Chapter 241: Entirely Average. Probably. Maybe. Surely.
Lucia was having a lovely, calm night. Much of it was spent cuddling Iris in bed or reading until she dozed off. She still did not often sleep well, per se, but she did sleep better these days, which was an obvious improvement from how things had been in the past.
She did not, however, get to sleep through the night. In the middle of it, when most regular people decided to get their rest in, there was a noise. Of course, while Lucia was a lighter sleeper than Iris, the former assassin was a lot more perceptive than her lover. So, when there was a noise, Iris awoke first.
This did have the consequence of also waking up Lucia. The Voice of Order rubbed her eyes and looked on blearily, giving a big yawn. "What's up Iris?" she muttered. "Come back to bed."
"Something's at our window," Iris said, warily. The shadows in the room wrap around her, and it feels a little brighter.
Lucia blinked a few more times. It's… gosh, what time was it? Slowly, through, she rose from the bed, and ignited her inner flame. The sleepiness slowly bubbled and boiled away, and she took a deep breath. How bothersome.
A flicker of anger sprouted and fanned her fire. Was this a new assassin? One of the skinstealers? She looked out of the window, and there was another tapping noise.
Oh god. She recognised it. This was worse.
Before she could say something, Iris carefully approached the window, knife in hand, and slowly opened it. Her eyes flickered with detection spells, and landed on a particularly dark blob that stood out against the sky. "Good evening," Mercury said. "I need-"
Iris yelped and stabbed. The mopaaw hopped back, off the fall, and started plummeting in the open air, before suddenly smacking into a platform of pure, solid force. "Okay," he wheezed, air knocked from his lungs. "I probably deserved that."
"... Mercury?" the maid asked, looking down at his splatted form.
"That's the one," he replied.
Very slowly, Iris put her knife away. "What, exactly, are you doing here? Why are you… covered in ash?"
He blinked. "See," he said, "now the hostilities make a lot more sense. I entirely forgot to look into the mirror. Is Lucia home?"
The priestess stepped up to the window, with a long, suffering sigh. "Haaaaah. Yes, Mercury, I'm here. What do you need?"
"Awesome. Can you set me on fire?" he asked.
Lucia looked at him. Iris blinked. "What?" the maid asked, confused. Lucia, for her part, didn't need to be asked twice.
She eagerly obliged.
- - - - - -
In an entirely unsurprising turn of events, getting burnt by Lucia hurt a lot more than the average fire he was able to make with a little bit of wood in the chimney. Mercury felt it run across his fur in a blazing conflagration, but frankly, the pain was minor. The bits of it he did feel were simply swallowed up by
At the end of the day, his body was simply more resilient. And, while the priestess did need a suspiciously low amount of prodding to throw a full scale fireball at him, he didn't think she truly meant him harm. They were both gay, how could they dislike each other?
Surely that was how that worked. Surely.
Mercury smiled a little, and slowly discarded his silly thoughts, instead focussing on the nature of the fire. It came easily, as Mercury slipped back into that half-obsessed, enlightened state he'd been in before, when he came up with the brilliant idea to light himself on fire.
His fur caught easily, frankly. Its outer layer was thick, and burnt off quickly, preventing the fire from spreading to the lower layers. Unfortunately, there was plenty more heat, so those lit up, too.
But Mercury didn't mind any of that. The adaptation presented by his skill simply made him closer to fire. The blood pumping through his veins heated up, and he could feel the way the light licked at his eyes. It was all at once horrible and absolutely fascinating.
And then, Mercury imagined what the metal must feel like. He needed to burn hotter, turn up his internal temperature even more!
"More!" he told Lucia.
"Move upwards," the priestess countered. "I will not set fire to the buildings around you for this new fascination of yours."
That made sense. With a quick, shaky hop, Mercury landed on a higher platform of rijn, then repeated this process. When he was firmly above the window, Lucia's worries about causing any structural damage to other places was quickly dispelled, and she let out a veritable flood of heat.
Mercury's blood boiled, then adapted to the higher temperatures, then boiled all over again. Somehow, despite that, it was still painless. Was he supposed to feel pain? Did metal feel hurt when it was smithed? Maybe it was appropriate for Mercury to feel pain?
He decided against it for now, simply letting the knowledge of the heat wash over him. He blinked a few times, getting the blood out of his eyes before it evaporated anyways. Frankly, it was surprising that the fire had not yet damaged his eyes, but it was probably related to his rapid adaptation.
Second by second, his temperature rose in a torrent of white fire. His fur singed down to his skin, and then his skin began to blister, too. Hmmm. He needed to be more like metal, then? Ah, but didn't he already have an understanding that worked like that?
Warmth melting the shell of loss and grief, as flame would turn metal soft. He laughed at that, just a little, finding humor in the strange circumstance. Then, he was again too busy being burnt alive to focus.
Now, after only a few minutes, the fire stopped. Mercury looked down and saw that they'd drawn quite the crowd, including Gorm from the city council. The old man was waving a cane disapprovingly, yelling about "youngsters" and "fire", which seemed about in character.
Mercury had to concede that maybe he had troubled a few people's sleep. Maybe even worried some of them. Which wasn't exactly nice of him to do, so Lucia stopped the fireworks.
Compared to the crowd though, she shot him a bright smile. "That was lovely," the priestess said. "We should do that again sometimes."
Iris gave her a look, and then Mercury another. Then, the maid gave a sigh, and headed back to bed. "Good night, Mercury," she said. "It is good to have you around again." Then, she smiled a little, and closed the window.
Mercury, for his part, was happy that Lucia agreed to help him out. But did she really have to be so enthusiastic about it?
With scorched, regrowing fur, he hopped across platforms of rijn back to his home. The only hint of his stay near the church being faint particles of ash down on the street. It was an uneventful night.
[
- - -
The next morning, Mercury used
Which was good, given that he planned on doing this a few more times.
He understood fire a little better already, he thought, but it wasn't quite good enough yet. In fact, it was still an infantile, blooming understanding that would certainly need more time. But he had the whole night to meditate on it, which helped consolidate the experiences and glimpses he'd gained during his nighttime escapades.
Yasashiku was, at first, impressed with Mercury's progress. The old man praised his understanding of fire, and even said that he was glad Mercury had decided to meditate. Parsing experiences with thought was important, after all.
And it was true. Mercury had spent a good chunk of the night meditating. But he had also lit himself on fire, and when his old teacher heard that, he was much less excited.
"Oh, you wanna know how metal feels, huh, Starlight-kun?" he asked, a vein on his forehead throbbing as he cracked his knuckles. "How about I shove you into the forge and hit you with a hammer a few times, huh?!"
To which Mercury elegantly replied "Glbrlhrghflrharbgh!" as his head was, indeed, shoved into the forge.
It was a day full of exciting learning experiences.
- - -
At the end of the day, he still had not forged whatever it was that Yasashiku wanted him to make. He hit the metal with his rijn over and over, and as much as the old man grumbled, he did still try to teach Mercury to the best of his ability.
He was building his foundation, even if it felt frustrating to hammer away at the same problem day after day. His "training sessions" - if one could call them that - continued. Lucia set him on fire, Yvette showed him swordplay, and when he thought he needed to know what an impact was like, he had Avery kick him.
The guildmaster was the least enthusiastic about it, actually. Avery had no particular desire to hurt Mercury, at all. In exchange, Marcel found the whole thing completely hilarious. He'd laugh, even as he healed Mercury after the fact, helping his regeneration along.
During the nights, Mercury meditated on
Wasn't it a little funny that fire was one of the fundamental elements, with air and earth and water when really it was much more of a process? When it was so much more complex? Like, sure, the sun gave off heat, but did it count as burning? He sighed, and let that thought go.
His thoughts were being too complex. What he needed to do wasn't grasp all the intricacies and definitions of fire. Just its nature. Just the idea of consuming a thing to make something warm. How bothersome, though, that it just didn't quite click for him.
Slowly, Mercury let it go, and focussed on some of his other Skills and abilities. The world was big, after all, and he had much to learn.
- - -
"Ruvah, I want to know what it feels like for metal to be quenched," Mercury explained.
His friend, currently assuming a shape similar to him, a cat made from a shell of ice with liquid water swirling in between, gave him a long look, then laughed. "What a silly proposal!" she said.
Lucia nodded. "I tried to tell him that, too. Aren't things usually quenched in oil, too?" she noted.
"You can use water. It causes a different effect, making things harder but more brittle," he said.
"So what?" Ruvah asked. "The priestess-"
"Lucia," Lucia said.
The water elemental nodded politely, and smiled. "Lucia will be our… forge, I suppose?"
"I am going to set him on fire, yes," she readily admitted.
"And then… you want me to drown you?" Ruvah asked, tentatively.
"Exactly!" Mercury confirmed with a little too much enthusiasm. His friends eyes him with a little bit of worry.
"... Right," Ruvah said slowly, then turned to Lucia. "You are sure this is safe, yes?"
Lucia looked at her for a long moment. "Yeah, sure," she eventually said. "Completely safe. I'll slow roast him, don't worry."
Mercury smiled a little. Lucia may say it, but he also knew she'd been holding back. If she really, really tried, she could have done a lot more damage than some light burns on his skin. He was tough against elemental effects, but not nearly that tough, especially when he wasn't using any of his abilities to mitigate the damage.
No, Lucia could certainly hurt him. But she hadn't. All she'd been doing is… venting, a little, maybe? Was this how people at these levels interacted? If Zyl smacked a regular human on the back, did he just run the risk of snapping their spine? Maybe that was why Otto often hesitated to touch other people.
"I'll be okay," Mercury assured them both. "Really. This will help me."
With a shrug, Lucia turned to Ruvah. She hummed, noncommittal, then promptly lit Mercury on fire.
The fire caught on his fur, instantly lighting him up in a blaze. Lucia very casually fed it, a steady stream of golden flame from her palms licking Mercury's fur. He got singed, then heated up.
His adapted body dealt with fire much better already.
A minute passed, and by the end of it, he was taking on a subtle glow, his body radiating out thermal energy in the form of light. Hotter and hotter, still. Mercury only spent a brief moment in his own head joking about how hot he was, then rapidly moved on. He didn't say it out loud, because filling his lungs with fire was a particularly unpleasant experience he had no desire to repeat.
For now, the pain simply dropped into
More and more, he was burnt. His skin charred. His bones began to flake, and his health slowly sank. And still, his body adapted. He
The sensations that came with it were bizarre, to say the least. His bones felt so malleable in the heat, that a simple casting of
There was a physicality to this magic. To those Skills, and the way they focused on his body. The same kind of feeling he got from his stamina-based abilities. Something he hadn't trained nearly as thoroughly as he ought to do.
Was there a secret in that? Some kind of stamina aspect that he needed to master before understanding metal? He thought about it, letting
Ruvah, too, seemed to notice, and Mercury got to experience one of the most bizarre sensations he had ever gone through. Rapid cooling.
See, when things heat up, they expand. Mercury was made of flesh and blood, so his cells expanded quite a bit in the heat. And now, all of a sudden, there was a medium in contact with him that cooled him down, cooling his skin way faster than his internal organs.
His cells contracted, and some of those connections broke. He shrank. His bones solidified after a moment as the heat propagated through his body. His joints popped, and his skin cracked all over, like a porcelain figure.
The water hissed furiously, as if enraged with Mercury's state of being. Metal that was cooled with water also cooled quickly. That cooling, and the way it caused the metal to contract, was what introduced the stresses in its crystal lattice.
Mercury was, decidedly, not made from a crystal lattice that could turn brittle, so in a few meaningful ways, he broke apart - and then a quick cast of
Then, for a brief moment, it was a confused Lucia, a worried Ruvah, and a very wet cat standing on cracked pavement. Until Mercury burst out in laughter.
"Hah. Hahahaha!" he laughed, heartily. "That was," he said, "without a doubt one of my silliest ideas ever. I should have more of those! How fun. How novel. It felt like I was kind of being pulled apart from the inside? But like, different. Like each of my bones had eaten a lemon and was cringing up! Yes. I felt like I'd been suffused with lemon."
Wait.
Was there actually a connection there? Contraction meant an increase in density, and often an accompanying increase in hardness. So, in a lot of ways, was the contraction of muscles not something that turned them into something akin to metal? Or maybe each fibre was like it? There was also metal in his skeleton and-
"He's having the look," Ruvah noted.
Lucia nodded, solemnly. "Give him a few minutes, I'm sure he'll ask me to light him on fire again."
- - -
"Light me on fire again!" Mercury yelled with excitement.
Ruvah grumbled, bringing out a single, silverish coin, and placing it in Lucia's hand. A pale. Mercury tilted his head. "We made a bet," Ruvah said. "I lost."
"Don't worry about it," Lucia consoled him. Then, a stream of fire distracted him from his thoughts.
- - -
Evening eventually came, and Mercury still had not quite comprehended metal. It was kind of funny, really. He had never pushed himself like this before. Not on purpose, at least. But he felt a lot closer to both fire and metal, by now. Which was nice.
Also, he now knew that his body was rather more… malleable than it had any right to, maybe? Most people did not casually get heated to the point where stone started melting.
Well. Not that he could do it all at once. Lucia had very steadily increased the temperature of the fire, giving him a chance to grow used to the effect. Otherwise, he'd be in trouble. He also knew that her fire could bite a whole lot more if she focussed or used the rest of her Skills.
Still, even considering all of that. He could, reasonably, with enough prep, just maybe give swimming in lava a try. Which was a weird thought. Mercury was no stranger to adjusting his mindset to… less than human standards, but this one still was particularly difficult to adjust to.
Humans used fire, but were also scared of it. Getting burnt was, after all, a rather miserable experience. Maybe Mercury ought to embrace a little more of that to understand metal and fire? He'd been swallowing it all up with
… Could he change his nervous system with
Hmmm. Something to think about, at least. Probably not something he'd do. Well, maybe soften or dull it? Vitality did that to a degree, and so did his Skills, though. At a certain point, pain didn't make sense for some things, anymore, because it was just… fine? Not that big of a deal?
Like, sure, getting stabbed in his heart was unhealthy but it wouldn't kill him. Probably. Maybe. Surely.
He decided to shelve that train of thought for now. Mercury gave a grand sigh, limping home. His prostheses were getting better, but since using ones made from ice gave him the most trouble, that's exactly what he decided to do.
Also, having one of his zeyjn try to maintain a block of ice within Lucia's flame was great practice for his freeform ice magic casting. He was getting better at that, by now, too, using the mana conversion circle to imprint the magic with an aspect, then weaving the rest himself.
More and more, the circle was starting to look a little bit like a crutch, though. There had to be easier ways to give the mana an aspect. He blinked.
Daydreaming was really a bit of a troublesome interest.
Giving a much smaller sigh, Mercury went home, made himself a small meal using a dozen ghost hands while meditating on the secrets of the universe with his other three minds, watered the plants in the garden, read a book to completion, then went to bed.
What an average day.