Jenni’s singsong whispers were tinged with sweetness, but the seething hatred hidden beneath it all sent an icy chill down by back. If I was taken away from the temple, Rosina and Wilma would be sent back to the orphanage. Jenni wanted nothing more than for them to be miserable there, and I knew there was nothing I could say that would make her let go of me.
“We can consider the contract done then,” Bindewald said with a throaty laugh. He started walking this way. Jenni’s grip didn’t loosen no matter how much I struggled. She was lithe with slender arms, but a weak child like myself couldn’t even come close to overpowering an adult woman’s grip.
Bindewald took out his shining wand and turned it into a knife. The look in his eyes as he brandished it was the spitting image of how Shikza had looked at me; they were the eyes of a noble who believed that, as a commoner, I was inferior to him, and that me submitting to him was the proper way of the world.
All I could do was tremble in fear, just like I had when Shikza had pulled a knife on me. The tip of the glowing blade grew close, then cut my fingertip.
“Ow!” Unlike the shallow cuts Lutz would make for blood stamps, Bindewald had dug deep into my finger, paying no mind to any pain or lasting damage. Blood almost instantly began to seep from the wound.
“Open your hand.” He took out a contract and pushed it toward me, wearing a nasty grin all the while. His toad-like face only got more disgusting as he came up close to me. I glared at him, squeezing my hand shut as hard as I could in defiance, but there was no stopping the blood from dripping out.
“I told you to open your hand.” I flailed about, trying to avoid him grabbing my hand and wrenching it open. I was weak enough that it would be over as soon as his hands were on mine.
“No, no, no! Go away! Ow!”
“LET GO OF HER!” I heard a roar, and a second later Dad kicked Jenni from behind as hard as he could. The sheer force sent us both flying toward Bindewald. I slammed into his fat belly, knocking us all onto the ground, and for a second I couldn’t breathe, squashed between Jenni and him as I was.
Within seconds, Dad raced over and pulled me out from between them before picking me up and holding me in one arm. “Sorry about that, Myne. Did I make it in time?” he asked, not looking at me. He pulled Jenni up a bit with his free hand as she gasped for air, then kicked up into her stomach. She flew off Bindewald with a gurgle, vomit spewing from her mouth.
“Th-That was just cruel...” muttered the High Bishop. Both he and his attendants were trembling at the sight of violence that was never normally seen in the temple.
Dad gave them a cold look. “So you’re saying it’s not cruel to stab a little girl with a knife and force her into a slave contract she doesn’t agree to?”
“S-Silence, commoner!” Bindewald, whose face was bright red in humiliation as he sat up on the floor, angrily swung his ringed hand. He shot out a larger blast of mana than ever before, and the massive ball of shining blue mana came right for us. It was too close for me to launch my own blast of mana to deflect it.
...I’m dead! I squeezed my eyes shut as the ball shot toward me, but Dad was braver. He grabbed me in a hug and immediately leapt to the side, rolling as he hit the floor.
“Ngh!”
“Dad?!” He hadn’t completely dodged the mana attack. His left shoulder down to his elbow was bright red, as though he had been burnt. The sight of him groaning in pain flipped a switch inside of me.
I rolled out of Dad’s arms and stood up. I locked my eyes on Bindewald, who was building up mana for a second attack, and hit him with all my mana from the very start.
“I WILL make you pay!” I shouted, and the force of all of the mana in my body made the feystone on the ring burst apart like a popped balloon. In the same moment, the full force of my Crushing hit Bindewald; he blinked in surprise and fell to his knees, eyes wide open in surprise. He tried to move his trembling hands, only to find he couldn’t move them at all, as if heavy weights were crushing his body from all sides. I had no intention of letting him do anything else.
“Count Bindewald?!” The High Bishop’s panicked voice sent my head turning toward him in a glare. I wasn’t scared of him now that he had given up his human shield.
But the second after that thought passed through my mind, he took out a black feystone from the pocket of his robes. “Don’t think the same trick will work on me twice!”
The black feystone in his hands was sucking my mana right out of the air. He gave a smug smirk. I kept Crushing him with mana, but it was all sucked straight into the stone.
“Ngh... I let my guard down. To think she had that much mana in her,” Bindewald said. I saw him staggering to his feet out of the corner of my eye before making his wand appear, his scornful smile replaced by a completely blank expression.
The Black Charm
“Apprentice!” Damuel, a panicked expression on his face, took out his shining wand and stood between the count and me. As he protected my right side with a red light, I continued pouring mana into the High Bishop’s stone as his face twisted with smug assurance in his own victory.
“You waste your time,” he said, barking a laugh.
But a
