Varick snorted at my words and fired two thick jets of water from his hands, each one about a meter wide, like a pair of industrial fire hoses. The streams were fast, but since I could read their trajectory, I slipped aside before they even got close.
Relying more on brute force than finesse, the mage swung the attack around to track me. I hit a wall, scrambled up its face, and launched myself into a jump.
The streams cut off.
"Slippery little rabbit, aren't you!" Varick called out, somehow making it sound like both a compliment and an insult at once. Then he visibly tensed, and a thinner but curving stream of water tore free from his hand. "Water Magic: Water Whip!"
Exactly what it said on the tin came screaming toward me, and I was back to running and dodging. I circled toward the edge of the street, vaulted a stone wall, and tried to close the distance. I had to abort immediately, throwing myself backward as the water whip punched clean through the stone with a sharp crack and came right after me.
"Damn!" I thought. "This is a completely different level of magic!"
I cleared the wall again, had to drop my sword to get enough height on the jump, and barely avoided a water sphere that came right behind it. The problem was my strength barely cleared the bar above a regular grown man's. I was scraping by on every dodge, and that couldn't last forever.
After a few more close calls, I grabbed a decent-sized rock, pushed off the whip's arc, and flung it straight at Varick's head. His whip bent at the base and knocked it aside like it was nothing.
"Pointless to fight back, you dumb little monkey. Don't think you've got anything on me. I'm not some useless dog!" He kicked the subordinate still down on all fours beside him, then turned back my way. "Let's wrap this up."
He bore down harder, feeding his other hand into the whip spell, and the thing shot forward. Ten seconds later, give or take, something snatched my ankle and yanked.
Mid-flight, with practically zero way to correct my course, I slammed straight into a water sphere that had already formed, sized perfectly for me.
The mass closed in and compressed around my body all at once, and I let out a gurgling breath.
"Caught a fish!" Varick said. I couldn't hear him through the water, but lip-reading was well within my capabilities. Not that it brought me any comfort.
He kept talking, but nothing worth paying attention to.
My heart clenched painfully for a moment, then gradually settled as the adrenaline burned off. I had factored in losing. I'd prepared for it.
To any outside observer, my body went limp and unconscious. But with my brain effectively asleep, I, an Awakened Soul, could still observe the outside world through Soul Vision. My mind lived not just in my head, but in my inner core as well. Just one more perk of being what I was.
And sure enough, right in line with everything I'd read from Varick's behavior and goals, he didn't wait for my body to actually drown. He released me from the sphere and was even considerate enough to drain the water from my lungs.
After that, the raid boss sent one of his lackeys to fetch the rest of the crew and started handing out assignments to his remaining ten men.
"Alright, listen up, you brain-dead moles. You four," he said, circling a finger at four of them, "keep hauling those knocked-out otter runts to the ship until you're done. You five, go find the slaves we haven't rounded up yet. I've got two idiots telling me a little red-haired girl gave them the slip. About this kid's size. Go find her! I want everyone accounted for! And you, the one left, pick up the little one and carry him to the ship. Carefully. He's weak, but he's a mage and he can pull the work of three people. Tie him up like a gorilla! Understood?!"
"Yes, sir!" the chorus rang out, and the slavers got to work.
Varick himself gave a satisfied grunt at the well-oiled operation he'd set in motion, then moved on to check on things elsewhere. He was certain that without him the morons around him couldn't do anything right. He wasn't wrong. So he went to supervise.
My body was delivered to the ship shortly after. And once I registered that I didn't need to burn my remaining soul energy keeping a drowning body alive, my consciousness shut off. The fight had wiped me out, body and mind both.
I came to, to my own mild surprise, not in a private cell but in a shared one. Iron bars, the whole setup. In with the villagers taken from Rosemary.
I opened my eyes, slowly pushed myself up on my arms, and winced. On top of the unexpected company, there was a stripe across my back that hadn't been there before, a whip mark, the blood already dried to a crust.
"What the—?" I rasped, and immediately had someone's full attention.
"Lian!" Erza was beside me in an instant, her arms pulling me against her so I had something to lean into. "You're awake..."
"So I am. I was hoping they wouldn't find you. Life's rough..."
"You're not wrong there, kid," a man nearby sighed heavily.
Simon, who was in with us, gave a grim nod. Then he looked at me with something close to guilt. "I... I'm sorry. But I have to thank you for trying to save me. Thank you."
I listened to Simon's words, then to the thanks that followed from the others in the convoy I'd half-taken down. I took it all in and smiled, kind of.
"We're here and not free. Didn't go smoothly..." I trailed off, feeling the gentle sway of the ship we were apparently sailing on. "But we're alive. Which means nothing's lost yet."
That landed in dead silence.
"They told us we're heading to an island far offshore. No escaping from there," an old man said. I knew his name, though we'd never been close.
"Hey. Don't kill the mood." I finally got myself sitting upright and shot him an annoyed look. He just sighed deeply, which didn't help at all. I waved him off. "Fine, forget it. Erza... sweetheart, did you happen to hear how we ended up here? And why is my back on fire?"
She gave a sad little nod and started explaining.
She'd apparently just been found herself and woken up already here. My story was more eventful. At first they'd taken me to a private cell, which was right near where they were loading everyone onto the ship. One of the slavers came in carrying what looked like some kind of magic sphere. Not long after, panicked shouts came from him, something about a "source being blocked" and "can't let Master Varick find out."
He found out. Fast. He brought everyone involved into my cell, the guy who'd carried me and the one with the sphere, and started demanding to know just what the hell had happened to make a promising slave's magic source lock up.
The one with the sphere started stammering that maybe my body, having taken too much damage at a young age, had instinctively burned through too much magic on healing, and that was what had caused the source to block.
Varick took that as blame aimed at himself. He got angry and whipped the sphere guy. Then, deciding it was obviously the other one who'd been careless with the cargo, he whipped him too. And finally, just so I didn't feel left out, he cracked me across the spine as well, called me a "useless slug," ordered them to throw me in with the rest, and left.
What a piece of work.
My plan had always included the possibility that Erza and I both got caught. That was exactly why I'd held back from killing anyone. I wasn't going to give them a reason to do the same to us.
We were alive. Which meant we were still in the game. And these slavers were going to regret leaving us that way. I didn't have the specifics yet. But time was on my side, not theirs.
We sailed slowly toward our destination.
We, slaves now technically, spent most of the journey in silence. The new status stung my ego. Stung a lot, honestly. But not enough to waste energy on anger when it was so much more useful keeping Erza steady.
We spent most of the trip with our arms around each other. Slept that way too; it wasn't a short voyage. By midday the following day, we arrived at what our captors called the R-System.
After we disembarked, control of us passed from the raiders to the dark guild members stationed on the island. Up on the high ground stood a large, single-story, octagonal structure with no windows and no doors, built mostly from brick. It looked less like a tower and more like a massive foundation waiting for one.
They lined us up, and out came something enormous, three chins, a body that would have taken real creative effort to call human, and the energy of someone who had never once in his life questioned his own importance.
"Listen up, you rabble!" he shrieked, spraying the front row. "Rejoice, for you stand before the High Priest of our dark order! Our goal, and now yours, is to build the R-System! Work hard! Or you'll regret it!!!"
He swept us with a look, then waved a hand.
"Take them to the barracks. Brief them on everything. Get them to work as fast as possible!"
He turned and waddled off, and a few people led us away.
The slaves, meaning us, mostly stopped resisting at that point. They'd made their peace with it, or rather been forced to. Early on, a couple of people had tried to start something, and as a lesson they were beaten until they couldn't move and thrown overboard. A horrifying thing to witness, especially for children completely unprepared for it.
I'd made my peace with it too. Not with being a slave for the rest of my life, but with the fact that I was going to need time to scout and find an opening. That meant playing the role for a while before any escape would be possible.
Along the way we saw plenty of the existing workforce, our new colleagues, and the conditions were immediately, obviously awful. Most of them looked hollowed out from hunger. Everyone was thin, filthy, and dressed in rags. Each slave was shackled with iron cuffs connected by white threads to floating enchanted objects, three to a set.
Those slaves were hauling construction materials while scaffolding rose in every direction, making it clear there was a long, long way to go. Guards posted throughout with whips, spears, swords, and some kind of mutant hound-things made it obvious that slacking off wasn't an option.
Eventually they brought us to a cave with large barred cells, told us this was home now, fitted us with the same restraints as everyone outside, and split us into sector groups. We went to sector eight.
Work was assigned based on what people could physically do. The cult members were, as a general rule, arrogant, profoundly stupid, and casually cruel in the way of people who'd never had to answer for anything. But someone up the chain actually used their head for more than eating, and had put together a functioning system with at least a basic kind of order.
Erza and I were lucky enough to end up on the same chain, and we spent the day up until evening laying brick. First, of course, some loud and completely brainless overseer had to screech at us about where to do it. How to do it was apparently beyond his intellectual range, so I walked Erza through everything myself, including how to pace herself so she wouldn't burn out.
By evening, alongside the work, I was running reconnaissance. The picture wasn't good. The ships were well-guarded. Even if we managed to steal one, they'd chase us down with another, and there was more than one water mage on site. A rowboat was out too; the hounds would track us. Swimming on our own wasn't viable either, not enough energy. The water was cold, and while soul energy could keep us warm, it wouldn't last more than a day. And that was just me swimming solo. I wanted at minimum Erza with me, and preferably a three-day margin, ideally five.
The situation, on first look and second look alike, was firmly in the category of shit. Which it was. But hey, did everything have to go right on the first try?
In the meantime, I kept my soul energy use quiet, using it daily but treating it as my hole card. It kept me from getting as worn down as the other kids while leaving the element of surprise intact.
That evening, Erza and I made it back to the cell block. This time it was full, the other residents were in. We didn't waste time.
"Yo, I'm Elian. This is my sister, Erza. You look like you run the younger crowd around here," I said, walking up to a blue-haired boy with a strange tattoo on his face. About my age, maybe ten.
"Hey, we're not little!" protested an even younger kid, tan skin, blond hair twisted up into a point like a brush tip.
"That wasn't an insult, just a statement of fact. Look at that guy over there." I nodded at a random adult slave nearby. "Compared to him, we literally are small."
The kid went quiet and thoughtful. I took the opening and turned back to my original target.
"My name is Jellal Fernandes," he said, then added a little uncertainly, "Where are you from?"
"Fiore, village called Rosemary. Former village, probably. Alright, what's the lay of the land here? We good? Just so we're clear, if you try to make me or my sis scrub the bowl or pull some fresh-meat bullshit, I'll drown you in that fucking stainless. Understood?"
That earned some odd looks.
"Lian... we're not in prison," Erza said, tilting her head. "I've read about people talking like that in novels. You read them too, didn't you?"
"Among other things," I said, turning back to Jellal. "So. What's the deal?"
He wasn't exactly thrilled about my approach. But he started talking anyway.
Unfortunately, nothing he told me was particularly useful. Or even moderately useful.
From what the other slaves had pieced together, the tower was a fair distance from Fiore and the Kingdom of Caelum, not impossibly far but far enough. People only ever came from those places. And it confirmed what we already suspected: we were out in open water, and nobody was swimming to the continent from here. What actually was useful were the tips and tricks Jellal shared about the work itself, how to get through it, what to watch out for, what mistakes got people in trouble. I thanked him genuinely, which seemed to catch him off guard, and left him with a vague promise of a favor to be named later.
"You don't have to thank me," he said with a small smile. "There's not much to do here. New people at least break up the monotony."
"Fair enough." I shrugged. "Can I ask something kind of tactless?"
He tensed. He didn't know what "tactless" meant exactly, but given how I'd started the conversation, whatever came next was clearly making him nervous. He was a kid though, and curiosity won out almost immediately.
"You can..."
"Where'd the tattoo under your eye come from?"
"Oh, that. I was born with it. Nobody knows why. Not even Grandpa Rob. But it looks pretty cool, right?"
I studied the tattoo for a moment, then confirmed yeah, it was pretty solid. Then, unexpectedly, the question swung back around.
"So what are your full names?" He looked at me, then at Erza.
"We don't have last names," I said. And then, noticing Simon nearby trying very hard to act like he wasn't listening, I moved on. "Anyway, thanks for the conversation. I need to talk to my friend about something private."
I wrapped up with Jellal, who turned out to be genuinely open and easy to talk to, which explained the whole leadership thing, and went to find Simon, who perked up noticeably at being included. Erza stayed behind and kept questioning Jellal on her own, following my example.
We moved somewhere quieter so I could pass Simon something that wasn't for anyone else's ears. The ship hadn't offered any privacy. Now we had some.
Simon's parents had been killed by the slavers. He was, in fairness, one of the toughest kids I'd met, but he hadn't fully come back from it. What was really holding him together was his sister Kagura. He was tearing himself up over where she was, since she hadn't been on the ship. So I told him: Erza and I had hidden her. By all appearances, she hadn't been found.
That hit him harder than I expected. This quiet, closed-off kid nearly broke down right there, that was how relieved he was. And then, once he'd processed it, he immediately started worrying again: would she make it to a city, would she be okay, was she safe. All I could honestly do was try to reassure him that her odds of surviving and building a life were considerably better than ours.
I left him there and went back to Erza, who immediately hit me with:
"Brother, what do you think about the last name Scarlet?"
"Scarlet?" I turned it over in my head, then noticed the slightly anxious, hopeful expression on Jellal's face. "Not bad. Could use more punch and elegance, but it's far from the worst anyone could have come up with. Your idea?"
Jellal deflated a little at my underwhelming review.
"Yeah..."
"Don't take it personally. I just say what I think. No offense."
"That's... kind of cynical?"
"Possibly."
We kept talking after that, burning through the boredom. There wasn't much else to do.
On the last name question, Erza and I eventually decided, fine, Scarlet it was. My alternatives, Valcrimson (Superior Scarlet), Ruberion (Lord of Red), and Crimzarion (Embodiment of Scarlet) had all been shot down for being absurdly over the top, which, fair enough, wasn't the energy we needed right now. So unless something significantly better came along, we'd keep it simple.
Over time in that miserable place, we got to know a lot of people. Erza found what she'd been missing, kids her own age to talk to. My tastes ran differently. The most genuinely worthwhile company, for the caliber of challenges he posed to my mind and not for how exciting his stories were, turned out to be an old man called Grandpa Rob, a mage from the Fairy Tail guild.
He was the one who explained the outside world to us. In Fiore, where Fairy Tail was based, and in most other countries, mages operated through organizations called guilds. These divided into legal guilds sanctioned by the Magic Council, the top governing body for mages worldwide, and dark guilds, meaning any guild the Council hadn't approved. Then there were independent mages who worked alone or in small groups and didn't join anyone.
What really caught my attention was magic itself and how it was accessed.
"It all begins with belief in your heart," the old man said. He was skeletal thin, long silver hair, a magnificent set of mustaches and a beard, and eyebrows so long they practically reached his chin. "You children might think of Tarot, Faith, prayer, and all the rest as magic. That wonder, when a true believer in magic can actually feel it, that is real. Only those who genuinely believe with their whole heart, in magic and in themselves, and who can exist in harmony with everything around them, can use something like Magic."
"Interesting interpretation," I said, sitting cross-legged beside him. "But if we try to put the term in more concrete terms, could we say magic is a substance capable of accumulation, transformation, and external projection, subject to the will of whoever carries it? It should follow consistent laws, I'd think, and knowing and working within those laws would let us evaluate a mage's skill. And it's connected to unity with the world, a kind of resonance with magic. As energy moves through the cycle, it develops a kind of memory of what it was, which is why it's easier for a mage to reconstruct an existing form of magic than to create a new one."
"Not quite, Elian. You're right that magic has patterns. Everyone has a magical container that fills from the outside. And yes, some techniques are easier to repeat than others. But all of that is secondary. Always remember: magic is a miracle. You cannot put it in a box, because if you try, you'll only limit yourself. Feeling, and genuine faith, that is the key to true magic."
I sat with that for a long moment. I was fairly sure I could have told him plenty about manipulating energy myself. But in my previous life I'd had two distinct kinds, and they were nothing alike. Soul energy was essentially raw. The other kind had deep embedded capabilities, things it performed almost on its own, naturally. So it stood to reason that the local Ethernano would have its own sharp differences. Heavy reliance on emotion and belief? Honestly, that was kind of intriguing.
Life in the tower under construction slowly began, I'd like to say, to settle into routine. Except it didn't, quite.
Weeks passed.
Magic didn't happen. Rob never gave me anything concrete on how to actually wake it up. Believe and focus, he said, and it'll come. So I meditated during rest periods with no clear target, and every time I pushed for specifics I got the same answer: believe harder, try more, and when the time is right, it'll work itself out.
We kept working, eating the distinctly terrible slop they fed us, and occasionally watching the guards take out their frustrations on slower-moving slaves. Not usually at me and Erza specifically, but at people around us. And even my pretty calloused conscience took the hit every time I watched them lay into someone over nothing, kids included, without a second thought.
It was pulling something dark up behind my eyes, slowly. What was genuinely humiliating was the helplessness. I had been something significant once. Running an entire planet had been just one item on a longer list. And now I had to watch Erza's back to make sure some belligerent idiot with a sword didn't decide to cut her up as a lesson.
That part I managed, more or less, with varying degrees of success.
"Attention, slaves!" One of the local guards came up outside while we were loading bricks onto a rolling platform inside the ship's hold. This particular specimen was generously gifted with higher cognitive function, as demonstrated by what came out of his mouth next: "I'm in a terrible mood because my boss is a greedy bastard, basically. Docked my pay. But good news for you! I'll only be taking it out on one of—"
The relaxed guard flinched when he met my eyes. Not surprising, given that I'd simultaneously sent a focused pulse of Bloodlust straight at him.
And, what terrible timing, he was standing at the exact midpoint of the wide boarding plank connecting the dock to the ship.
His feet tangled. He toppled backward, took two stumbling steps, cracked his head against a stone corner on the way down, and went into the water with a clean splash.
Glug.
"What was that?" Erza came over from deeper in the hold; she'd only heard someone approaching.
"Doesn't matter anymore," I said easily.
"Elian," Jellal said from beside me, he'd been working our spot that day and seen the whole thing. "I think I felt something strange from you just now..."
"Did you?" My face went innocent. My eyes didn't cooperate. "If I'd woken up my magic, I'd have already gotten out of this place. You're imagining things."
Jellal went a little pale but looked away and let it go.
"Miron!" another guard came running along the dock and looked down at the water that wasn't giving anyone back. "You absolute disaster of a person... The boss cursed you. I swear to Zeref, he cursed you."
"Who did I curse now?" A new figure approached, staff in hand.
"Sir... I'm sorry to report that Miron drowned."
"The one who drank my whiskey out of my private stash? The one who said, 'I figured it was for everyone so I took my share,' and then handed me back an empty bottle?!"
"That's the one."
"Good riddance." The nameless superior turned around and walked off without another word, completely unbothered.
Situations came up and you dealt with them. But soon, a small crack of light cut through the gathering dark.
One day, watching the guards through Sphere Vision, I happened to catch by reading lips that most of the senior leadership had sailed off somewhere, taking nearly all the mages with them on some business the lower ranks weren't told about. And I saw an opportunity. One fast, large ship had been left behind. If a big enough group of us could take it, there was nothing to chase us with. The only two water mages assigned to the tower were both gone, Varick still out raiding and the second one having left with the leadership.
So there I was, filling seams between large stone blocks alongside Erza, and I quietly, carefully started building an escape plan again. Slow and deliberate. No rushing. Because if it went wrong they might not leave us alive this time. The stakes were too high for anything less.