In all of her twenty three years of uneventful life, Joe had never imagined that she would see a living, breathing human being exploding like a water balloon, right in front of her eyes. Yet here they were, standing in the midst of such exploding humans, blood and guts and entrails flying everywhere in the shadowy corners of the Grimm canyon. Joe resisted the urge to retch out her last eaten sandwich, as the stench of blood became thicker by the second.

Nero stood motionless by her, eyes narrowed in concentration. She could see beads of sweat rolling down his face.

“N-Nero,” Joe ventured bravely, “What on earth is happening?”

The man ignored her completely, a first since she’d known him in this world, and Joe wondered if he couldn’t hear her over the bloodcurdling screams of the exploding bandits around them. The ones that tried to attack them head on succumbed first, inflating like hideous balloons and bursting away in a splatter of blood and innards. Joe deftly dodged a pair of eyeball flying at her face, and watched the battlefield with a growing dread in her gut.

The men clutched their stomachs and shrieked, blood spurting out of their eyes and noses and mouths before their heads exploded in spontaneous blasts.

“Run away! RUN IF YOU WANT TO SURVIVE!” A bandit screamed from his position behind the cliffs, not even bothering to hide the terror in his voice. “That man is one of THOSE! You can’t win against HIM!”

As if a switch had been flipped, the bandits halted in their tracks and scrambled away from the clearing, like ants running away from a drop of water. The weapons were flung away, the lanterns smashed, their positions abandoned. The men frantically mounted their horses and ran to the opposite direction, away form the clearing and further into the shadows. The ones with dead horses jumped over the corpses of their comrades to climb the cliffs with their bare hands. They were only halfway up when their bodies caved in to the explosion, blood and guts splattering over the walls.

The girl watched with a horrified fascination, unable to take her off what ought to give her some serious nightmares later.

She suspected that she was already standing smack in the middle of a nightmare herself.

When the screams died down and the dust settled, they were the only two left in the barren riverbed. The weapons lay abandoned in the clearing, with torn limbs and bodies and guts spilling out. Joe turned away hastily, resisting the urge to hurl. Joe tried to focus her eyes at the narrow strip of sky instead.

The moon had gone into hiding behind the clouds again. She couldn’t blame it. Who in their right mind would want to watch mindless bloodshed after bloodshed? (The fact that she had actually watched it up close wasn’t entirely lost on her, but her screws were already kind of loose to begin with, so she paid it no heed.)

‘It’s over?! Just like that?’ Joe could hardly believe her eyes. They’d not only survived, but even won against a gang of battle-hardened, bloodthirsty bandits in an unfamiliar terrain. The girl shuddered, suddenly feeling the chill of the night. She didn’t dare breathe too deeply, for the scent of fresh blood was still lingering heavy in the air.

“My lady.” Nero must have sensed her thoughts, because he relaxed his shoulders and flashed a look of concern at her. The fatigue of the ambush was beginning to show on his face. Joe noticed the exhaustion as he slowly ambled towards her with an unsteady gait.

Some five steps later, Nero visibly winced and faltered on his feet, and to Joe’s horror, crumpled down on the barren soil with a groan. The girl nearly tripped as she dashed to side frantically, her stomach clenching in worry. Please be okay, please be okay, please be okay!

Nero’s face was beginning to turn pale, a very telltale sign that he was obviously not okay. He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t move, and he couldn’t even hear her shouts of concern as Joe shook his shoulders and grabbed his face and screamed in his ears in frustration.

Tears of guilt almost sprung up in her eyes, but Joe managed to blink them away. She would not cry helplessly when Nero was dying. She would NOT!

The crescent moon that finally peeked out of the clouds had bathed the eerie canyon in a muted silver. The shadows of the cliffs danced with the flux of moonlight, but Joe paid them no heed. She fetched the canister from their rucksack and splashed the remaining water on Nero face. He was sweating and staring at a distance in daze, face scrunched up in pain.

It was only when Joe had torn off the helm of her dress and given his face a firm wipe, that he broke out of his trance and finally looked into her eyes. His breath came out in small puffs, but he still managed to give her a pained smile. “Thank you, my lady Joanna. But I am quite alright now.”

As if on cue, a thin stream of blood trickled out of his nose.

“Ah yes.” Joe replied curtly. “I’m sure that I can see that.”

Nero winced like a child caught red-handed with hands in the cookie jar, and rubbed the blood off with his longer sleeves. In his defense, he hadn’t quite expected the after-effects to turn out this bad.

Joe helped him to a sitting position at the base of one of the vertical cliffs and peered into his eyes seriously. “It’s the trick you used on the bandits that’s causing this, isn’t it?” she asked, “The one that made them explode inside out like water balloons?”

Nero who was busy resolutely evading her eyes, almost laughed at the words. Leave it to her to find the most incredible analogies! The little lady was far too perceptive for her own good, the ex-soldier thought; even though he had a nagging suspicion that she wasn’t so ‘little’ that her current age seemed to suggest. And she was surprising stubborn when she wanted to be. He clearly wouldn’t be able to lie his way of out of this one, not without jeopardizing her trust.

Trust was a very fragile thing, he knew it, even more fragile than a man’s ego.

“What do know about the water attribute, my lady?” he asked her instead.

Joe raised a skeptical eyebrow at the change in subject. “It is one of the four basic elemental attributes.” She said, trying to remember the solemn voice of Lady Joanna in the great Central Library. What happened only a week ago suddenly seemed like lifetime to her. “Those with the water attributes can manipulate any source of water in their vicinity, provided some condition for the initiation of the magic is met.”

“Very good.” The man sitting in front of her nodded his head approvingly. Joe felt like a child, confused and helpless and suddenly happy to hear some unexpected praise. It made her feel foolish.

Which she probably was, all things considered.

“It is too late to be confessing this, my lady.” Nero began with an uncertain smile. “But I am one of those few commoners that can wield magic in this world. My attribute is water.”

Joe stared.

The pieces fell down into place perfectly. The terrifying explosions. The spray of fresh blood gushing out like fountains. The terror in their eyes, as the blood leaked out from every available opening.

The screams of the last bandit, ‘This man is one of those. You cannot win against him.’

“You manipulated their blood.” Joe said, unable to hide the tremor in her voice. “You caused their blood to force itself outside and explode everything in its way.”

Nero watched her with a strange expression, as though she was the long missing piece of a puzzle he had entirely overlooked. Joe was gratified to see that there was at least some semblance of shame in his eyes, but she might as well have imagined it.

“I can control water, and it includes that which is contained in the human body, the human blood.” Nero went on, his voice uncharacteristically soft. “Although it is not a commonly known use of water magic, it is not entirely impossible.”

“What about the initial condition?” Joe found herself asking.

The man smiled at her. “There was blood in my hands, was there not?”

“O-ohh.” She didn’t know what to say. When Joe had heard of magic, she had thought about floating water droplets, swirling fireballs, flying islands and flowers springing up in sandy deserts. Maybe an unexpected snowfall in the middle of scorching summer, if she was lucky.

Magic wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine. This wasn’t a fairytale, and Joe wasn’t its fairy princess. That shit happened in the harmless confines of storybooks, not in reality. In reality, be it earth or fire, wind or water, every magic was a weapon honed to survive, to fight. And to kill, if need be.

She’d be a fool to forget that.