Anyway, if you can't manage even this much, there's no hope for anything else. Let alone becoming a mage, you won't even manage to become a magic swordsman like us."

"Is being a mage harder?"

"From what I've heard, magic swordsmen have it a little easier since it's not mana alone doing the work. The difficulty of handling mana itself is about the same either way, I'd think... but there's no need to get into the details now."

True enough, an explanation like that meant nothing to Kanata when he couldn't even sense mana in the first place. He hadn't even reached the starting line.

"Hmph...!"

Kanata closed his eyes and turned his focus to his fingertip.

The sting of the small cut. The pull of blood clinging to his skin.

He forced himself to *mistake* it for the *movement of mana*.

That he was releasing mana, right now, from the very tip of his finger.

Silence settled between Kanata and Griare. Faintly, through the window came the noise of the town, and through the door, the boisterous voices of the other scavenger kids resting on the floor below.

He'd never once tried focusing his attention on a single finger like this. He looked deep in concentration, wondering if he was even doing it right, but a swirl of scattered, useless thoughts kept racing through his head instead.

"No good, huh."

"Ah..."

Before he knew it, half his break had slipped by. At Griare's words Kanata opened his eyes to find the blood on his fingertip had stopped completely. His shoulders sagged, disappointment written plainly across his face.

"What are you so disappointed about, like you had any right to be? You're no prodigy from some great noble house... there's no way you'd manage this so fast. Even we didn't pick it up right away."

"R-really...?"

"Just being told to 'picture it' is hard enough on its own. If you'd managed it in a single day, that's what would have actually surprised me."

Griare crouched down to meet Kanata's downcast eyes and gently wound a strip of cloth around the small cut on his finger.

"That's enough for today. Try keeping mana in mind through your everyday routine. Don't go hurting yourself on your own, though. I won't have this turning into a real problem. This kind of practice only happens when I'm around."

"Wh-what, but that's..."

"In exchange, I'll give you something to work on so you can keep it in mind even without me there."

"A-an assignment...?"

"This practice of sensing your mana is a step toward understanding the magic you used the other day... So why do you want to be able to use magic in the first place?"

"Huh...?"

"Thinking about that kind of thing is in its own way of becoming conscious of your mana. Give it some real thought while you're at it."

Handed an assignment he didn't fully understand, Kanata left the room.

"Haah..."

He let out one long sigh outside the door and made his way down the inn's stairs with heavy footsteps. Of course he wasn't a genius. Telling himself, again and again, that this was simply how it was.

Maybe, given the strange circumstances that had let him cast magic in the first place, he'd let himself hold onto some faint hope. Just a little, that he might be a budding genius mage. But somewhere along the way, the excitement he'd carried into that room had drained right out of him, his footsteps firm again as if reality itself had finally caught up with him.

That's right... he was no genius.

That he wasn't a genius but something *different* entirely, was a truth he'd come to understand only a little later.

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**Translator's Notes**

The raw uses emphasis dots  under a few phrases in the mana-sensing scene and in the closing line. These are rendered here with asterisks (e.g. *mistake it*, *something other*) to preserve the author's stress on those words.