Why Are You Coming Out Of There? (1)

“What’s the matter, Leonard?”

Samantha asked just as breakfast was winding down. Normally Leonard chattered away and never sat still for a second, but today, for some reason, he was quiet.

“Ah. It’s nothing.”

Leonard had been absently stirring his spoon around the bowl. He managed a faint smile and shoveled the oatmeal into his mouth, then, because his mother was still watching him with worried eyes, said it again, firmly this time.

“I’m fine, really.”

Bewildered, Samantha turned to her husband, Marco, but he was just as much in the dark and could only shrug.

Damn it all.

Leonard dropped his gaze below the table. None of this made sense, and he could hardly believe it, but with his parents sitting plainly alive in front of him, parents who should have been dead long ago, he had no choice but to accept it.

Leonard Felix had gone back in time.

Why in the world is this happening?

He had closed his eyes on the battlefield, so why was he sitting here? And who, really, was the human that had appeared in his final moments? No, had it even been “human” to begin with?

More than that…

If this was real, a more important problem was waiting.

“Did you hear about Colin’s family?”

“They’re moving to a bigger town, I heard. Sounds like a relative talked them into going in on some business together over there.”

The couple murmured back and forth as they went on with their meal.

Leonard listened quietly, and without meaning to, he squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. This conversation, this moment, every bit of it matched his memory.

Today was April 22nd.

Exactly one week, to the day, before the date of his parents’ death.

“Leo?”

“Thank you for the meal.”

Leonard rose slowly, handed his mother his plate with the food still half eaten, and went straight back to his room. Marco and Samantha blinked after him, puzzled by the strange impatience in their son.

“Did something happen to him?”

“Kids that age are all over the place, aren’t they… I’ll have a talk with him later, just the two of us. Looks like I won’t be taking him out to the fields today after all.”

With his back to the voices drifting faintly through, Leonard leaned against the bedroom door and dragged a palm down his face.

April 22nd, the fateful day that had turned his life upside down. Monsters had appeared out of nowhere, and in no time at all Keld Village, the home he was born in, had been laid waste.

Fewer than a hundred people lived there, and it sat so far out that even by the Empire’s standards it was the back of beyond. Against monsters pouring in like waves, it never stood a chance of putting up real resistance.

By the time the army arrived a few days later, only a handful of children and adults were left alive, Leonard among them. He had lost his family and his home in an instant, and endless nightmares had hounded him for the rest of his life.

Right up until a few hours ago, that is.

— Scrrritch.

His nails raked the wooden wall and left faint marks behind.

This is a chance.

One week left.

Could he find a way to protect both the village and his parents in just one week? Once his thoughts got that far, his boiling blood slowly cooled and his mind sharpened.

What do I do?

The best option was to evacuate the villagers. The monsters wouldn’t come for about six days, so if everyone set out now, they could get a fair distance away.

But however he turned it over, that was impossible. No villager would take a brat who had barely turned nine seriously.

He even weighed something as extreme as setting fire to the surrounding land, but the village was buried in forest; one wrong move and they would burn to death instead of escaping.

The village wasn’t without weapons, but turning them on an army of monsters was still asking too much. Nor was he without people he could call on for help, but if they failed to arrive in time, there was no fallback.

In the end, only one option remained. He would stand and fight, even if he had to do it alone.

So that’s the only answer after all.

Leonard bit his lip and walked over to the window.

Tonight, he had to “die” one more time.

In the small hours before dawn, Leonard slipped out of the house without his parents knowing and headed for the knoll behind Keld Village. He wandered for hours through a forest without a scrap of light, and finally gathered a few stalks of grass and some berries.

Next…

He crushed the leaves and berries together, then set about extracting their essence with a flint and a pot of water he had brought from home. Before long the water had clouded to a murky purple.

What he had made was poison, nothing less. Its smell, though, was sweet, a fragrance that teased faintly at the tip of his nose. He had thrown together every plant he suspected might be toxic, more or less at random, but the effect was certain.

Anyone watching would call this the stupidest thing in the world.

Inside the body of every living thing is an organ that holds mana, the energy of life. It is called the “blood meridian.”

As a rule, the blood meridian and one’s mana grow together with age, but in a few people born with blessed genes, the mana sometimes outgrows the blood meridian’s capacity. To process the excess, the blood meridian forms a small outlet known as a “Circle.”

Only after going through this process can a human draw mana out of the body, and only then can a person be called a “mage” at all.

The problem was that Leonard had first manifested mana at around sixteen. With the average age of awakening at thirteen, that was late. Very late indeed.

So what was he to do?

— Gulp.

Gazing down at the poison, now gone cold, Leonard swallowed dryly.

If he artificially pushed his flesh to the brink of death, the instinct to survive would make his mana lash out as well, violently enough to break through the blood meridian.

…In theory, at least.

There’s no other option.

A gamble.

Would he master his mana and cure the poison first, or would the poison kill him before he could? If the first, he lived. If the second, he lost even this second chance.

Quit whining, you idiot.

Leonard heaped curses on himself. This body had already resigned itself to death once. If he was going to die either way, he would gladly stake his life on this.

Mother. Father.

He had gotten to see his parents’ faces again, so he had no regrets. Leonard steeled himself, took one short, deep breath, then tipped the bowl and drained it in a single motion.

Afterward, so he wouldn’t bite his tongue when the shock hit, he stuffed a strip of cloth he had torn from his own clothes beforehand firmly into his mouth.

“Haah, haah!”

He waited for the poison to spread, and then, all at once, his vision and his head went white.

“Khhrrrggh!”

Blood rushed to his abdomen and chest, where the blood meridian lay hidden, and his pale skin darkened to a deep red. Pain struck without warning. Leonard staggered, let out a groan so beastlike no one would have believed a small child made it, and collapsed where he stood.

Once. Twice.

Then five times, ten times.

Every time the keen edge of his mana scraped the blood meridian, a jolt like lightning tore through his whole body. Blood seeped from under the nails he had dug deep into the dirt, but he clenched his teeth hard enough to shatter them and held on.

If he passed out now, the whole thing would come to nothing.

Endure it!

There had been times he went into battle clutching his own spilling guts. Next to that pain, this was nothing. Leonard talked himself through it and curled up tight.

About an hour passed like that.

Sweat had soaked both the ground and his clothes by the time something exploded in his belly and Leonard gasped.

“Haaugh!”

The blood meridian had been pierced, and through that opening, the Circle, a clear, cold energy flowed out to the farthest tips of his body and washed over the exhausted frame of a nine-year-old boy.

His body couldn’t hold all the mana that had burst out at once, so it vented the surplus through the pores of his skin. The energy spread into the air, caught in the grass and the trees, and scattered into a mist of light that lit the forest around him.

“Ah…”

For an instant, Leonard lost himself completely in the spectacle unfolding before his eyes.

Overflow.

All the mana a person has built up from birth to the present gushes out the moment the first Circle opens. It is a rare sight, seen only when a mage awakens for the first time, and its light is visible to mages alone.

It worked… it actually worked!

Having awakened later than everyone else, he had naturally lagged behind in ability too. While younger classmates pulled far ahead, he had trained to close the gap without missing a single day.

He had always been the one scrambling to catch up, and now he was ahead of everyone before he had even reached the starting line. The success was so enormous he could barely grasp it himself.

Now then.

The poison was gone without a trace, and the blood meridian had stabilized. Leonard brushed himself off and stood. He clenched and unclenched his fist, and mana he couldn’t have felt even yesterday began circulating through his whole body.

— Tap!

He kicked off the dirt and shot high into the sky. Even the trees, five times the height of a grown man, lay below him.

From midair he took a quick look over the whole village, then dropped back down and landed.

I expected it, but this much really isn’t enough.

A Circle was the measure of how much mana a mage could put out and how strong he could be, and a mere first Circle could never hold off every monster attacking the village. What he desperately needed was reinforcements who could help him at the decisive moment.

But before any of that, I’m the one who isn’t ready yet.

Normally, new Circles form as one masters mana or simply grows older, but the closer one gets to old age, the harder the blood meridian sets, and that blocks a Circle from opening naturally.

But what about now? His body was still young, and he had the mana-handling skill of an Archmage.

…I’m probably the only person in all of history who’s ever tried something like this.

From here on, he didn’t need the poison’s help. All he had to do was handle and release mana without pause and let his body accumulate new experience. Only one problem remained.

Could a child’s stamina really hold up under the pain of forcing a Circle into being?

Leonard hesitated a moment, then made up his mind. If he wanted explosive growth in a short time, this was the only way. He let out a short sigh and clamped both hands around the thick trunk of a nearby tree.