Carrot and Stick: Practical Self-Defense Magic and When Not to Use It - Chapter XIV

Chapter XIV

Hmm, what do you think of the new title? The last one had... an off-vibe?

***

“Did you sleep well, sweetie?” her mom asked as she slumped into their kitchen.

“Mm,” Carrot replied, then she pressed her hand over her mouth to hide the biggest yawn ever. “Yeah, I guess. Feels like I didn’t sleep enough.”

Her mom smiled, then pressed the back of her hand against her forehead. “Are you sick?”

“No. Just didn’t sleep enough.”

“You know, it is winter break. You can sleep in a little. It won’t hurt.”

Carrot shrugged. “I know, but I have stuff I wanna do.  I should have slept more, but I was practicing magic all night. I almost have my Chains of Darkness spell perfected!”

“Carrot,” her mom said. “You know what I said about casting spells in the house.”

“I didn’t cast. I just... you know, studied it, and prepared to cast without casting. It’s an exercise!”

Her mom’s lips pursed a little, and she might have pouted a smidge as well. Carrot looked away, but then her mom gave her another hug and it was okay. “I’ll make you some breakfast. We have eggs! Farm fresh, and there’s a bit of orange juice left over.”

“Thanks mom!” Carrot replied.

She sat down, and soon enough there was food and juice, and she happily told her mom all about the improvements to her spell. It had taken hours but she finally had a design that she was pretty proud of. 

Compared to the earlier versions of her chains, her newer one was a little smaller, but the links were much more magically dense, and she’d incorporated a bit of a twisty knot pattern to the individual links. It was a design she’d found online with made the chains a bit more space-efficient and she hoped would make it easier for them to contract into each other and then whip out less. A certain amount of stiffness was good.

She had also seen a design that made the outer edges of the chain kind of sharp, with a point on the fattest part of each link. She wasn’t sure if that would be a nice idea, exactly but if she was fighting a particularly big monster, then maybe that could help restrain it?

The only problem was that her new chain design, being more dense, was also more magic-hungry. 

“I need to find a way to keep my mana topped up,” she said. “Maybe Mister Silas has a way to do that?”

“Hmm? I’m sure Mister Sylvy can help. Are you still seeing him?”

“Yup! I’ll be going to his place later.”

Her mom looked at her for a moment. “He hasn’t said anything weird, has he? Or asked you to do anything you don’t want?”

“Nope! If he did, I know what to do!” Carrot said.

Scream ‘stranger danger’ then cast Doom point blank.

“Good girl,” her mom said before attacking Carrot’s face with a damp towel to get some ketchup stains off. “Now, you have fun today, okay?”

“Okay!”

It wasn’t long that Carrot was bundled up for the wintery weather and back out the door. As she walked towards where Silas was staying, she kept her magical senses on alert, but didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary. So, she instead practiced her magic. “Chains of Darkness!” she cast under her breath. Her hands were together in the big pockets of her knit coat, so she summoned just a teeny chain inside of her pocket and then clinked through it, as if it was a set of rosary beads.

She had to pause her magical testing when she saw someone trying to cross the street with a baby carriage and helped them get it over the sidewalk hump, and again later when she discovered someone’s trash bin had been tipped over and the trash was all over the sidewalks. She found a public restroom to wash her hands after, but didn’t want them in her coat until then.

It was okay, the breaks gave her time to think on how to improve her spell! 

Spells were complicated, and so far she was doing a lot of work by overpowering the complicated bits with lots of willpower and by flooding the spell with more magic, but Silas was right, that wasn’t efficient or particularly good. Waste was bad! 

She skipped the last bit to Mister Silas’ place, then knocked. “Hi!” she called out. “I’m here!”

***

Silas opened the door, and sighed. “I can see that,” he said. Carrot was all wide-eyed and horrifically bushy-tailed on the other side of the door. He wondered, with some amount of horror, if she ever felt tired at all. 

“Good morning!” 

“Morning,” he said. “Let me put my shoes on.”

“Are we going around the city again?” Carrot asked. “Are you feeling better?”

“We are. I am,” he said rather shortly.

At least that last part was true. His magical circuitry was still uncomfortably itchy but when he cast Light this morning it had worked. He had cast it with the efficiency of a first year academy student looking over an upper year’s poorly written notes, but it had worked. 

He wasn’t combat-ready, but another couple of days and he would be. He reopened the door once his shoes were on, then he paused as he took in Carrot. She was different, somehow. It took him a moment of staring to realize. IT wasn’t the redness of her nose or the puffiness of her cheeks. It was the hat.

“The hat shrunk,” he said.

“It did?” Carrot asked, clueless as ever. She reached up, then gasped. “Oh my goshness, it did!” 

The hat was still ridiculously oversized, but it had lost about ten centremetres in radius. He wasn’t sure that it was any weaker, however. The hat had gained a few small flourishes and maybe some... lace on the inside, but it had definitely gotten smaller.

“Is this a bad thing?”

“No, it’s probably just adapting. Unless you lost a lot of magical energy for some reason?”

Carrot blinked, and then he could feel her. It was like a wave of warm air bursting off the girl, though nothing around them moved so much as a hair. It was all magical energy bleeding off of her like water shooting out of a fire hose.

“Mmmm, nope?” she said. “Doesn’t feel that way?”

He took a slow breath as the overwhelming feeling of Carrot faded at last. That was a lot. That was maybe Rank VII? No, he’d been around Knight Initiates before, had taken missions from them and had crossed by some. That amount of energy was straight up Rank VIII, at least. A full Wizard Knight’s worth of magical energy, and it had just been a casual test of her own power.

He shook his head. It wasn’t impossible, just rather improbable.

“Should we head out?” he asked instead.

Carrot grinned then bobbed her head in a nod.

They headed out, and it wasn’t long before Carrot was showing him the progress she had made with her chain spell. Ordinarily, he may have been worried with someone casting openly, but she was at least discreet enough to cast in her pocket and her chain looked like... well, a chain.

He played with it for a moment, his now-sharper senses poking at the little all-black links. They were slowly bleeding off magical energy. “How long do these last for?” he asked as he inspected them a little closer. 

These were a pretty big improvement over what he had seen just the day before. The links weren’t all perfectly uniform, but they were closer, tighter, and the magic had the hallmarks of... well, it wouldn’t be a grade that got any praise at the Academy, but it would get a passing mark.

“If I don’t do anything with them? I don’t know? I never took a stopwatch to it, but I guess a few minutes? Maybe up to twenty minutes?” Carrot said.

“Hmm, might want to time it. It’s a good thing that they fade. If you leave them where civilians might run into them, they’ll disappear before anyone can make a fuss. Still, with any sort of physical summoning spell, duration is usually tied directly to the efficiency of the spell. With some exceptions.”

“Like what?”

“Some mages do things like summon sand into an hour glass, timing it so that it fades before touching the bottom of the glass. It requires a fair bit of control.”

Carrot grinned. “Sounds like a neat party trick.”

He shrugged. She wasn’t wrong. He’d never been very good at that kind of thing, though he practiced enough that he wasn’t bad which was what mattered. “It is. But any control ‘trick’ is worth learning if it means eeking out even a few percentage more power from your spells when it matters.”

“I guess so,” Carrot said, spoken like someone with obscene reserves who didn’t know it.

She started to ask about more tricks, and he begrudgingly showed her a few, though only after making sure that no one was around to see. A few of them were even useful. There was a trick to concentrating magic in just the right way to produce some light without casting the Light spell, and one that produced little sparks. 

They circled around the main downtown part of the city, but neither he nor Carrot, nor his magic detected anything, so they continued to search the city. Eventually, he decided that they might as well take the bus.

The routes lead around the centre of the city and into the areas just outside that centre in a rather rough circular pattern. It was a decent way to move around that didn’t require that he actually walk.

Carrot might have boundless energy, but he was starting to feel all the walking in his knees. 

They continued to talk about magic. Or he did, at any rate. Carrot had a way of looking at him full of expectations and hope and he tended to fold and just tell her stuff that he’d learned. It wasn’t a proper education, but he was kind of hoping that he’d encourage her away from anything too dangerous by repeatedly mentioning how some things were dangerous.

He was just explaining Merlin’s differential (Which he had to repeatedly explain had nothing to do with the mythological figure) when Carrot suddenly sat up.

“Did you sense something?” he asked even as he stretched out his own senses. He didn’t feel anything, however.

“Maybe? It was like... you know when a fire alarm’s batter is low?”

“No?”

“Oh... well, it makes a loud beep, but only once in a while, and I thi--there it is again!”

Carrot pulled the lever to stop the bus and soon he followed her own onto the sidewalk where she... kind of just stood, sniffing at the air like a dog scenting an unguarded steak. “I can’t see anything on here,” he said, looking at his detector.

“I’m sorry. I think I... no, there!”

He followed here to the end of the street, then they waited. It took a minute before she moved in another direction, then back, then back again. He was starting to wonder if she’d finally cracked and lost her mind, but he was also timing the ‘pings’ and they seemed to be more or less evenly set apart. 

The infrequency of them made it tricky to follow, but eventually they sort of triangulated it, though they were working off of Carrot’s impressions and memory.

Eventually, that same triangulation led them to a park off to one side of the city. It was older, with proper metal playsets, overgrown bushes, and a few signs that there had been a homeless camp here just recently.

“It’s here,” Carrot said.

He looked around, then cast his senses out. “Yeah,” he said. “Something is here... or was, in any case.”

Whatever kind of daemon had been here was gone, but that didn’t mean that they hadn’t left some signs that they had been around. 

***