I'm the Only Magus in This Witch World

"Are you alright?" Magna asked, a hint of guilt in his voice as he rushed to her side from behind the sofa.

Faye lay on the floor, staring up at his face with wide eyes for a second or two. Then she let out a relieved sigh. "I’m fine. Why did you scare me like that?"

"Sorry." Magna chuckled, looking a little sheepish as he reached out a hand and pulled Faye up off the floor.

"You were crying. Why?" He asked, looking into her ice blue eyes.

Faye looked away, bending down to pick up the book she had dropped.

"I wasn’t crying. You’re seeing things." She sat back down on the sofa and went back to reading.

Magna glanced at the book in her hands. "You’re holding it upside down."

Faye’s face changed the moment she realized the words did indeed look strange, though she didn’t bother fixing it. "I’m practicing my reading."

Magna could tell something was wrong with her, but he decided not to push it. She clearly didn’t want any help.

He sat down beside her on the sofa with his own book in hand, settling comfortably into the soft cushions, and went back to reading from where he had left off.

Faye glanced at him from the corner of her eye for a while, checking whether he was watching her. Then, slowly, she turned the book right side up, careful to do it without drawing his attention.

"You know, telling people your problems and asking for help isn’t something you should feel embarrassed about." Magna said, his eyes still fixed on his own book.

Even as he gave the advice, it wasn’t something he had ever really practiced himself.

He had always been alone. Whenever he had a problem, he had to solve it on his own, since there was never anyone by his side to help.

He had grown up that way, which was exactly why he knew just how tiring it could be. It had been the hardest part of his whole life.

Having no one around meant no one to tell him how new clothes looked on him whenever he went shopping.

It meant no one to give him advice on how to express his feelings when he liked a girl and didn’t know how to talk to her. It meant no one to share it with when he passed an exam or accomplished something that mattered to him.

But worse than all of that was having no one to turn to when he truly needed help.

That was also why he decided to start working on artificial intelligence, and ended up building and training one of his own. It was around that time that Gaia was born, his very first project.

He later abandoned her, though, since she wasn’t perfect. After all, he had still been just a child when he made her.

"I know. I’m not shy." Faye replied stubbornly, still acting like nothing was wrong.

But the way her voice trembled gave the truth away.

Magna sighed and turned his focus back to his book. There was no way to help someone who refused to ask for help anyway.

But just a few seconds later, the sound of quiet sobs pulled his focus away again.

He glanced at Faye out of the corner of his eye and saw her tears had come back, heavier this time.

She was trying so hard to hold back her crying, trying not to draw attention, that her face had turned completely red like a tomato, the veins on her forehead and neck starting to bulge.

"If you want to cry, go ahead. I don’t mind." He said, turning his eyes back to his own book, then added. "Right now you kind of look like a tomato."

That was the last straw for her as she broke down completely, bursting into loud sobs, the sudden noise making Magna jump.

"I’m not a tomoto." She looked genuinely offended, insulted by being compared to a vegetable she couldn’t even spell correctly.

"Okay, okay, you’re not a tomato, can you please stop?" Magna closed his book and tried to calm her down.

But that only made her cry even louder.

"I can’t..."

She was crying so loudly now that Magna started worrying someone would hear and come running.

He didn’t want to end up having to explain some misunderstanding to whoever showed up, so he got up, planning to just leave the room instead.

He could always finish the book back in his own room.

But then he remembered the maid waiting right outside the door, and his steps came to a stop.

’Damn, now what am I supposed to do?’

With nothing else left to try, he turned around and sat back down beside the girl, who was still crying loud enough to fill the whole room.

He placed a hand on her head and started patting it gently, copying the way Celeste often did it to him.

"Calm down, okay? There’s nothing worth getting this upset over. There’s nothing that can’t be fixed." He tried to make his voice sound as warm as he could.

Strangely enough, it seemed to work. Her hysterical crying slowly settled down, until only a few hiccups were left.

"R-Really?" She asked, looking a little calmer now. She flipped back to the page she had been reading earlier and pointed at the drawing of the lizard.

"Do you think I can... kill this to pass my first trial?"

Magna looked at the drawing again, finally understanding why she had been crying so hard.

Even though he still barely understood anything about trials, he forced a smile. "Yeah, of course. It’s just a mini lizard man, right?"

In his head, he was thinking something completely different. ’Sorry, kid, but you’d probably barely even count as a snack for that thing.’

He could still remember his last encounter with two of them all too clearly.

He hadn’t even had a chance to escape on his own. Titus had shown up at the very last second to save him.

"But what if I can’t?" She asked between quiet sobs. "If I fail again, I’ll never become a Witch."

Magna genuinely felt bad for her. Failing and having to live as an ordinary person for the rest of her life sounded like a terrible thing to go through.

"Wasn’t your trial about goblins? Why do you need to kill one of these now?"

Faye answered, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her white robe. "My grandmother gave me a new trial after I failed the last one. Now I have to kill one of these within a year."

’’A year is a long time. You can get a lot stronger before then.’’

It hadn’t even been a full year since Magna arrived in this world, and yet so much had already happened in that time.

Even he was fairly confident that within a year, with Gaia’s help, he could get strong enough to fight one of those lizards one on one.

That was assuming the future options were good enough, and that he could keep finding enough food to fill the gauge regularly.

Faye looked a little more convinced now, seeming more relaxed, though the worry hadn’t completely left her face. "But I’m dumb. I can’t even use my bloodline trait properly."

"Bloodline trait?" Magna raised an eyebrow, remembering the strange moments when Celeste and Faye would suddenly shift into that cold, emotionless state.

That guess turned out to be right, as Faye explained, her eyes starting to well up again. "It’s a serene state. When I focus, I can shut down my emotions and clear my mind, so I can fight better. Without it, I can’t even chant a spell properly."

’So that wasn’t some kind of split personality thing after all.’ At least one mystery about this world had finally been cleared up.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!