Seeing the corpses up close, Merlin realized most of them were beastmen. There were some humans too, but two thirds were beastmen. Emelyn, seeing that Merlin was fine despite being surrounded by corpses, was puzzled and worried, but in that situation, it was preferable to the normal reaction of a 5-year-old kid cowering in terror.

Emelyn started looking for survivors, with all that destruction, it was unlikely to find any, but they couldn’t rule out that possibility. Besides, it would be easier to determine the cause of such death and destruction if someone survived and explained it.

Merlin followed his mother in her search, but he abruptly halted. He was sure he had heard something. He closed his eyes, concentrated on his hearing and… there it was! It was faint, but he could hear the sounds of two people breathing heavily under the debris of a wrecked carriage. He looked at his mother, but she was almost at the other side of the camping site a few yards away. He then brought upon himself the task of freeing the two people trapped under the debris, so he started circulating his mana and used his strengthening technique to put the debris away.

What he discovered beneath were two unconscious little beastmen girls, one of the cat family and one of the wolf family. The two girls were bruised all over, one of them had a broken arm, while the other had a broken leg, but overall they were fine and they would survive. Their physical damage was easy to heal, but the psychological damage was a completely different matter, it would take time… how much, he couldn’t tell.

Merlin looked at his mother, she was still away and wasn’t looking in his direction, so he took the two unconscious girls to their carriage, the coachman saw it, but he didn’t say anything. There were two reasons for Merlin’s actions: first, he didn’t want his mother seeing him using magic, and second, he didn’t want the massacre scene to be the first sight of the girls after waking up. He used a low-level healing spell of water attribute to heal the girls, it would take more time, but with all the interference caused by the residual magic signatures from the battle, the magic signature of his spell wouldn’t be enough to be noticed by his mother. But he focused so much on the healing that he became oblivious of his surroundings, and his mother, who arrived to the carriage several minutes later, caught him red-handed.

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Emelyn’s POV:

I was a little worried about Merlin’s attitude, a normal child his age shouldn’t be able to deal so well with that situation. He started following me when I looked for survivors, but he suddenly stopped advancing and stayed just a few yards from our carriage. *I guess that no matter the situation, a child will remain a child*. Seeing that he wouldn’t move from that spot, I continued looking for survivors on my own. After a while I looked at the place where Merlin was supposed to be, but he wasn’t there. I called him, but there was no answer. I grew more and more scared by the second. I run to the carriage to see if he had gone inside, but an impossible sight received me there.

Merlin was safe and sound. He was kneeling on the floor of the carriage between two unconscious beastmen girls, and he was healing them with magic. WITH MAGIC!? He had yet to receive his magic awakening a year from now, so how was he able to use magic? That should be impossible… yet, he was doing it before my very eyes! I couldn’t deny the evidence in front of me… I checked the girls, and they were almost fully healed, so they would wake up at any time now. When Merlin was done with their treatment, he noticed me and looked at me with a panicked expression.

Merlin: “This isn’t like it looks like… And, you’re not buying it…”

Emelyn: “No, I’m not. How is it that you are already able to use magic, when there is still a year until your magic awakening?”

Merlin: “That’s not important… Could you please keep it a secret? I don’t want any strange men coming after me to make me their experiment material.”

Emelyn: “Ok, I won’t ask you anymore, but if you want to keep it a secret, even if it’s a life and death situation, don’t use your magic at all until you officially receive your magic awakening, otherwise your secret will eventually get out!”

Merlin: “I understand, mother.”

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Then, the girls woke up screaming. They calmed down a little when they saw the interior of the carriage, but after seeing Emelyn and Merlin, they crawled backwards until they hit the wall, and started trembling in fear. Seeing this, Emelyn was about to talk to them when Merlin stopped her and asked her to wait outside of the carriage. When the girls saw Emelyn leave, they relaxed a little, but started sobbing. Merlin silently walked towards them and hugged the both of them until they finally calmed down enough to have a conversation.

Between sobs, they told him who they were. The cat-girl was Bastet, and she was 4 years old, and both of her parents were magi, her father was a Rank 6 Fire-Wind magus, while her mother was a Rank 5 Darkness magus. The wolf-girl was Luca, she also was 4 years old, and her father was a merchant, while her mother was a Rank 5 Light-Water-Space-Time magus.

Merlin knew that in the beastmen tribes magi were scarce, not only because the people capable of using magic in those tribes were less than in the human tribe, but also because they valued physical strength over magic, so even when someone had the capacity, it was usually left unused and the person only trained the physical strength. This meant that the two girls had really gifted parents, besides, one had a dual-element magus father and the other one had a triple-element magus mother, so the girls should have some magical capacity and at least affinity to one attribute, if not to more than one.

After they presented themselves it was Merlin’s turn. Merlin presented his mother too, but the girls didn’t want to see her yet because the caravan had been attacked by human adults, and Emelyn was a human adult. Merlin asked them if there was anything he could do to make them trust his mother and they answered that if he swore eternal friendship to them and to protect them, then they would trust his mother.

Merlin swore it, but Lupa and Bastet denied with their heads. They asked him to remove his shirt and they removed their blouses. Merlin tried to stop them, but they said that it was necessary to do the ritual of friendship. Lupa took the initiative, took out the claws in her right hand and scratched her own chest right over the heart, then she did the same to Merlin, and after licking Merlin’s wound, it closed. Finally, she asked Merlin to lick hers, and after he did, her wound closed. After Lupa had finished, it came Bastet’s turn. She repeated Lupa’s process and they all dressed up again after they had finished.

Merlin suspected that, for the girls, this ritual held more importance than he originally thought, because after finishing it, their cheeks were red and they wouldn’t look him in the eye. He didn’t care though, because they were really cheerful now and seemed to have forgotten about their parents’ deaths.

Merlin went out and told his mother that she could enter the carriage. When Emelyn saw the situation inside, she wondered what had happened for the girls to act so shyly around Merlin, but the second she put a foot inside the carriage, the girls immediately hid behind Merlin while holding one of his hands each. Emelyn was surprised with this development, but she didn’t make any comment. After Merlin presented the girls to her, she asked them about the attack.

The girls answered that a group of about 20 people, warriors and magi, with baronet Linus’ crest on their armor and robes, had attacked and pillaged the caravan under the premise “no witnesses” and killed everyone, the two of them had been lucky and got trapped under the debris of a destroyed carriage, which made the killers think they had already died. She realized that reporting this to Katra, or doing a full report in any other town, would just make her family and the girls targets, so she decided they shouldn’t report it. Someone else might do it later.

They recovered the bodies of Lupa’s and Bastet’s parents and Emelyn used magic of earth attribute to make a pit under a big tree, to bury them. After finishing the burial, they got into the carriage and departed towards Laklostia. Emelyn was pouting a little because she had planned to pass all the time possible with Merlin, and the girls were so clingy with him that there was no space for her, but she understood that, in their sorrow, Merlin had become their pillar of support.

They arrived at Laklostia three days later, but the village, they found was quite different from the one they had left six months before. Half of the wall on the west side of the village had been destroyed, while the one on the east side was non-existent. Half of the barns had been burnt down and most of the houses had suffered damages. Their house was one of those which had been spared from pillage and damages, but that had only been because Emelyn had enchanted the walls with spells of fire and earth attributes before going to Shephiria.

After making sure there were no damages whatsoever, Emelyn proposed to take a bath. Merlin would go first, then she and the girls would enter together. Lupa and Bastet wanted to go in together with Merlin, but Emelyn didn’t yield. Merlin didn’t exteriorize his thoughts to avoid hurting the girls, but he was secretly grateful for that, the girls were over-clingy and even though he enjoyed their physical contact, having it 24/7 wore him out.

When he finished bathing, he dressed up and went to investigate the well. He had a theory and he wanted to see whether he was right or not. He went to the well, made a ladder with magic of earth attribute and descended to the bottom. He thought that this well might hold other secrets besides the orb and the tunnel which led outside the village, but the only way to know if he was right was to search it by himself.

Emelyn went into the bath with the girls, who were blankly staring at her bosom, but seeing them, she couldn’t help but sigh, because she recalled a similar situation with her sister ten years before… she wondered why it is that little girls always envy the size of a busty adult woman, they usually get depressed over their own size without realizing that they still have many years to develop theirs…

That train of thoughts was stopped when she saw something on the chests of the girls. She had little knowledge about the customs of the beastmen tribes, but she was certain that the “mate marking ritual” couldn’t be done before reaching adulthood at the age of 15. That meant that either they knew the ceremony and performed it on their own, or their parents had already chosen a mate for them and the ritual had been performed at a very young age. Emelyn decided that if they already had a mate, they should go to them and stay with their families.

She decided to ask them about their marks, but the answer she got left her speechless. They shyly said that the mating marks were real, that they shared the same mate, and that their mate was Merlin. Emelyn didn’t know how to react to that new information. She checked if the girls understood the real meaning of the ritual, and they did, as for the reasons why Lupa and Bastet chose Merlin as their mate were different, yet quite similar:

Lupa: “Our people can assess the strength of a person by their smell. Mother always said that if I found a man whose smell is stronger than a dragon’s and who made me feel safe, I should try to seize him no matter what, and Merlin met those requirements.”

Bastet: “I-I just really liked his smell, besides, I wouldn’t be able to find a place where I feel safer than by his side.”

After saying that, the two girls looked down and covered their red faces with both hands.

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