8 years earlier.

As I opened my eyes, I found myself in an unfamiliar town.

The roads were paved with odd-looking stones and horse-drawn carriages navigated through them. Sudden nausea assaulted me, so I dragged my wavering body to the closest alleyway. I puked the content of my stomach on the wall of a decrepit building and stepped back to catch my breath and dry my tears.

Although the heartache had been expulsed along with the bile, an excruciating migraine remained. I sat down and tried to ease the pain by massaging my temples.

A strident sound came to my ears and made me lift my head abruptly. The source was an old door opening on the wall next to me.

A young woman came out of the doorstep. Scarlet hair. Freckles. White, snowy skin. She looked gorgeous. In contrast, I must have looked awful because she took a step back when she spotted me.

Nonetheless, she moved forward. She threw the garbage bag she was carrying in a bin close to me. Yeah, that’s right. I was entranced by her beauty even as she carried away trash.

Then, she closed in on my pathetic self and bent down to put her lovely face at the same height as mine. No, I am not a midget. I was seated, so she had to bend her knees.

Her lips opened, and she spoke softly.

I didn’t understand a single word that came out of her mouth. I didn’t know this language. Worse, I couldn’t even identify a language that resembled it. It had an oriental vibe because it was admirably fluent, but that might also have been caused by her bell-like voice.

“What?”

If she answered in my mother tongue, we would be able to have a proper conversation.

She replied with a short word. I assumed it was her equivalent of “What?”.

Seemed like communication was not an option. I was terribly thirsty, so I mimicked the act of drinking from a glass. I figured hydrating myself might help with that headache.

She led me inside the decrepit building she just left and stopped in front of a rustic counter. Behind it stood an imposing man with a long red beard.

She spoke a few unintelligible words to the man while designating me with her finger. The man mouthed some sort of low growl. It was unclear whether he was communicating or simply complaining.

In any case, he grabbed a mug and filled it with tap water. Wherever I ended up couldn’t be so bad. They had running drinking water and even a garbage disposal service. Well, assuming his tap water was connected to a municipal network, and assuming they had a service in place to pick up the trash bags the girl threw in the bin.

She pulled a chair from a nearby table and signaled me to sit on it. I did so promptly and gulped down the mug of water put at my disposal.

As I exhaled satisfyingly, my stomach growled loudly.

I looked at them, embarrassed, and wiped my lips from the dripping water. Now that I took a closer look at the colossal man, I could see that his eyes were surprisingly gentle. I could almost catch a glimpse of a smile under his beard.

With a large ladle, he scooped stew, poured some into a bowl, and gave it to the girl, which in turn served it to me.

She sat across the table from me and stared while I devoured my meal. It was cold, but I didn’t care. It was delicious.

They were really nice people. They were feeding a random guy that was found puking next to their building.

Before I knew it, I was in the back of the inn, doing the dishes. It’s not like I had anything better to do anyway, and I needed to pay them back for the meal. And that girl… Well, to say the least, I kind of wanted to delay our farewell a bit longer.

At the bottom of the sink where I used to wash the dishes, I found a weird-looking stone. It was glowing in a shade of red somehow indicating its function which was to heat the water. The way it worked was that it drained a small amount of mana from the nearby living beings to heat itself.

It was a mundane magic tool, but just being next to it soothed my headache a bit.

Was the headache somehow related to my magic?

Yes, it was. I’m not going to make a mystery out of this.

At the time, my mana pool was still growing, and the stone, by siphoning my mana, slowed down this process. By growing, I really mean just that. Like a growing body during puberty, my mana pool was expanding by creating more room to stock mana within my cells. Not that I knew any of this at the time.

However, there was a small problem. The stone, instead of stabilizing at a comfortable temperature, kept draining mana to raise its temperature even further, thus heating the water until it was nearly boiling.

I came to name it the scorching flames of hell.

That was the beginning of our little trio. I washed the dishes, the imposing man did the cooking, and the girl attended to the customers. As for the rooms upstairs, we were sharing the cleaning duties. I probably don’t need to explain it at this point, but this building was a two-story inn. The first floor was a restaurant and the second one was the inn, strictly speaking.

During our free time, she taught me their speech, and how to read it and write it. This language was pretty complicated and didn’t have any similarities with anything I knew. But with time, I managed to grasp it.

“My name is Anastacia. What’s yours?”

“Rat, Linch-it is.”

Coincidently, parts of my name were actual words in this language. This made the whole thing awkwardly confusing.

“Lynch, is it? What a nice name!”

**Well, I guess it’s time for a new name. I can’t call myself Rat, after all.**

By then, it was only a matter of time. I fell in love with her. However, fate would not let me consume this love of mine just yet. I was drafted into the military for a foolish territorial war to quench the king’s greed. It didn’t take me long to discover my extraordinary latent magical abilities.

Using this prodigious magic, I quickly put an end to this so-called Insurrection, triggering every possible death flag on the way, like “I’m going to propose to her once the war is over!”.

I survived. I proposed to her. We got married. Wholesome story, isn’t it?