That’s it!
“Mariel-san, how did you do that magic?”
“Huh? It was just a regular Waterball…”
“I don’t think a regular Waterball could pulverize like that.”
“Eh, but…”
Uh-oh, it feels like Mariel-chan was about to say something like, “If it were Cristea-san, it would have been even more amazing.” She’s probably just being kind by not saying it out loud. Anyway…
“Well, the Waterball seemed to shrink, pass through the target, and then it looked like it burst inside the wall… it did feel a bit different from a regular Waterball.”
“Huh? But, um, I just imagined the magic like a Waterball, made it a bit smaller since it was too big to hit the target, and then fired it to hit the target.”
“… That’s probably it.”
“? What do you mean?”
Sei didn’t seem to understand the meaning of our conversation.
“I thought it was strange because water is supposed to be almost incompressible, but it shrank. Mariel-san must have imagined the water shrinking only to the point where it hit the target. So, after it passed through the target, the Waterball, which she had forced to be smaller with magic, tried to return to its original volume and burst due to that energy.”
“I-I guess… I did only imagine it until it hit the target.”
I knew it. Waterball can be used to crash, push them away, or suffocate, but making it burst from the inside is just too cruel…! Sei and Mariel-chan probably didn’t think about what would happen if it hit a person, so I’ll make sure to talk to Mariel-chan later and tell her not to use it again. For now, I shouldn’t make her feel discouraged or she would go “It’s impossible now!” or something like that.
“Mariel-san, it’s actually easier to split the Waterball into several smaller ones when trying to make them smaller, you know? Trying to force it to shrink it uses too much unnecessary magic power.”
“I-I see…”
The precision of magic varies depending on how detailed you imagine it. And as you increase precision and power, you need more magic power. However, if you prioritize efficiency in your imagination, it can actually save magic power. Trying to do something like using fire magic to make it extremely hot or using wind magic to create a vacuum, which deviates from the usual imagination, requires a tremendous amount of magic power. So, when it comes to simply reducing the size of an overly large Waterball, it’s more efficient to divide it into several smaller ones.
I, too, once accidentally conjured a large Waterball when trying to fill a pot with water using water magic. Since I didn’t think of compressing it, I ended up panicking and took out multiple pots from my inventory, then performed an acrobatic act of dividing the Waterballs into several smaller ones and dropping them into buckets. Only Mashiro and Kurogane, who witnessed the incident, know about this secret event. I almost flooded the fief’s kitchen… Thanks to that, I’ve become extra cautious with controlling fire and water magic.
“Mi-Miss Mariel! Was… was that the power of that magic tool!?”
“Miss Mariel, if it’s alright with you, could you show it to me?”
“Wow! Miss Mariel, you were so amazing! So cool!”
The three men, who had recovered from their shock, rushed over to us.
Oh yeah. There was an audience…!