After the meal had finished, the pitiful Belladonna was relegated to washing the dishes. This time, Crazy had taken mercy on her however and taught the young girl a unique way to use hydromancy to clean objects. To summarize, this method of magic involved enveloping the object in water before manipulating the water to spin at high rotational speeds. But such a technical skill was something that Belladonna wasn’t capable of casting on a reliable basis. Crazy had taken this skill from a similar version of light magic a temple priest had once shown her. Taking that spell and modifying it to use with water, she was able to improve the nature of water to have it take on a cleaning effect.

In the far future when Belladonna became a Saintess, she would still be able to remember this rigorous moment with absolute clarity. But at the same time, this would be a secret she would never tell anyone else. Her future descendants would later try to surmise what exactly happened during this period, but with no success.

In the canon, it had been written “The Saintess Belladonna, Prophet Elric, the Divine Knight Kite, and Jerry the Unifier received the holy teachings from the Holy Father from His residence in the Sacred Forest. And from Him, the Saintess Belladonna was given the holy water to bring back to humanity. The Prophet Elric was ordained to give guidance to the holy lands. The Divine Knight Kite was to destroy the relics of the original organization, and Jerry the Unifier was to establish the New World Order.

There weren’t many possible ways to look at the canon of the religion objectively, and even the later historians would all write down their own thoughts. “The foundation of the new religion was due to the part of two great figures, Belladonna and Elric. At the same time, the biggest contributors to the creation after them were Kite and Jerry. Our earliest records show them appearing from the Sacred Forest, but this is a topic that has been up in controversy over. There is one thing that cannot be disputed however; it was in the Sacred Forest that Belladonna learned the way to make holy water. It was this creation that led to the chain of miracles that occurred with its usage. No longer would it be reserved to the higher echelons of the religion, but even the people of the commonwealth would be able to use it. The doctrine of our Holy Father had spread quickly along with the holy water. But a baffling subject that confuses historians today is that when the doctrines were being spread throughout the lands, it was not Sovereign that it started in, but the rival neighbor, Karth….” 

History has a special way of messing with the people of the future.

From start to finish, Belladonna had suffered. But then, even she had found solace and comfort in her mind. The devastation that would befall Elric and Kite was more than enough to make her shudder.

For Kite, Crazy had used an ancient training method to toughen him. When he saw Crazy carefully thumbing through the black covered tome, Kite’s mind couldn’t help but feel fortunate that he had been trained rigorously as a part of his knightly lineage!

Unbeknownst to him, that tome contained the written records of an ancient magical empire destroyed five hundred years ago and was filled with instructions on how to train a magi-warrior. In the current era of the world, magic and martial arts were categorized on two different systems of strength. While there were those that were proficient in magic and could combine it into martial arts, the two aspects could not be mastered together. 

As such, Crazy hit her growth limit once after she became capable of using magic from the four primary elements. An experiment was conducted a long time ago to address this issue, but the experiment had been costly and required her to have at least a preliminary level of understanding of martial arts. It was a shame that she was an expert in magic and not martial arts, but luckily having people that’d fit her needs show up at her front door was an unexpected surprise. Not taking advantage of such a fortunate encounter would be a crime, to be frank. 

When she obtained the tome she was holding in her hands, she noted that it contained the records on how to combine magic and martial arts together to form a battlemagus. But this method involved stripping away the consciousness of the user and transforming them into a killing machine. The applications of such a method was rather small, and even with Crazy inventing a particularly special way of refining the mind via meditation, there was no way she could test it out and thus her experiment had reached a dead end. Yet here she was today with an experimentee ready for her to use and abuse.

The pitiful lab rat had been chosen.

“Kite. In order to attain victory in a duel, what important factors must be calculated for the advantage?” Crazy asked.

Kite had no idea why Crazy would ask such a question, but this was a question he had heard and replied back to countless times since young. “Power, speed, and technique.”

“Add some details to that.” Crazy instructed.

“Power is the origin of an attack and correlates with speed and technique to fully guarantee the full might of the attack. Speed is what manifests with the strike and consists of both attacking speed and reactionary speed. Speed is reflected by the power of the attack and shows off the technique of a strike. Technique is the final component in an attack. It is technique that makes use of the power. It is technique that finds the hole in one’s defense. It is technique that allows for deviation in one’s attack style. And it is technique that allows me to know my enemy.” Kite answered with assurance.

“Very good.” Crazy spoke. “In terms of a showdown, the basics is the same in both magic and martial arts. The only thing is that we magi tend to overlook the aspects of speed and technique. But. You’ve seen my battle with that wolf. You should know by now just what can be accomplished with both speed and technique.”

Thinking back to the hair-raising battle they had witnessed and the destruction it had caused, Kite and Elric seemed to have realized it as well.

Continuing, Crazy reasoned, “And so rather than chasing after the elevation of power, why not allocate your energy efficiently in the other two aspects? This second way improves flexibility in everything. I am sure that in a duel of swords, your instructor would say the same thing!”

“Yes, my father would always warn me that against a powerful enemy, one should disregard all-or-nothing blows and instead adopt a form where both offense and defense are combined into one.”

“Hahaha, I spoke correctly.” A shrill laughter could be heard in the air again.

“There is that same correlation from martial arts to magic. Think about it, why not try out a new offensive style of magic?” By this point, Crazy was trying to seduce them into her experiments as an enchantress might do.

In the course of Kite’s fanatical mind, there had never been such a tempting offer. Even religion had been a thing that failed to move him, and he had never once deviated from his zealot nature.

But now. Even when fronted with this suicidal training style, Kite found Crazy’s words to be as sweet as honey.

The contents of this training was distinguished into two types. Increasing magic tolerance and synchronizing magic with martial arts.

Magic tolerance training involved quickly increasing the magus’ sparsely used mental fortitude to help increase their resistance to magical damages. There was an emphasis on speed and flexibility however, the two aspects ignored most in magic. But the objective was: Escape if you can escape, dodge if you cannot escape, and endure if you cannot dodge.

And with the synchronization of magic and martial arts, one would be able to maintain a meditative level of mind even while fighting.

So whenever Kite looked as if he had burnt like a duck straight from the oven or struck by lightning so badly he couldn’t walk, Kite would still be able to jump up and down at the very least. Sometimes in his training when the synchronization of magic and martial arts had been disrupted, the energy would explode even. But Crazy would be on hand to put out the fires with her ice water. Belladonna had felt even more fortunate for herself after that. People had their lives, and it seemed that some god had taken pity on her.