Chapter 7 The Birds
It began with a flash of lightning and ended with an explosion. The first group of the massive bird creatures they'd fought had only contained about five or six. The group that came to reclaim their nest consisted of more than twenty. But Gray had been right. With two entrances and only two or three coming at once, it was almost too easy to dispatch each bird and send it spiraling down to the rocks below. If it hadn't been dead at the beginning of its fall, it certainly was by the end.
It turned out to be a good thing Cana had stored the nests in her cards before the battle. Otherwise, the nests and everything in them would have been blasted apart, incinerated, or frozen solid. By the end, the cave was charred, scored, and pitted from their magic, and littered with feathers.
It only lasted five minutes. Then the last bird screeched and tumbled down to crash onto the rocks like its fellows, a singed hole through one wing and ice encasing its claws.
"Is that it?" Cana sounded disappointed.
Harry shrugged. "I guess so."
"Then let's head back to town and collect our reward," Gray said with a grin. He slammed his hands down on the edge of the cave and a slide made of pure ice appeared, neatly avoiding all the protruding boulders and ending in a patch of grass beneath the trees. "Ready?"
"Um, is that even—Gray!"
Gray jumped onto his slide and sped down, whooping. Cana followed, grinning widely. She cheered as she went down and grunted at the impact at the end.
"Come on, Harry!" she shouted, waving at him.
Harry rolled his eyes. He was a little unsure, but he supposed it couldn't be worse than the Gringotts carts, and those were actually kind of fun. So Harry sat at the top of the ice slide and eased himself down. The moment his hands left stone, he took off. Harry yelped in surprise, then whooped as he spiraled down to land with a grunt beside Cana.
"Fun, right?"
Harry grinned. "Yep."
Gray slapped him on the back. "That's the attitude!"
"Are you going to leave it?"
Gray shrugged. "Eh, it'll melt in a few days anyway, in this heat. My ice lasts longer than most, but it doesn't last forever."
"Let's go!" Cana waved them on impatiently. "I want that reward!"
"Don't forget, we have to try and return what we can!" Harry hurried after her and Gray followed.
Jogging, it took them about thirty minutes to reach the town—and then they stared in horror.
"I guess this is the real boss battle," Gray said, staring wide-eyed at the flocks of birds that swarmed the town. They were regular-sized magpies, but they were everywhere, perched on trees and houses, swooping from the sky, fluttering aimlessly. There were so many that the sky was dark, even though the sun hadn't yet disappeared. Harry was rather horrifically reminded of a short film he'd had to watch in Year 5 in primary school where birds took over the world and killed everybody by pecking out their eyes.
"About time you guys got here!" Loke yelled, waving them over. He looked awful. His clothes were torn and wrinkled and his usually gelled hair was now slicked with sweat. "I've been trying to chase them off for hours, but there's just too many of them!"
Gray and Cana cracked their knuckles. "Perfect. There weren't enough of the big ones to satisfy me," Gray said with a smirk. He glanced at Harry and Cana. "Ready to let loose?"
"Try not to destroy the buildings?" Harry offered weakly.
"Unavoidable collateral damage," Cana said, straight-faced. "Now, let's go!" She threw a handful of cards at the nearest flock, and the cards exploded. So did the birds, scattering singed feathers everywhere. The birds nearest those honed in on their new enemy and attacked.
Then it was chaos.
Within minutes, Harry was panting, his arms aching as he flung them around to cast every spell he knew to bring the birds down or chase them off. He barely noticed that he was no longer tracing actual wand movements with his fingers, just vague gestures. Yet the spells did exactly what he wanted them to.
"Ice make: darts!" Gray flung his arm and a rain of darts took out a nearby group, only for another to take its place.
"Stupefy! Depulso! Reducto!" Harry was taking pot shots, only able to target one bird at a time. But that last spell was a mistake. The bird literally exploded in the air, showering him with bird guts, blood, and feathers. Gagging, Harry frantically shook off the worst of it.
"That was a mistake," Harry said breathlessly. Cana and Gray laughed at him while Loke looked a little green.
Needless to say, Harry did not use reducto again.
Cana accidentally blew off the roof of a building taking out a group that hadn't yet gone airborne. Gray sent a rain of frozen birds through another. But Harry made use of the rubble. And the bodies of frozen birds. Using his banishing charm, he sent rocks and frozen birds at the ones still in the air, and he quickly realized he could target more than one by banishing more than one rock at a time.
Seeing Gray's repeated use of his ice dart spell, Harry tried to mimic it.
"Glacius!" he cried, telling his magic to shape his ice into a dozen icicles. He only got three, and misshapen at that, but it was a start. Harry banished them through three approaching birds, then tried again. "Glacius!" This time he got the full dozen. Grinning, he sent them at a group of birds Gray was about to target.
"Hey! That's my move!" Gray complained.
"And it was so good that I stole it!" Harry sent another rain of icicles into the swarming birds. "Got a problem?"
Gray narrowed his eyes and tried to outdo him, sending out two dozen icicles with his next spell. Harry grinned and did the same. And so it went, each of them trying to outdo the other until Harry realized that the magic cost was more than the effort was worth. Plus there were fewer birds now, with each of them taking out thirty or more with each move.
Loke took out several at once with his Regulus blasts—bursts of golden fire that somewhat resembled Natsu's fire dragon fist. Curious, Harry cast a lumos and tried to make it into a fireball to mimic Loke's move. The light made a bunch of the birds wheel away, but he couldn't make it hot. So Harry tried incendio instead. The uncontrolled burst of fire took out quite a few birds, but it also set a building on fire.
"Work on your control already!" Gray shouted, dodging out of the way.
"I am!" Harry frantically tried to reign in the fire, but he couldn't control what was already burning. So Harry put that one on the back burner for practice in a more controlled environment. "Glacius!" Harry exclaimed, trying to put the fire out. He conjured a layer of ice on everything, but it evaporated quickly, filling the air with superheated steam. And the fire kept burning.
"I didn't ask for a sauna!" Cana shouted from nearby.
"Sorry!"
After that, Harry stuck to what he knew.
When night fell, Harry conjured up a dozen lumos orbs to float above them so they could still aim. And finally, an hour or two after sunset, one last bird screeched and tumbled to the earth while its last few fellows fled into the night.
Immediately they were plunged into darkness, as Harry's lights extinguished themselves. Harry collapsed to his knees, gasping. He felt dizzy and his limbs were shaking. Cana, Gray, and Loke were panting, but not as badly as Harry.
"Oy, you gonna be okay?"
"M-maybe. I think…I overdid it…" he said breathlessly.
"I'll say." Gray pulled Harry to his feet and dragged his arm around his shoulders.
"You need to keep an eye on how much magic you're using," Loke chastised him. "If you'd gone any longer, you'd have passed out. If there had been more enemies than there were, you would have become a liability."
Harry looked down. "I'm sorry."
Cana clapped him on the shoulder. "Don't apologize. It's all part of the experience. You're new to all this, so it's only natural you wouldn't know your limits yet."
"Try to remember how you were feeling toward the end, and when you reach that point next time, stop."
"A hearty meal and a good night's sleep will put you right, though," Cana said with a grin. "And I know just the place…"
Cana led them to a quaint little restaurant that had (thankfully) survived the damage they'd inflicted accidentally to the part of town they'd been fighting in. Harry tried to order for himself, but Cana wouldn't let him. She whispered the order to the server, who grinned and nodded. Harry felt uneasy.
"Don't worry," Gray said. "When it comes to food, Cana doesn't mess around."
"Indeed," Loke agreed.
Before long, their food arrived, and Harry immediately started salivating at the huge steak on his plate, doused in spices and butter. Sides consisted of a jacket potato, some kind of vegetable Harry wasn't familiar with but looked like miniature cabbage heads, and a deliciously soft and golden dinner roll.
"Dig in," Cana said with a grin.
Harry didn't need to be told twice.
They rented a hotel to stay in for the night, rather than camp in the woods. Harry was sure he'd never slept so well. In the morning, they got a list of all that had been stolen and returned a handful of the jewelry they'd found, as well as a leather-bound tome with gold-leafed pages and a bronze clasp that had somehow escaped damage. Then they accepted their reward, bought some supplies for their two-day journey back to Magnolia, then set off a little after midday.
The return journey was just as enjoyable as before. They walked most of the afternoon, but Harry didn't mind. He was no worse off for his magical exhaustion. Cana had been right; the good meal and a good night's rest had him right as rain.
Harry let Loke light the fire when they made camp that night, but the next day, while they were on the main road and surrounded by open space, Harry practiced his incendio. It accidentally turned into a full-on, four-way sparring match, which was great practice and great fun. Though the result was giant scorch marks in the grassy fields half a mile off the road, and spikes of ice sticking up through the weeds.
But Harry did manage to gain control over his fire. He could do anything from sparks to fireballs like Loke's to huge flaming bonfires—it all depended on the intent and the amount of magic he put into the spell. And he could control what burned and what didn't, because Harry didn't want to burn anyone again after catching Cana by accident during their practice.
They arrived back at the guild hall around midafternoon the second day. They sheepishly admitted to accidentally destroying a few buildings, but at least the damage was contained and not too extensive. Their reward was reduced on account of the damages, but not by too much. They still each received 20,000 jewels for their services and thanks for returning the townspeople's heirlooms. They'd divvied out the rest of the hoard that morning before leaving their campsite as evenly as they could without knowing the true value of anything.
They had also decided what they wanted to keep. Gray kept a simple chain bracelet. Cana snuck a jewel-encrusted drinking horn after claiming a simple pendant necklace, and Loke chose some rather gaudy cuff links and a few rings. A light pen that looked more like a fountain pen than a marker caught Harry's eye, and so did another simple pendant necklace with a silver chain and a tiny clear jewel (Harry wasn't convinced it was a real diamond) at the bottom of a rectangular pendant. Everything else, after being divided, they pawned off to local shops.
There was one piece that caught Harry's eye that he didn't keep, however—the gold, emerald-encrusted locket Gray had pointed out when they first found the nests. It felt dirty somehow. Dangerous, even. He refused to keep it, but he did tell the owner of the pawn shop that it might be magical, and to let him know when it sold, and to who—just in case. Harry didn't plan on tracking the person down, but he felt uneasy with the idea of not knowing who had it. The odd thing was, though, the shop owner didn't notice a thing.
That just made Harry more uneasy.