Yuno had to fight to keep his eyes open as he sat in the garden that was the courtyard of the Golden Dawn’s castle before the sun even came up. Even back at the orphanage, he never got up this early outside of Winter. What made it even worse was that his bed had been hard to sleep in. It had been too soft. Whoever heard of a bed that was too soft?
Klaus had told Yuno to meet him in the courtyard, but as the sun peeked its way over the battlements, marking the time as an hour past dawn, his teacher had yet to show.
Secre had flown off after the two of them woke up, telling Yuno she’d head out to check on Asta for a day or two before coming back.
“Oh, hello there! Are you supposed to meet with Klaus for training as well?”
The unfamiliar and feminie voice from behind him made Yuno adjust himself as he looked back to see a girl approaching him from behind. Like Yuno, she had on a Golden dawn robe, but was dressed in something other than the official uniform underneath. However, unlike him, her clothes were a poofy top that covered her arms and short pants that didn’t go down very far at all.
Which did nothing to hide her amazing figure. Despite being fifteen, the girl was developed as Sister Lilly had been, with her puffy short pants only making it seem like her hips were even bigger than they probably were, judging by how the boots that came up to her thighs looked. Despite the time of year, she had another cloak on beneath her Golden Dawn robe, which actually had a bit of magic in it. As for the girl herself, she had green eyes and long, flowing blonde-golden hair that fell down to the center of her back in waves, with some of it ending up in front and managing to reach her breasts.
Yuno frowned a little. “I was told to come here before dawn and wait for Klaus to arrive.”
The girl blinked, surprise evident on her face. “Really? I just saw Klaus leaving the cafeteria on his way here and rushed to get ahead of him,” she said. “Are you sure you heard him give the correct time?”
“Yes,” Yuno replied as his eye twitched. The man had ordered him into missing breakfast.
Then the girl got a thoughtful look as she tapped her chin. “That’s odd,” she said before smiling. “Well, maybe he just forgot. I know that I’m completely useless in the morning until I’ve gotten some good food in me.”
The odd thing was, the girl actually meant what she was saying. Growing up an orphan, Yuno had learned quickly to spot people who were trying to trick him after Asta had nearly been beaten to death when they were children. And the girl was being one-hundred-percent honest.
“Oh! I’m being rude,” she said before going into a curtsy, despite her clothes not being made for it. “Hello sir. My name is Mimosa Vermillion. Might I ask who I have the pleasure of addressing?”
Yuno blinked. She’s serious, he told himself through the shock of someone in the Golden Dawn actually showing him courtesy, and a great deal of it at that. Unsure of how exactly to respond, Yuno got up and made an awkward bow that was probably nowhere near deep enough. “Oh, my name is Yuno. I’m from Hage Village,” he replied before standing back up and blinking. “Wait...Vermillion? But your hair’s not…”
The question got a giggle from Mimosa before she waved it off. “I know, I take after my father, while Leo and Fugoleon look more like their mother, who married my father’s brother. They’re my cousins,” she explained before something obviously occurred to her and she let out a little gasp. “Oh! You’re the boy with the four leaf, aren’t you? The...ba-uh…”
“Bastard?” Yuno supplied for her evenly.
Mimosa blushed and bowed her head. “Sorry,” she said before picking her head back up. “It’s just when everyone around you is saying a word, no matter how awful, it tends to sneak its way into your mouth. I know that’s no excuse, but sometimes I accidentally let my mouth get away from me.”
The apology had Yuno standing there, stunned. “That’s um…” he had no idea how to respond to the girl. She was unlike any noble he had even seen since joining the Golden Dawn, much less met. “It’s fine. It’s not like I can deny it.”
“No it’s not!” Mimosa told him with a stern look that she just couldn’t seem to make passable. “People shouldn’t talk to you like that, ever! At least, I won’t. We’re both magic knights, and no matter where we came from, we stand as equals now. So, we should show each other the proper respect and do our best together, okay?”
All of a sudden, Yuno hoped that Klaus was another hour late to his first day on the job as instructor.
Because of some evil curse, the second day at Black Bulls HQ was a completely normal, non-explosive day without any distractions or catastrophes. Sunset wasn’t forced to track through the mud, deal with wild animals, or a pair of boys that were constantly trying to one up each other or anything else. There was work to do. But it was grunt work that only involved repetitive motions and little thought.
Which let her mind easily wander.
Sunset’s only salvation was that she managed to drag Noelle with her since Asta was assigned his own list of chores.
Unfortunately, the royal pain was a bit reluctant to do her duties…
“Why in the hell should have to help you wash everyone’s clothes?” the girl demanded.
Sunset didn’t favor her with an answer right away, deciding to look over the three piles of clothes that stood half as tall as a person. In truth, things would have probably gone a lot faster if Noelle wasn’t around to see Sunset work magic on the various items and remove the stains with more than one element. However, getting done too quickly in a building of people who actually knew something about magic might raise questions she didn’t want asked. “Because the sooner I get done, the sooner we can get to work on taking care of your magic problem,” Sunset half-lied. There were some other reasons, but they were private.
However, the completely logical reasoning didn’t seem to penetrate Noelle’s head. “You’re kidding, right? I’m royalty. We don’t do laundry, Sunny.”
“So you...what? Sat on your tiny butt your whole life and did nothing?” Sunset asked.
Noelle crossed her arms. “I had my studies to keep me busy.”
There was a pause in the conversation as Sunset thought about going for a low blow, but decided against asking her how much of that time was wasted studying magic. “Well, can you at least make some water to fill these wash basins?” Sunset asked as she pointed at the empty oversized buckets in front of her.
“Uh...you know what happens when I use my magic, remember?” Noelle asked.
Sunset sighed. That was one of the bigger problems she knew would stand in her way of trying to smooth Noelle’s magic over. Magic was the power of a person’s belief, their faith in themselves. If they thought they were going to screw up every time, then they would screw up every time. “I’m not asking for a huge blast or anything like that. Just make some water and drop it in the tubs. Please?”
Very hesitantly, Noelle held out her hand and a ball of water appeared in front of it before she just let go. There was a big splash as most of the water landed where it was supposed to, but a good deal overflowed and Sunset found herself sitting in a puddle.
“See? I told you, I-”
“That was really good, Noelle,” Sunset told her before the girl could finish.
The royal blinked at the complement as stopped in her tracks. “Huh?” she asked before looking back at her mistake. “But...I made too much and now you’re all wet.”
Suppressing her annoyance about her legs getting soaked, Sunset just shrugged. “It’s not like I’m not going to get wet doing this, you know,” she told the royal that looked terrified what she was saying was all some kind of trick and Sunset was going to turn on her any instant. “Can you fill the spare one up too? Try using less than half as much mana this time and let’s see if it works any better.”
After realizing Sunset wasn’t going to bite her head off, Noelle nodded and moved to the other wash basin to hold her hands over it. However, it looked like she severely overcompensated this time around and only got it a quarter full. As the girl blushed in embarrassment, Sunset found herself coming up with some more words of encouragement. “Hey, good idea. Just drop the water in at minimal power until it’s full. That way, we can avoid making more of a puddle.”
Of course, it was obvious to Sunset that Noelle hadn’t meant to do anything of the kind, but the girl needed the compliments. As things were, no amount of practice would let her use her magic correctly because a lifetime of failure had made her expect to mess things up. And if she knew her magic was going to blow up in her face, then it always would.
A few minor victories under her belt, some kind of proof that she wasn’t a waste of space. Noelle needed those things if she was ever going to overcome her problem.
“Okay...um...now what?” Noelle asked.
After putting some of the clothes into the metal tub, Sunset put her hands on the side to heat the water until it was boiling, then pushed the thing aside to let the clothes soak before she looked over to the royal. “Can you hand me the soap and the washboard?”
Noelle nodded, then grabbed the items so Sunset could get to work on the actual work involved with her chore.
Five minutes into the whole thing, Noelle spoke up again. “Um...is there anything else I can do to help?” she asked tentatively.
“I thought all of this stuff was beneath you royals,” Sunset replied.
Noelle blushed a little. “Yeah, well...just tell me what you need me to do already!” she ordered. “You’re moving much too slow. And if you have to do this before we get to my magic training, then we need to get done as soon as possible.”
“HOW IS THIS ANY DIFFERENT THAT WHAT WE DID BACK AT THE CHURCH?”
Noelle looked up from inspecting her hands to make sure cleaning everyone’s clothes hadn’t given her some kind of rash and across the table in the mess hall where the shrimp was sitting. Since Sunny was his big sister, she supposed that it was okay for the peasant to sit so close, but if he kept that yelling up, they were going to have problems. “Tone it down.”
The rest of the group, which only took up about half a table in their four long tabled dining hall, were slowly making their way through an obscene amount of meat and minor collection of other food groups. Sunny must have shared her opinion of the overabundance of animal products, because while she had no problem taking some chicken and fish, she stayed away from everything else. “Well, the Black Bulls don’t have a support staff and Charmy’s sheep golems are restrained by the ‘cook’ title. So they can’t really do much else other than prepare food and clean the kitchen,” Sunset told him before looking over to some of the meat that had been cut to make breakfast, but never cooked until lunch. “What’s this?”
Charmy looked over to her. “Bacon.”
Sunset grabbed a piece and tentatively took a bite. Then another, then finished off the remaining half. “And it’s made from?”
“Pigs and boars,” Charmy told her.
After a few seconds, Sunset grabbed the rest of the bacon. “Pigs and boars are evil anyway,” she said before looking back to Asta. “And this is way different than the church. For one, we actually have real beds, three meals a day, soap to use on our clothes. Do I really need to go down a whole list of things?”
“Okay, but what does a magic knight squad even do?” Asta demanded.
While Sunny was probably too dumbfounded by the idiocy of the question to give her baby brother an answer, Magna didn’t seem too bothered to let it stop him. “You joined the Magic Knights without even knowing what we do?” he said before standing up to slap his hands down on the table and lean over it to glare at Asta from beside Sunset. “We protect the country you idiot! It’s the manliest job in the world! Why did you even join up if you didn’t know something as basic as that?”
Vanessa stopped gulping down her wine, despite it still being lunchtime, and looked over to the boy as she sat next to Noelle. “The fact we get paid despite no actual work, free room and board, free food, the fact I can walk around my place of business in my underwear.”
“A full pardon,” Gauche added.
Finral was quick to add, “got to move out of my parent’s house.”
“Food!” Charmy declared.
“So I could beat people up and get away with it,” Luck told him happily.
Gordon added...something, judging by how his lips moved.
“I’M ASKING RASTA!” Magna yelled at the others.
“...actually, it’s, Asta,” the boy with the headband corrected him.
A moment later, a scream cut across the room, drawing everyone’s attention to the shortest team member as she sat in front of her five empty plates. “W-What happened? My food, it’s all GONE!”
Sunset moaned and rubbed her head. “That’s because you just ate it,” she said before her voice dropped to barely audible levels. “Despite the fact that all of that meat had to weigh five times as much as you do.”
“You think that’s weird,” Vanessa said as she leaned over Noelle to whisper to the redhead. “Wait until you notice that she never goes to the bathroom.”
“COTTON CREATION MAGIC! SHEEP COOKS!” Charmy yelled before three balls of flush floated up into the air and took the shape of three bidpal sheep with chef hats on. Within less than ten minutes, they set another lavish feast down in front of the comically short girl that she quickly began tearing into.
“...there’s no way that meat should be done all the way,” Noelle pointed out despite the fact that it was.
At that point, the giant of the group stood up and walked over to where Asta was sitting and pulled out a large blue book before there was a giant puff of smoke. When it cleared, the boy was standing beside himself...literally.
As in, there were two of them.
“We do a lot of things, depending on the-”
“Oh my gosh, you guys have magic like that, here?” Sunset suddenly asked, stopping the double from talking as she jumped over the table and grabbing other-Asta by the shoulders while she examined him. “How does it work? Is it just a shell for your body that you reduce in size, or is there an actual rearrangement of things on a molecular level?”
What do moles have to do with transformation magic? Noelle wondered.
Getting a little nervous, Gray took a step back from Sunset. “Uh, well...I...um…”
Finral raised an eyebrow. “What’s she getting all excited about? It’s just transformation magic. You can do something like that with the right kind of magic item.”
“Is it only skin deep, or do your organs also change? What about clothes? Do you actually create them or-oh, transform into me real quick,” Sunset told the boy.
Gray gulped and took his book out again. “Oh-okay,” he replied before there was another burst of smoke and a second Sunset was standing in front of the first.
At which point, Sunset reached up and grabbed the other girls boobs to squeeze them. “Hmm, feels the same,” she said while Gray let out a girlish scream.
“W-What’re you doing?” she demanded in embarrassment as she looked away from the original Sunset and blushed as bright as her hair.
Vanessa took another swig of wine. “Hey, does that count as sexual assault? I mean, it is Sunset’s body she’s handling.”
“Checking for a bra, and your breasts feel the same as mine, so...maybe the spell fills in the blanks? What about-” she mumbled before moving her hands down and beginning to slip off the other Sunset’s pants.
At which point the other Sunset screamed and jumped away, while Sunset Prime was still holding onto her and the pair fell forward, with the primary redhead falling into the fakes breasts while Gray had her rear exposed to the rest of the team. While most of it was still covered by the once piece of underwear Sunset did have on, Noelle noticed something very off.
“What the-she doesn’t have your butt tattoos,” Noelle pointed out.
Vaness blinked and put down her drink. “Hey, you’re right.”
As the pair became the center of attention for everyone in the room, with Charmy stopping her intake of food to look at what was going on, Sunset stood back up and blinked. “Huh...well that’s…” she said while rubbing her chin in thought. “Guess that makes sense.”
“Huh? What makes sense, what’s everybody talking about?” Gray asked as she looked around in confusion.
Asta looked over to not-Sunset and put on an uncomfortable face. “Sunset’s got these weird marks on her ass that look like a freaky sun,” he explained right before the real Sunset pulled her pants down a little to provide a visual aid. “I DIDN’T SAY SHOW THEM!”
For her part, Noelle blanched at Sunset’s actions. How can she just...just SHOW HERSELF OFF LIKE THAT? the royal demanded in a mix of anger and a little jealousy. She didn’t look the least bit concerned about who was in the room!
“Feh, my body, my rules,” Sunset replied.
“AND MY EYES!” Asta retorted.
A second later, Gray was up next to the girl, studying the tattoo. “B-But my spell should have copied everything! Even the parts I couldn’t see!”
Finally getting a little embarrassed from all the attention, the commoner pulled her pants back up and blushed. “Uh...well...you see...that’s…”
Before an explanation could be forced out of the redhead, one of the doors leading out of the mess was kicked down and Yami walked into the room to take a look around before settling on the redheads and their light state of undress. “Hey, twins going at it, your floor shows are getting better Gray.”
“T-That’s not what this is at all!” Gray yelled back in an embarrassed diatribe before turning back into his giant form and quickly heading for the door.
Yami took a drag on his cigarette and let it out. “Whatever,” he said before looking over to the male delinquent with two tones to his hair. “Hey Magna, we’re heading out.”
A moment later, Magna turned from the show Sunset was putting on and stood up. “Yes, Yami sir!”
“What’s going on?” Asta asked as he looked around in confusion.
Magna cleared his hands off and readjusted his glasses. “There’s a mission.”
Excitement exploding from every part of his body, Asta jumped up and pumped his arm up. “A MISSION? COOL! JUST GIVE ME A SECOND AND I’LL BE READY!”
The older boy got a stern look on his face. “No, this one is too rough for rookies,” he said before adjusting his glasses. “Me and Yami will be taking care of it ourselves.”
With Magna actually acting serious for the first time since she had ever seen him, Noelle couldn’t help but wonder what was going on. Whatever it was, it must have been big to involve the head of the squad.
Sunset sighed and looked over to Noelle. “Well, ready for that magic practice now?”
“I think I’ll join you girls,” the mostly-naked half-drunk woman with the dull pink hair said before she stood up from the table. “I’m really good at controlling my magic, so I can give you some pointers.”
“So um...how is this supposed to help her get her magic working?” Vanessa asked as she watched Noelle bend forward to the point where she was touching her toes, barely able to keep her balance.
Sunset didn’t answer as she continued to limber up. A few questions asked to Asta about his workout routine during the last leg of their journey to the capitol had been surprisingly informative. With the first bit of information being how people who just started exercising needed to stretch their muscles out a little in preparation so they didn’t hurt themselves from the strenuous activity.
As she sat down to spread her legs and touch her toes, Sunset finally answered the woman. “Noelle’s magic doesn’t just surge out of control, she also has a problem aiming basic expulsions of her mana,” she said. “I know it’s probably because she thinks she’s going to fail before she even starts, but I was thinking about giving her something to pin the blame on and come up with a fake fix for it that might help her stop thinking she’s going to fail all the time automatically.”
“Or, we could try getting her a real magical item to help regulate how much power she puts into things,” Vanessa said before she looked the redhead up and down for a moment. “By the way, where’s your grimoire?”
Sunset looked over to the other woman. “I left it back in my room, wearing something like that would only get in my way right now,” she explained before moving onto the more important topic. “They have things like that?”
After staring at Sunset for a second, the woman sighed. “Right. I forgot that you got the same education as Asta.”
“Wait, didn’t you tell me yesterday that you were a part of the lady’s household or something?” Noelle asked. “And can I get up now?”
The comment actually made Vanessa put down her bottle, making Sunset start to feel a little nervous at the extra scrutiny. Crap, I did say that, didn’t I? she reminded herself. Stupid Noelle and her problems making Sunset be a little more honest with her. “Well, it’s...complicated,” she said before focusing strictly on Noelle. “And if it’s been a minute, stand up and walk around that tree one time.”
While Noelle was doing as told and grumbling about how it made no sense, Vanessa looked back to Sunset with a frown. “So, you going to tell us about this little...discrepancy or…”
Sunset reached back and rubbed her neck. “Okay so...the thing is...I only really spent two years with Asta and Yuno,” she told them. “Before that, I was in a different orphanage, where I got taken in by the local Lady because of my high magic potential. She taught me some things before I kind of found out this big secret of hers and might have run away after she expelled me from her house for fear of my own life,” she half-lied.
After taking a drink of her wine, Vanessa nodded. “Makes sense.”
“HOW DOES THAT MAKE SENSE?” Noelle yelled at the two of them after she finished her circuit and walked over to stand above them.
Sunset looked up at the girl. “Do you feel dizzy or anything?”
The question made Noelle blink before she moved around a little bit more. “Not really, should I?”
“Well, considering the problem with your magic has been around since birth, there was the possibility that it was a physical problem, like your balance was off and it’s been affecting your magic,” Sunset told her. “But if you can bend over for a minute and walk around just fine, then it isn’t something like that.”
The explanation satisfying her, Noelle nodded before frowning back down at Sunset. “Now answer my question! You ran away from a noble that adopted you to live in the Forsaken Realm? Why in the hell would you do something like that?”
“I never said she adopted me,” Sunset grumbled before she pulled her legs back up, the stretching put on hold for a moment as she grit her teeth. “She never cared for me. She just wanted to use me, turn me into her little attack dog and nothing else. That was made abundantly clear.” Even though Celestia might have done some good stuff for her too, it was a fact that the big pony had wanted to spend her whole life as some kind of slave to the crown rather than the pony wearing it.
Only good-natured idiots who never questioned Celestia got turned into princesses.
“Yeah, but-”
Vanessa cleared her throat, cutting Noelle off. “Okay, so...who’s ready for some magic practice?” she asked while looking around at the two. “I know I am! Noelle, how about you show us what you can do and we’ll see what we’re working with. Just…” A rather thick magical threat appeared and wrapped itself around Noelle’s leg. “There we go! Now, just in case anything happens like yesterday, the two of us can pull you out.”
Just mentioning the possibility of a repeat of the previous disaster had Noelle closing in on herself, telling Sunset this was all a waste of time. “Okay. I’ll try my best.”
Before anything could start to happen, there was a familiar fluttering of wings and Sunset looked up to see that the Secre had managed to find her. The bird landed on a low branch, and stared at Sunset.
Unfortunately, this did not go unnoticed by Noelle. She rushed right over to the thing and gushed over it. “Oh my gosh! That little bird is so adorable!” she exclaimed. “Just look at those evil eyes, and are those horns coming out the top of it’s head? And two tails? Where did a cute little anti-bird like this come from?”
“...that isn’t the usual terminology people use to elaborate with after saying adorable,” Vanessa pointed out.
Sunset groaned. “That’s uh...my pet,” she lied. “I should probably get her something to eat. Let me just head back to the hideout real quick and see if there’s anything left she can have. Vanessa, can you give Noelle those tips while I go do this?”
The older woman nodded. “Sure. Oh, and you might want to tell Charmy not to eat the bird. Wild animals that wander too close to her tend to end up getting roasted,” she warned.
Secre tensed as her head turned to look at the mostly-naked woman. “Eh?”
With the comment going unnoticed, Sunset grabbed the fowl and made for the hideout at a quick pace. Once she was out of sight and her mana sense told the girl that nobody was close enough to hear, Sunset looked down at the bird. “So, how are things going with Yuno?”
Asta groaned as he found himself once again marching through the underground passage beneath the base, doing one of his most dreaded duties as a member of The Black Bulls: feeding Yami’s pets.
Since coming to the mishmash of a house, he had cleaned, dusted, and taken in clothes for the guys that Sunset had put up to dry, but the task he was on now was by far the worst. Which was why when Noelle told him that handling everyone’s clothes after getting back from exercising was the worst job ever, Asta had decided to prove the rich kid just how wrong she was.
Unfortunately, calling the job he was about to do dangerous had also made Sunset tag along, with Secre riding in the back of her hood.
Which was how Asta found himself leading through the underground passageway beneath the hideout that led to the cage for the animals. “There’s three of them. I can’t really see inside the cage very well, but one of them looks like a wolf, another is this hairy...ape thing, and the third is...uh, well...I don’t think I’ve really seen number three in good enough lighting,” Asta said as he carried the buckets of raw meat that Charmy had left for him.
“So, feeding a cute little monkey, a dog, and something too frightened to even show its face is worse than handling Vanessa’s bras and underwear,” Noelle deadpanned. “Do you know where those parts of her clothes have been?”
Asta looked back to the rich girl with a raised eyebrow. “Um, yeah. I see them every time I pass her in the hideout.”
As Noelle got an odd look on her face from Asta’s lack of blushing over a woman that let him see everything, she apparently couldn’t stop herself from asking a followup question. “There’s no way you could get used to that in just two days.”
“Well, I’ve kind of had to since Sunset made me take baths with her every day for about a month,” Asta told her.
Noelle jumped back. “SAY WHAT?” she shouted before looking back and forth between the two. “Oh yeah, you said you were sib-wait, the two of you have only known each other since you were thirteen! Why would he be bathing with you?”
In response, Sunset shrugged. “We had to walk from the northernmost point in the country. You think there was a lot of privacy in the wilderness?” she said before looking to Asta. “Now, could we please get this horrible petting zoo you think it’s so awful to work at?”
Annoyed that the girls were trying to get onto him for the conversation they started, Asta turned back around, but stopped when he heard something coming down the hallway. It was much too small to be an escaped beast, which he knew could break out rather easily since they had already torn through the iron cage holding them in to get at the food once before. But, he still stood ready for anything.
Except for a pair of men in nothing but a pair of Black Bulls robes walking into the part of the tunnel he could see thanks to the torches on the wall. Yami didn’t even have a cigarette in his mouth and Magna was missing his glasses. Before Asta could even comment on it, Noel let out a scream and jumped behind Sunset to try and hide while the redhead just stood there, completely unaffected by the nudity.
“What the hell happened to you two?” she asked evenly.
Yami moved to take a cigarette that wasn’t even there before he stopped halfway and frowned. “I think the more important question is, how come it’s dinner time and my babies haven’t been fed yet?”
From her place behind Sunset, Noelle peeked her head out, her eyes still closed. “No, the important question is, WHY ARE THE TWO OF YOU NAKED?” she shrieked.
Sunset’s eye twitched as she stood behind one of the tables in the common room of the hideout. In front of her, a freshly dressed Yami and Magna were sitting on the long couch at the back of the room. After hearing their explanation as to why they had tried to sneak into the building with nothing on, she had to resist the urge to throw something at the two of them or use more Equestrian-friendly magic turn them into something with more intelligence.
Like goldfish.
“So, the two of you lost everything in a poker game including the clothes on your back, and now we have to go kill poor animals around a crappy little village in the middle of nowhere?” she demanded.
“Well, yeah,” Magna replied. “You don’t expect Yami to clean up his own messes, do you?”
The rebuttal was so stupid, Sunset couldn’t bring herself to speak for several seconds thanks to being paralyzed from the idiocy of it all.
Apparently taking that as her conceding defeat, Magna stood up. “So, go get your gear and meet me out back. We usually do teams of three, but since Asta has no magic and Noelle can’t control hers, I’ll need an extra person to fly one of them there. And hurry up, if we move fast enough, we can be back before nightfall,” he told her as he headed for an exit before Sunset could give a proper rebuttal.
“Well, I don’t care if it’s stupid!” Asta declared. “I’M FINALLY GOING ON A MISSION! YEEEEAH!”
“Why is he sending me?” Noelle asked. “I can’t control my magic. At best I’ll be a burden, and at worse, an even bigger problem than some stupid boar.”
I have to fly...on a broom? she asked herself hesitantly.
With that in mind, she slowly made her way to the stairs and up several flights until they were in her room. As soon as she shut the door, the bird hiding in the back of her robe’s hood fluttered out and landed on her bed. “Hmm, this place is a bit better than I was expecting. At least twice as big as Asta’s room,” Secre told her.
Sunset ignored the miracle of a talking bird to change the clothes covering her top half to her light green dress before she walked over to her writing desk, where two books were waiting for her. The first was the empty grimoire that technically didn’t even have an owner, and the second was something far more troubling: the journal that linked her to Equestria. Every time she saw the damn thing, a voice inside Sunset told her to burn it. Celestia was part of her old life, she didn’t need the nag anymore.
Unfortunately, there was also another voice that said Celestia deserved an answer to the question the wrote two years ago. Sunset owed her that much at least, didn’t she?
But...what would happen if she wrote back?
Did Sunset even want her to write back?
It would probably be a lot of lectures and demands for her to come home at once, despite the fact that Sunset didn’t think that was even possible.
Not that Celestia ever cared about little things like that. “Make friends Sunset. Kiss my plot Sunset. Train the pony I REALLY care about Sunset, then get lost when you find out that all I ever saw you as was a disposable minion,” the Celestia in her mind said. “What was that? You think I’m sad about you dying? I’m a thousand years old, you idiot! Ponies die around me all the time! Why in the hell do you think something as mundane as that makes you special?”
“Sunset, are you listening to me?”
A voice so close to her ears made Sunset let out a tiny scream and turn around to see Secre flapping her wings to float right in Sunset’s face. When she recovered, Sunset glared at the bird. “Don’t do that! Couldn’t you see that I was having a moment?” the girl demanded.
Not seeming to even care, Secre began speaking again. “Listen, the place where you’re going, Saussy Village, it’s one of the hiding places for a magic stone,” Secre told her. “We can collect it while you’re there.”
Sunset frowned at the information. “I thought you said that those stones were given out to noble houses and junk five-hundred years ago.”
“And others were hidden, or I retrieved them after the noble house fell in the past five hundred years and moved them somewhere safe,” Secre explained. “It wasn’t as if I could find new protectors at the time. So I hid one in the roof of a church in a middle of nowhere town. Now get your book and let’s get going.”
Groaning at being ordered around, Sunset reached behind her without even bothering to look and grabbed the tome that radiated magic before shoving it in the book case that she had moved on her belt so it hung behind her butt rather than on the side. It took a bit more effort than last time, but she got it in and headed downstairs as fast as she could.
Once she got out back, Sunset found herself frowning at the monstrosity of a broom that Magna was standing next to. The thing was at least twice as long as a regular broom and ten times as thick, big enough to have an actual saddle on the back of it. While there were bristles coming out the back, technically making it a broom, the rest of it was a collection of giant rib bones forming the bottom half with a large piece of curved painted wood placed over what Sunset guessed had been the animal’s backbone to provide a seat, as a giant bull’s skull wearing glasses with hand grips on the horns stuck out in front as some sort of steering apparatus. Then, to top it all off, a little flagpole was sticking out the back, holding a flag with the Black Bull’s emblem on it.
“So, what do you all think of my Crazy Cyclone?” Magna declared proudly before pointing to the traditional broom Noelle was holding. “It’s way better than some run of the mill broom like that!”
Noelle growled as she gripped the broom in her hands even tighter.
“SO COOL!” Asta told him as Sunset could practically see stars sparkling in his eyes.
Sunset had a different opinion. “If you want to fly around on the mutilated corpse of a dead animal,” she said before opening her hand so Noelle could give her the broom. “Are you going to be okay?”
“Just...don’t crash,” she asked the other girl softly before handing Sunset the flying instrument.
Stopping herself from gulping, Sunset let her mana flow through the object, then stepped over it to get on. Please let this be a short flight, she begged as Magna lifted himself up into the sky.
A second later, Sunset noticed Noelle hadn’t moved from her spot. The girl was giving her a cautious look as she fixed her eyes on how Sunset was sitting. “Isn’t that uncomfortable?”
“Well, not to start things off, but...give it fifteen minutes and yeah,” Sunset admitted. “These things really work their way into your pussy.”
Noelle’s face reddened as her mouth dropped. “Y-You don’t have to put it like that!” she exclaimed.
After rolling her eyes, Sunset looked back to Noelle. “Not like there’s anyone else here but us.”
“And you should show more tact in front of royalty!” Noelle went on before she walked up to the broom. “The proper way for a lady to sit on one of these is like this.”
Sunset blinked as Noelle turned around to put her butt up against the stick before sitting down, using her arms to steady herself as her legs hung off one end and the back end of her body, the other. “Can’t believe I’m actually having to put some of those old froofy classes that taught me how to act like a proper lady to work. Now, there’s a bit of a trick to it so you don’t go falling off the broom and getting us both killed. You need to let most of your rear hang off behind you and sit right where your legs and your butt meet. Little more, maybe.”
Half an hour later, Sunset was glad for the coaching from Noelle. While the new position made her legs a little sore, it was ten times better than what she knew her crotch would have felt like after a half-an-hour ride on a broom. However, when they came in sight of what had to be the village, Magna pulled back on his monstrosity of a broom until he wasn’t moving at all, making Sunset fly past him until she adjusted her speed to near zero and let him catch up to her. “What is it?” she asked before looking down at the village.
What little she could see of it, at any rate. Saussy Village itself was built on a small mesa that stood just a little taller than the trees surrounding it. The only access to the vertically enhanced village was a pair of inclined bridges that started a good distance away from the small town to keep their incline at a minimum before joining into one right before hitting the landmass. The place had a defensive wall around it, but other than the opening on the western side, Sunset couldn’t see anything thanks to a dense fog that filled the space inside the protective barrier to make a dome.
An actual dome that looked in no way natural.
“They got some pretty weird weather around here, huh?” Asta commented.
Sunset had to fight to keep on the broom after hearing her brother’s question. “Okay, I’m going to take a guess and say that isn’t normal?” she asked the delinquent while keeping an eye on the town.
Magna frowned. “No, it’s not,” he said with a worried tone. “And there isn’t anyone in town close to powerful enough to make magic like that.”
From her space on the back of her broom, Noelle shifted around. “Is the village under attack?”
“That doesn’t make any sense!” Magna told them. “Saussy is a poor village. Clover needed it for an operating base during some big war about fifty years ago with a tribe of savages from the special magic region and they left those defenses in place. Even if it was easy pickings, which it isn’t, it’s not worth the trouble of raiding.”
Her curiosity peaked, Sunset looked back over to Magna. “Why isn’t it easy? Last I checked, the Forsaken Realm doesn’t have much in the way of people to defend it.”
Magna snorted. “The village chief is a failed magic knight candidate that specializes in metal magic that he shapes into weapons and sends flying through the air,” he said. “Back when I first got my grimoire, I got a big head and rode around the Forsaken Realm, thinking I could take over a village or two. I thought I’d make Saussy Village my base of operations since it already had a wall protecting it and that stone bridge to act as a choke point. But old man Seihi whipped my butt good...literally.”
“You don’t have to sound happy about that, you know,” Sunset pointed out.
It seemed that the story wasn’t finished, and Magna went on. “I came back again and again, hoping to beat him. But I ended up being sent packing every time. Of course by then, I had given up on my plans for world domination and was just trying to beat the old man,” he said. “However, after a few months had passed, old Seihi told me to grow up and do something with my life before pointing me to the capital and telling me to go join the Magic Knights.”
With the story over, Sunset focused her senses on the fog and did her best to examine it. “It’s not just a concentration of water mana. Looks like there’s some kind of misdirection enchantment thrown in. If we go flying into that stuff, we’ll probably crash into a building before we even notice it,” she said before finding something noticeably different than anywhere else in the village. “There’s also a large concentration of mana in the center of the village and from the lack of any differing magical signatures anywhere else, I’d say it’s probably the townspeople.”
“No lookouts?” Magna asked.
Sunset shook her head. “And from the look of things, that spell will confuse the directional senses of anyone inside it, except maybe the caster. There may be something to alter sounds as well, so calling for someone you just lost sight of would also be useless, but I’d have to get closer to be sure.”
After thinking about things for a moment, Magna looked back at his passenger. “Hey Asta, can your sword cut through fog?”
“Oh come on Magna, swords can’t cut through fog,” Asta told him with a forced smile. “Everyone knows that.”
Noelle groaned and rubbed her head. “You can if it’s magic, moron! At the very least, it will dispel the confusion enchantment.”
“We’ll land at the edge and deal with the fog, then head into the center of town to see what’s going on,” Magna told them.
While she thought it was a better idea to hold one of their people in reserve, maybe even Magna himself, Sunset decided to keep her mouth shut. They didn’t really have time to argue if people were in trouble.
Noelle kept to the back so nobody would see her rub the bottom of her butt after the two brooms were brought in for a landing. Having never ridden on a broom except for the one time where she crashed and almost got herself killed, the youngest Silva hadn’t built up a tolerance to getting a rod shoved up under her ass for nearly half an hour straight.
“Okay, grimoires out,” Magna ordered. “Asta, you’re in front, I’ll back you up. Sunset, you can cover our backs and Noelle...uh…”
“Useless,” her elder sister’s voice echoed in the royal’s mind.
Noelle reached up to rub her arm as she looked at the fog, the type of magic Nebra used. “Just try not to get in the way, right?”
“Help us by keeping an eye out,” Sunset said helpfully as she undid the safety strap on her book’s covering. “And try to look intimidating. Nobody aside from us actually knows about your magic, so you could always try bluffing our way through this.”
The very possibility that she might help her friends made Noelle smile a little. But, it was a short lived expression when she noticed there was something very wrong with the book that Sunset was pulling out of her pack. Like the fact that it was a book instead of a grimoire. “Uh...Sunny, what’s that?” she asked while pointing at the book that had the same mark on the cover that Sunset had on her butt.
Sunset blinked at the question before bringing her book around and blinking. “Oh...okay, um...crap. I grabbed the wrong book.”
“You didn’t bring your grimoire?” Asta asked in surprised confusion.
“How in the hell can you forget your grimoire?” Magna demanded as quietly as he could. “That’s like-I didn’t even think that level of stupid was possible! Congrats Rasta, you are no longer the dumb one in your family.”
Sunset’s eye twitched as she looked down at the book, then slid it back down into the container that was meant for a grimoire. “Oh, shut up and get going. It’ll be fine.”
“Considering the fact that you just went from our heaviest hitter to slightly above Noelle in terms of usefulness?” Magna questioned before shaking his head. “No, I don’t think it’s going to be fine, not by a long shot!”
The jab at Noelle made the girl wince. “You’re even more worthless than a commoner without a grimoire,” the phantom voice of her eldest brother said.
Sunset frowned back at Magna. “I can still manipulate mana and enhance myself. That’ll have to do,” she said before crossing her arms. “Now get moving, or do you want the girl without the grimoire to lead us into the big scary bit of fog?”
After hearing the taunt, Magna snarled and turned around to tell Asta to get moving as Noelle moved in close to Sunset. “Um, just asking, but...how did you manage to mix that thing up with your grimoire? And what is it, anyway?” Weren’t skilled mages supposed to be able to sense the location of their grimoires?
“My old journal from when I...lived somewhere else. They’re the same size, weight, and both give off a magical aura,” Sunset told her. “I...might have been in a hurry and a little distracted when I was getting changed for the mission and grabbed this book by mistake.”
Noelle looked back down at the book pack hanging over Sunset’s butt for a few seconds as Asta came to the edge of the fog. This is bad, she told herself. Based on the time she had tried to help Noelle with her magic just earlier today after getting some food for her bird, Sunny knew magic like the back of her hand. The girl’s grimoire was probably filled with spells despite her age, at least ten of them. But without it she was…
...still just as confident as she looked a minute ago when she still had her grimoire.
She even reached back to take Noelle’s hand and give it a little reassuring squeeze, forcing the other girl to smile. I wish I could be more like that, the royal told herself. Her confident mask was built off of looking down on other people, focusing on the fact that she was just born better than them. But it was just that, a mask. And one that knocked other people down.
When the reality of it was…
“You’re worthless.”
“A shame to our family.”
“Absolute disgrace.”
Noelle hung her head low as she took out her useless grimoire to open it and let it float in front of her, wrapped in a blue glow. A blank page was all that greeted her.
Up ahead, Asta walked into the fog and swung his sword twice. The magic in the air began to quickly dispel, taking the mist with it a few seconds later when it didn’t have any magic to keep it in effect. Foot by foot, he cut his way into the village, hacking at the fog that couldn’t do anything to stop him. As he did, Magna guided him through the village, telling the group to head to the right or left after Asta knocked away enough of the mist that a building or public barn for storing goods could be seen.
As they moved closer, Noelle got a sense of what Sunset had said earlier about there being a powerful magical presence in the town. There were four of them in all, with one far stronger than the others. Nowhere near someone like Yami, but easily comparable to some of the people she had seen at the exam before Nozel came to take her away.
After making one last swing of his sword, Asta banished the mist in front of them to reveal a large area that had to be the village common area, right in the center of town where the church stood not too far off. Over fifty people, the entire population of the village from the look of things, stood kneeling on the ground, some of them praying with tears in their eyes as others hugged children who couldn’t have been more than nine years old. There was barely any commotion as the magic knight team made their entrance.
The inborn magic sense that told Noelle to look up showed her why. A mass of floating icicles, each one the size of a lance or bigger, hung over the crowd, slightly shaking as they were positioned to skewer each and every person below them.
Noelle’s eyes widened when she realized what was going on. “Oh my God. Those aren’t hostages, this is an execution.”
Right as she spoke, a voice cut through the air, seemingly uncaring. “Kill them.”
“Yeah, that’s not happening,” Sunset said before she raised a hand at the mass of ice. A very impressive burst of raw fire magic shot out of her hand and covered the visible sky for several seconds, turning the ice that was hanging there into nothing but water that fell harmlessly on the crowd, doing about as much damage as cold water could hope to.
The bust of flame also disrupted a bit of the mist, clearing out a little more of the area and revealing four mages standing in front of the door to a large church that stood at the center of town, while the one that had to be the leader sat on the bottom of the steps. Three of them were in blue robes with their hoods up, which rendered them faceless. But the one in charge had his head exposed and wore clothes that looked slightly different than the rest.
The man who just ordered fifty innocent people to die was a slender man with slanted eyes and a large chin. There was a large scar at the top-left of his head that was the start of a small gash which led to the bottom right of his face. Honestly, seeing him just sitting there and looking at a pocket watch, he didn’t fit the image Noelle had in her head of a mass murdering psychopath that could so casually call for the death of children and their families.
While the rest of the group focused on the enemy mages, Magna ran over to one of the children at the center of the mass of people. He was a blonde child of maybe twelve in a ratty vest. “Nick. What’s going on? Where’s the old man?” he demanded.
Nick looked up at the delinquent with tears in his eyes. “Magna! They...they killed grandpa!”
Noticing something behind the child, Noelle spotted the corpse of an old man with a small gray mustache and hair of matching color laying there. A large splotch of blood coloring the shirt underneath his vest and an even bigger pool of blood underneath him. If she had to guess, he had been stabbed in the back.
“No,” Magna said before he got down to sake the stiff corpse. “No, you...you can’t be dead old man!”
“He was just trying to protect us!” one of the villagers cried out.
“T-They’re here, just like you said, Grandpa. The Magic Knights came to save us,” Nick told his dead grandfather between the sobs.
Asta looked over to the four mages and glared. “You just went and killed this man?” he demanded. “WHY?”
Sunny just stared at the corpse with wide eyes, the sight of it seemingly transfixing her as the people leaned in around it as if to give thanks to the man for trying to help.
Across the way, the man responsible looked up from his pocket watch and let out a distasteful snort. “You’ve thrown off my schedule,” he told them before looking back up. “I’m going to have to allocate time so that you’ll have to suffer for it. Ten seconds from now, everyone here will die.”
The man raised his book and the pages turned on their own before he began whispering the incantation too low for anyone to hear the title of the spell. A large ice projectile, the size of a small room, formed with a point at the end that would burst through a person’s whole body went flying at the villagers a moment later.
“I got it!” Asta declared before he ran forward and leapt into the air, cutting the thing in half despite his sword being much too small to fit through even a quarter of the ice. As soon as his sword touched it, all movement stopped and the two pieces fell to the side to dissipate before they even hit the ground. When Asta did, he glared at the mage. “You’re not doing anything to these people!”
Next to Noelle, Sunset’s eye twitched. “Next time, keep charging ahead and take out the leader when they’re just standing there like idiots,” she grumbled much too low for Asta to hear before she looked up at the little place of worship. “Do they have to be standing right in front of the one place I can’t burn down?”
“You guys aren’t Diamond Kingdom, and you’re too well dressed for a bunch of savages from The Zone,” Magna muttered before pointing a finger at the lot of them. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I hadn’t heard any of the Magic Knights were going to be in the area,” the middle goon mumbled.
“Maybe they’re here unofficially,” the one on the left surmised.
“And how did they manage to get through the mist barrier and into the village?” the guy on the right asked.
Sunset frowned at the three. “Did two of those idiots just confess to having knowledge of our troop placement?” she whispered to Noelle.
Despite the tense situation, Noelle nodded. She had picked up on that too. But, it wasn’t as if magic knights were all that quiet about their movements.
The leader of the group let out a sigh. “The Black Bulls, the most inept and hated of all the magic knight squads,” he said. “Dealing with riff raff like you shouldn’t take too long. But I’ll make you pay for wasting the five minutes it will take to deal with you. Then, we can find what we came for.”
Sunset frowned and her cute little pet bird made its way out from the girl’s hood to stand on her shoulder. “What did he just say?” she mumbled. “That’s a coincidence, right? This is all one really stupid mix of bad timing.”
“YOU’RE NOT KILLING ANYONE!” Asta yelled as he charged forward now that they were all on guard again.
The mage on the right raised his hand. “Mist Magic: Illusionary Mist,” he said before Asta was swallowed by a fog. “Be lost forever, fool.”
“YOU’RE THIRTY FEET AWAY, MORONS!” Asta yelled before the mist around him disappeared and he took a step to steady himself from having to swing his giant sword at a run. Despite being just a few steps away from the boss mage, he stopped and raised his sword. “NOW, TELL ME WHY YOU’RE TRYING TO KILL THESE PEOPLE!”
The mage in charge sighed and took a look at his nails. “If you absolutely must know, I’m just trying to rid the world of useless trash that serves no purpose.”
Sunset frowned. “But that wasn’t what he said, oh wait, Asta asked the wrong question,” she mumbled before stepping forward. “That’s it? That’s why you’re here? You just want to kill people you’ve never even met before today?”
“No,” the mage replied. “I’m here to retrieve a particularly important magical item. The death of these villagers is just a service I’m providing for the world. Certainly, as a magic knight, you must agree that people with such low magic power are nothing but a waste of your time?”
The question made Sunset’s eyes widen and she took a step back, as if struck by some invisible force. As she just stood there with her mouth agape, Noelle took a step closer to her. “Uh...Sunny?”
“SHOWS WHAT YOU KNOW!” Asta yelled. “I may be a magic knight, but I don’t have a drop of magic power in me. And my sister, she may be the most powerful mage I know, but she has never looked down on me, or anyone else because of our lack of magical ability! I’d call you a monster, but the last one I met didn’t try to justify his actions! SO YOU’RE NOTHING BUT A PATHETIC LOSER WHO CAN’T EVEN DO THAT RIGHT!”
The head mage of the group sighed before he raised his hand. “So you complain about my reasoning after asking to hear it? Children today have no consistency,” he said before whispering something before a dozen little piercing icicles appeared in front of his raised palm.
Asta took a defensive stance. “YOU THINK THAT’S GOING TO GET BY ME?”
One of the mages in the back raised his hand as well and cast out another layer of fog that swirled around the people and out of Asta’s striking range. The sound of ice crystalizing could be heard all around and Noelle looked up to see dozens of ice shards manifesting above them from all the angles.
Which seemed to snap Sunset out of her daze. “Omnidirectional attack from multiple points? We’re not in a mana zone so how-” she grit her teeth before the fire mana flared around her. “Crap! That idiot is using the mist to channel his attack and launch it from all around us!”
“Ice and Mist Compound Spell: Endless Ice Cage!”
“Oh balls! I was hoping Shorty would keep them talking longer to let my mana build back up some more!” Magna said before he raised his grimoire. “Red, how many sides can you cover?”
Sunset spread her legs out to brace herself. “All of them except the one behind me. But this is a creation spell. I can blunt the attacks and make them non-lethal, but they’ll still be big enough to cause real damage. Take out the guy on the top right! He’s the one throwing the mist!”
“Got it! Flame Magic: Scatter Shot!” Magna cried out before throwing out a hand as if pitching a ball that suddenly split into dozens of attacks.
The ice shards flew from all around before Sunset threw out her arms and a curving wall of flames encompassed everything but the side facing the four enemy mages. The hail of ice made it through the defense, but there was a water trail behind each one and instead of jagged daggers, the shards had taken on an appearance more akin to a bad hailstorm. People cried out as they were struck, but as the adults covered the children and the back of their heads while cowering on the ground, it didn’t look like anyone was actually killed.
Meanwhile, Asta deflected the spread of ice missiles headed towards him with the side of his sword, actually sending them back at the caster an instant before Magna’s attack followed suit. The first attack simply dissolved in the air when the mage cast his spell before the seconds was deflected by a bunch of ice forming to block his attack and causing it to go off prematurely.
The villagers screamed as the assault continued, and Noelle looked around at the scene before hearing something from behind her. “Damnit, I could block all of this with a simple shield spell. It would be easy! Then I’d get the breather I need to focus.”
She turned to look at Sunset as she held up the wall of fire and blinked at what she saw. The wide eyes and trembling hands Noelle has seen in the mirror too many times to count. Despite the stalemate, Sunset actually looked afraid for some reason.
Noelle took a step back and looked back at the man Asta and Magna were fighting against, with Asta creating a shield with his sword and Magna trying to get a fireball through their defenses. She thought about blasting him, but...if it turned and hit one of them, especially Asta, their defense would crumble.
“Tell you what?” the boss called out as the battle continued, him seemingly uncaring about the two magic knights attacking him. “I’ve got a schedule to keep, and waiting until the lot of you run out of mana will take too long. So I’ll make you a deal. Leave now, and I’ll let you all live.”
While Asta and Magna shouted their defiance and Sunset just kept her cool, Noelle...found herself considering the offer. What’s wrong with me? she asked herself. Even though I have more magic power than anyone here. Even though I actually brought my grimoire I can’t...I’m not...I...I need to get out of here! I’m royalty, I CAN'T DIE IN SOME BACKWATER VILLAGE!
Noelle heard a child cry out behind her, and she looked to see what had to be the girls’s mother slump over, struck in the head by an ice block as big as her fist. “Mommy! Mommy wake up!” the little girl cried as she shook her unconscious mother.
Then, the child turned towards Noelle and ran up to her. “Ms Magic Knight, help!” she said before grabbing Noelle’s dress and trying to pull her along towards the injured woman. “Please, help us!”
With the child who couldn’t have been more than ten grabbing her dress as she clutched a doll in her arm, Noelle found herself unable to move. This little girl is looking me in the eye and begging for help, Noelle told herself. I...I...I’m royalty. I...I’m supposed to protect these people. That was the whole reason royals had such impressive amounts of mana. Not just to rule over the people, but give them shelter when they needed it as well.
Looking down at the child, Noelle steadied her frayed nerves. She didn’t know what she could do, but...I CAN’T JUST RUN AWAY!
Noelle felt a surge of mana within her before she turned to look at her grimoire a second before it lit up like nothing she had ever seen. However, despite the bright light, she could see words being inscribed on it in the arcane language that magic was written in. Despite it making no sense, she had a strange...understanding what it was trying to say. Is this a spell? My spell? Ohmygish, I GOT A SPELL!
Even though she couldn’t read the text beyond the title of it all, Noelle knew that what she had on the page was defensive magic. She quickly put it to use after crouching down to brace herself for whatever might come. “Water Creation Magic: Sea Dragon’s Cradle!”
Less than a foot inside Sunny’s fire wall, the water Noelle brought into existence swirled around the villagers, Asta, Magna, and Sunny to create a defensive barrier, like some kind of whirling sphere of water that churned at an extreme speed. The ice attacks struck it before being either broken apart or swept away.
Sunset turned around to look at the Silva in surprise. “Did you just pull a spell out of your butt in the middle of combat?” she asked in surprise.
“Do you have to put it like that?” Noelle demanded. How in the hell could she have ended up with such a vulgar friend?
“Yes, yes I do. It makes me feel better about how you people can just make leaps ahead with your magic like this,” Sunny deadpanned before smiling. “So, I take it you don’t feel so useless anymore.”
Noelle snorted and turned away from the redhead. “I’m not useless, I’m royalty!”
“Okay Princess, since you’re actually doing something to earn that title, looks like I’m going to have to show you up a bit to stroke my own ego,” Sunset said before she crouched down a little bit. The mana around her condensed to form a tight layer of power that looked almost paper thin. “Asta, I’ll take the boss, you come in after and break through their defenses so Magna can take down the flunkies in one shot.”
Magna looked back at the redhead. “Hey! I’m your superior officer, here, I give the-” was as far as he got before the ground beneath Sunset seemed to explode. The girl rocketed past him, a blazing trail of mana flowing out behind her until it hit the wall of water.
Outside the cradle, Sunset’s trajectory took her right above the ice mage, whose eyes widened. “How can you move that fast with your grimoire still in its case?”
“I ate a lot of vegetables while growing up,” Sunset replied before she threw a punch that seemed to explode on impact, knocking the mage into the stairs below and breaking them as it burned his robe off to darken the skin beneath. Right as she made contact, Asta charged out of the defensive field with Magna not far behind.
“Master Grice!” the three stooges cried out.
However, things didn’t quite go as planned. When Magna fired off his attack to strike the three goons standing up on the stairs, they were so stunned that they didn’t even put up a defense with the multiple fireballs struck them square in the chest to become some kind of binding magic that wrapped itself around their arms and held them down.
And just like that, it was over.
“YOU COULD HAVE TAKEN HIM OUT JUST LIKE THAT THIS WHOLE DAMN TIME?”
Sunset winced at Magna’s question as she sat on the ruined steps of the big church with the blue roof and looked past him and towards the villagers. None of them were dead, thank God, but several were nursing horrible-looking bruises. “Not while I was keeping those flames up,” she half-lied as the woman who had been knocked out, whose little girl ran to Noelle for help, picked herself up and rubbed her head. “And if I dropped them...people would have died. And using a long range attack spell with raw mana would have made any hit it caused run wild after it connected. Anything big enough to make it through their defenses would have burned down the church they were standing behind. I needed a second to concentrate my mana.”
“I could have intercepted...well,” he sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “Guess I shouldn’t have underestimated you so, this one’s on me.”
Sunset pulled her legs up onto herself as one of the elderly villagers stumbled while complaining about his back, where an ice ball had struck him. It only added to the mountain of guilt that was weighing on her back. “No...I could have stopped it if I had just…” The not-unicorn stopped herself from talking and sighed. A simple shield spell, that’s it. I could have thrown up one of those with enough mana to hold for a few seconds and got my mana skin working just fine.
But she didn’t because...she wanted to hide...and that meant people got hurt.
Because she was too selfish not to stop it.
“Well, I better make sure their boss is all cozy, the knights back at the capital will have a few questions for this guy. But I want to have a word with him first,” Magna told her before walking off.
Right after he left, Sunset felt an extra weight in the back of her cloak. “I got the stone, it was right where I left it,” Secre told her. “We need to find out if this Grice character knew anything about it. And if he did, how he knew it was here.”
Sunset didn’t move.
With the only person around who knew anything about her true origins nearby, Sunset couldn’t stop herself from talking about what was on her mind. “Hey Secre...do you think I’m selfish?” she asked softly.
“...uh oh,” the bird mumbled.
Sunset picked her head up and frowned, despite the fact the bird had no way to see what she was doing, hiding in her cloak like she was. “What do you mean, uh oh?” the not-unicorn asked.
“I’ve seen hundreds of conversations like this over the course of my life,” Secre said. “And it never ends well for anyone involved. If I say you’re selfish, you’ll argue and try to prove you aren’t, but if I say you are, you’ll start to think of all the times you did something for yourself instead of giving your food away to feed the hungry orphans sitting across the table to prove that you were selfish. Nothing I say will help you decide either way so...I’m just gonna say...you’re fifteen, and leave it at that.”
The bird’s little speech didn’t help her any. Because… “Actually, I’m more like twenty. When I went through the mirror and came here, my body regressed in age until I was on the eve of what this species considered adulthood. But I’m still just as old in my head as I always was.”
“And once reaching some magical age, would you just have everything figured out, and all the secrets of the universe solved?” Secre asked.
Sunset sunk in on herself a little more. “Well...no,” she said. “But that’s what Celestia...when she kicked me out, she said it was because I was selfish. And after today...I think I agree with her. I could have stopped all of this from happening. And it would have been easy. But...because I didn’t have that grimoire that I didn’t even need, I let people get hurt. All so I could hide that I’m different.”
“And what do you think would have happened if you had shown everyone your magic is different than the baseline for the rest of the world?” Secre demanded harshly. “Do you think people would have just ignored it? No! Noelle would have gone to her brother, or even the Clover Kingdom’s Parliament. You would have been locked up and dissected, your magic examined in every possible way. That can’t be allowed to happen! You have a purpose you must fulfill!”
The bird made Sunset grit her teeth. “Even if people have to die because of it?”
“One village in the middle of nowhere cannot compare with a whole kingdom,” Secre said. “It’s a sad fact of life, but it’s true. Without its proper leader, Clover will collapse in just a few short years. You’re worried about fifty people? Try five hundred, because that’s how many will die from riots and bandits every night if this nation crumbles.”
Tired of talking to the bird, Sunset stood up and reached behind her to grab the gem in the back of her hood and pull it out. It was a small thing, barely bigger than one of her fingers and red in color, with an arcane marking in the center. A gem of that size would have been laughed at back in Equestria, and the cut would have had it thrown out.
Where they really here for this...piece of garbage? Sunset asked herself ass he examined it.
She could sense something from within the gem.
Something dark and menacing.
Just what the hell is this thing? she asked herself. It felt nothing like the magic she had felt since coming to the Clover Kingdom. And just about as opposite of Equestrian magic as it could be. Just touching it made Sunset start to feel sick.
So, she quickly put it away.
After pocketing the thing, Sunset walked over to where Magna was kicking the leader of the little gang awake as he lay up against the wall of a barn while Noelle and Asta watched. With his robe burned off, the man sat with his black, skin-tight undershirt that even covered his neck laid bare. “Hey there bastard. My boss is going to want to have a few words with you after we haul your sorry butt to the capital. Then, you’re going to spend the rest of your life making up for what you and your little goon squad did here today,” he told Grice while the man sat wrapped in flames. “But before that, the Magic Knights are going to pull every bit of information from your brains. We’ll find out why you were here, who you’re working for, everything!”
“I think not,” Grice said. “The end times are upon us.” Right as the mage finished speaking his little phrase, a glow began to emit from his chest despite his magic being restrained and Magna holding onto his grimoire. “Ice burial.”
Sunset felt a buildup of magic power and could almost see something inside the man’s chest that shouldn’t belong begin to glow. “What the hell?”
“He’s got a magic item inside of him?” Magna questioned.
There was a powerful surge of mana before the leader and his three men were consumed by four separate ice crystals that enveloped them and quickly shattered, along with the bodies inside. A second later, the grimoires the four men had held also broke apart and turned to nothing.
How is something like that even possible? Sunset thought as she focused on the logical problem in front of her. It helped her ignore the four deaths she had just witnessed. Everything she knew about biology said that putting a forgien object inside of a living body caused some serious problems. If humans were anything like ponies, the guy shouldn’t have even been able to walk because of the immune response!
“What was that guy thinking?” Asta demanded through gritted teeth. “Life isn’t something you just throw away!”
Sunset took a deep breath to help keep it together. “Well...now we know he had a boss, and one with some serious resources.”
After walking up to the redhead, Noelle looked over to her. “What makes you say that?” she asked.
“These guys were surprised to see magic knights here, which means they thought they knew where we all were, or even where we’d be. On top of which, putting something inside a human body and leaving it there? I don’t know any magic that can do that. Accomplishing it through normal means would have needed extremely advanced surgical skills, and that’s not even going into how much pain it might have caused. All of which takes a lot of resources,” Sunset surmised. “These weren’t just some random killers on a murder spree.”
Magna rubbed his chin. “Well, Saussy Village is pretty defensible, but there’s not much else that’s worth anything here. They could have been after the village itself,” he told them. “Ah well, we can report this and let the higher ups figure out what to do about it. Right now, I have to go bury the closest thing I ever had to a real father. And, I’ll need to come back tomorrow to handle the boars. No need for you guys to trouble yourselves.”
It was eight o’clock by the time Sunset flew Noelle back to the Black Bulls HQ. The four of them gave their report to Yami as he lounged on a cushioned chair in the entry room. While the man listened, he smoked on one of those awful cigarette things that were rumored to cause magical impotency. Still, each one of them were allowed to give their take on the situation, with Noelle figuring out something on her own with all of the other facts Magna and Sunny had pointed out.
“He might have been a noble, or at least connected to one in some way,” she told the large foreigner. “That pocket watch he had didn’t look cheap either. I never owned one myself, but I saw one that my uncle had when he was showing it off. Because they’re so complicated to make, you have to go to specific people to get repairs. So, there should be a maker's mark on it somewhere to identify the craftsman behind it and that guy had a pretty identifiable scar, so the man behind the watch should recognize his description. That might lead us to an acquaintance or two.”
Yami took a drag on his cigarette and looked over to the two Black Bulls who were writing everything down. Finral had his head on top of the notepad, but Vanessa gave them all a sympathetic look.
“Anything else?” the captain asked.
Sunset rubbed her left arm. “Look, I know we don’t have any proof, but it’s pretty obvious that those guys were there for something specific,” she said hesitantly. “The more I go over it in my head, the only reason I can think of is that they would have killed themselves if they were just part of a larger group that couldn’t risk getting caught.”
“And that’s about it, Yami, sir,” Magna told him.
“So, a group of mages on par with a team of magic knights busted up the town for some reason we don’t quite know and killed old Seihi, huh?” he asked. Then, Yami threw his head back and laughed as Finral and Vanessa made their exit through one of the spatial mage’s portals.
What is he so happy about, somebody died! Noelle thought.
Asta cringed at the sight. “Sir...no disrespect, but is this really the time to be laughing?”
The question made Yami stop and look over to the boy. “Seems an especially good time, if you ask me.”
“HOW CAN YOU SAY SOMETHING LIKE THAT?” Sunset yelled at him.
Yami looked back at the girl and took a drag on his cigarette. “Okay girl, I’ll spell it out for you,” he said after breathing out the smoke. “Four powerful mages attacked a town and all they were able to do was kill one old man that bought everyone the time for you lot to show up and stop anyone from getting more than a nasty bruise when they were going to kill everyone there. Old man Seihi’s probably laughing in his grave at the lot of them right now. So you can either join him in celebrating no one else getting hurt, or obsess over the one guy who died before you could get there and stop it.”
“Yami’s right!” Magna agreed. “Seihi wouldn’t want us to be sad! He was a man of laughter! SO LET’S LAUGH FOR THE OLD GUY! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
Yeah, that’s pretty forced, Noelle told herself.
However, a minute later, the other three were forced to join in and it sounded like the worst acting troupe in the world.
When it was finally over and Yami told them they had done a good job, Magna raised his hand in the traditional salute of the Magic Knights, which of course, the commoners from the middle of nowhere took notice of. “Hey what’s that?” Asta asked while Sunset just inspected the signal with curiosity.
“Wait,” Noelle said as something occurred to her. “Asta, I can get. But weren’t you supposed to have been educated by a noble?”
Sunset looked back at her evenly. “You mean the person who wanted complete control of my life and never even taught me even the bare bones of history or social norms?”
“I’m surprised she taught you to wear clothes,” Yami mumbled.
Magna groaned. “How do the two of you not know something this basic?”
“I just got done explaining it to Noelle, weren’t you listening?” Sunset demanded.
Still holding his hand up, Magna moved it out without changing the hand sign. “The Magic Knight’s salue is three fingers held over the heart, each representing a leaf of the clover. You do it to show respect to your superiors and fellow officers.”
A spatial portal opened back up, with Finral and Vanessa coming back into the common area. “We dropped off the report. They’ll be sending an investigation team over to the village within the hour.”
“Okay, so...next order of business. Tomorrow’s payday,” Yami told them. “But, I don’t want to get up early with that being our day off and all. So, I’ll hand out the cash now. And you only get paid once a month, so don’t blow it all in one place, got it?”
It was close to the middle of the night as Sunset made her way into the woods surrounding the Bull’s hideout. After some looking, she managed to locate the area with all the craters created by Noelle’s target practice and sat up against the tree her friend had never been able to hit. Then, she looked down at the open journal in one of her hands as the flame she created hovered above it, allowing Sunset to read the last three things Princess Celestia had written.
With half of her day filled with chores that let her mind wander, and seeing another person die in front of her, Sunset’s thoughts came back to something she was finding it harder and harder to ignore. What made things worse was that tomorrow, there would be nothing to occupy her mind. Vanessa had promised to take her into one of the towns surrounding the castle and help Sunset pick out a new outfit. Trying on clothes was not distracting at all.
Which meant she didn’t want the thing in the back of her mind that had been eating at Sunset since Lilly died to be given her full attention.
So, she looked back down at the journal and sighed.
Sunset hated Celestia. The nag was a manipulative control freak that lied about everything under the sun just to make everyone love her because that was the way Equestria worked. After living for two years in a world where people had to depend on themselves, she could see the difference between that and a country where ponies brought problems like ‘who should eat a pie that’s made from ingredients produced by two different farms’ and other nonsense Sunset had heard in the Day Court.
There were certainly real problems that she had seen during the times Celestia had allowed Sunset to sit and listen, but so many ponies that were supposed to be adults came to the old nag, expecting her to practically change their diapers. They were little more than babies, crying for mommy’s attention.
But...Sunset knew that she owed Celestia...something.
It may have been years, but the old nag had been around for centuries. So unless she just decided to get rid of all the evidence that a pony could do without her just fine and threw away everything related to Sunset, the not-unicorn was willing to bet that her old journal might be around somewhere, collecting dust.
So, Sunset reached into her pack and took out an old quill and some ink that had been in her desk. Then, she began to pen a response. Dear Princess Celestia, Sunset began. I’m not dead.
She stopped and moved the quill over to keep the ink from dripping onto the paper. “Might as well make it good,” the girl mumbled before starting a new line.
I met some creatures that treated me like actual family. Which, I now see you aren’t and never were. I guess that was my bad, the stupid delusions of a filly who never got to know what a family was before I met you. So, I guess I can let you off the hook for never really loving me too.
Sunset stopped again. That wasn’t where she had been planning to go with the letter when she began. Ripping Celestia a new one would have felt better, but...Sunset supposed she needed to just get that out there.
But that doesn’t mean I forgive you for everything, or anything else beyond not getting rid of my own misconceptions, really. You lied to me, told me that you would help me fulfill my special destiny, then just treated me like a tool that you could throw away when it didn’t do things the way you said. After coming here and seeing how this place works without someone like you around, there is no doubt in my mind I could have been a better princess than you ever were after a bit of seasoning, she wrote.
It felt satisfying, but at the same time...hollow.
What the hell did it matter that she finally told Celestia off?
Sighing, Sunset read over the message again, there was something missing, but...she couldn’t think of anything else she wanted to say to the nag.
So, Sunset signed her name.
Which was when she remembered what was missing from the letter and added more ink to the quill. P.S. Tell Cadance I’m sorry I wasn’t a better teacher. Looking back, I think we would have been good friends.
Then, reading over the letter again, Sunset found she had one last thing to say. P.P.S. That’s called an apology, by the way. Maybe you should learn how to do it, so the next pony you turn into your tool doesn’t decide to replace you one day like I should have done.
After standing up and letting the ink dry while she walked a few steps, Sunset closed the book and stood up as it sent the message. There was a light sound that came from the journal, telling her that the letter had been received by its counterpart in another realm.
So, with nothing left to do, Sunset removed the protections from the book before she dropped the journal into the hole and set it on fire.