The Wizard West

[Andreea]

The West Marches smelled like wet dirt and something that might have been freedom, if freedom came with a side of panic and a strong urge to vomit.

Serika Westwood—because that was apparently her name now, according to the translucent blue window that had materialized in front of her face approximately three minutes ago—pressed her back against the rough bark of a tree and tried very hard not to hyperventilate. The tree was real. The grass under her boots (boots she didn't remember owning) was real. The massive rat-thing currently sniffing around a pile of rocks twenty feet away was, unfortunately, also real.

"Okay," she whispered to herself, because talking to yourself was a perfectly normal coping mechanism when you'd just died saving a kid from a truck and woken up in what appeared to be a medieval fantasy world. "Okay, okay, okay. Think. You can think. Thinking is good. Thinking got you through organic chemistry, it can get you through... whatever this is."

The blue window—her status screen, apparently—hovered at the edge of her vision, politely waiting for her to acknowledge it. She'd dismissed it twice already, but it kept coming back like an overeager puppy.

[STATUS]

Name: Serika Westwood
Class: Wild Witch (Tier 1)
Level: 1
HP: 45/45
MP: 120/120

Stats:
STR: 4
DEX: 7
INT: 16
WIS: 9
CHA: 12
LUCK: ???

Ignis (Lv. 1) - Basic fire spell. Cooldown: 30 seconds.

Stupendo (Lv. 1) - Stun spell. Cooldown: 45 seconds.

Blessing: 《Blessing of the Miscast Witch》
Spell failures transform into wild successes. Cooldown reduction through dramatic gestures. Experience gained through stylish spellcasting rather than enemy defeat.

Serika read the blessing description for the fourth time, her brain trying and failing to process the implications. "Dramatic gestures," she muttered. "What does that even—"

The rat-thing chose that moment to notice her.

It was, objectively speaking, the size of a golden retriever, with matted brown fur and teeth that looked like they could chew through steel. Its beady red eyes locked onto her, and it made a sound somewhere between a squeak and a growl that sent every instinct in Serika's newly-reincarnated body screaming at her to run.

She didn't run. Running seemed like a bad idea when the thing had four legs and she was still getting used to her new body's proportions. Why was she shorter now? She'd been five-foot-six, and now she was maybe five-three, and her center of gravity was all wrong.

"Right," she said, her voice only shaking a little. "Magic. I have magic. I can do this."

She raised her right hand—her left hand was gripping the tree so hard her knuckles had gone white—and tried to remember how the system had said spells worked. Verbal components. Intent. Visualization. Easy. She'd watched enough anime to know how this went.

"Ignis," she shouted, and immediately felt something inside her chest lurch sideways, like someone had reached into her ribcage and yanked on a string connected to her sternum.

Nothing happened.

The rat-thing took a step closer, its nose twitching.

"Ignis," Serika tried again, putting more force behind it, more intent, picturing flames and heat and please-please-please-work-you-stupid-spell—

The sensation in her chest intensified, became almost painful, and then... fizzled. Like a sneeze that wouldn't come. The system helpfully popped up a notification:

[SPELL FAILURE: Insufficient focus. Emotional state: PANICKED. Recommendation: Calm down or embrace the chaos.]

"Embrace the chaos?" Serika's voice cracked on the last word. "What does that even—"

The rat-thing lunged.

Serika yelped and threw herself sideways, landing hard on her shoulder in the grass. The creature's teeth snapped shut on empty air where her leg had been a second ago. She scrambled backward on her hands and heels, her new black twintails—twintails, she had twintails now, which was objectively adorable but also deeply impractical—whipping around her face.

"Stupendo," she shrieked, because if fire wouldn't work, maybe stunning it would, and at this point she was willing to try anything that didn't involve being eaten by an oversized rodent.

The spell activated.

She felt it this time, a sharp pull from somewhere behind her navel, like a fishing line going taut. Blue-white light erupted from her outstretched hand. For one glorious moment Serika thought she'd done it, she'd cast a spell, she was a wizard—

The light veered left.

It missed the rat-thing entirely, sailed past its twitching whiskers, and slammed directly into a small wooden structure about thirty feet behind it that Serika had barely registered in her panic. The structure—which she now realized, with a sinking feeling of horror and inappropriate hilarity, was an outhouse—exploded.

Not with fire. Not with force. With sparkling, glittering, rainbow-colored light that fountained into the air like someone had detonated a firework inside a disco ball. The wooden walls blew outward in slow motion, each plank trailing ribbons of pink and purple sparkles. The door spun through the air, rotating gracefully, and landed with a soft thump in a patch of wildflowers.

The rat-thing froze, its tiny brain clearly trying to process what had just happened.

Serika stared at the wreckage of the outhouse, her mouth hanging open.

The system dinged cheerfully:

[MISCAST DETECTED! Blessing of the Miscast Witch activated!]
[Stupendo → Glamour Burst (Wild Success)]*
[Target structure: Destroyed. Collateral damage: Minimal. Style points: +15]
[Experience gained: 50 XP (Stylish Spellcasting bonus applied)]

"I blew up an outhouse," Serika said faintly. "I blew up an outhouse with sparkles."

The rat-thing, apparently deciding that anyone who could make buildings explode in rainbow light was not worth the trouble, turned tail and fled into the underbrush.

Serika sat in the grass, her heart hammering against her ribs, and started to laugh. It was the kind of laughter that bordered on hysteria, the kind that bubbled up when your brain couldn't quite cope with the sheer absurdity of your current situation. She'd died. She'd been reincarnated. She'd destroyed a toilet with the power of embarrassment and bad aim.

"This is fine," she told herself, wiping tears from her eyes. "This is totally fine. I'm a wizard. I have magic. I can figure this out. I need to... not panic. And maybe work on my aim."

A scream cut through the air.

Serika's laughter died in her throat. She was on her feet before she'd consciously decided to move, her head whipping around to locate the source of the sound. There—through the trees, maybe a hundred yards away, she could see movement. Figures. And one of them was screaming.

Every instinct told her to run the other way. She was level one. She'd failed to cast a basic fire spell and accidentally demolished a building. She had no business running toward danger.

But that scream—it was raw and terrified and human, and Serika's feet were already moving.

She crashed through the underbrush, branches catching at her coat (a cute travel coat with too many pockets and brass buttons that she definitely hadn't owned five minutes ago), her breath coming in sharp gasps. The trees thinned ahead, opening into a small clearing. Serika skidded to a stop at the edge, her eyes going wide.

There were five of them. Goblins, her brain supplied helpfully, because of course there were goblins. They were small, maybe four feet tall, with mottled green-gray skin and ears that stuck out at odd angles. They wore scraps of leather armor and carried crude weapons—a rusty sword, a club with nails driven through it, a bent spear. And they were surrounding a girl.

The girl couldn't have been more than eighteen or nineteen, with short blonde hair and a white cloak that was spattered with mud and what might have been blood. She was on her knees, one hand pressed to her side, the other holding a wooden staff that glowed with faint golden light. The light was flickering, fading. The goblins were closing in with the patient confidence of predators who knew their prey was cornered.

"Stay back," the girl shouted, her voice shaking but defiant. She thrust the staff forward, and a weak pulse of light pushed the nearest goblin back a step. "I'm warning you—"

The goblin with the club laughed, a sound like rocks grinding together, and raised its weapon.

Serika didn't think. She moved.

"Hey," she yelled, stepping into the clearing with no plan and even less sense. "Hey, ugly. Over here."

Five goblin heads swiveled toward her in unison. The girl's eyes went wide with shock and something that might have been hope or horror, Serika couldn't tell which.

One of the goblins—the one with the spear—grinned, showing teeth like broken glass. It said something in a language that sounded like gravel being churned in a cement mixer, and the others laughed.

"Right," Serika said, her voice coming out higher than she would have liked. "Okay. So. I'm going to give you one chance to leave. Turn around and go. We don't have to do this."

The goblins did not, in fact, turn around and go.

The one with the spear lunged.

Serika threw up her hand on pure instinct and screamed, "Ignis."

This time, the spell didn't fizzle. This time, she felt the pull in her chest, felt the magic respond, felt something click into place like a key turning in a lock—

The system window flashed red:

[SPELL ON COOLDOWN: 28 seconds remaining]

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," Serika breathed.

The spear was three feet from her face.

She dove sideways, hit the ground rolling (badly, her shoulder was going to bruise), and came up in a crouch. The goblin with the spear stumbled past her, off-balance from its lunge. Serika scrambled backward toward the girl with the staff.

"Can you fight?" she asked, not taking her eyes off the goblins, who were regrouping with the kind of coordination that suggested they'd done this before.

"My magic—it's not working right," the girl gasped. "I used too much trying to heal myself, and now I can barely—"

"Okay, okay, that's fine, we'll figure it out." Serika's mind was racing, running through her options at approximately a million miles per hour. She had two spells. Ignis was on cooldown for another twenty-five seconds. Stupendo had a forty-five second cooldown, which meant—she checked the timer that had appeared in the corner of her vision—thirty seconds left. She had no weapons. She had no armor. She had a status screen that said her strength stat was four, which she was pretty sure meant she couldn't punch her way out of a wet paper bag.

What she did have was a blessing that turned spell failures into wild successes.

And a notification she'd barely glanced at earlier that said something about cooldown reduction through dramatic gestures.

"Oh no," Serika said softly. "Oh no, no, no. That's not—that can't be—"

The goblins charged.

"Do something," the girl behind her screamed.

Serika made a decision that she was going to regret later, assuming there was a later.

She planted her feet, raised both hands above her head, and struck a pose that she'd seen in approximately twelve different magical girl anime. Left foot forward, right foot back, arms crossed at the wrists with her fingers splayed, back arched, head tilted. She felt like an idiot. She felt like she was going to die of embarrassment before the goblins even reached her.

The system dinged.

[DRAMATIC GESTURE DETECTED!]
[Analyzing pose... Style: Magical Girl Transformation, Variant 3]
[Cooldown reduction applied: -15 seconds to all active cooldowns]
[Bonus: Confidence boost (+2 CHA for 30 seconds)]

Serika's Ignis cooldown dropped to ten seconds. Her Stupendo cooldown dropped to fifteen.

The lead goblin was five feet away and closing fast.

"Come on, come on, come on," Serika chanted under her breath, holding the pose because she didn't know if breaking it would cancel the effect. Her arms were already starting to shake. The goblin raised its club, and Serika could see every detail of the nails driven through the wood, could see the rust and the dried blood—

The Ignis cooldown hit zero.

"IGNIS," Serika roared, and this time, this time, the spell didn't work.

It detonated.

Fire erupted from her hands, not in a neat little fireball like she'd been picturing, but in a roaring column of flame that engulfed the lead goblin and kept going, spreading outward in a cone that caught two more of the creatures in its path. The heat was intense enough that Serika felt her eyebrows singe, and the sound was like a freight train made of thunder.

The goblins screamed. The fire roared. Somewhere in the back of Serika's mind, the part that wasn't currently freaking out about the fact that she'd incinerated three living creatures, she heard the system notification:

[WILD SUCCESS! Ignis → Ignisium (Tier 2 evolution)]
[Damage: CRITICAL]
[Targets eliminated: 3/5]
[Style points: +50]*
[Experience gained: 150 XP]
[Level Up! You are now Level 2!]

The flames died as quickly as they'd come, leaving three smoking craters in the grass where the goblins had been standing. The remaining two goblins—the one with the rusty sword and the one with the bent spear—stared at the craters, then at Serika, then at each other.

They ran.

Serika stood frozen in her magical girl pose, her arms still raised, her heart hammering so hard she thought it might break through her ribcage. Smoke curled from her fingertips. The smell of burnt hair and ozone filled the air.

"Did I..." she started to say, and her knees gave out.

She sat down hard in the grass, her hands shaking, her whole body shaking, and stared at the smoking craters. She'd killed them. She'd killed three living creatures, gone in an instant because she'd panicked and struck a ridiculous pose and cast a spell that had turned into something she didn't understand.

"Are you okay?" The girl with the staff was crawling toward her, her face pale but determined. "That was—I've never seen fire magic like that. What spell was that?"

"I don't know," Serika said honestly. Her voice sounded distant, like it was coming from very far away. "I was trying to cast Ignis, and then it... it turned into something else."

The girl reached her. Up close Serika could see that she was younger than she'd first thought, maybe seventeen at most. Her eyes were a warm brown, and there was a dusting of freckles across her nose that made her look simultaneously fierce and vulnerable. "Well, whatever it was, you saved my life. Thank you."

"I blew up an outhouse," Serika said, because apparently her brain had decided that shock was the appropriate response to almost dying. "Before this. I tried to stun a rat and I blew up an outhouse with sparkles."

The girl blinked. Then, impossibly, she smiled. "That's the most chaotic introduction I've ever heard. I'm Rio. Rio Brightwill."

"Serika Westwood." Serika took Rio's offered hand and let herself be pulled to her feet. Her legs felt like jelly, but they held. "I have no idea what I'm doing."

"Yeah," Rio said, looking at the smoking craters and then back at Serika with an expression that was equal parts awe and concern. "I got that impression."

A new system window popped up, this one larger than the others:

[QUEST COMPLETED: Save the Stranger]*
[Reward: 100 XP, +1 to all stats, Skill Unlocked: Ignisium (Lv. 1)]
[New Quest Available: Explain Yourself]

Serika read the quest notification, then looked at Rio, who was watching her with cautious curiosity.

"So," Rio said slowly. "You're new to the West Marches, aren't you?"

"I'm new to this entire world," Serika admitted, because at this point, what did she have to lose? "I died. Got hit by a truck saving a kid. Woke up here with magic powers and a blessing that makes my spells explode when I mess them up. Also, I apparently level up by being theatrical, which is either the best thing ever or the worst thing ever, I haven't decided yet."

Rio stared at her for a long moment. She started to laugh, a sound that was bright and genuine and a little bit hysterical around the edges. "Of course. Of course that's how this day is going. I get cornered by goblins, nearly die, and get rescued by a reincarnated witch who levels up through dramatic posing." She shook her head, still grinning. "The West Marches are going to eat you alive, Serika Westwood."

"Probably," Serika agreed. She looked down at her hands, which had stopped shaking, and then at the system window that was still hovering patiently at the edge of her vision. Level 2. One new skill. A potential party member. And apparently, somewhere out there, an entire frontier full of monsters and magic and opportunities to make a complete fool of herself.

"But hey," she added, surprised to find that she was smiling too. "At least it'll be interesting."

Rio's laugh turned into a snort. "Interesting. Right. Come on, let's get out of here before those other goblins come back with reinforcements. And maybe you can tell me more about this 'dramatic posing' thing on the way to town, because I have questions. So many questions."

"I have questions too," Serika said, falling into step beside her new... friend? Acquaintance? Fellow disaster survivor? "Starting with: where is town, and do they have food? Because I haven't eaten since I died, and that's probably not healthy."

"Town is about two miles east. And yes, they have food. The stew at the Frontier Guild is pretty good, if you don't mind mystery meat."

"At this point, I will eat anything that doesn't try to eat me first."

They walked into the forest, leaving the smoking craters and the destroyed outhouse behind them, and Serika's status screen helpfully updated with one final notification:

[Achievement Unlocked: Theatrical Debut]
[Description: Cast your first Wild Success spell through the power of dramatic posing. Style: Questionable. Effectiveness: Undeniable.]*
[Reward: Title gained - "The Posing Witch"]
[Warning: This title will follow you everywhere. Choose your poses wisely.]

Serika groaned. Rio raised an eyebrow.

"Don't ask," Serika said.

"Oh, I'm asking," Rio replied cheerfully. "I'm asking about everything. This is going to be the best story I've told in years."

And despite everything—the death, the reincarnation, the exploding outhouse, the near-death experience with goblins, and the deeply embarrassing title she'd earned—Serika found herself laughing.

The West Marches stretched out before them, wild and dangerous and full of possibilities. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear the sound of water running and birds calling and the rustle of wind through leaves. The sky was blue and vast and dotted with clouds that looked like they'd been painted by someone who'd never figured out perspective.

It was ridiculous. It was terrifying. It was completely insane. Serika couldn't wait to see what happened next.