By now Marilou had taken off from the spot to more than ten meters up, and was liable to crash at any moment.
At the critical moment it was Viya who used her staff, set her body alight, and grew a pair of fire-red phoenix feathers from her back, flying up to haul Marilou down.
Once they were on the ground, Viya rapped Marilou on the head.
"Is there something wrong with your comprehension? What decent person generates wind by shoving it under their own feet the entire time? Watch closely. You use the wind to overcome your body's weight, and then move your limbs quickly to achieve the visual effect of displacement."
"I see."
Marilou scratched her head. She'd thought it odd herself. What kind of magic just kept generating wind? So she'd had it wrong.
"Train at it slowly. Moon Step is a very cost-effective technique among the movement skills. It uses little mana, it's fairly friendly to mages, and it lets you close on an enemy quickly, or get away."
Marilou took several bottles of blue mana-restoring potion out of the bag she'd just been handed, along with a plain, antique-colored parchment scroll.
"Today you're going to attempt a perception skill: Earth Sense. On the way home after this we'll pass through a stretch of not-fully-developed forest. Learn this skill, add Moon Step to it, and if you meet danger, running should be within your means."
Marilou took the scroll and unrolled it, and found nothing written on it at all, only a six-pointed magic circle.
She closed her eyes and felt the mana circulating across it, and knowledge about Earth Sense appeared in her head.
"Amazing. One look and I've learned it."
"That's what magic scrolls are. Otherwise why would they sell for such a price?"
Marilou poked at her lips. "Then if I bought a lot of scrolls with money, wouldn't I be able to swagger around this whole region?"
If learning magic really could be done through scrolls, Marilou had no objection to getting hold of more money to buy them with.
Learn a few more escape or survival skills and that ought to be enough for most situations.
After all, if you can't outrun something you probably can't beat it either, and on a limited budget, escape skills were the better value.
"It isn't that simple. Skill-learning depends first on the scroll's materials, and that alone is no small expense. Second, it depends on the user's own quality; if your level is insufficient, forcing a skill scroll is no different from letting the magic burn out your mind."
Viya drank a bottle of mana potion and wiped her mouth dry.
"And to take it to the extreme, a nation is effectively an infinite storehouse of resources. If there truly were an item that could raise the standard of an entire army, the state would go into debt to mass-produce it.
"To this day the Kingdom still uses basic scrolls, on the same principle as those minor subjects you study in class: they won't teach you the real thing, but they'll stop short of leaving you completely lost when you see it."
Marilou nodded, picked up a mana potion, and went to find a corner to train Earth Sense in.
Perception skills consume mana at an exceptional rate; the user has to perceive the objects around them continuously, and the range of that perception depends on their own mana and aptitude.
Someone with a natural earth-affinity gift, or in a profession like gathering that deals with mountains and forests constantly, will learn perception skills far faster than their peers.
Marilou channeled mana into the little wooden sword, and several small points of light appeared in her mind. The whole of her mind was pitch dark, and as the mana poured in, her sense of the objects around her rose sharply, and even without using her eyes she could picture where a thing was and what state it was in.
CRACK—
The little wooden sword, trembling in the air a moment ago, abruptly shattered.
The Earth Sense she had just raised collapsed with it. Marilou's eyes went wide. The staff she'd gone to such trouble to buy, broken already?
But when Marilou picked up the hilt, she found the broken fragments still hovering in the air.
The mana inside her was climbing sharply. Marilou hurriedly shut her eyes, and into that formerly dark space came every blade of grass and every tree around her.
Her spell had been cast an uncountable number of times.
Could it be that with the "staff" shattered, every single fragment could cast the magic once?
Cast the spell a single time, and all the fragments would cast the same spell in unison...
"This... this isn't closed, is it..."
Marilou opened her eyes. The broken wooden sword had assembled itself around the hilt into a clear sword shape.
And then the fractured sections were whole again.
Marilou cast Earth Sense a second time. This time it was pitch dark again, with only a few small points of light.
"Can I break it on purpose?"
Marilou tapped the staff and found there was no breaking it at all. What had happened must have been an accident.
"If every fragment can cast once, then isn't my skill effect stacking, as they call it?"
Marilou turned the "staff" over in her hands and tried again to find the feeling from before. After a long while, the best she managed was to split the staff in two.
That produced two consecutive Moon Steps, and compared with her earlier attempt, this time Marilou flashed straight from the front door of the house to the back of it.
And it wasn't two separate starts, either; there was no sense of any pause in the middle at all. One unbroken take.
If it had been that fully shattered mode from before, how terrifying would her Moon Step be?
Marilou felt as though she'd discovered a new continent. If she could chain this, absolutely nobody would be able to outrun her.
Then she'd be able to shout at a boss: "You can't outrun me. Believe it?"
Except that as she said the line, Marilou kept feeling the scene was familiar somewhere in her memory, as though she'd heard those words before.
While her thoughts were still moving, Viya brought over a plate of fruit.
"How's the studying going? Have something to eat first."
"Oh. All right."
Marilou put the staff away and came under the pavilion. There was watermelon on the plate and several bunches of grapes, with a number of cups of yogurt thoughtfully set beside them.
Marilou put the watermelon and grapes into the yogurt, then fetched some puffed rice and threw that in too.
The milk in this other world really did taste better than anything she used to buy in the supermarkets on Blue Star. No wonder people here treated yogurt as a staple.
Some farming households even dried the milk into brick shapes, and once dried it could be eaten as sweets whenever you liked.
Marilou swallowed a mouthful of thick yogurt and thumped her chest. "I've sort of learned it. But the world I see is pitch dark. I can only feel a few points of light moving."
"That's perfectly normal. People find it hard at first to locate objects by mana. It's the instinctive human fear of the unknown, and you need to overcome it, or you'll always have one fewer pair of eyes than everyone else."
Viya took Marilou's hand and looked seriously into her eyes.
One finger lifted lightly.
"Watch closely. I'll only teach you this once."
Viya slowly closed her eyes, and the mana-thread behind her began weaving ceaselessly, composing one clear image after another. To Marilou it felt as though they had boarded a rocket traveling at enormous speed.
Outside the window the scenery rushed backward, and though her body hadn't moved at all, she genuinely saw what was happening far away.
Viya opened her eyes, and flames shot through with blue kindled on her fingers.
"The earth has no end to it. What truly limits your sight and your perception isn't your eyes but your heart. Imagine your mana as your will, then imagine the far shore you mean to reach, and drive it through like a sword. Then you will see."
Viya closed her hand hard in front of her, and a falling leaf on the branch, just about to break away, was caught on a single finger.
"Your thought can outrun time."