Chapter 12 - Horse Chase
It had been two years since the fight with the bandits.
I am seven now.
Hard to believe, really. My body was still small, my arms thin, and I could barely swing a wooden sword without toppling over, but something inside me had definitely changed.
My mana had grown. Not just in size, but in presence. I could feel it pulse gently under my skin when I focused, like a second heartbeat. Thanks to my training, I kept exhausting my mana to the point I fainted, hell I might have felt like dying at one point, but the mana was more than noticeable.
I had no frame of reference for how much mana was considered "a lot" in this world. But compared to what I had when I first arrived... it was a different realm altogether. Back then, my mana felt like a flickering candle. Now, it was a steady lantern, bigger than a regular lantern.
And I noticed something to myself recently too. I've been very productive the years of me being in here... I think mom was right, it really was that damn phone, no endless scrolling, no staying up all night just to grind items, or following up on an anime I liked. Here, everything are old school and you work physical most of the time. It kinda... felt better than my previous life, in a way. There always have been a weight behind my back, probably all those sleepless nights doing nonsense. Here? I felt free. I get to sleep before 8! That's a huge difference in terms of my current health than to my previous one.
Lyra is already ten, soon eleven. In this world, just four years away from being considered an adult.
As for Saul, he recovered well. He's missing an arm now, but he carried himself like it never happened. Lyra, bless her, tried to apologize the only way she knew how; by baking a cake. It tasted horrible. Like burnt flour mixed with gravel. Saul ate it with a straight face.
Thorskil had offered him money in return for saving our lives. Saul refused, of course. He said he only wanted to pass down his teachings to Lyra. Maybe even to me, if I was serious about it.
Thorskil was hesitant, concerned like any friend would be. I'd overheard him say things like, "Are you sure about this?" and "You should really take it easy." But Saul only smiled and shrugged it off.
In the end, Thorskil gave Saul five goats, and two cows, and those were the finest ones dad had. Saul just ended up accepting it because dad kept insisting, and he added additional two bags of gold for him; risking his life for us.
In the end, he started training both of us even stricter.
I never found out what information they got from the surviving bandits. Five of them were captured alive, Thorskil said they were interrogated, but when I asked about it, he told me not to worry. The next morning, those bandits were just.. gone.
Now, I found myself sparring in the clearing once more, the field stretching out around us like a canvas painted in green and gold. The sun was high, the wind light. Birds chirped in the trees, and the grass whispered underfoot.
Clack!
My wooden sword met Lyra's, the sound echoing through the field.
"Great form, Kyro!" Saul called from where he sat cross-legged on a flat rock, watching us with his usual calm demeanor.
I grinned.
Clack!
Lyra swung low, I leapt to the side, rolled, and rose with a counter.
"Yes, that's it!" Saul encouraged.
I stepped forward, momentum behind me, eyes on my target. But then, Lyra's face changed and her grin faded. Her eyes narrowed and I was too slow to react.
Whack.
Pain exploded through my stomach. The breath left my body like a punched wineskin.
"Gaaah!" I wheezed, crumpling to my knees.
—F-Fuck...!
"Lyra!" Saul's tone sharpened.
"What? I had to try it at least once!" she protested, rolling her shoulder casually. "How else is he supposed to improve?"
"You don't test new moves on your younger brother," Saul sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "If you want to pull something risky, try it on me."
"Ugh, fine," she said, then looked down at me. "Your face is just so puffed and squishy sometimes, I can't help it."
"I... I'll take that as a compliment.."
She knelt beside me and draped my arm over her shoulder.
"Can... can we have a time out?" I murmured. "I think I almost pooped..."
"Ewww!" she shrieked, immediately checking behind me like a startled raccoon.
A few minutes later, I sat on the bench near our garden, ribs still aching but grateful for the breeze. In the field, Saul and Lyra continued training. Their strikes echoed like a drumbeat. Lyra's form had improved, significantly! She was starting to move like a real warrior. Confident, sharp, purposeful. I tilted my head back, watching the clouds drift lazily through the sky. Part of me wondered what it would be like to be taught magic the same way Lyra was taught swordplay. To have a mentor guiding my mana, helping me grow it, control it, shape it into something powerful.
A little while later, I was doing chores once again.
That was the deal, and it had been the deal for long enough that it no longer felt like a deal and had simply become the order of things.
Lyra's assignment for the season was the far field: specifically, the collection of what the cows left behind, and its conversion into fertilizer under Mom's instruction. She had accepted this responsibility with the wounded dignity of someone who believed they deserved better and had been forced to make peace with the situation. Every morning she collected it. Every morning her face communicated, very clearly, that she had not moved past this emotionally.
My assignment was the barn.
And I preferred the barn.
The barn smelled like hay and warm animal and old wood, which was not the most glamorous combination of scents but was at least honest about what it was. Six cells ran along the left side, each with a water trough and a slot at the front for feed. The horses were all different: a pale gray one at the near end that belonged technically to nobody but had decided it liked Lyra, a pair of brown workhorses in the middle that my father used for hauling, two younger ones still being worked with that shied at loud sounds.
And at the far end, in the last cell, Kelsey.
She heard me coming. She always heard me coming. By the time I reached her cell with the last batch of wheat, she had already pressed her face to the wooden bars and was making a sound that was objectively undignified for an animal of her size.
"Good morning," I said.
She licked my face in response.
"Okay. Yeah yeah. Good morning."
She kept going, It tickles, haha.
"Kelsey. I have your wheat right here. If you let me put it down, you can eat it."
This reasoning did not reach her. The licking continued with great enthusiasm.
Kelsey was my father's horse, technically. She was also, in practice, the warmest and most uncomplicated relationship I had on the farm. I had been feeding her for over a year. She remembered this. She had feelings about this that she expressed through her face and her tongue without any apparent concern for whether this was appropriate.
"You're like a very large dog.." I told her.
She pushed her nose against my cheek.
"Heh, I take that as agreement."
I scratched behind her ears, which produced a sound of deep contentment. For a moment I just stood there and let the morning be quiet around us: the barn smell, the light coming in through the gaps in the planks, the sound of the other horses moving in their cells, Kelsey's warm breath against my face.
Then I had an idea; Ideas, in my experience, were most dangerous when they arrived that felt obvious. An example of which was how I died as Paul Gapor.
The idea was: Kelsey was exceptionally well-behaved. I had been working with her for a year. She responded to voice and touch and had never once done anything unpredictable. The field adjacent to the barn was enclosed but open, and a horse needed to move, and a brief stroll with a rope and a seven-year-old who had been feeding her for twelve months seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
I found a rope on the peg near the barn entrance. Tied it to Kelsey's halter. Walked her down to the gate at the edge of the field, which I had not yet opened because I was a responsible person who did not open gates without assessing the situation first.
"Hey."
Lyra had appeared at some point behind me, which I had not noticed because she moved like a person who enjoyed not being noticed when it was convenient. She was holding a wooden tool and wearing the expression of someone whose morning had been olfactorily challenging.
"Uh, hi Lyra."
She looked at the rope, she looked at Kelsey, then finally, toward me.
"Dad said not to open the gate for the horses." She crossed her arms.
"It's fine," I proclaimed. "Kelsey's perfectly behaved. I've been feeding her for a year and she's never done anything bad."
Lyra squinted, clearly having doubts.
"I have the rope right here," I shrugged. "Even if something happened, I'd have control. We'd just walk around outside the fence line, come back in five minutes. She could use the exercise."
Lyra's eyes moved to the rope, her right eyebrow rose. "Kyro."
"What?"
"Your rope, look at it, nitwit."
I looked at the rope. Then I looked more carefully at the rope. Specifically at a section about two-thirds of the way down, where the fibers had frayed to the point that the word "rope" was doing some generous work as a description. It was more of a rope suggestion. A rope aspiration.
"Okay," I said, "N-no problem! I'll just get a different rope."
I turned to reach for the gate latch with my free hand, intending to close it properly while I went back for a better rope, which was the correct sequence of responsible actions.
What happened instead was that Kelsey made a sound.
A large sound. A sound that emerged from somewhere deep in her chest and expressed, with great clarity, a position on the subject of being cooped up in a barn and then being stood next to an open field with a gate right there. Her legs gathered under her. She rose onto her back hooves with the drama of an animal that had been considering this for some time.
Then she went forward.
The gate was still mostly closed. This did not particularly matter to Kelsey, who cleared it in a single leap that made the entire fence structure tremble and sent her dark mane streaming behind her as she landed on the other side and hit the dirt road at full speed.
The rope snapped in my hands. The frayed section, which had been holding on through sheer optimism, finally gave up.
The recoil of the rope swinging back did not help my face's relationship with the gate, which I was still standing next to.
BAM.
Wooden gate and my nose kissed. A brief, sincere introduction between them, which hurts a lot.
"OW," I yelped, extremely sincerely.
Then I turned around, Kelsey was already fifty meters down the road and moving faster.
Lyra stood beside me. She was looking at me with an expression that contained multitudes, none of which I had time to catalog.
"See?!" she said, which was technically only one word but managed to convey a complete and detailed editorial on the preceding five minutes.
"I was about to get a different rope," I said, touching my nose carefully.
"Even then, you'd get dragged along through the mud, moron! They are ANIMALS!"
"I—she's never done that before!" I argued back.
"Because you've never opened the gate before!" She made a pointed the obvious.
This was, I had to admit privately, a fair point. A horse that had never had the opportunity to escape had no track record on the subject of escaping.
Lyra was already moving toward the gate, yanking it open. "We have to get her back before Dad gets home or Mom notices!"
"We can't run as fast as a horse!" I blurted, following. "Look at us." I gestured at my seven-year-old legs. "And look at you! We are not horse-speed material!"
"Shut up," She turned and crouched. "get on."
I looked at her back. At Kelsey, now a dark shape disappearing around the curve of the road. At the general situation.
"Are you sure?"
"I SAID GET ON."
I got on without question, and we took off.
[End]