Mereoleona Vermillion dashed through the dense mashes, following the trail of the bandits mana as she closed in ever closer on her prey.
The people of Praumba, a village on the outer southern edge of the Clover Kingdom, had been overjoyed when a Magic Knight like Mereleona had just so happened to be in the area when several of their village folk had been kidnapped by bandits. It had been the first time any of them had ever even seen a Magic Knight in their village, many of the elders not even recognizing her Crimson Lion's cape. Since it would have taken days to contact the order and place the requests for assistance, not to mention the fees usually involved, they had all been in despair when Mereloena asked them what the problem was.
Honestly, things like this was why she thought the Magic Knights were stupid. Well, one of many reasons.
The Magic Knights were a group of over 500 of the country's best mages sitting around in their clubhouses back in the capital, rather than being out in the real world doing things. The 'STAR' points totals said it all. 500 of the best and the brightest couldn't even manage to perform two good deeds a piece over the course of an entire year. Most of them were more concerned with wealth, politics and sniffing their own farts than with actually helping people, and now her dear little brother went and became a CAPTAIN.
Right after turning down the position herself, the 24-year-old Mereoleona decided to get out of the capital, before the rotten mana they had there corrupted her too.
God, why couldn't her brother understand just how sweet the mana tasted out in the world? This was how mages were meant to live.
Not only that, but you actually got to HUNT monsters and villains, instead of just sitting around and looking pretty and going to parties and competitions. There was nothing that Mereoleona loved more than the hunt. After all, it is the lioness who hunts for their pride.
The trail was getting stronger, and it seemed as though the group had made the ever so poor decision to stop their progress. Did they think that they had already fled far enough? Or had they reached their hideout?
"Nn?" Mereoleona stopped and ducked down as she focused on a sudden change in the mana before her. The steady trail she had been following had suddenly spiked. The natural mana around her became cloudy with less natural mana, which would often signify the use of spells.
Had she been noticed? She hadn't exactly been reining in her power, but she hadn't expected any of the bandits to be versed in how to sense changes in mana.
Cutting her output, Mereoleona crouched low into the tall grass and moved in, prepared to pounce on her prey, should they show themselves.
However, as she got close and the unmistakable sounds of battle started to reach her, she sped forward a little fast in order to see what was happening.
Though when she came within view of the targets, the sight waiting for her was so shocking that she simply stood there and watched.
A redheaded child, no older than seven years old and holding a pair of wide black and white sabers in each hand, was fighting with the bandits. Not only that, he wasn't doing too bad. Granted, these were just small fry bandits, but he was still doing will.
Mereoleona would have said he was a beardless dwarf or half-dwarf, instead of a real child, if it weren't for the fact that he had no grimoire with him. Most people would be more likely to leave their head behind in the morning than their grimoire, after receiving it when they turned fifteen.
A stone golem, around the size of an ox charged the boy, who jumped six feet in the air with magically reinforced strength, landing on the golem's shoulder and slicing through the stone neck, kicking off as the head was separating from the body.
Moving forward, he attacked the bandit who had summoned the golem, forcing the man to jump backwards. But as the mage was jumping backwards, the child threw his weapons at the man… or rather, at his Grimoire.
The mage gave a scream of panic as he barely managed to levitate the book out of the way of the thrown blades before they could have cut through the spell book.
Mereoleona was surprised by the move, going after a mage's spell book was not something normally done, as the spell books were legendarily resilient to damage. But a quick glance around showed two other bandits holding the remains of their own spell books, which seemed to have been cut to pieces, looks of shock and horror on their faces.
Though if the attack on the books was merely surprising, what happened next left Mereoleona in complete shock.
Two of the bandits started to throw fireballs at the now unarmed child, only for another set of the black and white swords to appear in his hands before he used them to deflect the oncoming fireballs.
It was Creation Magic.
The boy had performed Creation Magic without the use of a Grimoire. Something that Mereoleona was fairly sure SHOULD have been impossible.
While mana manipulation and basic magic, or even spell casting, could be performed without a Grimoire, Creation Magic was different.
In order to properly perform Creation Magic, you needed more than a steady supply of mana. You needed a blueprint for whatever it was you were creating. If the blueprint was in any way flawed, then nature's mana would erase the created object in an instant. Even with a Grimoire, Creation Magic would only last a few hours, so using it without one should have been simply impossible, the human mind just couldn't create or maintain a clear enough image, especially not in the heat of battle.
It was pure curiosity that caused Mereoleona to sit back and watch the little kid work. His thrown weapons boomeranged back around and one of them slammed into the rock magic user's shoulder with the back of the blade, knocking him off balance and rendering him a sitting duck.
Mereoleona saw first hand as the child closed the distance and cut through his magic book with his black and white swords.
Those swords must have been something else to cut through a Grimoire so easily. Though the non lethal method of the assault was perplexing. They were bandits and slave hunters, the scummiest of scum. Perhaps the boy felt like death was too merciful. Understandable, but he should have at least taken a limb or two.
It was a mistake that would cost him.
"Put down your swords, now!" One of the bandits shouted as he had snuck around to the wagon where the kidnap victims were held, pulling out a girl and holding a blade to her throat. The young farm girl began to sob as the knife came within an inch of her throat.
The boy did as he was told, dropping his swords to the ground, though his body was still crouched low, his eyes locked onto the man holding the knife in a predatory manner that Mereoleona quite liked. If the man moved even an inch, the boy would surely strike.
But Mereoleona couldn't exactly allow a defenseless innocent to be in harm's way. Her noble pride wouldn't allow for it.
The moment she opened her book, the boy's eyes widened, and he turned to face her, arms raised.
"Flame claw!"
A whip of fire magic, shaped into a lion's claw shot out from Mereoleona's hand, moving too fast for the bandit to react to. One moment the bastard was holding a knife to a girl's throat, the next his arm was missing, reduced to ashes.
The man screamed, falling to the ground and clutching at the stump which used to be his arm, as Mereoleona casually walked out of the bushes into the cleaning.
"Magic Knight. What a Magic Knight doing in a place like dis?" One of the bandits golped, backing away in terror.
"So, does anyone feel like resisting?" Mereoleona said with a wide grin. The kind of grin that had used to make her own squad members quiver in fear. Only two of the bandits even tried to run. Mereoleona let them get around twenty feet before she reinforced her legs and dashed forward and past the runners. The two collapsed to the ground, each missing a leg. "Anyone else? Please, give me an excuse. I DARE you."
The bandits threw down their weapons and spell books, each prostrating themselves to the apex predator. Not that Mereoleona really cared. None of them had the power to so much as scratch her, and she was more than ready to incinerate anyone who made a move against her.
The only one she had eyes for was the boy.
He looked up at her with an utterly startled expression as she eyed him up and down.
Kid looked like shit. He was scrawny to the point of being boney and clothed in a large sake with holes cut in it for his arms and legs. While he had done a good job in his fight, he still bore small burns and scrape marks here and there from when he couldn't completely avoid the attacks.
"Tell me kid. What's your name?" She asked.
"...My name is Shirou." The boy said, his accent not one that Mereoleona could place, but one that felt somewhat familiar. She found herself liking it, the polite, yet sharpness in his voice.
"Shirou, huh?" She said, her grin widening even further.
Yes, she liked this one.
It had been nearly a year since Shirou had woken up after his battle with Gilgamesh to find himself on the sandy beach in an unfamiliar land, where mana is plentiful, his body returned to that of a small child. He would admit that in that time, he hadn't exactly been treated well by the people around him, but this felt like a particular low point.
"Tell me, who's kid is this!?" The tall woman with hair as red as Shirou's own demanded of the village elder, holding Shirou's up in front of the man's face by the scruff of his neck.
"Ah, well… He doesn't actually have any um… I believe he's been staying in the Eric family's barn for the last few months, in exchange for labor." The man said, understandably nervous about the muscular woman who stood in front of him with an annoyed look on her face.
The woman reminded him of Fuji-nee only being more Fuji-nee than Fuji-nee had ever been. She emanated that same 'I will do as I please' attitude as the young woman had, as well as her short temper. Though this woman also had a rather crazy grin and the bright red eyeliner, which were also rather unsettling. All that, along with the bandits who were missing their limbs, caused her to be very intimidating.
"A barn!? You have a child working just so that they can sleep in a barn and wear a sack!?" The woman said in outrage, causing the man to flinch, which only seemed to anger her more. "Even if he's an orphan, you should have sent him to the church! Has the local baron been stealing money from the orphanage or something!? No, even that couldn't explain this! So what gives!?"
"A...After the way he showed up, washing up naked on the beach and all and spouting out that queer language, people thought the child possessed. No one wanted anything to do with him." The man confessed, though trying to make sure to share the blame rather than keeping it all to himself. Many of the nearby villagers who had shown up to give thanks to the woman who had saved their family members paled and started to move along as fast as they could.
It was true, it took Shirou a lot of eavesdropping to start to get a hang of the local language. He still wasn't that great with it. There had also been times when he would have stones thrown at him or be chased out of town for being a 'demon'.
The word 'church' was unfamiliar to him, but it must have been part of their government or religion, if it was connected to the orphanages. It mostly depended on if a 'baron' was a type of lord or a religious leader. Though Shirou could be completely wrong for all he knew.
"Of all the stupid crap…" The woman started to twitch, fire flickering on her clenched fist before turning Shirou around to face her. "Alright kid, since you don't belong to anyone, I'm going to be taking you with me, got it?"
"Yes ma'am." Shirou said immediately.
Odd as she was, this woman was a powerful magic user. A stupidly powerful magic user. When she first opened her grimoire, Shirou had been half convinced that a Servant had appeared. Rin had been a genius with an unbelievable amount of magical energy for someone born in a world where mana was on the decline, but this woman's raw quantity of magic was something else entirely. She also used that power to help save innocent people.
The townspeople called her 'Ms. Magic Knight', and while Shirou hadn't heard the term before, he was pretty sure that a 'knight' was some kind of soldier.
More than any kind of home, Shirou was hoping that she would become his teacher. He had never had a proper education in magecraft. To call his knowledge bare minimum was an understatement that Rin would and had broken down laughing over.
"Wait, are you going to be taking him to the orphanage, or are you saying you are going to be adopting the boy?" The village elder asked in surprise.
"Adoption?" The woman said, as if she had never heard the word either and was rolling the word around in her mouth to see how it tasted. "Yeah, why not. He's already got the red hair. He'd fit in perfectly in the Vermillion house. Right. I'm adopting him."
"Vermillion!?" The village elder croaked, going from merely pale to a deathly white. "As in, the Royal Vermillion family!?"
"Yeah, that's right. I'm Mereoleona Vermillion, first born daughter of the Vermillion household." The woman said, puffing out her bountiful chest with pride as everyone around them stared in disbelief. "Come on Shirou, let's get going and find you some proper clothes. No son of mine is going to walk around wearing a sack."
Mereoleona then tossed Shirou onto her shoulder before kicking off the ground and jumping nearly a hundred feet in the air as she pulled out her grimoire. Flames erupted from the soles of her feet and the two of them started to fly away, the village staring at them as they went.
With Shirou's enhanced vision, he could see the looks on all their faces, as if a tornado had just blown through.
"Not too bad. White and blue look good on you." Mereoleona said after having dragged Shirou to the nearest city and into the first clothing store she could find.
They originally tried to deny her entry, given Shirou's state, but apparently Mereoleona's family were big shots and after seeing a crest she presented to them, they simply did whatever she told them to.
It took no time at all for her to get Shirou several sets of clothes and a pair of shoes that fit him. They weren't fancy clothes, but warm, thick and durable clothes, meant for ruffing it in, but Shirou was more than fine with that.
"You still smell like shit, but we can take care of that later." Mereoleona said, taking a sniff and making a face. "Really, you smell like a pigsty."
"I was sleeping in a barn. Of course I smell like barn animals." Shirou said flatly, gaining a grin from the woman. While she was practically a force of nature, she enjoyed people confronting her and bantering with her, though most probably didn't have the spine. Shirou could also smell the alcohol on her clothes.
She really was just Fuji-nee version 2.0, upgraded from a tiger to a lion and from big sister to… mother.
That was going to take some getting used to.
"Tell me Shirou, why'd you do it?" Mereoleona said, her grin fading a bit.
"Why'd I do what?" Shirou asked, not understanding the question.
"Those people treated you like literal shit, and yet you went out and risked your life in order to try to save them. Why?" Mereoleona asked.
"...Because it isn't wrong to try to help people." Shirou said seriously.
Mereoleona stared at her before snorting, reaching out and ruffling his hair. "That's stupid, but it's a good kind of stupid. The world would be a better place if people would just think like that."
"Ms. Vermillion."
"Just call me mom."
"...Mom. Please, teach me." Shirou said bowing to her. "Teach me to be strong like you."
"Oh, you want to be strong like me do you?" Mereoleona said, her grin coming back full force. Shirou could feel the air around her vibrating with her power. "Tell me Shirou, what do you want this kind of strength for?"
"I want so that I can save everyone." Shirou said without hesitation.
"Save everyone? Do you think that it is even possible to save everyone?"
"Don't care. Even if it is impossible, I'm still going to do it." Shirou replied with all the determination he could muster on his childish face.
"Hahaha! Good answer!" Mereoleona roared with laughter before staring down at Shirou with her wild grin. "I'm loving your determination, Shirou. I knew you were something special. So let's go get this training started."
"Right." Shirou said with a quick nod of his head, earning another roar of approval from his new mother.
Shirou would do whatever it took to become stronger, and Mereoleona would make sure he took it all.
Alright, now someone take this and write an actual story.