Ninya woke up with a start. She quickly looked around—what time was it? Her sister was still next to her, so that could only mean it was still early, right? Right. She moved and almost fumbled out of the bed. Had she always slept this close to the edge of it before?

  "Ninya..." Tsuare muttered, her hand moving up, attempting to grab and drag her back to bed, but Ninya was faster—she was already out of the way moments before. Ninya carefully watched her sister. Tsuare was still tired; she needed sleep.

  When Ninya saw that Tsuare wasn’t going to wake up soon, she nodded and opened the chest beside their bed. A shirt, pants, and then a dress on top—this had been the common way the girls in this vilge dressed, but with Lord Carpef now gone, was it still necessary?

  Of course it was, Ninya reasoned. There were dangerous people out there willing to take advantage of girls, and Lord Antikythera wouldn’t always be there to save them! Ninya pumped her fist—she’d make sure that no other girl suffered when she was strong enough! She’d make sure of it!

  Ninya fixed her hair and washed her face. She looked as young as she always did. Most adventurers started way older than this though, right? She wondered if she could be an adventurer at this age, but maybe she could? The guild didn’t exactly care how old you were as long as you knew how to kill monsters.

  Ninya kissed her sister on the forehead before she left. Tsuare muttered something about it being too hot and pulled her bnket closer. What? Ninya smirked. Tsuare’s words and actions didn’t make sense at all!

  Shaking her head with a smile, Ninya made her way out of their house. The vilge was already active. They had finished harvesting the White Stalks they’d been growing and were now working on pnting more in the plots Lord Antikythera's automatons had prepared yesterday.

  It was strange to think about—like, how did Lord Antikythera live with other humanoid automatons who didn’t think like him? What were they even to him? How did he see them? If Ninya had brain-dead people around her, she’d only feel bad, but automatons weren’t people. They also didn’t need a functioning brain to do their job—their bodies didn’t stop responding to them when their brains didn’t work either.

  Ninya guessed that Lord Antikythera probably thought of the non-thinking automatons as golems or something. Ninya felt excited at the thought of that. Could she make golems at some point? That sounded fun. And awesome. Maybe a golem like the one that saved Tsuare? Lord Antikythera said he had several dozen of those.

  How many people could she save with several dozen golems? Ninya wondered. Probably countless, she answered her own question.

  Ninya saw Lord Antikythera waiting in his usual spot when her eyes were no longer blocked by the houses. The rge... man? Could he be considered that? Sat perfectly still, probably meditating. Lord Antikythera said he could think faster than a regur human could, but just how fast could he think?

  Ninya didn’t dare ask that question aloud as she reached the metal man. She bowed to him. She was no longer breathless this time, since she didn’t run and all that—that was stupid of her yesterday.

  "Lord Antikythera, good morning!"

  "Ninya." Two dots formed on the automaton's head and focused on her, unblinking. "I see that you have finally decided to take yourself off from your book."

  "Yeah, my sister said she wants to read it, so I gave it to her." Ninya rubbed the back of her neck, embarrassed. "I think I want to make a new one."

  She’d been feeling down when she learned her spell tome wasn’t as good as she had thought at first. Like, she knew that she was an amateur mage who didn’t know what she was doing, but she expected that her talent at least gave her some kind of advantage on that front!

  Apparently not. Lord Antikythera showed her just how cking she was when learning magic—that she was just fumbling around like some kid trying to help their parents cook. With her talent, she could have learned magic years before she met Lord Antikythera, but it was her own incompetence that prevented her from doing so.

  "You will make a new one. It is a must," Lord Antikythera pushed. He used that strangely intimidating tone of his again. That meant there was no room but to follow his orders. "Do you have another book to spare?"

  Ninya smiled. Lord Antikythera was considerate at times, even if he got a little scary. She shook her head. "No, but I’ll try to get something when a traveling merchant passes by. Why?"

  "You will learn how to properly read spells before you get your hands on another parchment." Lord Antikythera would usually use some kind of spell at this point, expecting her to read it, but he didn’t do anything. "But before that, I will make you work on your terminology. It is simply too ckluster for it to belong to a proper mage. I will teach you about the objects which make up this world of ours. At the start, they will rete to the spell you managed to acquire."

  "You gave it to me though..." Ninya muttered.

  "I had no such intention, merely testing your mana-weaving abilities. You replicating the spell came as much of a shock to you as it did to me," Lord Antikythera admitted. "Now, you will learn about proper terminology."

  Ninya nodded in determination. "Got it!"

  Ninya spent the next morning learning about how the world worked. Lord Antikythera told her that there was more to the air than just mere wind—it was a collection of gases that made up an "atmosphere." And though most of what it meant went over her head, she at least understood that an atmosphere had little to no physical effects on a human as long as they were able to use it for respiration—if the air wasn’t made out of poisonous gases.

  "Lightning mainly uses the atmosphere as a medium for it to move through," Lord Antikythera was expining to her how lightning formed right now. "And to first do that, the air needs to be electrically charged. Yesterday your hair stood up when we both cast [Electro Burst] for long periods of time, correct?"

  "Yes?" Ninya tilted her head. What did that have to do with anything? Wasn’t that just a common side effect of being a mage? She thought it was kind of cool.

  "That was our hair reacting to charged electrons," Lord Antikythera expined. "You can sometimes see it in an open field. When a farmer’s hair stands up, that means lightning has a high chance of striking in that area."

  "You’re telling me that I can easily cast [Electro Burst] if I just 'charge' the air with my mana first?" Ninya tried to figure out the deeper meaning behind Lord Antikythera’s words. There was always something like that—there had to be. The automaton wouldn’t tell her this for fun.

  "Yes!" Lord Antikythera sounded happy, so Ninya felt happy too! She grinned, though the automaton didn’t share it. Or he couldn’t, since he had no mouth and all. "That is an important fact for you to remember. Spells that use the word 'lightning' or 'thunder' will have an easier time manifesting if you charge the air around you using mana. And you can do this in a myriad of ways."

  Lord Antikythera raised his hand and started doing something with the mana wafting out of it. Ninya felt her head begin to split just from trying to understand how it worked. "This is me producing vibrations in the mana I produce, which theoretically disturbs the local atmosphere. It incites a certain type of movement into the molecules, and if I cast my spell—"

  Ninya knew that the casting was almost instant. She nodded in understanding. "It was made quickly."

  "Correct." Lord Antikythera nodded in approval. "But vibrating mana is not something organics can do. Instead, what you should be doing is trying to change the element of the local mana slightly—changing it from wind to electric to make it easier and less of a burden for you to cast [Electro Burst]."

  Ninya nodded. She still had so much to learn.