Ch.13 To Caelum

Sitting in the garden with M. Rais and the young girl with the bad temper, Sara, Jax was quietly waiting for their conversation to finish while reading his book. One surprising thing was that when Jax had arrived, M. Rais had been very supportive in hiring him as an escort for her travel time.

"I won't be going on my vacation while I have to babysit some random brat!" Shouted Sara as she was red from anger.

"You don't need to babysit him. He's a mage and can take care of himself. Moreover, if you don't accept, you won't be going on that trip." The older man replied ever so calmly.

"I don't care! I want a real bodyguard. What is going to happen if a dark mage attacks me? Do you expect that brat to protect me?" She continued while shouting even louder and gesticulating with her arms.

Unfortunately, as she was gesticulating, she touched the ancient teapot of her father, something costly. However, by the time she noticed and tried to catch it, the teapot was already halfway to the floor.

Jax noticing this from the corner of his eye, pointed his left finger at a nearby bush. By injecting his nature power, he made it extend itself to catch the teapot, effectively preventing it from falling to the ground. As the father and daughter duo were surprised, he moved his finger, making a small branch appear and set it down on the tea table. Jax, all this time as if nothing happened, continued to read his seemingly unfinishable book.

As the duo came back from their stupor, the girl seemingly didn't have anything else to say as the father sighed in relief. However, no one knew if he was sighting due to saving the teapot or because his daughter had stopped arguing.

"So, I can take it that you're okay with me?" Asked Jax while looking at Sara.

"Humph, you will do. You better protect me properly, or I'm going to hunt you once I turn into a ghost." She said while thinking she was vicious enough. However, it wasn't enough to throw Jax out of balance as he simply replied: "Ghosts are easy to destroy."

Hearing a chuckling from the girl's father, Jax smiled slightly while the young women seemed ready to beat him up.

"So, when are we leaving?" Asked Jax as he couldn't wait to start the job correctly.

"There's a boat leaving at 2 for Caelum. We'll take it." Answered Sara as she got up and walked.

Jax looked at the clock on the top of the wall and saw that it was merely 10:30. Frowning slightly while thinking of how he would spend his time, M. Walter Rais coughed slightly to bring Jax's attention to himself.

As Jax turned his attention to him, he started talking: "This time, I'll entrust my daughter to you. I can't tell if dark mages will attack you. However, if there are, they should be weak dark mages. I just hope that you bring her back safely from her trip." He finally added before getting up and going back inside. "You can stay here until she's ready."

Upon hearing this, Jax decided to simply spend his time reading until it was time to depart, and like this, three hours went by.

At 1:30, Sara and M. Rais came to the garden and seeing them appear, Jax knew it was time. Closing his book and storing it in his bag, Jax got up and went to join them. Without a word from the young lady, they made their way to the harbour and boarded a passenger boat to Caelum.

Knowing that they would be spending two days on the boat, they had to have a room for each of them. Their tickets gave them rooms next to each other.

Their rooms were under the deck, and they were at the furthermost of the corridor, with Jax's room being the second further and Sara's being the furthest. This arrangement would lower the possibility of random passengers walking in front of the cabin, reducing the trouble of guarding her.

As Sara settled in her cabin, Jax went and knocked on her door. As she opened the door, she said: "I don't need your protection on the boat as there's no way a dark mage is on the boat. They couldn't know that I would be taking this specific boat to go to Caelum." Before slamming the door in his face.

Shrugging his shoulders as what she said made sense, he went back to his cabin and started to read his book. However, he couldn't relax while reading and decided to switch to training his magic. Unfortunately, he couldn't work on his water magic as he needed it if something were to happen. It was the same with his fairy magic as he needed it in case he had to heal Sara. As such, he trained his light and dark magic. For light, it was pretty easy just to control the light to create different forms while doing the same with his dark.

While he was training his dark magic by making his shadow move, a wave suddenly hit the boat as the book he had left on the side of the bed fell directly on the ground and his shadow. It was all he needed as he got the idea of storing items in his shadow.

Stopping his light magic training, Jax focused entirely on his dark magic. The basic idea was to use his own shadow as storage to bring items with him. Thinking for a moment, he based his theory on two different magics. The first one, Requip, is magic that allows the user to store items in a sub-dimension. The user of that magic would always bring items out of their dimension as long as they have magical power. As for the second magic, he was thinking of shadow magic, a subcategory of dark magic.

Users of shadow magic could control the shadows. However, the only spell developed in this category that could help him is the 'shadow form' magic. This magic allowed the user to sink in a shadow and travel in it.

Now, he couldn't use Requip magic. However, by using the idea of how it worked, by creating a hole in space and storing items in it, he got the idea to make a hole in his own shadow by using a part of the 'shadow form' spell.

Focusing on his own shadow with his dark magic, he tried to create a hole in his shadow for a moment, which would allow him to leave objects inside. However, no matter how much he tried, he couldn't create a slot. He knew that the shadow form magic was only used by A-rank mages so, he knew that it would take some time to develop that technique.

Thankfully, in the past, Jax had read a lot of books concerning magic. After all, knowing your enemies' magic function is an advantage in battle. Moreover, by learning more about magic, he had managed to create some variation for himself, such as the root binding of his nature magic. In the beginning, Jax only used nature magic to grow vegetation and boost itself by being in a field created by themselves. However, after tweaking his magic a bit, he quickly turned it into potentially dangerous magic.

Continuing to train on his magic with a clear goal in mind, he only stopped when it was time for supper as he left the cabin escorting the young lady from afar. He was fully aware that she didn't want his protection. However, since it was his job, he could only protect her from afar and not bother her about security. Anyway, he would be there if something happened.

The supper went well, and they both went back to their room at the same time. Sara didn't bother talking to him all along, and Jax merely shrugged as he wasn't bothered by her attitude.

So, after supper, Jax took his book and read a little before preparing to sleep. Firstly, he used his sound magic to reduce the noise from the right side of his cabin and the alleyway next to it and, on the contrary, increased the sound in front of his place and on the left side. Finally, he used his earth magic to put some grains everywhere on the ground in front of both his and the girl's cabin.

All of this took little to no magic power for his earth magic, and it was a small continuous use of his sound magic power that allowed him to use it nonstop since he recovered at about the same rate he consumed the magical energy. The sound magic was to amplify any sounds in their cabin's surroundings, while the earth magic, which was everywhere on the ground, would alarm him due to the amplified sound of shoes walking on grains of dirt and stone. He managed to make a simple alarm system that would wake him up quickly, were someone to walk in front of their two cabins during the night.

With this completed, he changed into his pyjamas and turned off the light going to sleep.