The Weight of Legacy

Within the cupboard of a tiny house that barely met the minimum requirements to be considered habitable, something was moving, all the while a silver-haired man deftly caught the falling plates before they could meet a tragic end upon hitting the ground.

The spices had long since been cleared out—it was almost as if he’d suspected something might happen to them if he left them there.

“VEIT!”

“I told you it was a bad idea,” the forester in question said, clearly amused. For all he liked to complain about both the property damage and her actions themselves, he’d yet to actually do anything to stop her.

Malwine could have sworn she felt a smug shrug all the way from where she was. Her fellow literal bastard was most definitely enjoying this. “If you’d helped me get up how I wanted to, it might have worked.”

With a grumble, she kicked the cupboard’s door open, leaving it to flop on its hinges. Veit had refused to endorse her idea, so she’d had to climb up on her own. Now, as she slinked back down, she lay the responsibility of any and all ruined furniture at his feet for not helping her out.

Veit simply eyed the wooden plank as it continued swinging, one light breeze away from just falling off. “50 Strength, she says,” he muttered. “Sure.”

“Not my fault Bernie gave you a house made of cardboard.”

He just rolled his eyes at that.

Honestly, she couldn’t even deny her attributes were making her at least slightly superhuman by now. A real seven-year-old would almost definitely have had trouble mimicking her feats of debatable athleticism. While she felt like the Curse had her at next to no attributes compared to what could have been, her view of how much of a difference stats made had to be warped. She’d been so busy loathing how lowered her effective values were that she genuinely hadn’t put much thought into the fact that they might already have been somewhat above average.

Malwine let out a long sigh—the countertop was as good a lounging spot as any. “Why is it taking this long? It’s been ages!”

Was she being dramatic? Certainly. But did she deserve the chance to be? Absolutely. Nearly every waking moment she hadn’t spent on either family mealtimes or taking lessons with Hildegard, went towards trying to evolve [Shieldwork]. Her patience was managing to grow even thinner than it normally was when it came to these things, and Veit’s house was simply caught in the crossfire.

Of course, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t justified herself. Risking damage to the areas she frequented—let alone her room—wasn’t something she could really afford to do. Her family members’ cluelessness when it came to raising actually children was likely the only reason she hadn’t been subjected to more scrutiny, but there had to be limits. Her experiments with pushing [Shieldwork] to evolve had proven more destructive than she expected, and she’d had to accept something would probably go wrong if she tried this within the family home.

“‘Ages’? You’ve been working on this for two weeks and four days,” Veit told her—how he was tracking time was beyond her. She’d already asked if he just had a higher quality pebble somewhere, but he’d just said it was instinctive.

I’m definitely not insanely jealous right now.

“By your own admission, evolving [Meditation] took you far longer than this.”

Malwine simply grumbled, refusing to address that and sliding further down until she could sneak under the sink.

“I can give my constructs any shape within reason,” Veit had the gall to sound annoyed, when he was the one whose glass constructs were unbreakable to her despite his assurances. She couldn’t tell if the annoyance was genuine. “Must you really tear my house apart?”

Ignoring him, Malwine continued pressing her shield forward. The plumbing was strange—not that the widow had much experience with that, for her to think back on as a reference. Still, what little piping she could identify clung to the wall, far more compact than she would have expected it to be. Just how the plumbing made potable water show up was also beyond her, considering they seemed to be surrounded by seawater in most directions.

The piping survived the first shield-flexing session, at least. The same couldn’t be said for most spots she’d tried out.

It wasn’t that she had anything against Veit’s tiny kitchen—she’d just noticed small spaces seemed to make it easier for her [Shieldwork] to improve, as the Skill didn’t seem to differentiate between damage it blocked and being damaged by the force it applied against anything in its way.

Certainly, the improvements brought forth by her now-fixed imbalance helped, but the Skill had gotten 10 levels in what felt like a relatively short time. The evolution eluded her, but for all she wouldn’t outright tell Veit he was right, she found some measure of comfort in knowing it at least hadn’t been as bad as the whole debacle with [Meditation] had been.