“So, was it your mother, or your father that made you a bastard?”
Yuno flinched at the question and looked over to the man standing next to him as they waited for the young spatial mage to finish talking with his mother across the street in the Clover Kingdom’s capital. Night had long since fallen, but Langris hadn’t even seen to notice, so they were stuck there until the second-in-command was ready to leave.
“Excuse me?” Yuno asked.
The man in the mask didn’t even bother looking in Yuno’s direction. “Did you not understand the question, bastard? I’ll simplify it to account for your poor commoner education, then. Was the man who fathered you a rich royal that just took a woman that wasn’t his wife to bed one night, or are you the bastard offspring of a high woman that thought her blonde husband’s penis was too small and forgot to drink one of those concoctions that’s supposed to stop people like you from popping out?”
A growl escaped from Yuno’s throat as he reached up to wrap his fingers around the blue jewel on the end of his necklace, his only connection to the people who had brought him into the world. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
Captain William looked over to his new recruit. “Come now, bastard. You can do better than that. I know you thought you were special in that little shit hole of a village you came from. But here, you’re nothing important at all. Just a piece of shit that came out the wrong hole,” he said before giving the boy a crooked smile. “Come now, are you just going to stare at me, bastard? Do you not like me calling you bastard, Bastard? Why don’t you hit me? Take out that special little book of yours and blow me away. You want to, don’t you?”
The temptation was palpable as Yuno glared at the man. “Because you’re just baiting me,” he said with a frown.
“Yes I am,” he said with a nod and much lighter tone before nodding towards his lieutenant across the street, making Yuno look in that direction. “And he will too, as will everyone else in the Golden Dawn, every noble you work for, every royal you meet. They will look down at you like you’re trash. Some won’t even try to bait you into a fight, they’ll just lie and say you did something wrong, despite the fact that any inquiry with magic will find them to be false. I’m sure that your direct superiors will even assign you tasks that will be a complete waste of your skills, like cleaning toilets for the first week or so. It’s what they do to people like us.”
Yuno’s head spun back towards the other man so fast he was afraid he might have injured something. “What? What do you mean, people like us?”
After a few seconds, William looked up at the night sky. “My mother was just some peasant from the Common Realm. I’m not positive, but I believe the man who sired me pulled her into his bed one night against her will for some fun and she ran from the house in both disgrace and fear. Noble women don’t like it when their husbands are tricked into bed by the maids. Because of that, she had to flee to the Forsaken Realm for fear of her life, where we barely survived on one meal a day and had to deal with all the problems that come with poverty. Of course, the humor of it all was that the man who sired me knew where I was, despite my mother’s attempts to hide the proof of his escapades. He had me brought to him after his legitimate heir died. I think the child fell from his horse and broke his neck. His wife was unable to produce a replacement. Even after I was brought into his household, my stepmother abused me routinely until I turned fifteen and joined the Magic Knights,” he said before looking back over to Yuno. “And now, I am the captain of the Golden Dawn, the most enviable magic knight in the kingdom and rumored to be next in line to become Wizard King.
“So listen to me carefully, boy,” William told him. “Everyone you meet will hate you. They will look down on you. They will spit on you and might even try to sabotage your efforts if you start to shine too bright. But you will push forward and persevere. Because one day, they will look on you with envy and get on their knees to beg you for help. So, don’t fall for the traps, don’t take the bait, smile and bow when you have to. Because one day, you will stand above them all. Is that understood?”
Sunset was wise enough to know that she had made some mistakes in her life. Not demanding a living stipend from Celestia was the biggest one. Then, she would have had some bits on hoof to run away with out the back door of the palace instead of having to flee through an interdimensional mirror that transformed her into a young girl going through puberty again.
But not delivering a letter that would have gotten her into a more respectable outfit than the one she was currently attached to was a close second.
Less than a minute ago, Sunset’s de facto baby brother had tried to walk into the base of the Clover Kingdom military group known as the Black Bulls, and got knocked a good ten feet away from the door when it exploded on him. After making sure the boy wasn’t dead, as the commanding officer just laughed at the whole thing, Sunset used her mana to envelop herself in a protective field before running through the flames.
The Magic Knight Entrance Exam had been running all day, which meant that the commanding officer and most powerful member of the group had been absent. Which would have been the perfect time to launch some kind of attack on the squad’s home base.
Sunset ran into the fire, expecting some kind of grisly scene inside.
Instead she found…
“OKAY, NOW I’M REALLY MAD!” a young man in a Black Bulls robe wearing dark glasses, with hair that alternated between black and gray in a way that made him look a bit like a skunk shouted as he looked up at a boy with blonde hair, who was also in a Bulls robe, that was moving in the air more from inertia than mana. “You ready to take me on?”
“Nope! Not really!” the blonde boy shouted back in a voice that made him sound rather young. Which matched his immature looks. Even though logic said he had to be older than Sunset was, physically. Then let let out a cheerful laugh before lightning started to crackle around him. “But let’s go!”
Skunk screamed in anger before pulling a flaming bat out of his grimoire and creating a burning matrix in front of him that looked more like it was supposed to create other fireballs than be used as a weapon itself. A theory that proved correct when he it it with the bat, launching a series of fireballs with the kinetic force generated by the strike.
All of which failed to hit the child, who danced around on the room’s second-floor banister that was being destroyed more and more by the second.
What...the...hell? Sunset asked herself as the two people who were both in the Black Bulls attempted to kill each other.
With the sense of danger fading, Sunset’s tunnel vision switched off and she looked around at her surroundings. The room she had walked into looked like some kind of cheap bar, or ‘classical’ inn common rooms in Canterlot that hadn’t had their looks upgraded since Celestia had her braces removed. There was an actual bar in the far left corner that extended halfway down the room and a fireplace to the right. A few small tables dotted the floor, complete with padded chairs, as well as a couch in the far right corner, with another one just off to the right of where Sunset was. The decor was definitely ye old castle, complete with a few suits of armor, shields on the walls, some ratty tapestries in need of repair that hung from the second floor’s banisters, and light that was provided by candles without any means of magically increasing the illumination they gave off.
In short, the place was a dump.
The only thing more disturbing than the decor was the group of people that had probably been responsible for putting it up. Two of whom were destroying the building that looked ready to collapse at the drop of a hat already.
The third person she noticed was a giant of a man that had to be eight feet tall sitting down. He had barely any hair and beady eyes, with a body looked like he had trouble getting through doors both in the vertical and horizontal way, sitting next to a door on the far end of the room and breathing out enough smoke to double as a chimney, despite not having a single cigarette in his mouth or hands.
A fourth man was sitting to Sunset’s far left, in front of a floating mirror that radiated magic. Half his face was covered by light purple-ish hair as he spoke to...himself? “My precious little Marie. My sister, my love!” he said before turning back to the pair that was fighting. “HEY! Would you idiots shut the hell up? I’M TRYING TO WATCH MY LITTLE SISTER SLEEP!”
The rather...creepy declaration made Sunset take a step to the side just to get away from him, causing her to bump into Asta. Which made her flinch away from him in surprise. Ever since developing a decent mana sense, she had usually known when another human was getting close to her personal space. But Asta could still sneak up on her with relative ease.
A moan coming from what Sunset had thought was the unoccupied couch close to the door made Sunset look over to her right in time see a wine bottle drop to the ground and roll around a moment before a well-developed woman with long pink hair and maroon underwear, the only thing she had on, sit up and rub her head. “Uuuugh. Please, just make it stop,” she groaned. “My head is killing me.”
With the only normal-looking person in the room asking for help, Sunset took a step forward and found that she missed someone. Sitting in the chair to her left and previously unable to be seen because of her height, sat a ridiculously short girl with an almost comically oversized head that had her black hair done up in a bun.
But, the little girl could have looked like an interdimensional horror that drove ponies and humans both insane with a glance for all Sunset cared. Because the girl had food on the table in front of her. A pile of it. Real, actual, pony consumable food.
Since the day Sunset had come to the Clover Kingdom, her stomach had been empty of anything she could truly say tasted good. The occasional apple or orange grown via magic maybe once a month was more akin to a cruel joke than any kind of salvation from day after day of eating the same, dry, tasteless, thing grown in Hage village.
She didn’t even think humans could make something as complicated as frosting, what with their low level of technological development and backwards kind of thinking.
But in front of the little human creature was a sizable mountain of pies, cakes of every kind, tarts, treats and all kinds of eats.
It was like water, to a mare dying of thirst.
Sight for the blind man.
Sunset dropped to her knees, everything else forgotten for the moment as she made her way to this impossible oasis and put her hands up on the side of the table with a look of longing that would have put a puppy to shame before looking at the little angel that held salvation itself in her chubby little fingers. “Can I have some?”
The girl paused after eating a cupcake whole with a single ‘nom’ and looked down to Sunset.
Time seemed to stop as the little angel of baked goods sat in silent judgement over the equine-turned-human. Then, she reached into her pile of confections and handed the girl a glorious creation of flour, milk, frosting and sprinkles that had been baked in an oven to produce something Sunset hadn’t even seen in two years: a slice of chocolate cake.
“Here you go!” the angel of baked delights said in a cute little voice as she delivered to Sunset, her salvation.
Sunset didn’t even bother with the fork as she snatched the cake up from the back, getting frosting all over her hand as she brought the cake to her mouth and took a bite.
It...tasted different than she remem-SHUT UP BRAIN! I’M EATING, Sunset mentally screamed at her taste centers.
It tasted good. Great, even. For a species whose diet consisted of anywhere from forty to seventy-percent baked treats, ponies were the ultimate judges of what was good when it came to confections. With Sunset having experienced the best such chefs, what with Celestia and her cake addiction, she good honestly say that the food touching her tongue was more than passable.
Tears threatened to fall from Sunset’s eyes as she experienced a mental orgasm of delight that took her to a higher plane of- “I’M ASTA FROM HAGE, I’M A BLACK BULL NOW TOO AND SOMEDAY, I’M GOING TO BE THE WIZARD KING!”
With her moment of true happiness ruined, Sunset turned to the boy as the skunk guy continued to try and kill the kid that was now surrounded by lightning magic as the other Black Bulls just completely ignored the short newcomer.
“Shut up you guys, you’re going to wake my sister!” one-eye yelled.
Underwear Drunk looked over to the one-eyed pedo and shouted to him. “Get over it you creepy sister-lover!” she yelled before rubbing her head. “Ugh, I blacked out during that drinking contest. How did I end up back here?”
Then, Sunset blinked when a walking, bipedal sheep in a chef’s hat walked past her to place a whole new mountain of pastries on the table for the munchkin to begin chowing down on despite the fact that she had just eaten more than her own weight in desert.
The racket continued unabated as the woman in her unmentionables groaned. “I SAID SHUT UP YOU IDIOTS! I HAVE A HEADACHE!”
“That’s your own fault you drunk!” Skunk replied, taking a moment to stop his destruction of the building to yell at the woman.
“What did you say?” the woman asked as she began to get an attitude. “You virgin street punk?”
Skunk took offense and stopped his attack to get in the woman’s face. “Who are you calling a street punk, you damn wino?”
Then, the one-eyed pervert with the mirror entered the fray. “I SAID SHUT UP! If any of you keep me from the image of Marie any longer, I’ll destroy you!” he threatened.
There was a flare of magical power and Sunset looked back to see Yami had wrapped himself in a mana skin, boosting his physical abilities to their limit. “Okay that’s it!” he yelled before swinging back his arm and stuttering the wall behind him, creating a big enough hole to drive a pair of carts through. “QUIT BREAKING THE PLACE AND SETTLE DOWN!”
Sunset felt the need to point out the hypocrisy of it all, literally. With her finger. “You just made the biggest mess out of anyone here,” she said evenly as she stood up. How is this place even still here?
Judging by what had happened in the past five minutes, the entire building should have collapsed days ago.
When the smoke finally cleared, the fighting stopped and everyone, for some odd reason that defied all logic, seemed actually happy to see the unkept man. With most of them running up to the large slob to try and talk to him at the same time.
“How was the exam sir? Got in newbies you need to me to put in their place?” Skunk asked right before the rest of what was said became an incoherent mess of a word salad that had been tossed around too much by everyone present.
Yami laughed for a moment. “It’s good to be missed,” he said before his face turned serious. “Now shut up and listen! We got a new guy here I’d like to introduce.” After reaching over to grab Asta, Yami picked him up and held him in the air. “This shrimp is our new guy member, and that one over there is our other new girl.”
Sunset blinked. Other new girl? she thought to herself while raising her hand and waving when everyone looked over to her.
“Hey shrimp, introduce yourself,” Yami ordered.
After hearing the command, Asta stood up straight. “I’M ASTA, FROM HAGE VILLAGE. IT’S REALLY NICE TO MEET EVERYONE.”
Skunk snickered. “You’re from Hage, that’s out in the middle of nowhere.”
“Damn kid, you’re as loud as you are short,” Yami commented without any humor before nodding to the female newcomer. “Now you.”
“I’m Sunset,” she told them simply.
Yami took a drag on his cigarette. “Finral, introductions.”
The guy in the green shirt cleared his throat. “Sure thing sir.”
First up was the guy whose skin was far too pale, wearing too much dark eyeliner and black lipstick. At least, Sunset hoped that what was wrong with his face was just a lack of sun and too much makeup. “You’ve met Gordon Agrippa. Not always the easiest guy to talk to, but he’s good people.”
“Nice to meet you.”
Sunset blinked. The guys mouth had moved, but she hadn’t really heard anything come out.
Then came the mostly naked, hung over woman with lavender eyes and pink hair. “Vanessa Enoteca. She tends to get into fights when she’s drunk, which is...most of the time she’s awake. But she’s good people.”
Vanessa cocked an eyebrow. “When have I ever started a-urp!” she managed before her cheeks puffed up and she doubled over to throw up so many alcoholic drinks it almost looked like a rainbow was coming out of her mouth.
After the woman came the short blonde kid with the blue eyes and lightning magic. “Luck Voltia. He’s a battle freak who’s addicted to fighting. But he’s good people.”
“Hey, you wanna go a few rounds?” Luck asked as he suddenly jumped in front of Asta and started punching the air in front of him. “Come on! It’ll be fun.”
Protective instincts developed after two years of watching everyone around a boy without magic try to pull him down because he had more ambition than all of them put together made Sunset frown. It wasn’t the same thing, but… “Sure,” she said to the boy evenly. “I’ll be happy to break your legs!”
Luck turned around and gave the redhead a considering look. “Hmmm, no thanks. Mama doesn’t like it when I fight girls.”
...Mama? Sunset thought in confusion.
Without any introduction, the one-eyed pervert raised his mirror to reveal a little girl with blonde hair sleeping in a bed. “This is my sister Marie, the most angelic creature on the planet!”
“That’s Gouche Adlai,” Finral told them. “He...loves his sister a tad too much. But he’s good people.”
The little mini-person had gone back to eating a cupcake of some kind as Finral went on. “She’s Charmy Pappitson. Her stomach is a bottomless pit from which there is no escape, but she’s good people.”
Charmy said something that might have been a greeting, based on her raised hand that was waving, but the words were covered by the food in her hand and mouth.
Next in line was the giant in the back of the room. “That’s Gray. He never really talks and I have no idea where that smoke is coming from, but he’s good people,” Final told the newcomers.
Then came the guy with the black and gray hairstyle. Although, after getting a better look at it, Sunset didn’t think the word skunk was an apt descriptor for the man, as the black part in the center actually stood up a bit and had gray underneath it. There was also an odd scar on the right side of his face, above his eye that made it look as if someone had operated on him. “That’s Magna Swing, he’s a street punk. But he’s good people.”
While Magna just growled at Asta, making Sunset that someone might have actually tried experimental brain surgery on him by the look of his scar, Final pointed a thumb at himself. “And I am Finral Roulacase,” he said before making his way over to Sunset with a smile on his face. “Some people call me the most interesting man in the world, but all can agree that I’m the best date you’ll ever have. So how about you and I spend tomorrow evening together so I can prove it?”
Sunset crossed her arms. “I’m fifteen you weirdo,” she told the boy, actually glad for her reduced age for once. Why she had lost time when being transformed into a human, she didn’t really know, but it kept the male members of the species away.
“Which is the perfect age to find your soul mate,” Finral told her.
Logically, Sunset knew that human norms were different than what she experienced as a pony. Whether by design or lack of any basic medical care aside from magic, their lifespans were shorter. Perhaps that was why she ended up in the body of a fourteen-year-old girl after going through the mirror, rather than a pony on the edge of adulthood. Because for humans, fifteen was an adult, able to make their own stupid choices.
So, with the fact that Sunset’s age wasn’t a roadblock to getting close to her. She decided to go with the intimidation method of scaring away the unwanted sutor. With her mana still attuned to fire, Sunset flared it around her and frowned at the boy as the candles in the room fed off the excess fire mana to add to the illumination they provided. “Go away now,” Sunset told the guy as the furniture around her started to smoke.
Finral backed away faster than what should have been humanly possible as the rest of the group gave Sunset a nervous look. “And this is our captain, Yami Sukahiro.”
“...you forgot to say, he’s good people,” Asta pointed out.
The self-proclaimed ladies man gave Asta a nervous glance. “No I didn’t.”
Yami cleared his throat. “There are other members, of course. But the rest are out on missions, or up in his bed,” he told Asta before looking over to the hung-over woman. “Hey Vanessa, you’re a girl, right? Come here for a second.”
“Look...if that little hothead blows her top or gets too upset, we all die,” Yami’s voice echoed in Vanessa’s pounding mind as she led the redhead and Charmy through the black bulls hideout, towards the woman’s only section. The only place in the crazy mansion that didn’t change too much, although it was still a pain to find the girls bathroom in a new location every morning. “So, go do some girly stuff to welcome our ticking time bomb while we give this pipsqueak here his initiation. Oh, and get some of the spare robes out while you’re at it.”
“So, counting me and Asta, with this mystery newbie and that other guy Yami mentioned, there’s only twelve members on the entire squad?” Sunset asked. “I know that the exam only picked a little over twenty out of over five-hundred, but isn’t that a little low?”
Vanessa looked back at the little girl with the impressive mana and wondered why Yami was deciding to be cautious with her. Sure, she was impressive, but it would still be a few years before her body grew up enough to fully express all that mana as magical power that could be put into actual spells. “We’re the Black Bulls honey, nobody wants to join us,” the witch explained. In fact, the majority of their members didn’t even come from the exam floor, but people Yami had picked up over the years by just wandering around.
Proving herself to be an inquisitive little thing, Sunset continued asking questions. “Yeah, but why? Sure the two guys are kind of...explosive, and the one with the mirror is...creepy, but you two seem nice.”
“Aww thanks!” Charmy replied before she reached back to grab a pastry from the tray one of her sheep cooks was carrying behind her. “Have one!”
By the time Vanessa turned around, Sunset had picked up the much shorter girl and was hugging her tightly. “I love you,” she whispered.
Blinking at the display, Vanessa waited until the new girl was done being overly affectionate and just stood there with her hands on her hips. “Lady, I’m hung over and threw up within your first five minutes of seeing me. And I can’t even be in the same room as Charmy without feeling like I’m gaining weight just from looking at all the food she eats. You’ve got some weird definitions of-why are you staring at my breasts so hard?”
“Is that bra comfortable?” Sunset asked as she got within inches of Vanessa’s chest and looked at the undergarment with a scrutinizing eye, going all around the other woman to check out the straps. “It actually looks like it provides support instead of just squeezing your teats against your ribs. That’s all we could get back in the village I was at for two years.”
The question threw Vanessa off, and a close examination of the girl’s clothes told her Sunset wasn’t wearing anything beneath the threadbare green dress she had on. “Remind me to take you shopping for clothes after we get paid. Yami usually gives us the day off, so I can take you and the other newbie to get some better clothes. Ones that actually fit.”
Sunset actually moaned a little. “Good. Duplication through magic could only make so many alterations and those have already been stretched to their limits.”
“Oh, you knew a thread mage?” Vanessa asked, her curiosity peaking as they continued their walk towards the balcony on the girls’ side of the dormitory floor. It occurred to her that the new girl hadn’t actually given her hometown, but the clothes suggested that she was either from the common or forsaken realms. And going by her mana, the child of a royal that had decided to go slumming without sticking around to clean up his mess.
The reason for her question was quite simple, Vanessa used thread magic. Although, the name was more conceptual than literal. Doing things with clothes was within her power, but it was just a mana manipulation technique, any actual spell. Her mother, God damn her black soul, had said that Vanessa’s magic could be the most powerful in existence. But after a few years of that woman’s horrid attempts to ‘encourage’ that magic to develop, Vanessa had been given a chance at freedom and ran away as fast as she could.
Any attempts to look back were quickly brought to a halt with the help of some hard liquor.
“It was just some basic replication of a blueprint using raw materials,” Sunset told her. “Not real sewing or making of anything new.”
They made it to the balcony and found the other girl that was also fifteen and given a grimoire. Unlike the redhead, Vanessa knew exactly who the girl with the silver hair done up in pigtails was. Why Noelle Silva had been placed in the Black Bulls when her eldest brother ran the Silver Eagles was a mystery. But Vanessa didn’t like it when people asked about her past, so she would show others the same courtesy.
“Hey it’s you!” Sunset exclaimed as the redhead pointed to the girl with silver hair. “Noel, right?”
Standing so she leaned just a little over the balcony to watch what was going on down below, Noelle flinched, like a child that had been caught doing something that she shouldn’t have been. Then she stood up, sucked in a breath and turned around to give the three people standing in front of her the same kinds of looks Vanessa had seen nobles give commoners when she was on guard duty. “Just hearing you say my name makes me feel like you’re butchering it,” she said before focusing on Vanessa. “and-where are your clothes?”
Having been asked this question several times before, Vanessa wasn’t surprised in the least and gave the same answer she always did. “In my closet. I don’t really see the need to wear clothes in what is basically my house.”
THANK YOU!” Sunset exclaimed before throwing her arms out wide at the confused witch. “Somebody finally gets it!”
With the odd statement completely throwing off what Vanessa had been sure was a ticking time bomb, leaving Noelle just staring blankly and Charmy eating another bit of sugary food, Sunset walked out to the balcony to see what had attracted Noelle’s attention. What’s going on down there, anyway?”
“Oh, it’s just something they do with newbies...the guys anyway,” Vanessa said.
“Okay newbie, now give me five thousand push-ups!” Magna yelled as she looked over the edge for herself.
Down below, the boy Asta jumped up from a stomach crunching position and laid down flat on his chest. “Yes sir!” he shouted before beginning to move his body up and down with his arms at a ridiculous pace that no human could hope to keep for long.
“So...it’s a dick measuring contest,” Sunset surmised.
The other new girl let out an embarrassed scream before her face turned red and she looked over to the Sunset. “W-What the hell makes you describe it like that?” Noelle shrieked.
Sunset thought about it for a second before answering. “Because that’s what it basically is,” she pointed out. “Guys do it in different ways, but after living with a couple of boys for two years, I can call them with just a glance.”
“Very impressive!” Charmy complemented.
Choking on her indignation, Noelle actually took a moment to respond. “You don’t have to call them that!” she said before glaring at Sunset and sizing her up. “Ugh, but I can tell at a glance that you don’t have an ounce of good manners, walking around in that ratty dress without properly covering yourself up.”
“It’s called being poor, you...” Sunset replied, pausing before she completed what had most likely been an insult. However, the show of tact was not to last “But, I guess royalty that was just born into wealth and comfort wouldn’t know anything about how someone with nothing has to struggle just to get by in this world.”
Noelle scowled at the other young woman. “You think I had it easy?”
To which Sunset replied. “No, I know you had it easy.”
Her temper rising up along with her mana, Noelle stepped up in Sunset’s face, only to have Vanessa pull the redhead back before looking to the other girl. With one most likely being a bastard child of a royal and the other being a legitimate one that was raised in house, it was pretty obvious what was going to happen if they two of them were left alone to go at it.
Damnit Yami, how could you make me the responsible one? Vanessa mentally demanded as she put on a smile. “Okay girls, settle down. No matter where you came from, we’re all on the same team now,” the older witch told the two girls. “So how about…”
Vanessa quickly ran through her options on how to diffuse the situation.
Tell them to calm down and shake hands?
...too immature, she thought.
Booze?
...too close to restocking day, she told herself after thinking about how much liquor they had on the premises.
Give them an obvious distraction to their building anger?
...that might work, she theorized.
“...I show you the girls to the bath? It’s been a hard day and I’m sure you could both use a good long soak,” she suggested helpfully.
Sunset almost collapsed into the taller woman. “You have no idea.”
The other girl wasn’t as willing to call it quits. “Of course we do, I can smell you from here,” she commented with a disgusted frown.
After a second of eye-twitching, Sunset mumbled something barely loud enough for Vanessa to hear. “That’s five.”
Noelle Silva, of the prestigious Silva family, spared no effort to hide her disdain at the terrible bathing arrangements that were provided to her by the Black Bulls as she sank into the water across from that ragged urchin with the red and gold-ish hair.
Although the promise of a bath had made her stop from putting the low-level commoner in her place, Noelle was finding herself solely disappointed by what the Black Bulls’s base considered a bath. Instead of a marble floor with works of art that were also made of marble pouring water into the communal bath, it was a pathetic construction of the simplest stone and just had a garish gargoyle head on the wall from which water fell into the bathing pit.
What made it even worse was the company…
“So, I just need to massage these things at the end of the day and they’ll get bigger. And the bigger they get, the less sensitive they’ll be?” Sunset asked as she rubbed her breasts while sitting on the other side of the bath area next to the woman Noelle had learned was named Vanessa.
For her part, Vanessa just reclined more into the water, which only did more to highlight her physical maturity as she leaned her head back and stuck her chest out. “That’s what all the beauticians say. Although, it only works if you’ve got a bit of growing left to do. Which...you might,” she admitted before looking over to the girl. “By the way, I never did find out where you were from.”
That...thing called Charmy, who was in a little bathing suit and actually swimming in the bath like it was a pool stopped going back and forth across Noelle’s vision to turn and look at the other girl as she pulled in on herself a bit.
“Well, I was...left in an orphanage when I was a baby, so I don’t know exactly where I’m from,” Sunset told them as if pulling it out of the back of her throat with how hesitant she was to talk about it. “But, I spent the last two years in Hage Village with Y-well, guess the only one of them you know is Asta.”
Vanessa giggled and clapped her hands together. “And you both got on the same squad? Oh, that’s adorable!” she said.
Sunset rolled her eyes. “Yeah well, if I don’t look after that idiot, nobody else is going to,” she told them before looking over to Noelle. “Which also makes me wonder, why are you here, Noelle? I thought your brother was the head of the Silver Eagles. Shouldn’t you be with them?”
The mention of her brother sent a shiver down Noelle’s spine. “Well maybe I didn’t want to join my brother’s team! Did you ever think of that?” she demanded while standing up in the bath to glare down at the stupid, nosy, little poor girl who had no idea how good she had it!
There was a moment of silence as Sunset took a deep breath and exhaled out her mouth. “Okay, so...what? You got him to make that Yami guy take you like they all did with me?”
Noelle continued to frown at the girl sitting down in the bath. “I didn’t make him do anything! Big brother made me…” she trailed off, realizing what she had almost said to the girl that seemed determined to get under her skin.
Vanessa’s look became a mix of confusion and curious as she looked back and forth between the two girls. “Say what?” she asked before focusing on the redhead. “Uh, honey. Nobody makes Yami do anything.”
“Not even work. It’s why we’re last in the rankings!” Charmy added as she raised her fist triumphantly.
After giving the short creature a disbelieving look, Sunset leaned back and sigh. “Well, nobody else wanted me either. So, I guess I can’t be too sad that the story of my life hasn’t changed since the day I got dropped off at the orphanage.”
“Then you’re in good company honey,” Vanessa told the younger girl before she pulled Sunset in for a little hug with one arm around the shoulder. “We’re nothing but misfits, losers, layabouts, and the unwanted.”
Noelle’s eye twitched at the redhead gaining everyone’s sympathy. “I’m going to bed,” she suddenly announced before turning to get out of the bath.
The sound of an explosion made Noelle freeze and look towards the direction it came from. Was there an actual problem, or were those idiots blowing things up on their own again?
“Hold on a second,” Vanessa told her. “We still need to get the robes from storage since it sounds like the boys should be done with their little initiation ritual. And since you still need yours, you can go to bed after you get it.”
Seeing the logic in the woman’s argument, especially since she would have to put up with who knew what come tomorrow if getting it got delayed, Noelle nodded in agreement before getting a towel to dry herself off. As she did, the royal caught the urchin staring at her. “What?”
Sunset didn’t stop before getting some clean clothes that might have looked passable at one point in her life before they were used far too many times and put them on. Once she had covered herself up a little better, although Noelle could tell she still wasn’t wearing proper undergarments, Sunset looked back at the girl and answered her. “I was just trying to figure out why you’re not on your brother’s team is all.”
An uneasy feeling formed in Noelle’s gut at the idea of this girl figuring out why a legitimate child of a royal family was in the worst squad the Magic Knights had to offer. “Well stop it!” she demanded. “I didn’t ask you about your past!”
“Hmmm, okay...that’s fair,” she admitted before continuing on. “But I’m pretty sure I’ve already figured something about it out.”
“Then forget it!” Noelle ordered.
Once they all had clothes on again...mostly, the woman in her underwear led them through the base. However, it soon became apart to someone of Noelle’s intelligence and fine education that they were lost. How a woman who had been a member of the squad and lived in the hideout for years could get lost, she had no idea, but that was what they obviously were.
All of a sudden, Vanessa stopped at a door that looked just like all the others in the building. “Ah, there we are!” she said before opening the doorway into the room and holding up her hand.
Jealousy exploded in Noelle’s heart as the woman simply held up her hand and a trio of magical threads sprang from it to go into what she knew from personal experience at her family estate was probably a giant dust bin. The mana control it took to both craft and move something that fine was well beyond anything Noelle could ever hope to achieve. Just the sight of it worsened her already bad mood.
When the stripped down woman retrieved the outerwear and sent one to her on a thread, Noelle snatched the thing out of the air and broke the magic holding it. With that done, she gave a huff and walked away as any royal should do when dealing with commoners.
“Um, thanks...no offense...but I think I’ll wait till its been through the wash at least once,” the redhead told her.
After turning the corner and getting out of their sights, she looked down at the robe with the dark yellow and gold insignia of a bull’s skull with a star in the middle of its head. It was a real magic knight’s robe. And it was hers!
But, not from any showing of effort on her part.
That fact quickly killed the tiny bit of enthusiasm that Noelle had managed to cultivate from her achievement.
I think that girl got kicked out of her family, Sunset reasoned as she went over the information in her mind again.
She was certainly a big enough brat to have warranted it.
But...the thought also brought on a good deal of pity for the kid.
Which Sunset had managed to counter with the possibility that she might have been wrong.
She had seen Noelle talking to her big brother during the exam, and he had told her she didn’t need to take part in it before pulling her out. So, they were obviously still on speaking terms. Maybe it was like Mereoleona had theorized with Celestia’s actions, the family forcing her into the worst group to prove that she needed them and Noelle would go crawling back to them once she had enough of the crappy living conditions.
Well, cast off or not, I told myself I’d give her more chances and she gets three more before I deck her one, Sunset thought to herself. If the two boys were anything to go by, then nobody cared if someone in the Black Bulls got a little physical.
Vanessa let them back into the hideout’s common room, then suddenly stopped. “Wait, that Asta guy...he’s like a little brother to you or something, right?” she asked, a little nervous for some reason.
“Uh, yeah. Why?” Sunset asked before noticing something very wrong with the room that served as the entrance to the hideout.
It had four walls and a door.
While that was normal of most rooms, Sunset had seen the door get burned down and most of the wall had been destroyed as well. “How is that stuff back? Didn’t everyone put an expanding hole in the thing?”
“Hm? Oh! Yes, the wall! That’s a good thing to talk about, let’s talk about that!” Vanessa said happily. “There’s some kind of enchantment on the house that automatically makes repairs a minute or two after we stop breaking things. The trade off is that this place tends to...reorganize itself from time to time. Fair warning, if you have to go tot he bathroom, don’t try and hold it. They’re in a different location every day.”
“But the kitchen, library, bathing rooms, pantry and basement are always in the same place,” Charmy added. “And the tool shed for the garden too. But that’s not really part of the hideout, so I guess it doesn’t count.”
For once, Sunset was at a loss when it came to understanding the magic of the Clover Kingdom. She knew that there were several disciplines of magic that were rooted more in mental concepts rather than physical reality, but a house that just did what it wanted to the space inside seemed to jump back and forth between the two.
Then again, maybe she was overthinking things. Vanessa had just said the house moved and rebuilt itself, not that it used anything like spatial compression or point of reference gravity manipulation. But, if Sunset walked into a room to have it pointed out to her that she was on the ceiling before falling to the floor, then her and the house would have words.
“Thanks for the warning,” Sunset told her before heading out the door.
The sight that greeted her was...rather mundane.
One of the couches from inside the bar had been brought out and most of the people from inside were using it as a seat, with the exception of the giant, Gray. He was just sitting next to it and blowing smoke out his mouth.
Sunset through there was some kind of bonfire providing light, but it was just the nearby woods that were on fire. Not that it seemed like anybody cared. In fact the only two people who weren’t down on their butts were Asta, and that Magna guy from earlier, patting the shorter guy on the back so hard that it might have bruised anyone else. “I thought you were just going to block my magic, but you threw it back at me? You know, I think I’m going to like having you around, little Rasta!”
“Um...it’s...Asta,” he said between strikes to his back.
Hearing what she did, Sunset groaned and rubbed her head. Obviously, Asta had attempted to show off and had the fire magic user throw a spell at him, then knocked it back over the guy’s head and into the woods. If Magna wasn’t already giving Asta a congratulatory pummeling, Sunset might have felt the need to step in and punish her little brother for starting a forest fire!
Since Vanessa had gotten squeamish back at the building’s exit, probably since she didn’t want to go outside barefoot after just taking a bath, Sunset looked down to her other escort. “Hey, shouldn’t we be doing something about those flames?”
Charmy just waved it off. “Nah. Magna and Luck blow stuff up outside all the time, so we don’t have a lot of underbrush to easily spread the more natural fire. It’ll burn itself out by morning without more mana to keep the spell-based flames going.”
“Hey, sorry about calling you a magic-poor hick earlier and giving you such a hard time about coming from Hage,” Magna told the boy after he finished slapping him around. “I’m from Rayaka Village, myself.”
Asta looked over to the other boy. “Wow, Rayaka is way out there.”
To which Magna snorted. “Says the boy from Hage.”
The argument made Sunset have to think back to the map of the kingdom she had seen hanging on the wall of Father Orisi’s office. After she had learned to read, Sunset had spent enough time looking at the thing for her near-perfect memory, at least when it came to studying things, could recall it in full detail. While Rayaka was far enough away from the capital to be in the northern section of the Forsaken Realm, Hage was a good deal further.
“Oh and...it’s not that I’m low on magic, I actually don’t have any at all,” Asta admitted in a voice Sunset could barely hear.
As Magna went on about that little admission, actually turning it into a reason to complement Asta, the most of the other Black Bulls rushed in to also talk to and complement the boy on his showing off and bragging about the thing most people ridiculed him for. By then, Vanessa came walking out with Asta’s robe, which was a bit less dusty than the one she gave Sunset, but still smelled like it had been in storage for a few years.
“Here you go, kid,” she said before tossing him the robe with one of her threads attached so it floated down to him more than fell.
Asta reached out to grab the robe, and for a moment, Sunset thought he might actually start crying over getting his hands on the thing. It was something she could understand, but still...hadn’t he just pulled a big stunt to try an impress everyone? Sunset was pretty sure breaking down in tears would ruin it.
“And...maybe a little something extra,” Vanessa added. A wave of her hand turned Asta’s headband around so the mark he usually had on his forehead was on the back before a mass of threads wove themselves into the bare spot above his face to add another Black Bull’s insignia.
Once the commotion over Asta was over, everyone turned around and he looked over to Sunset. “Hey, why aren’t you wearing yours?”
Even though it might have offended Asta a little, Sunset held up the robe for him to see all of the dust clinging to it. “I prefer clean clothes,” she told him. “And you need to put that thing through the wash before you put it on again.”
“Okay mom!” he told her.
Which made Sunset groan and roll her eyes.
Although, seeing the entire group outside and being cordial...it made her wonder how Yuno was doing in his new squad.
I think I might have made a mistake in coming here, Yuno thought as he felt the weight in the hood of his Golden Dawn robe while he stood in front of the man Captain William had introduced as his direct superior and magic teacher before leaving the two of them standing in the shaded area that surrounded a water garden in the center of the Golden Dawn’s palace courtyard. How a man skilled in an earth-based magic was supposed to teach a wind user, Yuno didn’t know. But he already didn’t like the guy.
Klaus Lunettes was actually a bit taller than Yuno, which was an oddity for the boy, with hair that was more gray than silver and a defined nose above a chin that was a bit wider than some. He wore a pair of heavily spectacles that looked like they could take some punishment, which Yuno supposed made sense after considering the man’s occupation.
But, the man had the same contemptible gaze in his eyes that he had seen in the noble’s during the exam, as well as in the eyes of everyone he saw looking at him while he passed them in the hallway. Once the captain had gone inside, he began speaking. “As the captain said, I am Klaus Lunettes. And you, a commoner from the middle of nowhere, probably the a mistake made by a nobleman after a night of drinking and whores. What was the captain thinking, giving you permission to join the squad?” he snorted. “Don’t think you’re special just because all of the captains raised their hand for you.”
Yuno kept his mouth shut as the man in front of him reached up to adjust his glasses and turn around. “Now come along, commoner,” the noble spat. “I’ll show you to your room. Meals will be provided in the mess. I know people like you a attracted to anything shiny, but you will be thoroughly punished for stealing the silverware.”
“Understood,” Yuno replied evenly as Klaus kept talking.
“Books from the library are-never mind, considering your origins, I doubt you can read with any ability that would make it enjoyable,” he said as they turned into a stairwell. “We have maids to clean our rooms, but any fraternizing with them is extremely frowned upon and may lead to expulsion from the order. Captain Vangance takes a dim view of bastard makers, so keep that in mind. Your room will also have a private bath, which I suggest taking advantage of as soon as possible. Laundry is collected on Thursdays and returned on Saturdays. You should have your uniforms within the week of your fitting, which will either occur tomorrow or the day after. Our capitan runs an efficient ship.”
When they finally got to the room that Yuno was to be staying in, it was far beyond anything he had been expecting. There was an actual bed instead of just a mat on the ground, along with a desk for writing and an empty bookshelf, with a long table taking up a good half of the wall it was pushed up against. The candelabra above provided more than enough light and made the polished wood of both the furniture and walls shine like gold. A red rug covered nearly all of the floor, which was also wood.
“It’s better than you deserve,” Klaus told him after leading the boy in and letting have a brief look around. “Now, your training will begin tomorrow. You will be waiting for me at down in the courtyard, where I will instruct you on the proper use of your grimoire after breakfast. Do you understand me, boy?”
Close to reaching his limit, Yuno frowned. “My name is Yuno. Not boy, Klaus.”
The man snorted. “Legitimate children get names. Bastards like you are called whatever people like me feel you should be called. And watch your tone, boy, or I will have you written up for disrespecting a superior officer. Too many of those, and it won’t matter how many leafs are on your grimoire. The correct way to address me, is sir. Understood?”
Yuno held in a growl. “Yes. Sir.”
“That’s better,” Klaus replied evenly before he turned to leave. “Don’t be late tomorrow. That would make you guilty of insubordination.”
The door slammed shut and Yuno found himself focusing on the furniture that surrounded him. Just a single piece of it was probably worth more yul than all of Hage could scrape together in a year. “I really don’t like that guy.”
There was a tug on the hood of his robe and a fluttering of wings filled Yuno’s ears for a moment as Secre took herself out of her hiding spot to perch herself on his desk. “You’re the one that chose to come here,” she reminded him. “And it’s a better place than where the other two ended up.”
Yuno took off the robe to toss it onto the desk, then began to work on the rest of his clothes. Standing outside all day in the sun while wearing long sleeves had done its work on his body and he needed to remove the sweat. Even the trick Zell had shown him using wind magic to create a light breeze in the air around him hadn’t helped deal with the summer heat that well. “I lived in a village where we slept on the floor and got two meals a day. Anything at all is a step up from that.”
“I was referring to the opportunities you would have to make connections,” Secre told him. “Remember, your primary goal is to free the first Wizard King. Everything else is secondary.”
The reminder did little to help Yuno focus on something else besides the people in his squad. “Right, we need to save the kingdom from collapsing,” he said before opening the door to his bathroom. Like everything else, the place seemed overly gaudy. An ivory tub actually stood above the floor on four gold-tinted legs shaped like flowers matched the sink with its golden knobs for the water.
“You don’t sound too enthusiastic about that anymore,” Secre commented.
Yuno turned on the water and watched it run into the large basin, blinking when he noticed steam rising up from the liquid. While wondering how such a thing was accomplished, he looked back to the bird. “I lost most of the people I cared about last month. After that, it’s a little hard to care about the rest of society,” he told the bird. “Especially when the people at the top just spent half an hour spitting in my face.”
“That doesn’t mean other people aren’t suffering just as bad as you were, you know,” Secre reminded him.
After getting into the water, Yuno sunk down until his chin got just a little wet. “Maybe. But it doesn’t mean that I care about them any more than they did me, either.”
The thunder outside sounded with such force that it made the windows shake and the lightning that followed lit up the sky so bright that Noelle didn’t even need the candle she was holding to see where she was going. Not that the candles on the walls didn’t help, but they usually burnt out before the night was done, and the staff got lazy with their chores after midnight.
At eight years old, Noelle was a smart girl. But no matter how good she did with her tutors, nobody cared. Excellence was to be expected.
She was royalty, after all.
Since Big Brother Nozel would be too busy to bother with her, Noelle went to the large door with a blue cloud decorating it. Hearing the thunder again, Noelle squeaked in fear at the sound and knocked on her big sister’s door. She couldn’t actually be sleeping through the storm, could she?
After what seemed like forever, the door opened and Nebra looked around, then noticed the light of Noelle’s candle before looking down at her with a sneer. “Oh, what do you want, murderer?”
Noelle flinched at the accusatory name before looking up at her big sister. “Nebra, I can’t sleep. The storm is scaring me. Can I please sleep with you tonight?”
As soon as the question was asked, Noelle knew that she had made a mistake. Just like the rest of her family, Noelle’s big sister hated her.
The nineteen year old girl that was Nebra Silva opened her door all the way to stand in her nightgown as she glared down at her baby sister. “You called me out here for that, you little monster?” she demanded before her hand lashed out to strike Noelle across the face.
There was the loud ring of palm hitting flesh before Noelle fell to the ground, tears blooming in her eyes despite the fact that whenever she began to cry, her siblings would threaten her with something even worse than what made her tear up in the first place. “B-Big Sister?”
The candle Noelle was holding fell to the floor, but the flame was quickly snuffed out by a burst of water from Nebra before it could do more than cause a little flame on the rug. “And now look what you did!” she spat. “Ruining our family’s property. I should tan your hide!”
Then, the door across the hall opened up, and Noelle’s older brother Solid poked his head out. Much younger than her older sister, Solid was still a few years away from getting his grimoire. But he was still much bigger and stronger than Noelle was. “What’s going on out here?”
“This little serpent was trying to crawl her way into my bed!” Nebra said as she pointed a finger with a sharpened nail at Noelle. “I simply taught her not to bother her betters.”
Solid let out a groan as the lighting flashed outside again, followed almost immediately by the thunder. He walked out into the hallway and looked Noelle over in the dim light provided by the candles on the wall before looking back up to his sister. “You know the rules, Nebra,” the boy said. “Nothing that leaves a mark. It doesn’t look good on the family to see a royal who looks more like she came from the street than our house.”
“Feh, as if I care about such things,” Nebra replied with disinterest.
Solid grinned back up at her. “Oh, but it’s really such a fun game to play. Like this,” he said before looking down at Noelle and giving her a sweet smile. “Do you want me to show you how not to be scared of the rain?”
Noelle was still worried, the stinging on her cheeks reminding her what her older siblings liked to do as reminders of the bad thing that Noelle had done. But she nodded. He had mentioned a game though. Were they going to play a game?
“Okay then,” Solid told her before he reached out and grabbed a handful of her hair with his hand to pull on it so hard she had to follow the down the hallway.
“Owwww! Solid, you’re hurting me!” Noelle cried out as he dragged her along.
The boy laughed. “Funny, I don’t see any damage, so you must be lying,” he said before reaching a door that led to one of the balconies. There was a clicking sound as Solid unlocked the door that was mostly glass, made with magic to be just as stong as stone. “Here brat, let me show you that there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
The door opened to the a rush of air of the winter night as rain that was cold enough to sting beat its way into the hallway from the door. Then, Solid tugged on Noelle’s hair and practically through her out onto the balcony with enough force that Noelle fell to the ground on the stone and slid several inches before stopping in front of the railing.
Even though the balcony was partly covered by a roof, that did little to stop the howling winter wind from cutting into Noelle in her thin nightgown, sending bits of moisture into her that might as well have been solid for how badly they stung her on impact. Even thought Colver was a southern country, the elevation of where the Silva estate more than negated that fact as Noelle was left out in the cold rain while her siblings looked on from behind the glass door.
Noelle got up and ran to the door, only to find that the handle wouldn’t turn. Freezing cold, she looked up at her two older siblings as they grinned down at her from behind the glass, Solid actually laughing while the little girl was left shivering from the cold rain that assaulted her, despite the roof.
“Let me back in! Please, let me back in!” Noelle begged her siblings as lighting lit up the night sky again before the loud crash of thunder actually made her teeth hurt. “I’m sorry! Let me back in, PLEASE!”
And her older siblings just watched.
The lighting struck closer. The thunder roared even louder.
“I’M SORRY! I’M SORRY I KILLED MOMMY! PLEASE, LET ME IN!”
And her older siblings just just watched, and smiled.
Noelle opened her eyes from a rather restless sleep as she sat up in a bed that was far too small for royalty, but would suffice for now. The nightmares had come again, as they always did. Memories that were always on her mind blurred with the worst that her imagination could come up with.
Not that part of her didn’t agree with her siblings. Noelle had killed their mother in childbirth. Even though they had made her suffer for as far back as she could remember, the girl couldn’t deny that Mother was dead because of her.
Getting out of bed was a chore, like always. The energy to do what was needed was barely even there. She moved over to the edge and stood up, her body telling her to just give up and fall back into the sheets.
But, that would mean giving up.
Noelle couldn’t give up.
She was royalty, after all.
So, the royal looked around her new room in the nightmare of a mansion that her brother had sent her to rot away in. Less than half the size it should have been, Noelle’s bed was in the back corner, while her writing desk sat up against the far wall, only seven paces away, her useless grimoire sitting on it. Lacking a real closet, she had been provided with an armoire to hold her dresses, most of which were the same thing that had been copied several times; a joke from her older siblings that tended to make everything else she wore disappear.
So, Noelle dressed herself in the sister of the outfit she had on the day before at the exam.
Just thinking of the exam made her freeze. Because of her problems with magic, Nozel had refused her entry to the Silver Eagles, so Noelle had tried to prove herself to both him and the other captains by entering the exam. Only to become paralyzed with fear right after it started.
It was only after seeing that one boy completely fail at even getting off the ground with his broom did she find the courage to try. Even if she ended up looking foolish like he did...well, she wouldn’t have been alone in her disgrace.
For a brief instant, Noelle found herself wondering whatever happened to that boy.
Then, she went back to preparing for the day by strapping on her belt with its book covering before moving over to the desk where her grimoire was waiting before opening it up to check the interior and see if anything had changed during the night. When Noelle had gotten the thing six months ago, she had known everything was going to change for her. She would learn her first spell, master her magic and go on to become a proud member of the Silva family that her siblings would come to respect.
Instead, the grimoire refused to offer up a single spell to her, and her magic was still...problematic.
Now, she was a member of the Black Bulls, because her eldest brother had stuck her in the squad.
How, she had no idea. Everything she knew about Nozel said he hated Yami Sukihiro.
Which...made sense, considering the fact that Noelle would be nothing but a burden to the mages around her if they ever found out about her problems.
It seemed that her elder brother had finally found a use for his despised little sister.
She took the Black Bulls robe from where she had hung and blasted it with water the day before off of the little coat rack in front of the window and examined it before putting the thing on. Magic knight robes were made to be sturdy, so it looked in good condition despite the torrent it had been exposed to.
Taking a deep breath to help her push everything down into her gut, Noelle opened the door to her room and headed out to take a look around. It was the first day, so she doubted anything would be going on.
Of course, the moment she stepped out the door, things went wrong.
The redhead from the night before stepped out of the opposite end of the hallway at the exact same time. Like Noelle, she was wearing her Black Bulls uniform piece, but had on a shirt beneath it along with the same pants she wore the day before, and boots that might have been passable a few years ago, but were worn from overuse.
The two of them stared at each other for a few seconds before Sunset eyed Noel up and down and opened her dumb commoner mouth. “Do you have, like...multiple versions of the same outfit?”
“I don’t see how that is any business of yours, peasant!” Noelle snapped.
Sunset blinked and rubbed her chin for a second with a thumb and finger. “Okay, you have a point there. I won’t count that one against you. So...three more,” she said as she held up three fingers and wiggled them a little.
The stupid explanation that had no information whatsoever just made Noelle even angrier. “Three more what?” she demanded.
“Three more times to act like a brat to me,” Sunset explained. “Look, I get that coming to a new place with low quality facilities is an adjustment. But I learned awhile ago that just because your life is bad doesn’t give you the right to make someone else feel worse. So you get three more instances of being a little brat to me.” She made a fist covered in flame. “And then I lay you on your back.”
Noelle took a step back at the threat and felt a lump form in her throat. Next to the captain, the girl in front of her was the most powerful person in the squad that Noelle knew of at the moment. With the fact that she had gotten into the Black Bulls on merit instead of her name at the forefront of Noelle’s mind, the girl knew that she was more than capable of carrying out her threat.
However, there were other things available to Noelle other than magic power to protect her. “How dare you! I am a member of the royal house Silva! If you lay one hand on me-”
“They’ll give me a medal,” Sunset finished for Noelle before she could, making the silver-haired girl freeze. “If your family cared about you at all, you wouldn’t be here, now would you?”
Noelle flinched at the summation of the truth. “You don’t anything about me,” she told the other girl.
After staring at her for a moment, Sunset took a step back and sighed as she leaned against her door. “I know it hurts, and I know you’re in pain. To be tossed aside by the people who were supposed to love you without any conditions attached. I know what that’s like and more,” she said before looking back to Noelle. “I’m a lowly little street urchin whose mom just left on the steps of an orphanage, after all.”
Tired of the conversation, Noelle looked back and forth, down both directions of the hallway. “Where’s a servant? I need to order breakfast.”
“Oh wow, you...no, not going to do that,” Sunset told herself after taking a deep breath. “New day, better mood. Not covered in sweat. Come on, Noelle, I’ll take you to the mess hall and see what there is to eat.”
Without much else to do, Noelle reluctantly followed her guide down the hallway. Unfortunately, before the could get to the dining area, the mad cackling of hyenas assaulted Noelle’s ears, putting her in a bad mood. A second later, the source of the offending noise appeared. It was the pair of idiots from the night before, the one who could throw fireballs and that little shrimp with the black sword.
Noelle blinked upon seeing the second one. She hadn’t be able to tell last night thanks to the poor lighting, but it seemed like the poor boy who couldn’t even get his broom to work had actually gotten into a squad.
“Oh morning Asta, and uh...skunk-head,” Sunset said after a moment.
“What the-my name is Magna! You know that it is. You were there last night when Finral introduced you and the kid to the squad!” the older boy shouted.
Despite her attempts to remain collected, Noelle let out a giggle. The boy’s hair really did look somewhat like a skunk’s.
“HEY! Are you laughing at me, rookie?” Magna demanded.
After realizing that she was the one being addressed, Noelle got herself under control and put on her practiced airs. “I can laugh at whatever I want, commoner. In case you haven’t heard, I’m a member of the Silva family.”
Then, the oddest thing happened. The short boy with the gray hair just came right up to her and practically put a hand in her face. “Hey there Ms Silva! I’m Asta from Hage Village. Great to know me and my sister aren’t the only newcomers.”
Noelle almost slapped the hand away, but caught on to something the boy said at the end. “Your...sister?” she asked before looking over to the threatening redhead.
“I spent about a year and a half with Asta before I got my grimoire outside Hage Village because of a...magical item mishap,” Sunset told her. “We’re not related by blood, but the orphanage there was so small, everyone considered everyone else family.”
“Listen girl, I don’t care if you are royalty. I’m you superior and-”
“YOU’RE ROYALTY?” Asta shouted over Magna before he actually got on the ground and began bowing over, and over again. “My apologies your Highness! Someone like me should never have been so familiar to someone like you!”
Sunset groaned. “Asta get up, you can make an ass of yourself on your own time all you want, but not when you’re embarrassing me.”
The display didn’t just embarrass the redhead. Noelle took a step back from the unexpected treatment. Not even the maids at the Silva estate treated her like that, or any member of her family. Maybe back in her grandfather’s time, but people just didn’t do that anymore.
“Yeah well don’t expect any ass kissing from me!” Magna told her. “I’m your superior and as far as I’m concerned, you’re just a charity case that Yami took pity on. You’re no better than anybody else here, worse even!”
“You’re even worse than a commoner!” Noelle’s memory of her elder sister laughed in her mind as the girl stood there, soaking wet from the woman’s magic.
It took everything she had to keep a straight face as Noelle felt her anger boil up inside of her. Even if she was the lowest of her family, she was still royalty! In need of an outlet for her anger, Noelle focused her mana in front of her as she held out a hand. Water formed from her power, enough to completely encompass a grown man. “I’m a lot better than you are commoner. Now, here’s a little lesson to correct your mistake,” she said before releasing her magic.
“Stupid brat! You’re more worthless than a peasant!” Noelle remembered Solid yelling at her on multiple occasions.
The magic flew from her hand straight towards Magna, then curved at the last second to strike the boy standing next to him and knock Asta into the wall.
“HEY!” a angry voice from beside Noelle reverberated in her eardrums. “What the hell was that, you royal pain?”
A shiver ran down Noelle’s spine, and she looked out of the corner of her eye at Sunset as the redhead’s body became surrounded by mana that was on the eve of bursting into flame. Uh oh, she thought. Still, she kept her features under control. “What happened to, three more chances, hmmm?”
“Disrespecting Skunk-head was one,” Sunset told her.
Magna looked over to the girl. “Stop calling me that!”
“Attacking my little brother was two, which pissed me off, THAT’S THREE!” Sunset roared.
Noelle gulped and took a step back. Although her family had been absolutely horrible to her over the years, the one thing they had never done is outright beat her. There had been a slap here and there, along with a good deal of hair pulling, cold water, and other things, but never an outright beating!
Then, it hit her. The way out of this stupid mess.
She wasn’t going to stick around if being in the Black Bulls was even worse than staying at home.
“You know what?” Noelle said as she reached out to undo the clasp on her robe to take it off and toss it away. “The hell with this. I’m done here.” Not even bothering to look at the reactions of the others, Noelle turned and headed for the nearest exit.
“I worked my ass off to get one of these robes, and she just throws it away like it’s nothing,” the shrimp said as Noelle stormed off.
I think I made a mistake, Sunset told herself as the girl opened a door to the outside and slammed it closed behind her.
When she had first met Noelle, Sunset had seen herself in the girl...as much as she hated to admit it. But, the more time she spent with the girl, the more she thought that she had missed something. A big something, considering how everything had just went.
And why in the hell did she attack Asta, anyway? He was kissing her ass like a commoner was supposed to.
“So...we’re going after her...right?” Asta asked.
Magna snorted. “Are you crazy, I’m going to get some food. Charmy stops cooking and eats everything if you’re not there by the end of the breakfast bell,” he told them before turning to walk away. “You guys can go crazy bitch hunting all you want, but count me out.”
Putting the delinquent virgin out of her mind, Sunset looked over to Asta. “Why should we?”
“Well, me and Yuno went after you plenty of times when you threw a fit and stormed off.”
The completely fictitious account of her life at the orphanage made Sunset cross her arms. “No you didn’t.”
“Yes we did. There was that time during the first week, where you threw a fit after eating pot potatoes for seven days straight,” he said as he counted it off on a finger.
Sunset crossed her arms and snorted. “I was just looking for something else to eat in the woods!” It wasn’t her fault she didn’t know what foods would kill her and what wouldn’t.
“Then there was when you got into a fight with Father Orisi and tried to leave the church,” Asta went on.
“That was just a preemptive exile! I thought he was going to kick me out, so I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction and left!” Sunset explained.
Asta brought up a third finger. “Then there was that time you ran out of the bathroom naked and scared half the town, going on about how you were going to die.”
“I WAS HAVING MY FIRST PERIOD!” Sunset shouted at him. “Have you eve had a period? No! Or else you would understand that yes, it feels like you’re dying!”
Apparently hearing too much information, Asta blanched and held up his hands. “Look, my point is, when the stupid powerful, crazy magic user runs off into the woods, you chase after her to see if she’s okay, let her cry a bit, and then bring her home,” he told her. “Now come on, I need you to find her for me.”
Groaning over the fact that her baby brother had a point, Sunset stepped over Noelle’s stupid shoulder-length robe and followed him out the door. Why are these things so short, anyway? Sunset wondered as she picked at hers. The Diamond Kingdom had full-length robes. They might have been evil, but at least they knew what to wear.
It only took them a little over twenty minutes to find the Noelle girl. Sunset would have been faster, but she took the time to dry Asta off before they began looking.
Noelle hadn’t run off to get lost in the woods in some stupid attempt to find her way back to the capital. She hadn’t gone more than a mile from the hideout, in fact. She was in a loosely wooded area, glaring at a tree that had some whitewash painted on it that was surrounded by miniature craters in the dirt and a few other trees that had their bark stripped off. Sweat dripped from her face as she held her hands up in front of her to conjure a ball of water big enough for a human to float in before she launched it at the tree.
Said ball of water flew straight, then curved at the last second to shoot off to the side and soak the nearby bushes with enough force from the impact to strip them bare.
Then, she fired another, and another, and another after that, one after the other. They weren’t really spells, more concentrated bursts of her water magic given physical shape. Each and every one of them turned, bobbed and weaved to avoid the target on the tree and land somewhere else.
After seeing the display, Sunset put it all together and slapped a fist into an open palm. “Oh! I get it now, you have absolutely no control over your magical power!” she said, happy that little mystery had been solved.
Noelle let out a shriek and spun around. “W-What’re you two doing here?”
“Sup,” Asta announced as he raised a hand.
Feeling like she had caught Noelle doing something embarrassing, which Sunset supposed she did, Sunset rubbed the back of her head. “We um...came to...uh...Noelle?” Sunset asked when the girl stood there, frozen and shaking before she could even say anything.
“N-No!” the girl yelled before she held out both of her hands, crackling with mana as it changed into water right in front of her. Twice as large as her previous attacks and much more unstable “JUST GET AWAY FROM ME!”
Only, the expulsion of mana didn’t fire. It drew back on the girl and encompassed her completely. What was worse was that since the matrix of the proto-spell she had made was still attached to the source of the mana that formed it, it continued to increase in size until it was twice as big as her and still growing as it rose up into the air.
“Oh...crap,” Sunset mumbled as the Noelle floated up into the air, the power of her magic continuing to create a massive amount of water around her, which quickly swelled to enough to fill a good-sized swimming pool or small lake. “This is bad.”
“SUNSET!” Asta yelled. “DO SOMETHING!”
Like what, moron? Sunset thought back at him. The...whatever it was Noelle had made was an unstable mass of water magic that was feeding on the mana of its creator, and even managing to suck in some of the surrounding mana attuned to water from the surrounding environment. Even if she tried to suppress it with her own limited knowledge of water magic, that might end up just feeding the damn thing.
Fire was out. By the time the mana had been taken care of, the girl would have been boiled alive.
Wind was equally useless. Even if the matrix didn’t feed on a close element, the amount of force needed to blow it away wouldn’t be healthy for the girl trapped inside of it.
“Can’t you just...pop her out or something?” Asta asked in a tone that sounded he was demanding an answer.
Sunset sighed. “Not when she’s in the middle of that!” the girl explained as she threw her hands up at the mass of water that had become big enough to fill a good-sized lake in the time they had been talking. “I need a way to deconstruct her...oh, right.” She looked down at the boy’s grimoire that held a sword capable of completely shredding any magical matrix it so much as touched.
“Asta, take out your grimoire and hold it close,” Sunset ordered. “When you pop back in, activate it, take out the sword and...well, just dropping it in the water should do the trick.”
Asta blinked. “Say what?” the boy asked as he took out his book, but didn’t open it.
Instead of explaining the plan again and giving the water mass time to grow another ten-percent, possibly crushing Noelle with how much water pressure it must have had, Sunset simply snapped her fingers and made her baby brother disappear.
A second later, he reappeared a high diver's board length away from the mass of mana, as close as Sunset could get him with her magic. There was a lot of screaming, which was understandable since he was falling through the sky with a very bad dizzy spell hitting his brain because human bodies just weren’t made for unicorn teleportation.
Then he hit the water.
The bubble burst, telling Sunset that Asta had managed to draw his sword...so, he wasn’t going to drown in a mass of magical water that Sunset realized just then would probably have killed him in short order if he had failed to take that black sword of his out.
Then, Sunset realized another error in her plan as the giant mass of water no longer had anything to really hold it up. Damnit, this is my last clean set of clothes, she told herself before rain drops the size of tennis balls came pouring down.
A very small shield spell kept the water out of her face so she could look around. Any bigger than Sunset risked turning it into something akin to a window in a rain storm that was so blurry nothing beyond ten feet could be seen. Asta was easy enough to find thanks to his screams being so loud, but it took a bit longer for Sunset to locate Noelle, who was doing her best to curl up into a little ball.
She reached out with her natural magic and kept from adapting it to any element as Sunset snagged both of the kids in a light blue glow to slow their descent while also making sure Asta’s sword didn’t fall on her. The boy, she set down on the ground while Noelle fell right into Sunset’s arms. Who promptly collapsed onto the muddy ground because human bodies were just so damn weak when they didn’t have mana pumping through them.
The frightened girl that was shivering in Sunset’s lap opened her eyes. “Huh? What...what happened?”
Sunset took a moment to think of something to say. “Well, Asta busted up your spell and as for me...don’t you remember I said I’d catch you if you fell?” Sunset asked the girl in the clothes that were so wet they might as well have been transparent.
Noelle just stared at her with wide eyes.
However, the moment was not to last. In the two minutes or so that the giant death ball of water had existed, it had managed to draw the attention of every single person at the Black Bulls hideout, all of whom came running into the clearing where Noelle had fallen.
“What the hell is going on out here?” Yami demanded while the rest of his men and the two women that served under him looked around at Noelle’s handywork.
For her part, the girl curled in on herself and began trembling. “Here it comes,” she whispered as she tensed, like she was getting ready to be attacked or something.
“AW MAN! THAT WAS AWESOME!” Asta yelled as he jumped to his feet. Then nearly fell over again. Stumbling around, he just barely made it over to the pair of girls before bracing himself on his knees. “YOU’VE GOT SOME REAL CRAZY MAGIC POWER NOELLE! I wish I could do something that cool.”
Noelle opened her eyes and looked up at Asta with a blank stare, as if her mind couldn’t process what it had just heard. “...huh?” she said as a blush started to appear on her cheeks. “...A-Asta.”
With everything that had happened, the last thing that didn’t make sense about Noelle clicked into place and Sunset found herself remembering another hopeless little royal she had met so many years ago. “Hello, my name is Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, but my friends call me Cadance!”
Seeing the girl wasn’t going to do anything, Sunset ran some mana through her body to give her some extra strength and durability before she moved around a bit to put Noelle’s arm over her shoulder an helped her on her feet. “Well, I think you could use a bit of training first. But after you learn to get it under control in a few weeks, you’ll be fine.”
“Wait, that’s why you got all freaked out when you blasted Asta instead of me and stormed off?” Magna asked as if he couldn’t believe the explanation that was now so obvious. “Geeze, why didn’t you just say you were a magical failure? We’re a whole squad of losers, dummy. No wonder you were sent here. You’ll fit right in.”
The familiar sight of Vanessa’s magic carrying Noelle’s Black Bulls robe brought it right up to the two girls, letting Sunset put it on her. “You’ll probably be wanting this back, seeing as how you need a little extra to cover up with at the moment.”
“Hey, you are okay, right?” Finral asked.
Noelle blushed at the attention and nodded.
“With your great power, I’m sure we’ll be great friend-”
“I’m sure Marie would love for you to make a floating swimming pool for her to play in,” Goash added right on top of the pale creepy guy.
“Do you need something to eat?” Charmy asked before offering her some kind of delicious-smelling fried meat that was almost paper thin.
Yami took his cigarette out of his mouth and blew out some smoke. “Okay you idiots, back inside. I’m gonna need something to eat, then I’m going back to bed.”
As everyone began to leave, Noelle lowered her head and whispered just loud enough to be heard. “I’m...sorry for being so much trouble.”
“It’s fine, not like I didn’t help you along in all the wrong ways,” Sunset told her as Noelle regained her footing and pulled away. “You know...I think we got off on the wrong foot, so…” She held out her hand. “Hey, I lived with this noble woman until about two years ago when she kicked me out and I ended up in Hage Village. I’m a bit of a hothead, but I’m pretty good with magic and could help you out if you’d like me to. My name’s Sunset Shimmer, but my friends call me Sunny.”
Noelle stood there, staring at Sunset for several seconds before she give a smile and reached out to grab the girl’s hand. “Yes! I...I’d like that a lot. Sunny” she said after a short pause.
“Wait...you don’t have any friends, Sunny.”
Sunset blinked and looked over to her little brother, who Sunset had completely forgotten about, as Noelle snickered.
“Can it shorty.”
For some reason, that made Noelle laugh even more.