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But today, he wasn’t alone.

Sophie stood on the bottom step, gazing down at the ritual circles he was just working on.

“You’re that Blood Mage everyone was looking for!” she said. “That’s so cool! Can you show me your magic?”

“D-don’t move,” he said. “This place is extremely dangerous.”

“Why?”

“There are traps all over. They’ll kill you.”

“Did you put them there?” She leaned forward. “What do they do?”

“Just stay still,” he said, trying to figure out what to do. Then he frowned. “Wait, how did you even find this place? How did you get in?”

She looked down, a guilty expression on her face. “Well, I know you always go and work on magic stuff with that one Erza guy, and you said I wasn’t allowed to watch, but I really wanted to see what you did. So after we got home and you left again, I followed you.”

“You followed me all the way through the forest? And then, what, you waited to come down here until—” his eyes went wide. He’d sent Astrys up there and explicitly told her to attack anyone she saw. If he’d been slightly less lucky, she very well could’ve killed his own sister. “Why didn’t you run away when you saw the demon come out? Why would you come down here?”

Her mouth hung open. “That was a demon?! I’ve read about them—aren’t they super super strong? Are you gonna fight it? Can I watch?!”

“What? No. Just…” He breathed out. “You should really be more careful. You could’ve been killed by a monster in the woods, or by the demon, or by stepping on one of the traps in here.”

She shrunk back. “I’m sorry. I thought it’d be safe, if you were here.”

“...Okay. Well, just, trust your better judgment in the future. I won’t be able to protect you from everything.”

She nodded, then began looking around. “So is this place Erza’s home? Can you really do magic?”

“It has nothing to do with Erza. That guy’s completely separate from all this. And…” Zeth sighed. Where did he even start with his explanation? Did he even want to explain? He shook the doubts from his mind. At this point, Sophie had seen far too much for him to try and spin up some lie. He’d just have to trust her. “Alright. Come with me, deeper into the base. I’ll explain everything.”

Zeth had to pick Sophie up and carry her past all his hellfire circles to ensure she didn’t accidentally touch any of them as they crossed through the entryway into one of his main rooms. It was surreal having another human person in this place with him—at least, another person who wasn’t a prisoner. He almost felt self-conscious about the mess, with a random assortment of items thrown around in all the different rooms.

Once he came to a stop in a room with no Hellfire Rituals in it and set her back down on the ground, Zeth took a seat, motioning for her to sit, as well.

But she didn’t seem to be paying any attention to him, instead looking around in random directions in the middle of the room. What was she doing?

Eventually she spoke. “Um, Zeth? Are you still here?”

He blinked. What did she mean? He was sitting right in front of her.

Before he could respond, she continued, “Can you light a candle, or something?”

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah, I’m here. Sorry, I totally forgot that you wouldn’t be able to see.”

She looked in his direction. “Can you see?”

“Uh, yeah. When you have enough in the Shaping Stat, you can see light coming off of anything magical in nature. It\'s kind of like you’re physically seeing the mana coming off of it. I guess you don’t have any points in Shaping, so this place would look totally pitch black to you.”

“Wait, so this place is totally full of magic objects?” she asked, gazing around the room in wonder. “And you have a lot of Shaping? How much? What about your other Stats?”

“One question at a time,” he said. “But first, let me see if I can figure out how to let you see…”

As he wondered if he could make a torch out of the materials he kept down there, Zeth heard the trapdoor open and close back in the entrance.

“Astrys?” he called.

“Yes,” his summoned demon replied.

He let out a breath. Thank the gods there wasn’t another, less friendly intruder. “Come down here. You have that Skill that allows you to light a fire in your hand, right? I need you to use it to light up the room.”

He’d have to explain this new situation to her, as well. It’d be easier to do when everyone was in the same room, anyway, if he was gonna go over everything.

As he listened to Astrys come down the stairs and walk through the hallways as she headed toward them, Sophie asked, “Who’s Astrys?”

“She’s that demon I mentioned before,” he said. “By the way, did you just sneak by her to get in while she patrolled outside?”

Sophie nodded. “I—”

Suddenly, her voice caught in her throat, her eyes went wide, and she collapsed to the ground.

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Zeth dove forward to catch her before her head could hit the stone. What had just happened?! Frantically looking her over, he saw her face was frozen in an expression of horror, her mouth moving to let out a choked whimper.

At that same moment, Zeth got a notification of Astrys’s fear aura taking effect on him, and he realized. He was so used to working alone, he’d forgotten how awful it was to first experience.

“Back away!” he shouted to Astrys, worriedly staring down at his younger sister as he cradled her body. Gods, he was an idiot. Too frazzled by the sudden situation to properly remember something so basic about demonkind. He remembered how painful it had been when he’d first experienced a demon’s fear aura—he’d genuinely thought he was going to die. And that was with a demon far weaker than Astrys was.

He heard her footsteps hurriedly growing further away from him. She called out, “What is the—”

“Further back!” he shouted, still not feeling his own fear go away yet. He muttered to Sophie, holding her shaking body in his arms, “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ve got you. You’re gonna be alright.”

Eventually, Astrys got far enough away that Zeth felt the fear wash away. Sophie stopped shaking and her eyes refocused, but she still looked so out of it she was borderline unconscious.

“Sir,” Astrys called, “if there is an emergency, I recommend you inform me of the situation so that I may—”

“We have a visitor,” Zeth shouted back, not bothering to hide the anger in his voice. “You let someone through in your patrol. Thankfully, this person was friendly. But now, you’ve gotten close enough that your aura of fear almost killed her. That’s the situation.”

“I…” She sounded like she didn’t know what to say. “I apologize profusely. For my incompetence and negligence during my patrol, and for harming an ally. It was not my intention to—”

“Just back away further so she doesn’t get hurt,” he said. He understood the part where Sophie got hit by the aura was his fault, but he was annoyed that Astrys had let someone through while keeping watch. Even if it was a good thing this time that she hadn’t found Sophie, what if it’d been an enemy instead? He’d specifically sent her out there to find potential intruders.

“Z…Zeth?” Sophie spoke up, voice weak. “Are you there?”

He looked back down at her, holding her close. “Hey. Yeah, yeah, I’m here. I’m sorry.”

“What…was that?”

“That was the demon. They have a Skill which inflicts anyone near them with artificial fear. None of anything you saw or heard right now was real—they’ll cause tricks and hallucinations to make you more afraid when the effect is powerful enough. I’m so sorry, I made a mistake and forgot you’d be affected, and—”

“That was amazing!” she interrupted.

He stared at her. “What?”

She sat up. “That was all just from a Skill? It made me feel so afraid! And I didn’t even have a reason to! It was so awesome! You said all demons can do it? Can a human get the Skill? It said it was an Influence check—do demons do a lot of those? My book said normally mental effects would be a Poise check. Or is it different in their realms? Can I talk to the demon? Can they turn it on and off?”

“You’re…okay?” Zeth asked. He’d certainly needed a few moments to mentally recover after the fear had shut off for the first time.

“No!” she said enthusiastically. “It’s so cool! I still feel all weird and tingly, like a big monster’s about to eat me!”

“I…” He frowned. “Alright. Well, I’m glad you’re not upset. I was worried there for a second. Uh, you probably won’t be able to talk all that well with the demon—they can’t turn their Skill on or off at will, so any time you get close you’re gonna be under its effect.”

“Woah…”

Zeth breathed in and out, shaking off the stress of this whole situation. “Okay, I guess we’ll just have to do this in the dark.”

“Do what?”

“I’m going to explain everything that’s happened to me since the cave-in.”

It took a while, but eventually Zeth finished telling Sophie his whole story—beginning to end. He censored a little bit of it, skipping over the bits where he killed people for the child audience, but he really did tell her everything. The Blood Mage who’d killed his friends, him getting the Blood Magus Class, the journey back through the cave and the fights with the monsters from the Sixth Realm, all his run-ins with law enforcement and the insane things his Class could do—all of it.

It was beyond cathartic to finally explain everything to someone. Not a demon, who didn’t care and wouldn’t understand his predicament anyway, but a human being, who he knew and cared about. Unloading it all on an intent listener, who nodded along to everything he said, it made everything that’d happened to him feel real in a way it hadn’t before.

“So you’re really the one who killed all those monsters?” Sophie asked once he was done, eyes wide. “The one in front of our house? And the ones that attacked town?”

“Just one of the ones that attacked town,” he said.

“And you can do all that stuff with your magic? Make fire and summon demons and heal your wounds?”

He nodded. Then, when he remembered she still couldn’t see him, verbally answered, “Yeah.”

“That’s so awesome! My brother’s the strongest mage in the whole world!”

He chuckled. “Not quite. I’m still pretty low Level.”

“That just makes it more awesome! What are you gonna be able to do later?”

“I guess I’ll have to find out.”

“So, the evil mages, what can they do?”

“I’m not sure yet. Mostly, they can do weaker versions of some of the stuff I can, but a lot of them are higher Level than I am, so they’ve got tons more, potentially.” He looked at Sophie. “Listen. You absolutely, positively cannot go looking for them. No asking about their magic, or trying to spy on them to see what their abilities are.”

She nodded. “Okay, I won’t.”

“Really? You’re agreeing that easily?”

“Well, you’re way better than them. So I don’t care what their magic is like—I wanna see yours! Can you show me?”

“I’m not sure what I could show you. Most of my magic is combat stuff. I’d need to have a target for Hellfire Ritual, and it’s not like I can just summon a demon for no reason. Listen, it might be best if you just forget you ever saw any of this. I explained it to you because I trust you, and I think you deserve the truth, but you going around looking into all this stuff is just gonna put you in danger. I don’t want you getting hurt because of me.”

She looked down dejectedly. “Oh. Okay.”

Gods, Zeth hated making her look like that. But he certainly wasn\'t about to get her mixed up in all this. “Listen, you want to get a magic Class, right? You don’t need to see me showing off crazy Skills to do that. Just follow what those books said, get the Skills you need to get, and learn magic the normal way. I’m in way over my head—you don’t wanna be like me.”

“But, the books said I need someone to teach me,” she muttered. “I tried to learn everything I could without help, but now I can’t. And I tried to get that Erza guy to help, but he said no. And if you say no, too…”

Zeth saw tears beginning to form in her eyes.

“I-I don’t know how I’m ever gonna do anything by myself.”

“Hey, hey, you’re not by yourself,” Zeth said, reaching out and grabbing onto her. “I’m here. You’ve got me.”

She nodded. “...Can you teach me, then?”

He pursed his lips. He certainly didn’t want her getting mixed up in everything, but… “Okay, how about this: I won’t get you involved with my Class or anything relating to it, but I do know some general magic principles. So if you know what it is you need to be taught, then ask me and I’ll help you out. Mana sense and manipulation—I’m pretty good at all that stuff. So, every now and then, I’ll give you a little lesson, alright?”

Her face brightened. “Really?”

“Yeah,” he said, hoping this was a good idea. Though, Erza certainly seemed to find use in having a magic assistant to do all the brute force labor for him. Maybe Sophie could help Zeth while he helped her. “So then, do you want your first lesson right now?”