I wasn't grown in a flask. A common misunderstanding. I had real parents once. For the first six years of my life, I was an ordinary child in an ordinary family in a very ordinary small town, although my memories of that time have grown distant and hazy. I wasn't sure what happened or how, but I suddenly found myself an orphan loitering in the streets, surviving off the pity of the neighbors.
During the day, I'd play outside with the other children and act the same as always, but when the sun set, the others went home to their families, while my home stayed dark and empty. One day, I ran into a bunch of strangers in our house, ran away, and didn't dare to go back there again. I believed my parents were only away on a long trip and would eventually come back and set things right, but days turned to weeks, and I was alone.
I recall an elderly couple who often treated me to a meal in their humble one-room apartment. All they had to share was a piece of dry old bread and watery soup, but it kept me alive. I couldn't remember their names anymore, if I ever even knew what they were.
The old pair debated adopting me. The lady was in favor, but the husband opposed. He reasoned they were too old and poor to raise a child who wasn't even their own. The missus was fast talking him over until the soldiers appeared.
The army went around from town to town and village to village, collecting the homeless for reasons they wouldn't tell anybody. Their tour eventually brought them to the door of the old couple too, in the middle of dinner. They'd heard from the neighbors that I had no parents and wasn't needed or wanted. The soldiers asked if the seniors planned to take me in. In case they were, I could stay. But they would take everyone who had no one.
Take where? To war? No, I would be taken good care of. They had places for children like me, where I could have food and shelter and education.
The old couple was kind, but they weren't stupid. They sensed foul play, though they couldn't explain it. But I was becoming more trouble for them than I was worth. The talk dragged, and, unnerved by the men in uniforms, they finally caved in.
Well, take her then!
I never blamed that old couple for their choice, or even thought about them again. I was going to leave them anyway when my parents returned, and was relieved I didn't have to play family with them. But it wasn't about to get better.
Boot camp wasn't my destination. I was shipped to a plain-looking installation at the remote Lake Biscal, disguised as a fish farm. Within was hidden a state-of-the-art research facility run by the mages' association, Mysterium.
The bitter war with the beastmen of Rapatia had barely ended, and a new conflict already loomed on the horizon, the Empire of Tarachia swallowing up her neighbors at an alarming rate, like a giant, ever-hungry toad. More than muscle and steel was needed to prevail in a world of adversity. The Royal House pressed various factions for solutions, at whatever cost.
The flow of armed campaigns typically hinged on the use of magic, and if common wizards weren't good enough to make a real difference, then better wizards had to be manufactured.
It wasn't a new idea. Through history, Calidea had so far produced eight generations of artificial mages, but the results were less than stellar. They'd found methods to expand mana circuitry and techniques to augment casting processes via etchings, but the procedures had many drawbacks.
If the power output was too high, it undermined stability; the subjects died too fast and randomly. If the rituals were too advanced, the information load grew too high on the brain; the subjects went insane or wound up catatonic, or just...got weird.
Millions of crowns had been wasted to create unreliable suicide bombers, who were more a threat to their own than to the enemy. Researchers were happy to make discoveries, but the state thought otherwise, and Mysterium was fast earning itself the heretical brand.
A man named Philemon became the savior of the project.
Philemon wasn't even a mage, but he was what all great endeavors needed: a man with a big vision and no morality whatsoever. He reasoned that the main problem with the previous generations was the antiquated obsession with universal mastery. There was no reason to create archmages when what you really needed were catapults. It was better to create a pawn that could only do one thing, but who did that one thing better than anybody else.
Philemon picked out orphans of unique traits, assigned each a specific focus, and then doctored and trained them from the ground up to support that specialty. The ultimate fire mage. The ultimate wind mage. The ultimate earth mage. The ultimate metal mage. The ultimate lightning mage. And so on…
Extreme specialization—that became the core principle behind the ninth generation of "super mages." The Nines.
Of course, if you named your Ultimate Human Weapon Research Project like so, it would quickly become a top target for sabotage and espionage. So it was called simply PROJECT FAR SHORE.
And that was where it became my story.
My lack of elemental affinity was supposedly a rare trait. One in a million. So I became the poster girl of the project branch Philemon was personally most interested in: the ultimate neutral mage.
The "training" in the facility was, of course, nothing but torture.
"Ultimate" couldn't be reached without crossing a lot of lines. The reason they looked for orphans was because the mortality rate in the experiments was high. Previous generations had primarily used adult volunteers, but hiding the death toll from the media was hard.
Nobody asked after the undesirables, which wars, monsters, poverty, and lack of sex-ed supplied in a steady stream. If anything, cleaning up the streets gave the government a big popularity boost on the side.
Children were preferable to adults also because their brain and mana channel were still developing and more open to modifications. Who I used to be was efficiently, systematically broken down, physically and psychologically, and rebuilt over three years to become someone—something else.
I forgot about the pain and fear the first time I cast a Tier 7 spell.
I'd never forget that visceral dance of atoms in the desert night sky. Clouds of pure light and fire, blooming in the way of living flowers, faithfully fulfilling the prophecies of mathematics. The firmament replaced with a manmade radiance that cleft across time and space, echoing the early seconds of the cosmos. Calculations that had previously existed only in lunatics' scribbles, made manifest on demand.
Only then, for the first time, did I feel truly "alive."
No longer an ignorant, frightened, tormented child, but an emissary of realms beyond mortal understanding, a prophet delivering truths of existence that human ingenuity had torn from the darkness of ignorance.
In that moment, enlightened, I could see the wisdom and purpose of those heartless days of abuse, and was made a believer on the spot. Even my life, the life and suffering of thousands like me, would've been a small price to pay to bring such glory into being.
Everything for which so many people had worked for so long, and bled and died to create, had come to fruition at last, redeemed—The feeling couldn't be described in words. We all wept out of joy, the researchers of Mysterium and I with them.
But there was still the war to fight too.
The project had achieved its goals—surpassed its goals—in creating mages of exceptional ability. But our opponent was a federation of nations, overwhelming in scale and numbers. Conflicts like this didn't pan out like methodical exchanges on the Go-board. It was a vast, sprawling, garbled, ugly, inchoate sludge smeared wide across the map, burying continents under it. There was no one big problem with a matching solution, but a shapeless conglomerate of problems giving rise to yet more problems, and each solution came at a heavy cost. There was only so far theory could take you.
No one person, however powerful, could "solve" war. And even the ultimate mages were not immortal. Of the thirty completed Nines to survive Project Far Shore, only two lived to see the days of peace. Only two.
Family. The meaning of that word I'd already forgotten.
Even the fact that I'd been someone's child, once.
Come to think of it——what had been my original name?
—"Aha! There, Hope. You got that part wrong. Tut-tut. Redo."
So Ms Asia would point over my shoulder, leaning on my back, when I tried to solve math exercises. For reasons unknown, she insisted on personally tutoring me for the entrance exam. My days of taking it easy were over.
Charlotte always maintained a polite distance, only offering friendly suggestions at times. But in Ms Asia's eyes, I was only a teenager cruelly deprived of her biological parents, and she saw no need to be cautious of me. Like the General, she didn't have any children of her own, and was looking for someone to dote on—or so I suspected.
Or maybe she was just that bored and had nothing better to do?
But fractions were the last thing on my mind then.
"Auntie. Your breasts are on my shoulder."
"Focus, Hope," Ms Asia muttered close to my ear. "No erotic thoughts now. A mage must always be in control of her body and feelings, isn't that right? I may not be a mage, but I know that."
"I'm not having erotic thoughts about my aunt."
"You know, if you need to say it aloud, it comes across as dishonest."
"Not sure I see the logic."
"Hey now. Your pen is not moving. Do my breasts fascinate you that much?"
"I'm just not used to being touched. Especially by breasts."
"Oh my, aren't you pitiful. If that's the case, you can touch me as much as you like while you're here, so you can get used to it. Then you won't be a fish out of water and embarrass yourself when you find yourself a lover."
"I appreciate the thought, but that won't be necessary."
Why was it assumed that my future lover would have breasts?
My sixteen years of life so far had been exceptionally loveless, and I couldn't see that changing any day soon. But Ms Asia didn't seem to agree.
"No. You'll definitely need the experience when you go to the academy. Trust me. I know. The boys will duel each other to the death, and the girls will disfigure their best friend just to hold hands with you. That's youth."
"Sounds rather like war to me."
"That's right. Love is war. People have killed each other more for love than maybe any other reason in history. You should be careful. Read Caulfes if you don't believe me."
"Thank you kindly for the advice. Have they yet come up with a defense method against the menace of breasts?"
"Ah-a," she interrupted and purred in my ear. "There. See? A rounding error. Are you even paying attention? Ho~pe."
Was this because I teased her about being cute earlier? Was it payback? What a vindictive woman my aunt was. But if she thought I'd get all flustered and fall to pieces because of the proximity of her unnecessarily large lumps of fat and seductive voice, and sweet perfume, she thought wrong. I was a mage, and my self-control was, as a matter of fact, nothing short of masterful. Not even my heart rate went above sixty-eight beats per minute.
But then her breath tickled my ear again,
"So. Between me and my sister, who do you think has the nicer rack?"
At the sudden question, my mind automatically and unasked began to perform a comparison, recalling reference from another time and place. Moonlight. A desert night. Standing guard upon the windy cliff. In the distance, the bathing figure of a Swordmaster. Glowing pale in the light of the moon, marked by the thin, stretched ghosts old scars. Shapes. Unexpectedly, there were shapes and they were not negligible.
"Aa, would you look at the time!" I let my pen drop, got out of the chair, and went firmly striding for the door. "I believe I'm taking a law-ordained break now. Bye."
"Boo. She ran."