Chapter 9: Chapter 8: Sword of Damocles

From the manor, a huge sound could be heard. It strongly resembled the sound of a cannon being fired. Actually, it sounded more like a big firecracker or a firework but, in this world of magic, the need to create those never came. As such, everyone from this world would fear an attack from intruders rather than think someone was just playing or celebrating something.
In the Vallmonts' manor, most of the workers were either envisaging the former, or were just confused.

Maximilian, however, had a bad feeling for another reason. He was almost sure the sound originated from the west, and he saw about an hour ago Alice going outside in this direction.

“What is she even doing over there?”

He remembered that Alice was overly invested in a lesson about manipulating mana outside of the caster’s body and that she ran outside immediately after, so he feared this sound came from her. 

Still, he did not know if something had really gone wrong. It was weird in the first place that a sound like this one could be created with pseudo-strengthening magic, but Alice did not necessarily mess up. He decided to go towards the training ground, even though he was not wearing an appropriate outfit.

As he was about to leave the manor, his father, Isaac de Vallmont, stopped him.

"What do you think you are doing?! You and Alice, you stay inside while I send the guards over there!"
"Ah, but... I think Alice did that..."
"What? Is she over there?"

Isaac did not seem convinced at all. Maximilian then proceeded to tell him all about Alice’s behavior that day, starting with her getting all beat up by Rachel on the training ground a few hours prior.
His father eventually gave in, but he decided to go with him along with four guards to protect the both of them.

Upon arriving at the training ground, a young girl with white hair was on the floor, seemingly unconscious.

“Oh no, Alice! Are you okay?!”

The Marquis was the first to react in this situation and immediately approached the girl.
She was covered in burns and did not react to their voice.

“Father! Is she still alive?!”
“She is... You there, call the healing mage immediately!”

One of the guards was ordered to quickly call Lucius, a proficient healing mage who worked in the manor as an attendant. When he arrived, he treated Alice, starting with her right arm. Her skin was in tatters in certain areas, and the mage gasped at the sight. Despite this, however, he continued the treatment. Healing magic could decrease the severity of a wound and greatly increase the recovery speed of a body, but it rarely made injuries magically disappear as if they never were there in the first place. As such, even near the end of the treatment, it was still clear as day that Alice had been injured.
After what felt like several minutes or even dozens of minutes, a few doctors arrived to take over the treatment from the mage.
Soon after, as she was brought back to the manor,  Alice was put into a bed which had been prepared in a hurry by the Marchioness and her mother, the Countess. The latter was already crying when she saw her daughter.

"Look at her state! Please treat her with magic!"
"They already did, for half an hour... We should just let her rest for the time being."
"You can stay with her for the night, Leila. We will send a message to the Count."

***

(... Where am I?)

Early in the morning of the next day, Alice finally woke up. She did not recognize the room she was in since she had never been there. She was extremely confused and then saw her mother sleeping uncomfortably at her bedside. As she tried to lift her right arm to wake her up and ask her directly, she felt an intense pain. She then looked at it under her sleeve and saw that it was bandaged. She realized that, under the unfamiliar clothes she was wearing, some parts of her body were in a similar state. Even her neck. She also had tinnitus in her right ear.

(Ah… I remember now…)

She had caused this herself and had seemingly worried everyone, starting from her own mother. As she looked at her, she realized there were dried teardrops on her cheeks. Alice started crying too. She was not a hero who would rejoice over discovering the potential of her true power, but instead just a little girl who realized she could have not only killed herself, but also the entirety of the people living in this manor.

(I’m scared… I couldn’t control it.)

She did not want to think too much about what happened the day before because she was afraid it would occur again. After all, it had happened as soon as she nonchalantly thought about it.

She managed to stay alive with some burns, some hearing loss and a concussion, but she could have easily died on the spot.

At that moment, Alice had briefly been thinking about matter-antimatter annihilation. This was a phenomenon that took place when matter met antimatter. The result of this encounter was the total annihilation of both, that is, the conversion of both of their mass into light. After all, matter and antimatter were just another form of energy. The potential of this energy was incredible though, since it perfectly followed the famous equation E = mc². This meant that any object with a mass could theoretically be converted into other forms of energy such as light or heat. Even a minuscule amount of mass would result in a tremendous amount of joules since it would be multiplied by the enormous number that was the square of the speed of light.

The day before, Alice had sensed her hand that was controlling the cloud of mana trembling. For some reason, suddenly, the amount of mana started increasing and, in an instant, there was twice as much as before, without any visible change in the volume of mana.

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She then realized there was a weird fluctuation in the mana she had been casually manipulating in the air: there was a minuscule portion that contained a significant amount of mana. 

Somehow, she instantly made the connection between this and what she had just been thinking and thus knew something really bad was about to happen. In the first place, Alice was already feeling the air getting really hot because of the losses of a conversion she could not see. Rather than trying to control it, she decided to get this extremely dense ball of mana as far away from her as possible, but it still exploded only a meter from her.

What really happened was that Alice somehow converted a very small portion of the air into mana. Instead of just moving her mana, she messed up and inadvertently broke down pure matter into another form of energy.

Fortunately, this time, she targeted only a tiny volume of gas. This area, made out of air at a classic density of 1.225 kg per cubic meter, was even smaller than a red blood cell. As such, it contained more or less 30 picograms of matter, of which every particle was converted into mana or heat.

Because of the minuscule volume of the mana, its absurd density made it extremely unstable. It then blew up into light, heat and sound, hurting Alice before she could get away.

While it amounted to only a few thousand joules of energy, it was still way more powerful than the most dangerous legal firecracker that could be bought back on Earth. It was also about three times more powerful than a small dry ice bomb, except she received heat instead of shrapnels.

If she had converted only 10 times as much matter into mana, she would have possibly lost a limb or two in the explosion or could have even died on the spot in the worst case. Had she instead converted a few hundred milligrams, everything in a kilometer would have been destroyed, killing the Vallmonts, her mother and all the attendants, cooks and guards.

So, Alice was scared. What if it happened again? On Earth, antimatter, which was incredibly expensive and difficult to create, was needed to produce matter-antimatter annihilation. This time, however, only a thought was necessary for her magic to start converting matter and free all its tremendous potential energy. It was way too easy to mess up and obliterate enormous areas.

Unfortunately for Alice, the world she lived in was not a game-like one with a system, levels, skills or even with predetermined magic spells necessitating an incantation. Here, using magic was not too different from moving an arm just by thinking about doing it.
Thus, if she was not focused enough while using her magic, she could kill everyone physically close to her in less than a second. This was truly a sword of Damocles, as there was no safety to avoid an accidental activation.

Alice was seriously considering killing herself. She would rather die alone now than risk killing her parents along with her. Even in these conditions, her death would still have so much more meaning than that of her former self who had probably been a nuisance to her family during her final year and who had died a miserable and useless death in pain.

(I might even remember this life in my next one…)

“You’re awake!!”

Just as she was thinking about pretty serious things for a kid her age, her mother exclaimed with joy when she saw Alice woken up up and gently put her hand over the blanket near her daughter's leg.
Alice cried once again.

(But… I don’t want to die and lose them…)

She did not want to say goodbye to her parents. Not to mention, according to her mother’s expression, she would surely be devastated if her daughter killed herself like this.
She was also afraid to die. Even if someone in another world were to have her memories, she did not feel like it would be equivalent to being alive. Even she considered her former self dead, after all.

In the end, Alice decided to reduce her mana flow for the time being, and only use magic while accompanied with a practical instructor while focusing her mind on other kinds of conversion like kinetic energy. She also gave up on the idea of manipulating mana in her surroundings, at least temporarily, since it was while doing this that she involuntarily triggered an explosion.

Of course, she also thought about simply not using magic anymore, but she guessed it was a bad idea: since the time her mana veins had been activated for the first time, she had always been unconsciously emitting mana, whether it was normal or not. As such, in only a night, enough mana to destroy a capital was already mobilized in the air around Alice and was just waiting for her order to start this pseudo-annihilation, that is, the conversion of matter energy into 80% of highly unstable mana and 20% of heat. If that was the case, Alice thought she might as well get her mana flow accustomed to kinetic energy conversion instead of completely stopping using magic at the exact moment she messed up. If she did that, she would just be maximizing the chances of messing up again in her sleep. Of course, she would still manipulate this mana she was emitting in order to reabsorb it or consume it, but there was nothing she could do about it.

 

In the end, Alice had trouble explaining what had happened to her mother, the Marquis and the Marchioness. As far as they knew, her magic was similar in almost every way to strengthening magic. It made absolutely no sense that she managed to create an explosion.

She tried to explain this with the air exploding because of the power she gave it, but nobody seemed to really buy it. Alice did not realize it but she was, in fact, a terrible liar.

Nevertheless she promised she would not use magic without an official instructor keeping an eye on her and then thanked everyone for treating her, starting with Lucius who had eventually collapsed because of mana exhaustion when he went back to the manor.