Mage Among Superheroes

Warm sun on my skin, gentle breeze keeping the temperature just right, and just the right amount of grass to keep me comfy. This is the life, I thought. Much better than being stuck in a stuffy library reading uncountable tedious tomes. Plus, the villagers couldn't find me here to get their revenge.

It's not that I'd done anything wrong. I was just trying to learn magic. So people didn't like getting shocked, how was that supposed to be my problem? When monsters showed up they'd be glad I let them help me train. Sure, it had been a decade since the last monster sighting. Five decades since the last monster invasion. Clearly that meant they were hiding out, building up numbers for a massive undertaking. It wasn't possible they were actually all exterminated, right?

Or… maybe there would be a war! Peace couldn't last forever. People always wanted more land and resources. Sure, there were all the lands the monsters had previously made uninhabitable, plus better farming techniques making plots more efficient. All the free mages really did a lot for building up infrastructure inside and outside of cities. But someone had to want to start a war, right?

Weren't there necromancers or something? The Black Cowl? I frowned. Actually, the Black Cowl were the ones who figured out that they could conjure stone and make stone golems more easily than any form of undead, without getting anyone angry at them. I think they even learned how to use stone to flesh to make corpses, if they wanted them. Someone had to be angry about that, right?

Oh, or the Nizben empire! They were bound to start another war once the new emperor reached his majority. No, wait. He'd signed his throne away and started a 'democracy' or some sort of crap like that. They'd opened up their borders for trade and accepted the multicultural societies of those under their rules. A few states had sued for independence but backed out before it could go through, once they realized what the young not-emperor could do for them if they remained.

What else… what else… maybe an orcish horde? Eh… that probably wouldn't go over well. Humans might appreciate a half-orc fighting on their side, but they'd find it harder to trust a full orc like myself. And most of the orcs had realized that starting wars wasn't doing them any good.

Okay, what about disasters? No, the other mages could handle that and it wouldn't involve fighting. I could be a whaler, but I wasn't good on boats and to be honest a good harpoon was better than anything I could do. Hunting was much the same, and all of the slots were filled by experienced hunters who knew how to keep populations at the right level. I could fight in an arena! But uh, the Bloody Sand Pit really mostly just hosted bards these days.

Being a mage sucked. How was I supposed to learn magic in a world like this? There were so many things I wanted to do, but what I actually could do right now was… limited.