Thinking about magic

Whenever Lara listened to stories about hunting magical beasts she would imagine her grownup self in the story in stead of the adventurer telling it. She was fully aware that to become an adventurer was an impossible dream for her, as long as she was living under her fathers roof.

To become an adventurer you needed to be of age, meaning at least 15 years old. This rule was set because of the magical beasts. Even though most magical beasts looked mostly like normal animals, they were all much more powerful. No normal person could ever fight one fairly.

In addition to the age limit, a practical test was also in place to ensure that the applicant had some combat strenght. After it is passed the applicant could get their identification card. Still, even though you could then accept missions, most people chose to form a party before going out.

The reason for this was that if a soldier met a wild wolf in the forest one person would be enough to defeat it. However, to defeat a wolf type magical beast at least five soilders would have to fight together. Because of this it would truly be a waste to have children with no chance at all accepting hunting missions.

While Lara was remembering everything she had been told by the adventures and how they had strongly advised her to give up joining them, she was practicing her newfound powers. To better defend herself, Lara had decided that beeing able to cast her fire over a distance would be best.

Since she didn't have a sword and didn't know how she could make a bow, this was her only option. Lara wasn't strong enough to fight magical beasts without a weapon. If she kept her hands covered in fire she would definitely be able to inflict enough damage. But the problem was that she had never trained in any martial arts, and wouldn't be able to avoid taking damage herself as well.

Lara had been very worried about running into predators when she was being forced deeper into the forest by her pursuers. She had planned to climb the closest tree if she met any, but if she got cornered in a tree, the people chasing her would definetly catch up. Luckily no such thing had happened.

Now that Lara had a power that was her own she would definetly use it. She had thought that running away would most probably end in her dying in the forest. But even so, she had steeled her will to fight back against her fathers plan and run. Now that she was trying to make her magic a weapon, Lara felt she might just live.

However this was easier said than done, making the fire burning in her hand leave it and hit something away from herself was turning out to be a real challenge. Keeping a flame going in her hand was easy now, but her progress past that was very different from what Lara imagined her attack should be.

She had seen an adventurer use fire magic before. But what she had seen was a flamethrower attack. After using her magic for a whole day, she succeeded in copying the flamethrower. However, Lara noticed right away how ineffective and wasteful this attack was. The most usefull thing about it was that it was loud and bright.

She guessed that the adventurer that had shown of this skill at one of the parties had used it because it would seem powerful and grand to those who didn't know better. Since Lara now found herself on the other side of the fence, she realised she would have to figure out something better herself.

Since Lara didn't know anything about magic and there were no one around who could teach her, she started her development by thinking of different ranged weapons she had seen adventurers use. Most ranged attackers were archers or magicians. She knew arrows imbued with magic was very powerful but she couldn't think of how to make a bow. She just didn't have the right tools or anything she could use as a bowstring.

Lara thought about casting something between a flamethrower and an arrow, but shaping her magic like that was beyond her current capability. In the end Lara remembered the slings that the children in town used to play with. She knew that as long as you had the strenght to send it flying, a heavier rock would do more damage.

Of course, fire didn't weigh anything at all. Lara thought that to make up for it, her fire had to be very hot. Even so, she understood that this would cost much more of her total energy. While practicing her fire casting for an entire week Lara had run out of power countless times.

Since Lara was very unwilling to harm the environment around her, recarging was very slow. To gain back the energy she had used to practice, Lara would meditate. While focusing her entire being on only accepting the natural energy in the air around her, she would block out the plant life.

After a week her recharging was showing signs of speeding up. She had noticed that while traveling deeper into the forest, the energy in the air had become thicker. At the same time, as she had noticed much earlier those plants she knew from her home town was rarely seen anymore, while the magical plants had become much more plentiful.

After she realised that much, she could see that although the plants had much more energy than she could draw from the air in a short time. The air around her would never run out of magic. Lara made up he mind to only draw energy from living things in emergency situations. Also, she was going to work towards finding the limit to how much energy she could keep, so she wouldn't easily run out.