A Special Mage (Ike x OC)

Chapter 16 - Saving Grace

After Ike and I talked over the semi-rushed plan from earlier, the two of us headed back outside where a fair amount of people were gathered. The remaining fires had been put out, so it looked darker outside than it was before, especially since the sun had yet to rise. People were watching us as we headed over to the food storage area, but we paid them no mind. We were more focused on the catastrophe in front of us: smoke was still leaking out of the stone building that stored our food, and from the looks of it, everything inside was completely burnt and unusable.

"Well, this is worse than I thought," I whispered under my breath as I gawked at the complete wreck of a storage room. Piles of glowing ash and singed wood were everywhere, and all the stone surfaces of the room were blackened by the fires that had ravaged our supplies.

"Our best bet is to look toward the middle. If we're lucky we'll be able to find usable seed," Ike said.

It looked like it would be a grueling task, and I wasn't hopeful we would find anything, but I knew we had to at least try. So, we started sifting through the rubble, and any hint of something that wasn't black or gray powder felt like finding real gold in a vein of pyrite. By the end of our back-breaking search, we came up with only a few kernels of corn, three half-burnt tomatoes, a couple varieties of bean, and one apple with partially burned skin. There was probably more somewhere in the ash piles, but time was limited.

"So, you're telling me you can feed everyone? With just this?" Ike raised his eyebrows after looking at our measly collection of food scraps. It was understandable that he still had doubts.

"Yes. I can, and I have," I tried to reassure him, but the only way to prove it would be to actually put my words into action. "We just need to find a spot of open land, pronto." Quickly, I grabbed some burnt shards of wood leaning against the back walls of the building, and we bolted out the doorway.

Fortunately for us, we were adjacent to a wide field that was just beyond a small section of trees. The moonlight softly illuminated the sea of grass before us, and crickets chirped gently in the distance. A slightly cooler breeze wafted past us, giving us a brief sensation of peace. Like the calm before the storm.

"Will this do?" Ike turned to me and asked, but I'm sure he already knew the answer.

I smiled. "Oh, this will do alright. But we can't grow anything the way things are right now." It would be impossible to grow anything when grass was already taking up all the space. So we had to get rid of it somehow. "We need fire mages."

Ike looked confused. "What?"

"No questions. We need fire mages, stat!"

With that, the general was off, and he promptly returned in mere minutes with some random people I didn't recognize. But I didn't need to know them for what we were about to do next. The plan was to burn up a large section of grass in the field so that we'd not only have space for other plants, but we'd also be able to use the ash from the old plants as an excellent fertilizer. It was genius! But I realized we'd also need wind mages to spread the fire faster, so I had to send Ike running again.

Once we had everyone we needed, it was go time. The fire mages sent plumes of glowing flames into the grass, and then the wind mages sent powerful streams of wind over the fire, causing it to dance in the breeze and grow to amazing heights. It ripped across the field like some unstoppable beast.

"Uh...how do we put this out?" Ike asked over the roar of the flames.

"Uhh," I panicked. It was then that I realized I didn't think that far ahead, so I basically had to make something up on the spot and hope it worked, otherwise we were all doomed. "A ton of Blizzard spells," I suddenly said. "We need all we've got." I figured that if enough ice covered the fire, we would put the fire out and generate some water to help grow the plants. Another genius idea!