"Kuro, do you have any idea how imbibing something with magic is supposed to work?" Naofumi asked, looking up from his translated recipe book.

Two weeks passed since Firo got her frilly one-piece dress and the party hit the road, going from village to village, using the monsters they met on the road to level up and slowly building a reputation for themselves as the medicine merchant with the strange bird and the tasty food stand that always accompanied him. They were camped out on the side of the road for the night.

"I mean, if I understand it right, isn't that just Reinforcement in its simplest form? You just push magical energy into an object so it can exist harder?"

"Exist harder?" Naofumi asked incredulously.

"You know, a shield becomes more solid, a sword cuts better, alcohol gets you drunk faster," Kuro listed off examples on her fingers.

"And medicine becomes more effective," Naofumi muttered under his breath, "Anyways, how are you supposed to do it? Or even feel magic for the matter?"

The Archer's brows furrowed at that question. "Well...teaching you would be relatively simple, really, but the main problem here is that we don't know if you're from an Earth where the Moonlit World and Magic Circuits exist at all," Kuro explained, "But then again, you can't lack the ability to channel magical energy, proven by the fact that you have an MP bar and that I can draw it out from you."

Naofumi hummed with a frown. "Assuming I do have Magic Circuits?"

"Assuming you do..." she trailed off, taking hold of one of her Master's wrists, "And that your circuits have been activated since there's no other way for you to have a pool of prana to use..."

Just as the white haired girl closed her eyes in concentration, Naofumi felt a strange sensation. It was like pulling a muscle he didn't know he had, even though it wasn't something physical. Aside from that, he could tell that there was some sort of energy flowing between him and Kuro at the point where the girl was holding his wrist.

"What are you doing? And this sensation..."

"I just connected to your Circuits and circulated prana. I suppose flexing a metaphysical organ does feel strange when you've never felt it before," Kuro commented as she let go of her Master's wrist, "From your MP I would guesstimate that you have an average amount of low-quality circuits, though I have no idea how leveling up affects that."

Naofumi listened to her explanation with half a mind, instead trying to reenact the odd feeling he just experienced without success, making him click his tongue.

The Archer didn't have to hear him grumble under his breath to know what he was doing. "Yeah, you usually need a mental trigger for that."

"Why is it so hard? I asked Raphtalia and Firo and both of them just do it like it's a gut feeling."

"Unlike us, they are natally from a world where Magic is commonly used and accepted, so it makes sense that it's more intuitive for them," Kuro reasoned, "Contrary to what you might think, Magic is something unnatural on my Earth too, so we've got to do it the hard way."

"The hard way, huh. Why can't I just get a shield or something that gives me that ability?" he complained.

"What about affinities?"

"Oh, this is purely manipulation of magical energy. Reinforcement, Alteration and Projection are something that can be done irrespective of your element or affinities," the Servant lectured on automatically before realizing it wasn't her Master that asked the question. 'Geh. I spent too much time with Rin.'

"Raphtalia?"

"Weren't you going to sleep? What's wrong?" Naofumi asked, instantly switching to concerned caretaker mode. Looking around, he found Firo out cold in her bird form near the campfire, much to his relief.

"Oh, it's nothing. I was about to sleep when I overheard you two talking about magic and I was curious," the tanuki girl explained sheepishly, "Kuro just seems to know so much about it. Is it really that much harder to cast magic on your world?"

"Well…" Kuro began, her face turning contemplative. "That's a pretty loaded question," she decided to point out first with a slight grimace. "What you need to understand first is that 'magic' as you know doesn't exist in our world. There was once, but now we only have a flimsy copy of it called magecraft, and it takes much more research, effort and time to achieve the same thing 'magic' can, so families spend generations perfecting one type of craft.

"But because of all that research, we can also do things mages here think are not possible or are incredibly advanced. My family, for example, was really good at creating golems and alchemically created people called homunculus," she said, deciding to go with the example she was most familiar with.

"M-making a person?" Raphtalia asked with furrowed brows. "I can't imagine..."

"Right? I talked a bit with the magic shop owner and most of what you have here is just elemental stuff, or practical spells like healing or buffing," Kuro added her observation before she noticed the unasked question in the tanuki girl's eyes. "And no, I was born normally, though my mother was a homunculus," she answered with the simplified version of truth.

"Actually, what I wanted to ask if you can also…?" Raphtalia trailed off.

"No, and I don't think I want to be able to either," she denied quickly. "Human lives become just another resource when you can just mass produce them, so naturally conceived children like me just seem like a hindrance in comparison because we're not born with matured minds and bodies. The only reason I was invested in at all was to make a backup sacrifice for a ritual, you know?"

Kuro only smiled ruefully at the tanuki girl's gasp and Naofumi's grimace.

"So yeah, instead of having all that baggage, I'm actually kind of glad all you need to do is sync your magic with a magic tome," Kuro concluded.

A sullen silence stretched on as the other two digested what they just heard.

It was Raphtalia who broke it eventually.

"...I can't disagree, but do you think I could still learn what you're teaching Naofumi though?"

The Servant smiled brightly at that, happy to move on from the topic.

"Sure!"

~~o0o~~

It was a few days later when something happened that was a little different than the routine they had gotten used to: a wealthy-looking merchant had approached them in one of the villages and offered to pay for a ride to the next town.

"How grand! To think I am hitching a ride in the carriage of the Holy Bird!"

"Holy Bird?" Naofumi asked, looking at the man quizzically.

"You have not heard? Well, what people actually call it is 'Saint of the Holy Fowl' but that's a bit of a mouthful, is it not?" the merchant explained, making the outworlder grimace at the title, "But rumor says that wherever the carriage pulled by the Holy Bord goes, people are showered with blessings and miracle cures."

"That's ridiculous," Naofumi frowned, "We just sell medicine and any goods we can get our hands on," he said, taking out a potion from his belt pouch and handing it to him.

"Hmm...it's good quality, but it really is normal medicine," the merchant confirmed, "But how do I know you're not just hiding the real deal?"

"If you won't believe me, then it doesn't matter what I say," Naofumi scoffed, which only made the older man chuckle.

"You try to hide it with humbleness, but I can tell you're the one in charge, even if you try to make your cook appear to be the leader," he smirked, glancing at a surprised Kuro in the back, "Who I suspect is the Epicurean Lily I've heard about."

"The what."

The merchant raised his hands in response to Kuro's incredulous expression.

"I am not the one making these nicknames," he quickly acquitted himself, "It is only now that people began saying that the Lily appears following the Holy Bird. Though I must say, that story is greatly more elaborate than what I've heard before."

"As the story goes... following the carriage of the Holy Bird, the Lily appears — the Lily and her stand of delicacies. It is said that the enticing aromas of the delicacies at this stand are a lure, a temptation, one that draws innocent, fair maidens into her arms. With that, the deal is struck, the spell is cast — the Lily follows the maiden home, and conjures up a heavenly feast for her. Then in turn, after the feast, the fair maiden becomes the Lily's meal for the night, her innocence lost through a ravishing that the maiden will never, ever forget.

"And, as always, the tale ends the following morning. She falls asleep in the Lily's arms, but when the fair maiden wakes up, the Lily is gone. The only sign that the maiden did not merely dream it all is one last delightful aroma, a parting treat left on the table as bittersweet as the short time that she had with the Lily. After that treat is gone... nothing remains but the memory."

As the merchant finished his tale, he glanced back at Kuro and laughed out loud at the girl's expression of utter mortification.

"B-but I was just taking them out on dinner dates and left them some food in the morning as a way of saying sorry that I had to leave before they woke up," the Archer babbled, burying her tomato-red face in her hands.

Not wanting to make Raphtalia more uncomfortable than she already was with kissing, Kuro instead asked permission from Naofumi to go and have fun with the local witch of the village they were visiting or a girl that seemed to have a big mana pool.

What the merchant just described was a romanticized and exaggerated version of her usual dating process - she would flirt with the girl at her food stand and extract a promise for a date later, after which she would bring a basket of food to the girl's home for a dinner date. Then, after getting consent, she would kiss the girl silly and absorb her prana in the process, which was the only deception on her part. And since the drain would almost always leave them unconscious before long, kissing and some touching was as far as she ever got! What was this 'ravishing' that the merchant was talking about?!

The snickering that she was hearing from around her was not helping!

"W-why do you even know this kind of story?!" Kuro asked petulantly.

"Please, I am a merchant. As our creed says, there is no such thing as useless information," he brushed her off expertly.

"What kind of merchant are you anyway?" Naofumi asked, changing the topic to his Servant's relief.

"Oh, I'm a jeweler, though it would be more accurate to call me an accessory dealer."

"Things like fancy rings and necklaces then? How much do they go for?"

"Well, let's take this iron bracelet here," he said, holding up the piece he took out from a pouch, "It is embedded with a garnet. As it is, it would sell for 30 silver. But if I added magic to it, it would be enchanted to increase the wearer's strength and it would sell for about a hundred silver instead."

"Really?" Naofumi asked with raised eyebrows. "That's quite a profit."

"Indeed."

'Any of that seem familiar to you?' the outworlder sent to Kuro.

'Quite familiar, actually. There were these girls I hung out with back home, and both of them specialized in gem-based magecraft so quite a bit rubbed off me,' she replied, chuckling over their mental connection.

'So?'

'Right,' the Servant rolled her eyes at her Master's impatience and began lecturing. 'Unlike other objects, gemstones act differently when in contact with prana, as they're highly suited to storing magical energy and the thoughts of the owner, so gems are a really good medium for single-use spells. Whatever prana goes into it is tinged with the properties of the gem, so what you can use it for depends on what kind you have at hand.'

'Sounds like an expensive practice.'

'Oh, you have no idea. The biggest problem isn't even the cost of buying the jewels, but the fact that they self-destruct when the magecraft in them is released. Rin wouldn't be Luvia's maid if the jewels she has could be reused.'

'...I can see why they're used enchant items here instead,' Naofumi commented, quickly masking his briefly slack jawed expression from imagining the enormous costs.

"Papa, there are people up ahead," Firo whispered as she stopped, interrupting the impromptu lecture.

Naofumi stood from his seat to peer ahead with Kuro and Raphtalia jumping out of the carriage to see a large group of people walking out of the woods on the side of the road. With all of them armed and in mismatched armor, it was pretty easy to guess their occupation.

"Bandits!" the jeweler exclaimed in alarm.

"Hand over your valuables and that jeweler and you'll get to keep your lives!"

"Ooh! Naofumi, look! Real bandits!" Kuro said excitedly, pointing at the group. "It's just like Frostrim! They even got the corny lines down!"

"This isn't something you're supposed to be excited about!" her Master retorted, pinching the bridge of his nose in exasperation.

'There's fifteen of them. Do you want me to scatter them with an explosion so we can charge through?' Kuro sent, glancing at her Master.

Naofumi stood considering before shaking his head. 'We don't really have experience fighting people, so this might be useful.'

"You carrying anything that they might want?" the outworlder asked bluntly, turning to their passenger.

The older man gulped in nervousness before speaking. "N-not in particular…though I am holding onto a piece as a favor to someone. But how would they even know about that?"

"Then it looks like you have a rat to take care of later," Naofumi said, sighing in annoyance. "We'll be charging extra for this. Kuro, guard the guy and give us ranged support as usual. Raphtalia and Firo, with me," he ordered before stepping forward to meet the brigands.

"Sure." "Understood." "Yes Papa!"

"H-how are you so calm about this?" the jeweler asked in befuddlement before he saw the book-shaped attachment on Naofumi's arm turn into a shield. "Oh..."

"You'd better go take cover in the carriage, you know," Kuro noted, snapping him out of the daze.

"O-of course!"

"What's this? You think you can fight us? You're only going to be easier to rob when you're dead, you know," the speaker of the group, a bald axe-wielding man said haughtily.

"Oh, nothing like that. I wanted to see how much you're willing to pay for us to hand the jeweler over. Someone paid you to do this, didn't they?" Naofumi asked the apparent leader.

"Us paying you? Are you kidding me?" the bandit asked incredulously as the rest of the group laughed.

"Actually? Yes, yes I am," Naofumi confirmed to the befuddlement of the brigand at the same time as Raphtalia and Firo charged ahead with a gesture of his hand.

Exploiting the bandits' pride to make them let their guards down, the girls already downed several members by the time the rest reacted.

'Four down? Just like that?' the outworlder thought in surprise, watching the bodies being flung into the air by the sheer power behind their strikes as a grin formed on his face. 'These thugs have nothing on us!'

"Air Strike Shield! Change Shield!" he invoked one skill after the other, summoning the ethereal shield right in the middle of the commotion and changing it into the Bee Needle Shield with paralysis poison, instantly disabling an unfortunate bandit and making another fall over the sudden obstacle.

As a portion of the bandits redirected their attention to him, he was about to use Shield Prison on one of them for crowd control when something made him reconsider. 'Considering that Raphtalia and Firo are keeping up their pace and that Kuro has the jeweler pat down...'

Naofumi instead changed the shield on his arm to the previously used Bee Needle Shield and charged into the melee with an unpleasant smile. With his unreasonably high strength and defense stat, he simply barreled through unhindered as the poison of the shield paralyzed everyone that got in his way.

'Well, it sure looks like they have it handled,' Kuro thought, watching her Master bulldoze his way through the bandits.

With a sigh, she sat down on the front seat of the carriage, setting her bow on her lap. "My nieces' out fighting dragons, and what do I get? Guard duty," she quoted, snickering to herself.

"S-shouldn't you be helping them?"

She looked behind her to see the merchant peeking out behind the front curtains of the carriage.

"Nah, they've got this. I'm just backup," she answered. "Honestly, it makes me wish for some more enemies. I understand my role in the team, but it gets a little boring in the backline when I'm good at using swords too."

The instant she finished her sentence, she heard rustling and voices from the woods coming directly from her right. "Let's get 'em while the other guys are keeping the Saint and his girls busy!"

"I spoke too soon, didn't I?" she said ruefully, turning to see another group just like the one the rest of her party was fighting on the road.

"Aw, they left a lass like you to guard the jeweler? If you hand him over, maybe we'll let you go," the group's leader, differentiating himself from the rest with his full plate armor offered condescendingly.

"Yeah, no thanks," she said, drawing Kanshou and Byakuya from their sheaths, "Not when I finally have an excuse to use these bad boys."

"Hah! Let's give the lass a fight then, shall we?" the bandit asked loudly, the group behind him snickering and chuckling as they moved in.

"Trace, on."

Six swords, easily as tall as a man and twice as wide, materialized and stabbed into the ground, cutting off their direct path to the carriage.

"S-sword magic?" the merchant stuttered at the display.

"Crap! Get her before she can cast any more spells!" could be heard among other exclamations on the other side, the Archer clearly having jumped a few levels of threat in their eyes.

"Ready or not, here I come!" The white haired girl shouted as the merchant watched her jump over the swords, likely right into the middle of the group.

The jeweler had to admit, he was rather concerned about being left with just a young archer girl instead of the Shield Hero, but if the grunts and shouts of pain he was hearing were any indication, he needn't have worried.

~~o0o~~

"So what should we do with you guys? You're pretty useless if you won't tell us who hired you," Naofumi thought out loud, looking at the large group of bandits tied up in front of him.

"Do we drop them off with the guards at the next town?" Raphtalia also wondered out loud.

Naofumi glanced at the jeweler. "Think we could get a reward for that?"

"Well...probably so?" the older man answered, unsure.

"Well that's not very reassuring," Naofumi commented bluntly. "It's not like we can do much else with them," he said, shrugging when he saw the group leaders grin at each other.

"Hoh? You're thinking 'we'll just blame it on the Shield Hero and they'll let us go', aren't you?" he asked with an unpleasant smile, making the bandits pale.

"It's not like they'll believe you over us! Hah!" blustered one of the thugs, still cocky despite being tied up.

"I guess we'll just have to kill you then," the outworlder concluded, making the rest of the self-assured bandits also pale in realization.

"B-but you're the Bird Saint merchant! You wouldn't sink to that, would you? Think about your reputation!"

"And how is a corpse going to tell anyone what I did?" Naofumi asked, looking at Firo, "Or better yet, how are you going to tell anyone what I did in a monster's stomach? Firo, aren't you hungry?"

"Hungry!" the filolial exclaimed with drool on the side of her beak, making the brigands flinch away from her.

"Ooh, me first! Let's play a game!" the white haired girl exclaimed with a wild glint in her eye as her bow and an unusually long arrow manifested in her hands, "Let's see how many headshots I can line up at once before one of you pleads mercy and dies anyway!"

"M-mercy!" the bandits now pleaded, with the half of the group that was decimated by Kuro especially terrified.

"Fine. Tell us who hired you, give us everything you have and show us where your hideout is. No funny business."

"Aw," the Servant and the filolial pouted in unison.

'Wait, why is Firo acting disappointed?' Raphtalia thought in alarm.

"Firo, were you really going to eat them?" the tanuki girl asked while Naofumi and Kuro followed the bandits to their hideout.

"Hm...not really," the filolial replied to Raphtalia's relief, "But Firo thought teasing the bad guys was fun!" she went on, not noticing the tanuki's pinched expression.

"Amazing...she speaks!" the merchant said in amazement, looking at the Filolial Queen.

"Firo does!" Firo preened at the attention.

Shortly, the sadistic duo came back and led the carriage to their base, which was then filled with a surprising amount of money, equipment, alcohol and potions. The bandits had managed to accumulate an impressive hoard, which was now all theirs for taking.

"...that was clever," the jeweler spoke up for the first time since they hit the road again, seeming to be in deep thoughts as he was looking at the cargo that he was now sitting beside in the carriage.

Suddenly, Kuro and Naofumi found themselves slapped over their head by Raphtalia.

"Ow!" "What the hell Raphtalia?"

"You two are a horrible influence! Firo is going to have an awful personality because of you! What was that with telling the bandits she will eat them?"

"W-what? We were just trying to scare them so they won't think of messing with us!" Kuro defended.

The tanuki girl only glared with her hands on her hips. "And whose fault is it that Firo was emulating that?"

"B-but look! We got so much stuff out of it!" Naofumi attempted to justify.

"Stealing from bandits makes us the same as them!"

"How does that make us like them?" Kuro asked incredulously, "They would've used it to get better weapons, hire more of those classed-up guards and terrorize the local villages!"

"Yeah! We're gonna use that money and get us better equipment to fight better in the Waves and help save the world!" Naofumi quickly added on his reasoning.

"Oh! You're going to use it to pay for Big Sister's new ar-" was as far as Firo got before the hands of her caretakers clamped down on her beak.

The two's relief over preventing Firo ruining the surprise did not last, as they very shortly could sense someone glaring holes into the back of their heads.

Before she had the chance to push for an interrogation however, the merchant stood with sudden vigor.

"I've decided! For your trouble and for impressing me with your mercantile spirit, I shall additionally reward you with one of my accessories and share my trade routes with you."

"Are you sure about that?" Naofumi asked skeptically with a raised eyebrow.

The jeweler's grin only seemed to get wider for some reason.

"Oh, now you've made me even surer!"

~~o0o~~

A few days later

"With that, I have nothing left to teach you," the jeweler concluded. "You're smart enough to figure out the rest by yourself."

"You know, not that I'm complaining," Naofumi began, looking at the first enchanted accessory he's ever made using the skills the merchant taught him, "But is it just me or me becoming your apprentice was never part of the deal we made?"

"Oh, don't sweat the details," the older man brushed him off as he brought out a rolled up piece of parchment and presented it to the outworlder. "And here, as a parting gift. It is a letter of introduction to a gemstone mine I frequent."

Eyeing the letter being offered, Naofumi quietly decided to take the jeweler's advice and not sweat the details.