Convincing the other children to come with him was easy. The prospect of checking out a real group of seekers got them excited all on its own, so he just ran over to the shop they were in.
When that didn’t work and they were sent away by the owner, they waited outside while talking about what these people were doing here until the mysterious group moved to the tavern. Brennan quickly capitalized on the opportunity before the novelty wore off for the other kids. He didn’t particularly care if they interacted with the party; his concern was having to fight off Junia if the rest decided to do something else and she wanted to drag him along with them.
With it being morning, the tavern was running on skeleton staff and had one other patron aside from the party they’d been following. One serving girl in her teens, and a guy moving around supplies in the kitchen. Smells of cooked vegetables and smoked wood permeated the air.
“Miss! Miss!” Tobin shouted as they approached the table the newcomers were seated around. “Are you a mage?”
The woman nearest to them, clad in brown robes with a staff behind her back, watched them with a bemused expression. With a quirked eyebrow, she studied each of their faces and stayed silent for a moment, probably weighing whether entertaining a bunch of children was worth wasting the breath. Then she shrugged. “Yes.”
Brennan was caught flat-footed, both at her answer and the deluge of information he was receiving from Sense Magic. Every single one of these seekers had magic items on them, be it rings, weapons or other things he couldn’t see. This was the first time he had ever encountered anything enchanted with mana. Supposedly some of the village guards had equipment to deal with Zones, but he had never managed to get close enough to see for himself.
He would have expected the woman’s staff to be the most notable thing about her, but it was actually her clothing. There were multiple strange marks woven into the fabric, and if she had something in her pockets, he couldn’t perceive it. Either because she wasn’t carrying magic items except for the ones he could see, or because her robes were covering them up.
Even more strangely, she wasn’t the only one with gear like this. Next to her sat a hooded figure in a cloak whose features he couldn’t make out in the least. The window shutters were half-closed at this time of day, certainly not making the tavern so dark that someone with a hood would make the space where their face would be look like a pitch-black void. The fabric they wore exhibited the same obscuring effect to his senses.
The other two were a bit more open, one being a huge armored man with the visor of his helmet raised. A greatsword taller than he was sitting down, rested against his chair. Gauntleted fingers rubbed his beard, eyes staring at the ceiling. He didn’t seem to be paying attention to the conversation. Indecipherable mana patterns were engraved on all his equipment, but Brennan could at least sense there wasn’t anything else.
At the far end of the table, a plain-looking man dressed in white sat. An enchanted ring adorned his hand, with a phoenix-esque pendant hanging from his neck—the symbol denoting the Church of Renewal.
“You people can do magic?” Mellie leaned forward, eyes wide. “You can make the table float, yeah?”
“I can,” said the mage. “But I won’t; too much of a hassle.” At their disappointed faces, she continued, “I can show you another trick.”
Brennan paid close attention to what happened next. Already, he could feel the mana shifting in the atmosphere, but it wasn’t a large, domineering effect like he had seen with that Zone. This was controlled, not just mana being drawn to another unknown force. Rather, it was drawn to another source of mana, namely the woman’s finger. Her index finger was held up in front of her, clear motes accumulating there. It took him a moment to parse what he was seeing.
From his limited understanding of ambient mana, there was an obvious distinction between the wind mana and the water mana. The former wasn’t getting drawn in at all, it was just the blue particles getting pulled toward the finger as if by a magnet. But there was a key detail he had almost overlooked. The mage didn’t just generate mana, she generated water mana in order to pull together a larger cluster of it above her hand.
Not exactly like a magnet though, because there didn’t seem to be any polarity at play here, only the caster’s will. In just a second, the mana coalesced in the air and formed a sphere of water so smooth it looked like glass.
Skill leveled up!
[Sense Magic (Uncommon) Lv. 50] -> Lv. 51
The notification barely registered in his mind. He was too absorbed in witnessing the first undeniably magical phenomenon he had ever seen performed by a human to care at the moment. The oohs and aahs of the other kids were ignored as well, taking a backseat to the burning question on the tip of his tongue.
“How do I learn that?” he blurted, his tone sounding every bit like the child others thought he was. Didn’t matter. He had to know.
A chuckle escaped the yet-unnamed mage, one hand covering her mouth while the other waved the water ball around for the kids to poke. Blue eyes settled on him, crinkled with amusement. “Well, you need to be able to sense mana first.”
Without realizing it, Brennan had balled his fists in anticipation. “And then?”
“See what your element is, if casting spells is what you want.” She furrowed her brows, as if just realizing something. “But I guess entering a Zone would make it easier to learn how you control mana unless you have a tutor. So maybe when you’re older.”
“Cease poisoning the youth with delusions of grandeur, Florence,” another seeker spoke up. It was the religious man, palms flat on the table. “The time will come for their worth to be measured. By His Majesty’s grace, a practitioner of the arcane arts has been tasked with assessing their potential in but a few years. They shall prosper if the Goddess wills it.”
“Eeeh, no, he’s right. We don’t work at Rhovial. No point entertaining the chits,” the large man cut in, still not looking away from the ceiling.
A prickle ran up the back of Brennan’s neck, forcing him to look around in alarm until he found the source of his discomfort. The faceless cloaked figure, gazing right at him. “The child may find his own path, we don’t need to interfere,” they said in a distinctly feminine voice.
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Florence glanced around at her teammates with a hint of betrayal in her expression before she huffed and crossed her arms, the floating glob of water dispersing around Cedric’s hand like it’d never been there in the first place. “Fine, then. I’ll spoil your fun when we get to the nearest Rank-3, see how you like it.”
That was when the serving girl arrived with drinks for the party, a pinched look on her face as she set them down with extra care. The next second, she was on the kids, ushering them out of the tavern. “Let’s all stop bothering the Seekers, okay? You can play mage outside,” she whispered, as though Brennan had been one wrong sentence from getting splattered or something.
On some level, he appreciated the caution around a group of dangerous unknowns, but mostly he was just annoyed that he wouldn’t be receiving answers to the other questions he had. That was his most valuable source of information so far, and it was slipping out of his grasp after a minute!
Tobin tried to scream something. A hand clasped over the boy’s mouth before he could. “Thank you for your time,” Cedric called out to the table of seasoned combatants. “We learned a lot.”
“Thank you so much,” Junia copied him. No one acknowledged them.
And just like that, they were outside again, kicked out moments after making contact.
“That went well,” Brennan said, breaking the silence.
“You really think so?” Cedric replied, leading the group a safe distance from the tavern, back to the square they had met up at.
“No.”
It was basically the expected result. The people visiting that establishment weren’t there for their benefit, they were gearing up to dive into a Zone and fight wild beasts to the death. He just hated how easily his chance to learn about real magic had been taken from him. Like taking candy from a baby, he noted wryly.
“Oh, I thought it went alright,” Liam said, sounding a bit distracted.
“You think everything is alright,” Byron spoke up. “Those people were mean.”
“Where were they from?” Mellie chimed in. “We almost never get seekers in Craswidge.”
“They probably came from Trambol.” Cedric walked with his hands behind his head. “They wouldn’t be from there, but it’s where a lot of seekers in the area come together because the Seeker’s Guild has a branch there.”
“Wow, how do you know that?” Junia’s eyes were fixed on the taller boy.
“My dad told me,” he answered simply.
Trambol. Brennan had heard of it in passing. It was the next town over, and a larger settlement than Craswidge itself. The place they traded with most often as a village which made regular use of imported goods.
For Cedric’s father, he judged it was likely where the man got his rare meats from sometimes, given that towns would have a larger economy and therefore a bigger assortment of different goods. Not all the butcher’s cuts were sourced locally.
More importantly, Trambol offered access to more resources than Craswidge, provided you had the money to pay for it. Plenty of things he couldn’t find here, they would have over there. This was the reason Brennan had been considering working around the village a bit once his skills leveled up and he grew bigger. Having the capital to acquire resources was never not advantageous.
Considering the amounts people would pay a kid, it would take a long time. But if he could pair up skill training with real work, that’d be hitting two birds with one stone. Or that would have been his plan, if not for one new piece of information.
Magic would require a tutor, and he doubted his chances with that mage from earlier were any good. Meaning he would have to find someone else to teach him. Either that, or enter a Zone prematurely in order to gain magic. He didn’t even know if that second option was possible, let alone a viable solution. Find the original chapter at novelping . com.
So the only choice left to him was getting another person to show him the steps to unlocking magic. That required him asking his parents, since they would have to find someone outside Craswidge for him. Did they have the money to pay for that? He didn’t think so, and frankly, even if they did, there was no way he was going to rely on their dime to get educated if they could quit funding him on a whim.
I know better than that now.
Alternatively, revealing his Sense Magic skill could circumvent all of those problems. Potentially. If he could secure this world’s equivalent of a scholarship somewhere by showcasing that he was already pretty far along with his sensory magic skill at a young age, wasn’t that a free ticket to taking away his struggles?
Of course, that approach would create problems of his own. For a free mentorship to happen, people would have to see his talent, and that would invite scrutiny. He couldn’t answer questions about how he got his skill seeing as reincarnation was, to his limited knowledge, unprecedented.
And all of that wasn’t taking into account what it would mean for him to be taught how to do it. He would be admitting that he couldn’t manage it on his own. In an ideal world, he would just discover the secret to magic after some more practice. Ultimately, he decided to apply the day’s insights and reevaluate his options later.
No rushed decisions. I have time.
Out loud, he asked, “What was that Church guy talking about?”
Junia tilted her head. “Church guy?”
“Yeah.” Brennan nodded. “He said the king would send someone in a few years?”
“Oh, that,” Cedric said. “He was talking about the Royal Mage coming to check your elemental talent. All kids in Craswidge have to do it.”
“All kids?” He assumed there would be one sent to every backwater village to prevent a case of someone with talent slipping through their grasp. The exact type of people Brennan wished to get closer to and also wanted to avoid.
“Yup, last time me and Junia already went when we were really young. Mellie too. So it’ll just be you five, out of us.”
Looking around, he saw Byron bickering with Tobin, Liam off in his own world as usual, and Agnes silently trailing behind him. Had they known about this the whole time? Was it just not a concern to them?
“What happens if you have talent?” Brennan pushed, stepping closer to Cedric.
He got a shrug in response. “They take you to the capital? I don’t know, my mom said the last time it happened here was sixty years ago.”
Then none of the previous batch had qualified, including his sister. Speaking of, she was directing nervous glances his way every few seconds for a reason he couldn’t discern. Why? The topic wasn’t taboo or anything, based on what he could infer.
“I wanna do magic,” Tobin declared. “The secrets are in the Zones. When I Class, I’m gonna kill the Zonebeasts like fwoosh fwoosh BAM.” He mimed holding a wand and waved it around.
“Didn’t you want to be like Kane?” Cedric smiled. “What’s going on with that?”
“I wanna be a swordsman too! I’ll get two fousand magic swords!” Tobin lisped through his tooth gap, shameless.
“Can you even count that high?” Junia mocked.
The boy whirled on her. “Watch me! One, two…”
Productive conversation became a thing of the past after that, the short attention spans of the other children having already moved on to something else. Brennan continued to wonder about how he would try to train his magic first, thinking up and discarding various training methods. When he got home, he would have a lot of practice ahead of him. Going home unfortunately wasn’t on the agenda for a couple more hours at least. He would have to bear with it for now. In the meantime, he could see about increasing his attributes.
The question of how many members their group would lose in the next five years was firmly pushed to the back of his mind.