Chương 52: Like a Cucumber

Despite the pain his body was in when he returned to the camp, Jonny was in high spirits. And hungry. Very hungry. Apparently, spending all day out hiking, waiting, and fighting was good for working up an appetite. When he got to the campsite, he immediately grabbed one of the largest chunks of meat they had on hand and got a fire going to thaw it, humming to himself as he did.

"Something good happen?" Jonny flinched. He had thought she was asleep. Perhaps she had been, but seeing her now, he was pretty sure she had been pretending. Now that he thought about it, her sword was in a different spot than it had been when he left. She was probably ready to come after me if I stayed out too much longer, he realized.

"Yeah, you could say that," he said.

"You look like you were in a rough fight." Jonny glanced down, somehow for the first time noticing that his jacket was slightly torn up.

"I guess I kinda was," he said.

"There was this goat thing with huge black horns and gravity magic. It kinda kicked my ass."

"A gravity goat?"

"Is that really what they're called?"

"What else would they be called?"

"I dunno. Something cooler?"

"Like a cucumber?"

"What?"

"Cool as a cucumber. You said that the first day we met."

"I did? Oh yeah, I did!"

"Are cucumbers considered cool in your homeland?"

"Uhhhh, no not really. That saying is 'cause… I actually don't know. It's just a saying."

"I see. So I take it from your good mood that you were able to kill the goat?"

"Nope!" said Jonny, turning the steak over to let the other side thaw.

"As I said, it kicked my ass. But, watch this!" He held his arms out to his sides, then made himself heavier, and his arms fell to his sides. A second later, he realized that was perhaps the most boring demonstration he could have done.

"Wait, hold on," he said, trying to think of something more interesting to show.

"You can use internal gravity magic?" asked Igrette.

"Yes!" said Jonny. He then made himself as light as he could, and pushed off the ground with his hands. He only got a few inches off the ground, but it took much less effort than it should have, and he fell slowly enough to be in the air for almost a full second. More than enough to demonstrate what he could do, at least.

"And now that I can do this, when I go back, I'm gonna kick that goat's ass and take its mana well. By the way, it had a mana well. I didn't just fight it for no reason. It's got a whole mana well to itself, and now that I can use internal gravity, I can kill it, and we can stay there. It's kind of exposed, but it should be fine for a while. I'm pretty sure the goat basically cleared everything else out in the area, and there aren't many places for other things to hide. You should be able to recover well there!"

"Really?" she asked.

"Really," Jonny confirmed.

"It's perfect."

"It almost sounds too perfect," Igrette said with a frown.

"Are you sure the goat was alone?"

"Pretty sure. I waited there for a while, and nothing else showed up." Igrette's frown deepened.

"It'll be fine," said Jonny.

"There's, like, nothing else around. I didn't even see any plants. I bet that there's not even anything else living around."

"I certainly hope so," said Igrette.

"So we'll be moving in the morning, then?"

"Yeah, probably," said Jonny.

"I figured I'd bring you most of the way there, then go beat up the goat, then come back to bring you the rest of the way." Igrette nodded, though she still looked uncertain. Jonny was actually happy about her uncertainty. He understood her concern, but he was also pretty sure she was just confused. She had been prepared to die, but now she was suddenly going to live again. He had to admit she had a point about it all being too perfect.

It was almost like the mana well had been designed for their specific situation. And her questions put a seed of doubt in his mind about whether or not the goat was actually alone. He tried to brush them aside, though. The goat looked pretty alone, and if there were more, he doubted they were as strong as that one. It was clearly very experienced and very skilled at combat. Igrette did not press any further on the subject, at least.

Instead, she turned the conversation to internal gravity magic, and now that Jonny could use it, she started giving him more specific tips on how to use it, and different techniques to use it better. The techniques all boiled down to just turning it on and off, and raising the intensity, but it was still eye-opening. The most basic thing she said was that when striking, it was best not to activate it until as late as possible.

She called it "gravity flashing" and basically, the idea was to max out internal gravity right at the moment of contact to keep from sliding without interfering with the strike. Punching or kicking in high gravity was quite difficult, so having it active the whole time was not ideal, and using gravity flashing also helped to conserve mana. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

When he told her his idea of using it to counter the goat's magic, she said that she was about to advise him to do the same thing. In that fight, the goat's main weapon was its control of gravity, and if he could neutralize that, it was just a goat. A very strong, very experienced goat, but still just a goat. She also talked more briefly about some advanced techniques that involved using internal gravity for movement, but she said that most people couldn't use it effectively.

Enhancing or lightening personal gravity was one thing. Changing which direction it pulled was so different it was almost an entirely different branch of magic. Simple flight or rapid movement could be learned by combining physical agility with vertical internal gravity control, but true gravitational flight was something only the most skilled mages could accomplish. While she spoke, Jonny took care of the meat, and by the time she finished, their dinner was ready.

Jonny idly thought that maybe eating nothing but meat every day wasn't the absolute best for his health, but he felt fine so far, and he had never really liked vegetables much anyway, no matter how his nutritionist tried to prepare them. They went to bed shortly after eating. Igrette had been quiet ever since her lecture on gravity magic, and was clearly lost in thought, so Jonny didn't want to disturb her. He felt a brief pang of guilt as he lay down, but pushed it aside.

He would have plenty of time to say emotional stuff to her later. He didn't need to do it now. He went to sleep excited, and woke up even more excited. It wasn't even sunrise yet when he got up, but he felt wide awake, and knew he wouldn't be getting any more sleep. He ran out of the shelter, and immediately started practicing his newfound skill, jumping all around while making himself lighter or heavier, just to get used to it.

He was nowhere near proficient, but he could make himself lighter or heavier at will, and while the change wasn't as rapid as the goat's, and definitely not fast enough for gravity flashing, he had a feeling it would suit his needs. Being able to respond instantly would be nice, but being able to respond at all made the upcoming fight a very different one. Then, after about five minutes, he encountered an issue: he was running out of mana.

He hadn't noticed in his excitement the day before, but using internal gravity mana was much more mana intensive than ordinary mana use. He had actually been close to empty when he went to sleep, and now that brief, but intense training session had used up most of the rest of it. He glanced at where Igrette lay sleeping in the shelter, then over toward where the first mana well was. It was powerful enough that he would be able to recharge in a few minutes, and possibly be back before Igrette woke up.

He debated for a few seconds, then went inside and wrote "getting mana" in the snow beside Igrette before running off through the hills. As he drew nearer, he got nervous, wondering if maybe the thing in the cave was nocturnal, and that he might catch it awake by going so early. He stopped on the cave-free side of the hill, listening for any sign of movement. He heard nothing, but after a few minutes, he decided that the mana here was dense enough.

It would take a few minutes longer, but it wasn't like he was in that much of a rush. Half an hour later, he hiked back to the camp, and found Igrette in a very slightly different position than she had been. She was still asleep, or at least pretending to be, but it was clear she had stirred. Good thing I left that message… He got to work cooking them breakfast, and as usual, Igrette woke up just in time for food. They ate in silence, then immediately started packing up. Or, Jonny packed up.

Igrette just lay on her wolf pelt and watched. She only moved when Jonny stood over her severed, frozen arm, hesitating.

"Leave it," she said.

"The snow will melt before I am healthy enough that we can try to reattach it." Jonny frowned, then bent down to pick up the arm anyway.

"Maybe," he said.

"But maybe not. What if that's not true, and you end up leaving your arm behind for no reason?"

"…Fair enough." It was weird touching a severed arm, but somehow, the fact that it had frozen made it slightly less weird. And with it sitting beside Igrette on the wolf pelt now, it was her weirdness to deal with, not his.

"You know," said Igrette as Jonny started dragging her out of the snow bank.

"The bones of a powerful internal mana specialist can actually make strong weapons and tools." Jonny stumbled slightly.

"What?"

"Even if we can't reattach the arm, we should be able to make a knife or two that are better than the one you have."

"…That's actually cool as shhhh– a cucumber. Cool as a cucumber. Could you make, like, a prosthetic out of your own arm? Like you use the bones in the middle of the fake arm?"

"I suppose that is also an option," she replied.

"But the bones are fairly brittle right now. They never finished healing. The humerus is intact enough to maybe make knives, if handled properly, but the rest…"

"I guess," said Jonny.

"But maybe you could, like, seal the broken parts with gold."

"Gold?"

"Yeah, I saw a video about it once. There's this one place back in my world where when pots break, they don't buy new ones. They put the pieces back together, and then use gold to connect them. It looks cool, and I bet it'd go hard if you did it with your own bones.""'Go hard'?"

"I mean, it'd be cool."

"As a cucumber?"

"Maybe not that cool."

"Was there really a place that used gold to repair pots?"

"Oh yeah."

"That seems… extravagant. Was gold more common in your world?" That made Jonny's brows furrow.

"No, gold was pretty rare. Maybe it was only the rich people that did it then? I dunno, I don't remember what else the video said."

"Is a video a type of book?"

"Eh? What? No." Jonny spent the next fifteen minutes of travel trying to explain to the best of his knowledge what a video was. The best of his knowledge was unfortunately not very high, and he was pretty sure that Igrette actually knew more about science than he did. He ended up completely stumped when she asked how a camera saved images. He had never really thought about it before, and now that he had no way to look it up, he really missed the internet.

The conversation evolved from there, and the further it went on, the more Jonny realized just how little he knew about earth. The video conversation turned into a conversation on movies, at which point Jonny had to explain how they could record sound, except he didn't know that either. Igrette said that they did have something kinda similar called "memory crystals" but he was pretty sure that they didn't use those on Earth, since they were magical…

Unless that one crazy dude was right and the elites did have alien magic… The topic of movies got them onto genres of fiction on Earth, and Igrette was fascinated by the existence of the superhero genre. She asked a million questions, most of which Jonny couldn't answer, but what he could say only generated even more questions. Why could the alien fly? How did they make so many buildings tall enough for the arachnid hero to swing from? Why was the rich orphan with no superpowers the strongest hero?

That topic carried them all the way to the point where Jonny felt the mana getting denser and found a place to leave Igrette, and then some. The goat was not there when they arrived, so they just sat around talking even more. Jonny trained with his gravity magic as much as his mana regeneration allowed, but it was relatively mindless, so the conversation with Igrette just went on and on until she finally hushed him when she apparently sensed the goat arriving in the distance.

Jonny was already pretty warm from the hike and the gravity magic training, but he did a few more stretches while he waited, and when Igrette gave him the go-ahead, he grinned and turned his attention up the slope toward the mana well. He hadn't been in this good of a mood in a while. He had learned gravity magic, he had found a way to save Igrette, at least temporarily, and best of all, Igrette was finally a bit more lively.

She hadn't been this inquisitive since the first few days of travel, before she got all depressed. When he crested the hill and saw the goat napping on the broken stone table, he pounded his fist into his palm. That sound was enough to wake the goat, which stood up and looked at him hostility, and a little bit of disdain. The disdain might have just been Jonny projecting, but he still didn't like it.

"Round two," he said.

"Let's go."