Chapter 53: Lyra’s Feeling
Lyra’s point of view:
I am Lyra, the second child of the Waterfall family, a branch family of the heroic Winterfell lineage. For generations, my family has served as assistants to the Winterfells, always relegated to the shadows, unacknowledged by the other noble families.
Since childhood, I’ve been relentlessly compared to the main family. In my own family, I have one older brother. But unlike me, he lacks magical talent, so he’s set to inherit the traditional role of the Waterfalls: serving the Winterfells.
As for me, I do possess magical ability—but instead of the water magic that my family excels in, my aptitude leans toward support magic. My father, a renowned water mage and cousin to the patriarch of the Winterfells, placed all his hopes on me. He wanted me to carry on the family’s water magic legacy.
He trained me tirelessly, pushing me to master water magic. But somewhere along the way, he gave up on me. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t control water-element mana properly. I didn’t understand why. Support magic simply came more naturally to me.
In the end, I enrolled in Braveheart Knight Academy to understand and overcome this limitation, hoping to finally make my father proud.
But now, more than two years have passed since I started at the academy, and I still haven’t mastered water magic. I can only use basic spells like [Water Ball], and even those lack the power to cause significant damage.
The professors examined me and concluded there was nothing wrong with my mana flow. They suggested that the issue might lie in my mindset, that I lacked the mental readiness for water magic.
As I approached the promotion exam to advance to my third year, the academy partnered with the knight guild for a special trial: students would undertake missions to hunt monsters.
For this mission, I was paired with Freya. We’d always been in the same class and often worked as a team. She’s my best friend, perhaps because we share a similar fate—or maybe because hers is even harsher. We support each other like sisters from different bloodlines.
One day, we received a guild mission to hunt a mini-boss: a Big Wild Boar in the monster forest near the Blackmore family’s territory. It’s a Rank C target, commonly hunted by Rank C knights or magic knights like us. If we could take it down, we’d earn our promotion to the third year.