[V4C32] A Feeling You Can’t Get By Yourself
Translated by Jodas 4: Flying Through the SkyDuring the afternoon individual lesson hours after their strategy meeting, Tia walked alone through the gardens.
Tia cheerfully tweeted a song or two on days with good weather like this, but now her mouth was shut. Not because she was in poor spirits, but because she was uncharacteristically lost in thought.
(We’ve decided on an approach for the magic battle, but…)
Julius, Roswitha, and Sevil would be primarily responsible for attacking.
The inscription magic team would consist of Wren, Ella, Rukiye, Gerald, Finn, and Sophie — six people in all.
Rose, who could use defensive barriers, would be responsible for using those barriers to protect the inscription magic team.
Finally, Tia and Oliver would use their combined flight to draw attention, disperse the inscription magic, and move according to the situation.
For the most part, Tia would be focusing on keeping them in the air, so she wouldn’t be activating the inscription magic. Once they picked up a sheet of inscription magic, it would be Oliver who activated it.
Wren must have taken Tia’s mana emission problem into account when he made this plan.
(…I haven’t learned to do anything new.)
With the support of Oliver and the Magical Flying Device, she was now able to fly around to a certain degree.
However, that wasn’t enough for her.
(If I can’t zoom around through tiny gaps between trees like Frederik can, I’ll never beat him.)
He was the first person she called her ‘rival.’ She wanted to win. She didn’t want to fall short of him. It frustrated her.
Feelings she’d never felt before were slowly emerging from somewhere in her heart.
Tia did not yet know that these feelings were what promoted a creature’s growth.
(I wish there was something else I could learn how to do.)
Then, Tia’s ears caught the mewing of a small animal. A cat.
There was a cat with brown fur on the roots of a nearby tree. When Tia stared at it, the fur all over that cat stood on edge, and it darted up the trunk of the tree.
(Does that cat know that I’m a Monster?)
Or, it might just be skittish around people.
Tia absentmindedly walked closer to the tree, and the cat leaped almost straight up. It caught its claws on one of the tree’s branches, then fled higher up into the tree.
(Catch your claws on something, then boing right up….)
“Piyo!” She chirped, then Tia waddled as fast as she could towards the Management Office.
In a wide open space in front of the Third Spire: Water Bubble, Rukiye whittled away at a piece of wood.
This was the secret weapon Wren had asked her for — it was much too lame to deserve the title of ‘secret weapon’ but it was nonetheless something only Rukiye could accomplish.
A secret raises the value of a product. She got it now, Wren wasn’t an idiot.
He could be a bit of a brat, and he had his shortcomings, but he was good at finding the nature of things.
It frustrated Rukiye that she hadn’t realized the idea of shields being used the way he described in magic battles.
(… There’s a lot that I’m still lacking.)
These past few days have hammered that point home.
She was coming to realize that she was most likely being hardheaded and narrow-minded.
Even the whole thing about the ‘secret weapon.’ If she really was a skilled artisan, she should have been able to come up with that idea herself.
The best she could do at the moment was try to make other peoples’ ideas a reality, and even then she required Director Kappel’s advice.
Thus, while keeping her hands busy, she thought. Trying to come up with a new idea.
(If I engraved a magical formula into this trench and filled it with paint mixed with flakes of metal, would it have more mana resistance? But then, wouldn’t that prevent the inscription magic from activating? …It might be best if I experimented with it a bit more.)
As she started to puzzle out how to realize her little idea, she began to enjoy it even more with each new thought.
Rukiye unconsciously started to sing as she ran her file across a piece of cut wood.
“Winds of the grasslands, blow forever more. Following your shadow, blow forever more. Where is that white birch of yore? Where is that white birch of yore…?”
Rukiye grew up in the South of the Empire, near to the grassland nation of Torgai.
As a result, instruments unfamiliar to the Empire were often used, and songs of the grasslands were commonly heard.
Standing in a grass plain that continued as far as the eye could see, feeling the wind that smelled of grass and staring up at the sky. The far, distant sky.
She particularly liked the faint orange glow that hung around as the sky took on the color of night after the sun had long since set. It always reminded her of the embers softly smoldering in the hearth.
“Winds of the grasslands, blow forever more. Following your shadow, blow forever more. Where is that white birch of yore? Where is that white birch of yore?”
As she sang, her mood lifted more and more. She felt strangely good all of a sudden.
It was a joyful feeling that didn’t fit her at all. Yet, she didn’t hate it.
With her hand moving the file in rhythm, Rukiye sang. She felt good. Real good.
“O you who waits across the sands, scoop up some stars and toss them to the wind, and send them all the way to me.”
When she finished singing the last note, she noticed something.
Rukiye heard a voice holding on to the last note just a little bit longer than she had.
There was someone behind her. Rukiye felt a chill run down her spine as she slowly turned around…
“Piyopp!”
Standing there was a white-haired amber-eyed girl — Tia.
A drop of cold sweat ran down Rukiye’s face, and she asked with a faint voice.
“You, just now, were you singing?”
“Yep.”
With her usual childlike attitude, Tia nodded.
Right, that was Tia’s voice. It was Tia singing, but her voice sounded scarily like Rukiye’s own while she sang.
That was why Rukiye hadn’t noticed that Tia had started to sing along with her.
While she was singing, she just felt plain good. That was because Tia’s voice would support Rukiye through the parts she was shaky on, filling out the sound and leading her whenever she hesitated.
Rukiye didn’t like when other people joined in when she was singing. She understood that it was harsh of her to think that.
And yet, when Tia joined in with her song, she didn’t feel uncomfortable at all.
(…She made me feel as if I’d just suddenly got a lot better at singing…)
Since she grew up in a region where it was believed that a woman should be good at singing and had to learn at least one instrument, Rukiye had been through relatively strict training in both singing and instruments. So she knew very well what it took.
That was why she could tell just how terrifyingly advanced what Tia just did was.
She couldn’t help but stare at Tia, but Tia just made her same carefree “Pefupefu” noises as usual.
“Rukiye, I thought of something! A secret weapon I want you to make!”
“Eh? A… Secret weapon?”
“Piyo! Yes! Um, I’d like you to take the Magical Flying Device and…”
Tia leaned in and whispered into Rukiye’s ear.
When Rukiye heard what she had to say, she raised her eyebrows.
“…Can you use it?”
“I’ll practice!”
“After all, I wouldn’t exactly call you ‘nimble.’ The way you run is always so weird too…”
The secret weapon Tia suggested was one that demanded a certain amount of physical fitness.
To put it bluntly, even if Sevil suggested the same thing, she would have considered it ‘reckless.’
However, Tia chose that moment to take her boots and socks off. Then, barefoot, she lightly jumped up and down a couple times.
“Pefu. Yep, this feeling…”
Muttering to herself, Tia walked towards a nearby tree.
The trees around here were used as drying racks. In order to dry cloth and such things that have been painted or dyed, thin ropes have been stretched between the trees.
Tia climbed on of those trees, then set her feet on one of the ropes.
(…Is she about to try tightrope walking?)
The moment she thought that, Tia’s body fell over with tremendous speed.
She fell head over heels.
“Wai—!”
Rukiye was stunned, but just as Tia’s body hung straight upside down, it came to a stop.
She first assumed Tia had wrapped her knees around the rope. She was wrong.
Tia was holding onto the rope with her toes.
“Wh- Wh- Wha-….!?”
Rukiye was at a complete loss for words. Tia, upside down, waved her hand at her with a big smile.
“My toes are kinda strong!”
Tia’s toes let go all at once. She curled into a ball as she fell before ultimately landing feet-first on the ground.
Perhaps she had trained that move as some sort of performance? She was unnaturally good at singing too, so it was hard to throw out the possibility that she might have once been part of a circus troupe or something.
Once Rukiye’s nervous heart had settled down a bit, Tia waddled over and looked up at her.
“So I think I can do it! I can definitely do it!”
Even though the shock had worn off, her heart still beat far too loudly.
Her insides felt warmer, and a strange feeling started to emerge. Excitement.
(I want to make it.)
A preposterous secret weapon that would make anyone else ask ‘what good could that do?’
She wanted to make it by her own two hands. She wanted to watch Tia using it.
Rukiye balled her hands into a fist. Suddenly this warmth filled her whole body, and sweat began to run down her palms.
“Got it. You’re going to have to help me get the details right.”
“Yeah!”
Tia wiped the dirt off of the soles of her feet and nodded as she put her boots back on.
Looking down on her, Rukiye softly whispered to her.
“I don’t like it when people harmonize with my singing without asking, you know.”
“Piyoyo… I’m sorry.”
“But it put me in a good mood, so you can sing if you want to.”
“Piyo! Yippee!”
Once again, her heart was pounding.
That reverberating note that felt so good to sing wouldn’t leave her mind.
It was a pleasant feeling she would never be able to accomplish by herself. That was what she thought as Tia again sang alongside her.