Well it turned out that my prediction was correct. I very much was a mosquito among giants. Unfortunately for the giants, mosquitoes had a nasty habit of biting repeatedly until something died, and I was out for blood.
Another horn blast tore across the battlefield, shaking mud loose from the trench walls. Soldiers surged forward again, blades flashing as more of those twisted plague creatures poured over the lip of the trench.
The battlefield beyond the trench looked like a nightmare that refused to end. Bodies were littered everywhere.
"Hold the line!" someone screamed further down the trench.
"Do not break formation!"
The girl beside me—who I was increasingly convinced was some kind of ice prodigy—stood calmly with her staff planted in the mud, frost already creeping outward from the base.
"You stabilized your aura," she said, glancing at the faint lightning crawling across my arms.
"Naturally so. I'm a prodigy," I replied, ducking as a claw scraped over the trench wall above us.
She blinked once.
"You can still joke on the battlefield. I guess you are more hardened and less useless than I originally thought."
"Low bar, but I'll take it."
"Well, since we could die at any moment, I might as well get your name, mage," she said curtly as she smashed another ice rock at a creeping plague creature.
"Name's Kura," I said while slitting the throat of a jumping monster with my electric manipulation.
The meeting on the battlefield was very unconventional. Two young girls in the middle of a war talking to each other while slaying monsters as if it were a tea party.
Well, to be completely honest, this wasn't the first time we had this conversation. It had taken a good few deaths to reach the point where I could use the electric manipulation ability effectively. I had died several times during the process just to reach this point.
Death number four I figured out how to fluidly use my newly found adaption of my skin. What I called Righteous lightning blade, naming still in the work. Death six was particularly embarrassing, I accidentally overchanneled while trying to scratch my nose.
We don't talk about death six, so don't ask. As for number seven I stopped screaming when the stupid plague balls hit me, and by death ten, Luna's panicked face when I died had started feeling like a strange kind of goodbye ritual.
I was still far from mastery, but i was definitely progress in the right direction. The girl nodded nonchalantly, engraving my name into her memory.
"Luna Glacies."
Another three plague creatures vaulted into the trench at once, interrupting our conversation.
"You stupid little monsters, don't you realise that you are interrupting something? This is the furthest I've gotten and you're ruining things."
After dying a good few times to these things, they were starting to get incredibly irritating. This time I didn't freeze. Electric Aura Manipulation surged through my body as I pictured lightning coating my skin again.
The results of my continuous deaths had now culminated in what I would call controlled electric aura manipulation. Instead of picturing the skill images linearly in frames, I discovered that abstracting them into larger mental images and processing them simultaneously helped control the backlash.
Kind of like becoming a human computer. I stacked the ideas together: electric armour encapsulating my skin, the armour condensing into a single point in my hands, and then extending into saber-like blades—all at once.
The aura snapped into place around my arms just as the first creature lunged. My blade of condensed lightning carved upward through its chest. The creature shrieked before collapsing into a twitching, charred heap. As for the second creature, it got turned into an icicle pop with Luna waving her hand nonchalantly and freezing the entire thing.
'Damn, she's kind of scary. Better not get on her wrong side.'
The third creature appeared near my shoulder. Lightning surged as I extended my aura behind me into a single spike, impaling it on the spot.
"Hahaha! How do you like my porcupine attack, you stupid plague monster? Bask in my greatness!"
The creature convulsed violently before falling limp. Luna looked at me as if I were a half-crazed maniac.
'Hey girl, you don't know how much these stupid things have harassed me.'
But I guess I was acting a bit unbecoming.
"Eh… that one actually worked."
Her eyebrows creased slightly.
"Your technique is still inefficient," the ice girl said calmly. Somehow she had the ability to make everything sound like an insult.
I stared at her.
"Inefficient? Are we looking at the same thing? You saw my miraculous attack and thought that?"
"Yes."
"And you're not impressed?"
"You leaked roughly forty percent of your mana output."
It was true that I felt a faint hollow ache behind my sternum, like a bucket with a hole in the bottom, but she didn't need to know that.
"…You're really fun at parties, aren't you?"
She ignored that.
"I've died at least ten times to get here, you know. To reach the zenith of magic."
Luna paused mid-cast.
"You… what?"
"Well, at least ten deaths," I repeated cheerfully. "Give or take a few. I stopped counting after nine."
"I retract my statement. You are not hardened, but indeed crazy. Surely the gruelling outlook of war has been too much for you to comprehend. What a poor soul."
A soldier nearby swung his sword through a creature's neck before looking over.
"Wait a minute, we are on the same side! It's true, you know! All because of these stupid monsters, they're are making me look crazy. Death be to these cursed beings! Prima Lux is the GOAT and all of that stuff!"
The surrounding mages in the backline stared at me with looks of confusion and disgust.
Wasn't this what it was all about? Sure, some of these individuals had been their comrades who had died, but to me they were all NPCs, and the world would reset upon my death anyway.
"…Is that mage insane?"
A healing mage shouted from further down the trench.
"That cuckoo lightning mage is enjoying this! I didn't know the Ice Queen had such a peer. The opposing dynamic is kind of funny when you think about it."
"I AM NOT ENJOYING THIS," I yelled back.
Pause.
"…Okay maybe a little."
I raised my hand and waved at the person making the gossip, who quickly shut up and went back to healing.
'That's what I thought.'
Maybe if she wasn't so busy gossiping, the handful of times that I had been hit by that cursed plague might have ended in survival. Luna stared at me, placing a hand in front of her face. She looked disgraced to be around me.
"Why, of all people, do I attract the abnormal ones?"
"That's not nice," I said, slicing another creature in half. "I'm just extremely motivated."
Another wave of plague creatures climbed the trench wall. My lightning aura flickered violently. The irritation of dying and respawning over and over, only to get closer to passing the trial before dying again flowed through my head. The timer in my vision had been dropping each run.
First time I died in under five minutes. Second time maybe ten. Third fifteen. Fourth time I made it past thirty.
Now?
Now the battlefield didn't feel quite as impossible. With the trick of spell images figured out, even if Wrath's Thunder was still difficult to control, I stood a good chance.
"I can't believe I died all these times just because I misunderstood a metaphor," I muttered.
"What?"
"Nothing!"
We progressed further down the trenches, following command as we moved along. Just over an hour had now passed—the longest I had survived in the tutorial so far. Hopefully this was the victory run. I didn't think my sanity could take anything else.
"Progress forward to the church!" a voice yelled from ahead.
After a moment, Luna spoke again.
"So why are you fighting in this war?"
"If I told you that this was part of a super annoying game-like quest, what would you think?"
"…That you are one strange mage."
"Well, my situation is kind of unreasonable."
Luna remained quiet for a moment. The only noise was our footsteps moving through the trenches. Then she spoke again.
"Unlike you, I fight in this war for money."
"Oh. So you are chasing the bag."
"Chasing what? Actually, never mind. I don't want to know. My younger brother is sick," she continued calmly while freezing two creatures solid. "It's a long-term illness, so the treatment is quite expensive."
She stabbed the ice statue with her staff, causing it to shatter.
"I don't mean to be insensitive, but aren't you a fully qualified mage? Isn't that quite lucrative?"
If she was a warrior entering the battlefield, I could understand. But wasn't she a mage. Granted, I didn't know much about this world. But from the little information I had gathered—fewer mages than warriors, the fact mages had protection in the trenches, and the academy for mages, it seemed like being a mage was a rarer profession.
She looked down contemplatively.
"While that would be a decent line of thought, my family is of commoner descent. We have no land, no guild backing. So even though I was fortunate enough to awaken as a mage, I had nowhere near the amount needed to look after my brother, as it is burning through my personal funds."
Her tone stayed calm. Too calm.
"The Church is paying well for this crusade against the plague. Whether I survive or not, they have promised that the reward will fund his treatment for life."
I didn't know what to say. The battlefield noise filled the silence between us.
"Isn't there factions or groups that can sponsor you?" I asked eventually.
"That was the plan."
A creature rudely lunged at her, ice exploded upward and skewered it instantly.
"But those positions require time and years of study. Not to mention that I am no prodigy by any means. There are better mages who aren't commoners who they'd gladly choose."
She looked forward toward the distant church.
"My brother's illness requires daily medicine to support him. I'll do anything to give him a fair shot at life."
Oh. That… actually hurt a little to hear.
"I see," I said quietly. Which was a useless thing to say. I wanted to say something better. Something that acknowledged that she had just handed me something heavy and I wasn't going to drop it. But the battlefield was loud and Luna had already moved on, staff raised, frost curling outward.
The lightning on my arms flickered once. I let it. She glanced at me.
"And you?"
"Well, you could just say that I am a lightning mage," I said vaguely. "From a distant land."
"A distant land, you say?"
She didn't pry further, realising I might not want to share. I felt kind of bad. She had opened up to me, and all I said was that I was from a distant land. Although, technically, it was kind of true.
The church spires were coming into view now, poking through the smoke like they were very politely trying to remind everyone what we were fighting toward. A distant explosion disagreed with the sentiment, the ground lurching underfoot hard enough that I had to grab the trench wall to stay upright.
'Great. What now?'
Soldiers suddenly started shouting.
"MOVE!"
"FALL BACK!"
"TERROR WOLF!"
I had learned enough about battlefields in the past ten deaths to know that these battle maniacs didn't panic so easily. Whatever was coming had just changed that sentiment. My head snapped upward.
"What the hell is a Terror Wolf?"
Luna's calm expression hardened for the first time.
"…A problem."
The battlefield parted like water. All at once. Mid-lunge, mid-crawl, mid-shriek — everything on the battlefield just stopped moving. The silence lasted maybe two seconds. It was the most frightening thing I had witnessed so far.
Then something massive burst through the smoke. It looked like a wolf, if wolves were the size of double-decker buses and covered in black plague growths that pulsed like diseased tumours.
Bone-like spikes protruded from its spine. Its fur hung in patches, exposing rotting muscle beneath. And its eyes glowed with the same sick black haze as the plague creatures.
The Terror Wolf landed in the middle of a squad of soldiers. Three men died instantly. One was torn in half. Another crushed beneath its claws.The third was bitten and flung aside like garbage. The wolf howled, the sound making my bones vibrate.
"…Wow," I said quietly. "That thing is cheating."