‘Disappointment can be quite the motivator.’ I say to myself, still fuming from last week’s event.

  The very prospect of having to rely on people who can let you down at the most crucial moment is enough to send chills down anyone’s spine, spurring them into working twice as hard to minimise the occurrence of such interactions.

  Perhaps that motivation was the only thing keeping my fuse from blowing over, and keeping me focused on doing work that was originally assigned to ten people. My table at the library was cluttered with textbooks, parchment and scrolls that I scrounged from the shelves. I even had to fight an old lady to get my hands on the only copy of Mazaran’s Enchanted Plants I could find here. That fight would have been a lot easier if I had backup from my group members.

  “Gah! Those blasted, no good, free-loading—“

  Bam!

  “Ow!” I yelled as something hard hit the back of my head. I looked behind me as a large encyclopaedia steadily glided back in the direction of a woman who was staring at me sternly through her round glasses, a finger held up to her lips in a shushing gesture.

  I understood that knowledge was power, but boy was this librarian abusing it. Assaulting people with hard-covered books had to be against the law somewhere. Some of her weapons were capable of giving someone anything from a mild to a serious concussion.

  I decided to return my focus to the task at hand since complaining wouldn’t do much to fix the issue or extend the already encroaching deadline. As I scanned through the contents of the fourth textbook, my ire gradually shifted from my team members to the Headmistress of the Academy who gave us this insufferable task in the first place. I had never been a huge fan of botany, not to mention enchanted plants that only seemed to be related to bad news and catastrophic events. The only sort of plants I cared about were the ones my mom threw into a pot of stew.

  Still, a task to confirm or deny the existence of a plant that only appeared in legends and fairy tales was a strange one. Her logic was that she wanted to test our research and deductive prowess, as a good wizard would be capable of sniffing out the details of any ancient text to glean what the truth was. She ended her long tirade of excuses with a rather ominous line:

  ‘There are no myths in a world brimming with magic.’

  But again, they all sounded like excuses to me. I and many people took her course because it was an opportunity to be taught directly by an experienced and powerful wizard. Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t see how ‘Anomalies and the Exploration of Ruins’ has anything to do with magical vegetables. As far as I could tell, she didn’t want to teach us and just dumped an arduous task on us to keep us busy.

  I didn’t mind to begin with. But now that my hand felt like it was about to fall off from all the writing it started to bug me. My annoyance was steadily rising once again and I accidentally let out a long groan.

  “Ughhhhh!”

  As the sound escaped my lips, my eyes widened as I quickly whipped my head around just in time to grab the book that was gunning for my head at terminal velocity.

  “Ha!” I shouted in triumph as I thwarted the librarian’s attack.

  She clicked her tongue in annoyance right before flicking her finger and sending another book that smacked me on the side of my head, knocking me out of my chair.

  “Muwahahaha—oof!” Her triumphant laugh was cut short as a book also hit her on the forehead, no doubt sent by the head librarian.

  I decided to stay sprawled on the wooden floor, using the opportunity to take a short break. I stared emptily at the high ceiling of the library. It stretched so far up that I could barely see it, despite the light streaming in from the tall windows all around. I could see books flying overhead, heading to or coming back from their readers. Although some of them were probably standby ammunition for the librarians.

  The scenery was broken when a familiar but upside-down face came into view, staring down at me with her brown eyes.

  “Yo!” Hansel greeted.

  “Have you come to add to my stress?” I jabbed at her.

  She lightly kicked my head with her foot. “Is that how you greet a friend?”

  “No. But it’s certainly how I greet a nuisance.” I replied.

  I rolled away before she could stomp my face in with her shoe.

  “And what brings you here?” I asked her in a whisper as I sat up on the floor while she took a seat in the chair I was in.

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  She was wearing the white tank top and light-brown trousers she typically wore on quests, along with her signature leather gloves. A black bandana kept her flowing auburn hair out of her face so she could see whatever she was fighting without any distractions. I had once remarked about how her outfit made her look more like a magic engineer than a wizard, and her response to that was to wear it as many times as she could just to spite me.

  People could be rather stubborn about the weirdest things.

  “I was on my way to a mission and decided to swing by on my way there.” She replied in a low voice, picking up one of the textbooks and idly flipping its pages.

  “Must be nice having so much free time on your hands.” I said in envy.

  “Well, my group and I finished our project quite early.” She replied, trying but failing to keep a smirk from creeping up on her face.

  “Well, perhaps I would also have been done by now if my group members were more useful.” I shot back.

  “Sometimes the issue isn’t always with the members but could be with the leader.”

  “So you’re saying it’s my fault?” I inquired, raising an eyebrow at her.

  She shrugged in reply.

  “Look, if they weren’t going to do their parts then why act eager in the first place? It would have been easier if I knew from the start that they weren’t going to do anything.”

  “Perhaps they weren’t acting. I’m sure they were initially excited when they heard they were being grouped together with the great Felix!” She dropped the textbook to make a grand gesture with her hands as she made that remark, keeping her voice as low as possible while trying to imitate an announcer.

  “Top of the academy! Blessed by the ancients! The first space wizard in three thousand years! It’s quite a portfolio that’s bound to get anyone excited. But in reality, you’re a stick in the mud that doesn’t budge and can be a huge pain to deal with. They likely just got fed up and left you to do all the work. Not that many can put up with you.” She pointed out.

  “It’s not like the project itself is straightforward. I have to cover as many angles as possible to be sure I get a passing mark.” I replied in indignation.

  “It’s always ‘I’, ‘I’, ‘I’. Did you stop to consider that maybe you were swamping them with too much work?” There was a grimace on her face as she asked me.

  My writing hand ached as if to respond to her question.

  “It wouldn’t have been too much if everyone just did their part,” I responded, refusing to back down. “Besides, it would be a major blow to my reputation if I got a bad grade this late in the game.”

  “One thing’s for sure though, your reputation in this library probably isn’t as great.” She said as her eyes were focused on something above.

  I followed her gaze and saw seven books floating about a dozen metres over my head. They were moving around in circles like vultures stalking their prey. I looked down in the direction of the librarian who was in charge of this section of the library. This time she kept her gaze firmly on me like a hawk, while she held a water pack cooled with ice magic against her forehead.

  “That aside, I want you to come with me on my quest.” Hansel requested.

  “I’ll pass on that. I’m still busy.”

  “You’ve been in the library all day for the past four days. Surely you’re almost done by now?”

  “Almost.”

  “Then you can finish it up another day. The quest itself isn’t anything difficult.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “The Magic Bureau detected an arcane anomaly somewhere in Elshire Forest. I planned on making a trip to the forest for something else so I offered to take a look. From what they can tell, it isn’t a big anomaly so it shouldn’t be much of a threat.”

  “Then I don’t see why you need me there.”

  “You stuff your head full of books for a reason, don’t you? There’s no guarantee I’d be able to identify the nature of the anomaly all by myself. Plus I need the help of your magic for the other thing I need to do at Elshire.”

  “What is it you want to do?”

  “I’ll tell you after you agree to come along.”

  “That’s not exactly helping your case.”

  “Please?” She tried pleading.

  “No.”

  “Please?!”

  “Not happening.”

  “Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease?!”

  “If you keep that up you’re going to get hit by a book sooner or later.”

  I thought about her request for a while. In truth, I was in search of an excuse to get my mind off this project before I lost it. But this wouldn’t be the first time Hansel had popped out of nowhere and dragged me on some wild adventure. Many of them ended up as misadventures with one-too-many near-death experiences and even a close shave with a dragon once. But considering this involved a quest from the Magic Bureau, who were rather thorough when it came to quest details and handing them out, it shouldn’t turn out badly.

  Probably.

  “I promise we won’t get kidnapped by a flock of griffins this time. There aren’t any in Elshire.”

  “Sigh. I really hope I don’t regret this decision.”

  “Thank you! Trust me, you won’t! We'll be in and out of there in no—Ow!” A moderately large book hit her in the head when her voice got too loud from excitement.

  ‘So there WAS another copy of Mazaran’s Enchanted Plants!’ I thought to myself as the book floated back into the air. With how vengeful the librarian was feeling today, it was probably for the best that I took a break.

  “Don’t worry. We should be back in time for you to finish up the project.” Hansel reassured me, her voice back to a whisper.

  Yet, as I gathered together the notes I had written and sent the textbooks back to their shelves, I had a vague suspicion.

  A suspicion that I wouldn’t be back in time to finish the project.