Lily
Taking out my map after getting to Limgrave, it didn’t take me long to find Smarag’s location so I could properly focus on it to safely travel to a place close to it.
Looking at the glintstone dragon in the distance, I smiled. His mana felt like glintstone sorcery just before being cast. It was no wonder that he could cast Cometshard with ease when all he had to do was the final step of casting. If I could devour his soul or that of any other glintstone dragon, I’d massively improve my own ability to cast glintstone sorceries.
“Just give me a moment and we can test what’ll happen with both of us there.” I told Missy, ready to end the fight before it could even begin.
My twin, however, grabbed my arm before I could use Shunpo to close the distance. “Do you think I can beat that dragon?” Her intentions were obvious. She wanted to become a dragonslayer even if she couldn’t yet pay back Alduin for how he’d injured her.
Thinking it over for a bit, I eventually relaxed my muscles. “You should be able to.” What I didn’t mention was that she’d probably struggle. Smarag passively consumed mana from the air at a rate fast enough that there was basically a mana vacuum around his body.
When Raya Lucaria was nearby and emitted enough mana that it lingered throughout every other part of Liurnia that I could sense, that was a feat in and of itself.
Missy relied on her magic to a problematic extent. I was aware that that was hypocritical of me to say when I’d replaced the act of dodging with using my magic for a pretty long time but, where I replaced defence with magic, Missy replaced offence with magic.
Smarag would train that habit out of her really quickly.
Part of me wanted to warn her but I chose not to do so simply because my skills as a teacher told me she’d learn more if she figured it out herself and realized this problem on her own much as I had had to realize mine.
Missy wanted to grow and I’d promised to help her with it. So, even if I wanted to give her advice, I had to accept the fact that doing so now would hinder rather than help her.
All I could do was watch and be ready to step in should Missy be in danger.
I hated it already.
Missy
The first thing I did was to try to distort the space the dragon’s head was in. That failed just about immediately. My mana seemed to just vanish as it touched the space the dragon occupied.
‘That explains why Lily didn’t say yes immediately.’ If my magic had worked properly on the dragon, Lily probably would’ve just shrugged and let me go. I could just kill it instantly if that were the case, after all, and she could probably do the same.
But, instead, Lily had thought about it first and then sent me on my way despite looking really tense. Hearing the dragon roar, I took the time to decide which of my swords to use.
The lightsaber would either work really well or not at all based off of what Lily told me. Considering the amount of mana I could sense in that dragon, I was pretty sure it was the latter.
Aegis Sword was nice but it was mostly a sword that could function as a gun as well as use dust. Dust was basically mana and, if spells didn’t work, I got the feeling dust wouldn’t, either.
That left the ‘zanpakuto’ Lily’d given me, the sword I was least familiar with.
And, of my supernatural energies, I didn’t have much of a choice on what to use, either. Aura wasn’t that great offensively, being much better for defence, Mana didn’t work, apparently and I barely knew how to use that reiryoku stuff I had gotten from Lily. I didn’t know all that much about the Force, either, but at least it was something I could use.
Much as I didn’t like it, I could see why Lily refused to specialize now. Against something that eliminated mana, I couldn’t really do much of anything. I could still use mana to make the dragon’s blue breath attack miss me but most of my offensive options were thrown out of the window by the beast’s resistance to magic.
And, as I dodged a swipe of the dragon’s wing only to notice space severing for a moment due to how quickly it removed my mana, I decided that using my magic at all was probably not a good idea. If I’d gotten caught up in that, I’d have died.
‘Focus.’ I reminded myself and, this time, I jumped onto the wing rather than dodging its, jabbed my sword into it and ran along the wing for a few moments before the dragon, roaring once again, tried to shake me off and I used that to jump off it, landing near its head.
There was a wariness in its eyes now but there was fury, too. The dragon wanted me dead even more now than it had before.
“Bring it on, you big lizard.” I taunted it.
In response, it jumped into the air, the wing I’d cut barely able to sustain the flight for a few moments, and breathed its blue fire straight down at the ground around me.
I focused on the Force and prevented the flames from spreading as they’d done in its previous fire breath, holding them with Force telekinesis. That done, I sent them straight back to their sender, hitting its face and getting a roar out of it as it crashed to the ground.
As the flames cleared up, it barely looked injured from the fire but that was fine. I’d used its temporary blindness to close the gap and jump straight to its head so I could pierce its eye with my sword.
For a moment, I could feel its mana gathering in its mouth as if to breathe fire at me again. Then, the dragon went slack and I relaxed a little as I pulled my zanpakuto out of its eye socket.
“You did great.” I barely even noticed that Lily was at my side, throwing an arm over my shoulder to hold me close as golden light began to stream from the dragon’s corpse and towards us.
As it touched my aura, my soul, I not only knew that that light was the dragon’s soul but also that it was powerful. Had the dragon had aura, it’d have had several times what I’d had, I was sure.
I also noticed that my soul was pulling the dragon soul towards it and losing to another pull that I was pretty sure was Lily’s soul.
It was frustrating to know that Lily’s soul was just that much stronger in the tug of war we’d apparently entered and I’d have been annoyed to have lost out on the entirety of the dragon’s soul after I’d been the one to fight it but we’d come here to test what’d happen so I’d have been fine with it.
Except, Lily chose to stop pulling and instead let my soul have it all, leading to the very strange feeling of sensing my soul – through both my aura and reiryoku – eating another one until it was fully assimilated.
As a reward, I was a lot stronger than before. I could feel as much without even testing it out.
“Thank you.” I told Lily before really exploring the new abilities I knew I’d gotten from this.
“No problem.” My twin replied, grinning at me. “It’s your kill so it’s also your soul’s meal. Besides, there’s more glintstone dragons so I can always eat one of those instead.”
“All of that sounded weird.” I commented while Lily threw the dragon’s corpse into her inventory.
Lily laughed a little in response. “I mean, we could always try actually eating one of these guys. The crystals would probably make that annoying though.”
“I think I’ll leave you to it then.” I joked.
“More for me, I suppose.” Lily went along with it. After we shared a little laugh, she looked up at the night sky. “Anyways, I’m pretty sure it’s time for us to leave. You still need sleep, after all.”
“Alright then.” I replied and, a few moments later, we left this world again.
Lily
“Hey, before you go to sleep,” I began after we’d entered our home again, “can I talk to you about something?”
“Sure.” Missy shrugged while opening the door to her room. “I’m guessing you want some privacy for this.”
I nodded, already slightly worried about how this conversation would go despite me having planned it in my mind already. “That’d probably be for the best.”
Missy didn’t say anything, instead letting me into her room before taking a seat on her bed while I resisted the allure of the beanbag chair she’d gotten for me because sinking into it during this conversation would probably look bad. Instead, I sat down on her desk chair. “So, what’d you want to talk about?” She asked me with a raised eyebrow.
After taking a deep breath, I asked, “Why do you want to help people so much?” I could’ve eased her into the topic but…being direct would save time and not make this seem like some kind of manipulation attempt.
“What’s it to you?” Missy replied, her tone a lot colder all of a sudden.
“If you’re risking your life for it, I at least want to know why.” I answered, voice full of determination.
That seemed to take the wind out of her sails, thankfully, her demeanor becoming a lot less cold after hearing my response. “Because I want to use my power for something good. I don’t want to just have magic and all the other stuff and not even help people with it.”
Blinking, I began to realize what’s going on. Most of the world we lived in was full of propaganda designed to make newly triggered hunters go ‘let’s raid dungeons and kill monsters’ rather than ‘let’s become a warlord’. I’d ignored it because I didn’t care but, apparently, Missy had looked at it and seen a guide on what to do if she got magic.
The worst part was that the propaganda wasn’t focused on helping individuals but rather society as a whole. And my twin seemed to have taken that to heart.
“Alright then.” I said calmly as if I weren’t considering burning everyone involved in the propagation of that alive. “Can you agree with me that you weren’t going about it the right way?”
If I tried to talk Missy out of helping people entirely, it’d backfire. She knew I was a sadist with just about no empathy. That alone would create a bias against my words on this topic. Much like how one wouldn’t ask a blind person about the colour of something, one wouldn’t take the words of someone without empathy seriously when the topic had a lot to do with empathy even when that person was one’s twin.
“I wouldn’t have asked you to teach me if I didn’t.” Missy sounded quite sour about it as she answered.
“And I’m happy that you did but trying the same thing with more power will just lead to the same result once you run into something even stronger than before.” I pointed out, only able to use pure logic for my arguments. That probably sounded like a great idea until one realized that emotions tended to win against logic and Missy was led by her emotions at the moment.
Case in point, Missy glared at me with her arms crossed once I was done speaking. “So what? You want me to stop helping people?”
“No.” I refuted because I wasn’t stupid enough to think I could achieve that within less than a couple months at minimum. “I just want you to change your approach so I won’t have to learn that you got seriously injured again.” That was about as far as I could go in appealing to her emotions for the time being and I could only even do that much because Missy still felt guilty about all of that.
My twin flinched and some of the aggression seemed to leave her. “Fine. What do you think I should do differently?”
“For one, plan things out. If you’d told me to remove Sidious near the end of the Clone Wars, the jedi probably could’ve won quickly and the clones been removed from their proximity before anyone could potentially trigger Order 66.” I told her carefully, not wanting to say the wrong thing and make her dig her heels in.
We were both stubborn. We’d gotten it from our parents, I was pretty sure, and I knew how terribly fights between two increasingly stubborn people could get.
“If you knew that, why didn’t you tell me?” Missy asked indignantly instead of acknowledging the point I’d made.
“Because I didn’t bother thinking about it until after it was already done. It was your project, after all, not mine. I helped out because you asked me to but I also still had my own to work on and think about.” I told her, suppressing my own annoyance.
I was trying to earn enough money for centuries or even millenia. I had no time to plan her attempts at heroism for her.
Missy, thankfully, seemed to push down her own anger, too. “Alright. What else?”
“Learn how to pick your fights.” There was no good way to put that so I quickly followed it up with, “You fought the end of Nirn. If you can honestly tell me that you couldn’t tell that Alduin was out of your league, I’ll eat my hat.”
My twin winced at the bluntly worded advice. “So I should just…not fight something even if I might be able to get it to back off and it’s hurting people?”
“Yes.” I answered without hesitating for even just a second. “If you want to help people, you have to first be in a state in which you can help them or else you’re going to suffer just as much as the person you tried to help. Let’s take your fight against Alduin as an example: You couldn’t save anyone from him and, in fact, got badly injured by him. Had you just left after seeing him, the amount of his victims would’ve been decreased by one.”
Missy definitely didn’t take the truth well but neither could she bring herself to argue against the truth. Thankfully, she wasn’t that far gone.
“Consider it like this: You can’t help anyone if you’re too injured to help them.” I probably wasn’t going to be able to make a pragmatist out of her but I could at least get her to develop some survival instincts. Of course, I myself had had a tendency to ignore mine in combat when I was confident I’d win and that had come back to bite me against Godrick but I’d worked on it. Now I just needed to get Missy to do the same.
“So how do I figure out when I can fight and when I can’t?” Missy asked, pouting at me.
“By knowing what you can do as well as what your enemy can do. If you don’t know either, you can’t judge so you should run away just in case.” I explained. “Besides, there’s other ways to help people. They’re probably less fun but, generally, violence isn’t the best way to help people.” I added, the thought having come to mind while I was thinking on how to steer my twin away from fighting things like the Endbringers or Alduin.
Really, she had a terrible track record for picking fights with monsters that could almost certainly end worlds. At least I stuck to picking fights with things and people I could bully.
Missy seemed unimpressed by my wisdom. “So what you’re saying is that I should’ve talked that dragon out of burning people alive?”
“Oh no,” Shaking my head immediately, I suppressed the urge to giggle in amusement at the thought. “Alduin was never going to accept anything other than violence. The issue’s that you definitely could’ve figured out that he was out of your league long before he burnt you. And you know that I didn’t mean that every problem could be solved without violence. I just said that violence is generally a worse option.”
“Fine.” Missy relented, the fight leaving her as she sighed. “What do you recommend?”
“Find some way to make enough money to set things up to help as many people as you can. Personally helping people can only go so far since you can’t be everywhere at once and don’t have infinite resources.” The answer, to me, was obvious. Money made the world go round as the saying went and, with it, Missy could easily set things up to help people in worlds in which suffering was frequent since we could easily convert one world’s currency into another.
“Can you help me with figuring that out?” My twin requested, looking really awkward.
I sighed in response. “Ask dad. He’s the one who’s actually in charge of a successful company. I just shove everything onto my assistants. And attend my lessons on how to form binding vows. You will want your upper management to be bound to their word so that they can’t start things like pocketing money for themselves or any other activities that make your company worse.”
“Got it.” Missy nodded determinedly. “And…thank you. I didn’t want to hear most of that but I guess you’re right about it.”
“Don’t worry about it. I just don’t want you to get hurt.” I reassured her. “Now, if you don’t mind, I still have some things to do tonight and you probably need some sleep after today.”
“Goodnight Lily.” Missy replied, smiling at me.
“Goodnight.” I told her before leaving the room, smiling myself.
As long as Missy improved, I was much less likely to find her as injured as she’d been after her fight with Alduin again.
Hope you enjoyed and let me know if you have any feedback