When I left the clearing, I was both angry and, yes, frightened. I had heard stories of what magic could do. I had been moved by those stories to pursue training in magic for two years despite little visible progress. That was the first time, though, that I had seen first hand the raw power of magic.

I barely managed to hold myself together as I staggered back to the clearing where Kana was waiting. She was obviously skeptical of my claim that I was just frustrated that it had taken me so long to find our rag ball, but no matter how she pried I refused to embarrass myself by sharing the story of a disappearing fox woman and her unreasonable behavior. In the end, I managed to escape the conversation by claiming that I was late for my chores.

All through the rest of the day, any time I closed my eyes, I could feel an echo of that terrible magical force, pressing down on me. It would take me some time to shake off the lingering effects from an experience like that. At least now I had a concrete goal to aim for instead of conjectures built on bedtime stories.

The RPG-like interface of the blessing that the fox woman had bestowed on me was still visible on the edges of my vision. I tried poking at them a bit when I had moments of privacy, to no avail. I may have been sulking a little bit as I lay in my futon that night.

While I could see little icons in the corner of my vision and I could pull up my status at will, all of the actual power-ups that had been granted to me were now blocked off. The system had even been configured to play a sad little trombone riff of failure whenever I tried to select a grayed out option.

Pushing a little deeper as I lay on my futon, I discovered that there was a little bit of active magic in the system besides what it was using to taunt me. That was, on the status screen, it showed a generic player icon, but the icon was equipped with my own clothing. It had updated itself after I changed for bed.

The helper text accompanying the status screen implied the existence of an inventory space. And a quick clothing change mechanic. It was enough to make my teeth itch. Just imagine what I could accomplish if I could cheat time and space and conservation of mass!

At the bottom of the status screen was a little chart that I found quite confusing at first. It had six labels running all around the outside: strength, dexterity, endurance, magical strength, magical control, and magical capacity. Each label had been assigned to one of the lines that radiated out from a central dot like spokes on a wheel.

I don't know how long I stared at it before the penny finally dropped. It was a radar graph. It was the sort of chart that usually appeared in sports games, making it a little out of place in an interface that otherwise seemed to be inspired by role playing games.

In a radar chart, each axis corresponded to an attribute or skill, with the dots farther from the center indicating a higher ranking. Lines would then be drawn connecting the dots and the area between filled in, allowing you to evaluate a skill set at a glance. In a sports game, this would let you compare players quickly when you were considering substitutions.

In this case, my skill set was shown by that dot in the center of the chart. While I was happy to finally have a measuring tool for magic, I wasn't exactly thrilled with its evaluation of my abilities.

Fortunately, the interface allowed me to zoom in. I had to zoom. Then zoom some more. Then zoom some more. The fourth time I took a break and resumed zooming, the dot finally resolved into a proper radar chart.

I finally had a number I could put to my magical strength. Specifically, the number was .0000523001. I also had a number to go with my magical control, the equally unimpressive number of .00005104001.

Well, everybody has to start somewhere.

I was intrigued by the possibilities presented by the apparently limitless granularity of the tool. I could keep zooming in and it would keep filling in more decimal points. It wasn't useful information to have in its own right. Being the only person in the world with a perfectly quantified sense for her own weakness wasn't something I was going to brag about.

What it was useful for, though, was in evaluating my training methods. I could take note of the number, then check after a training session and see if it had changed. Similarly, I could keep an eye on it over time to see if any kind of passive growth was going on.

I got to it right away the next morning, once I'd stumbled through my chores. My first few tries didn't go anywhere, as tricks that I had thought would work as magic training proved to be completely useless. Finally, though, at the end of the week, I found a combination of meditation and exercise that increased my magical strength by .0000001 point.

From there it was a matter of diligent training and careful calculation. Exercises that didn't move the numbers were eased out of my daily routine. Exercises that made the numbers go up became mainstays. Over time, I would try tweaking each exercise to see if it could be improved. Naturally, as I figured out what worked and what didn't, I passed the knowledge on to Kana as well.

After several years of diligent effort, my magical capacity had skyrocketed to a measurement of .000230495. Most notably, it was at that point that I was first able to manifest unambiguously magical phenomena. If I focused on it for a moment or two, I could project a cutting edge from the side of my hand. It wasn't enough to do more than slice a leaf in half, but it was proof that I could do magic.

In terms of practical self-defensive, magic was most useful in boosting our strength and speed. It was difficult to measure such things accurately using the available tools, but in a pinch both Kana and I were capable of feats of strength usually associated with adult men rather than pre-teen girls. She was giddy at our progress, even if it wasn't much in the grand scheme of things. I did take some comfort from the fact that she would be able to defend herself, although to be honest Kana was always in more danger of being swindled than robbed. As the years went by and we grew older, she stayed just as naive and trusting as she had been on the day we met.

Meanwhile, I had picked up another motivation for mastering magic. I had always been interested in learning for its own sake, and perhaps with an eye towards some day being able to defend myself from the fox lady if she ever returned. However, my interest in learning became more urgent after I learned that even in day to day life, physical safety wasn't something to be taken for granted.

Shortly after I turned ten, an army came marching through our village. It was, as it turned out, the army of our local daimyo. They were on the move to put down a rebellion. As friendly troops, they naturally weren't going to raze the village to the ground or directly abuse us peasants. Still, they had to eat, which meant that we were hit with an impromptu tax.

That year was a hungry winter.

I started listening to Mama Matsu's bedtime stories with fresh ears after that. Her tales of glory and battle, which I had subconsciously treated as stories about a far off time, were really thinly fictionalized versions of current events. It was the second great paradigm shift, after my realization that her tall tales of superhuman feats were actually true.

When I was finally old enough to press Mama Matsu for factual data that wasn't couched in a bedtime story, the news I received was grim. Our island country, Yashima, was in theory ruled by the Emperor. He was the father of the country, and allegedly his position was responsible for protecting the ordinary people of the land of the rising sun from dark forces. I would have said it was a silly superstition, but it was hard to rule anything out when I was spending every free moment training to be better at using magic.

In practice, while the emperor reigned, he did not rule. According to Mama Matsu, by tradition the emperor's most powerful minister would handle the day to day affairs of the country. However, the transition of power from one generation to the next had given rise to a civil war during her own grandmother's time. The war hadn't ended in victory so much as mutual exhaustion. From that day down through Mama Matsu's entire life and now my new life. our country had been without any effective central authority.

The local daimyo competed and jockeyed for power. Some said that the Ota clan, who governed our lands, was well-positioned to take the lead in restoring nationwide government to our islands. As of right now, though, no single clan controlled more than two or three prefectures. It was balance of power politics played out in the context of a single nation.

I had played a few real time strategy games set in my old world's Japan during the Warring States era. That gave me a decent grasp of the nation's geography, but my practical knowledge of war was sadly lacking. For one thing, battle was necessarily simplified when it was put into a video game. For another, I hadn't enjoyed the privilege of magical troops to fuel my virtual conquests.

Fortunately, the next few years saw our quiet little village stay both quiet and peaceful. The local daimyo had successfully quelled the rebellion, and no enemy armies dared to invade our territory. Or no enemy armies bothered making their way to our little village, at least. Our only real product was rice, of which we had just enough to live off of after paying our taxes, so we weren't exactly a rich target.

My training program continued to show results. By the time that Kana and I were both seventeen, our practice spars had evolved to become a reasonable facsimile of battle. Neither of us was even close to the fox lady's level, but we would at least be able to defend ourselves against non-magical soldiers. Me more so than her, judging by my undefeated sparring record.

I did have that unfair advantage in mana sensitivity, after all. Kana diligently followed my instructions to the best of her ability, but for the extremely fine grained tweaks that I used to squeeze the last few percentage points of improved efficiency in training, there just wasn't much she could do. Even so, I was proud of her. I certainly wouldn't have stuck with training for so long if I didn't have the numerical results in my RPG interface to show for it.

It was too bad that I was still so far off from reaching my first whole point in magical power. A decade of training had jumped my total power up to .052. It was a tremendous improvement from where I started, but I couldn't help but feel that anybody destined to become a significant figure in the wars sweeping my homeland wouldn't have to count their strength in hundredths of a point in order to make it sound more impressive. I could only hope that I would be able to carve out a decent position for myself even if I wasn't the second coming of Shibadai Katsuie.