FFF-Tier System, SSS-Rank Wife-Chapter 37: Weirdly Intimate Oopsie

This wasn’t the first time I saw Selia use magic. Yet, just like when it happened for the first time, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her as it happened.

On the surface, all she did was bring her hand up to her mouth, whisper something right into her hands, and then watch how her fingers trembled for a moment. Then she would flick her hand in the direction of the kiln’s opening and, just like that, the fire‑padding at its top would light up.

That was the pure, raw physicality of it.

But how could magic be limited to just the physical act of casting it?

In Selia’s case, it definitely wasn’t.

From the moment she brought her hands up to her mouth, the air around her grew fuller, more intense, as if there was more to it than usual.

Selia herself changed too. Her skin appeared more vibrant; the slightly tanned spots on her skin grew darker, only serving to highlight her otherwise pale complexion. Her silvery hair took on a platinum hue, almost appearing as if it suddenly gained a light of its own while slightly lifting on the wind...

Even though I couldn’t feel even the slightest breeze.

Out of all those slight, barely noticeable changes, though, it was her eyes that changed the most.

Not as much as her eyes and her hair changed whenever she unleashed her full power—turning those two features golden—but they changed nonetheless.

The pale blue of her eyes suddenly grew deeper, more vibrant, like the shallow waters of an ocean’s shelf suddenly giving way to the mysterious depths once one ventured beyond, with nothing but the endless abyss below.

At the moment of the casting, right when Selia flicked her hand, the air around her grew still—and shifted, as if the graphical processor of the world was trying to catch up with the natural processing rate.

In that single moment of delay, however, the air around Selia exploded with sparks, making her appear as if she were basked in crackles of lightning.

Or maybe—who was I to deny it—that’s exactly what happened as she tapped into whatever force she was using to alter the physical rules of the world around her?

"Aren’t you staring... a little bit too much?"

With her cheeks now covered by a slight blush, Selia looked right back into my eyes.

Even then, it took me a moment to shake off my awed daze and recoil from the realization of what had just happened.

’She caught me!’

I screamed in my mind, seeds of panic buried in my soul the moment I first saw my FFF‑Rank Failure system now entering full blossom, throwing me to the back and making me stumble over my own feet.

Falling on my ass and while actively trying to look away, my head ended up pointing in just the right way to make me look right back at Selia again.

"Wait, whoa!" Just like me, although for obviously different reasons, she panicked—rushing forward as if to catch me—only to then freeze in place, marking the intersection between her speed, the distance she covered... and the time it took her to realize what she almost did.

Still, even with that realization, a profound sense of unease—if not outright sadness—pained her face.

And for the very first time since I’d first met her, I saw her for who she, if I wasn’t mistaken, could be:

Just a simple, hardworking girl, thrown into a situation she wasn’t really prepared for and doing her best to deal with it in the way she knew how.

For a moment, we simply stared at each other—Selia standing with her hands still reaching out, just a few steps away from me, and me lying on my ass, looking right back at her with my eyes wide open.

Weirdly enough, neither of us moved, as if scared this unexpected moment would end.

Why were we scared?

Why didn’t we want it to end?

Was it because, in the instant only our instincts acted, we were left bare of all the pretense we were both putting up? And while neither my reaction nor hers was what either of us wanted, once it had already happened...

Crack!

The slight sound of the fire burning through the padding in the kiln baited us both to look over, putting an end to this unexplainable moment of shared vulnerability.

I managed to gather myself and stand up while Selia brought her hands back and retreated a few steps, acting as if nothing had happened at all.

"It’s burning," she noted in a perfectly flat voice, showing an unexpectedly huge interest in the kiln and what it was supposed to achieve.

"Burning it is..." I muttered, still slightly dazed, only for my eyes to turn wide.

’Shit!’

Scared out of my wits, I rushed forward, gently placing my hands on the kiln’s sides while leaning over the fire before slowly, carefully blowing on it, just to feed the budding blaze a tiny bit more oxygen.

Thankfully, the fire didn’t die out. Instead, it quickly grew more intense, soon reaching a point where I had to pull my head back lest it start to burn my face.

"Is it supposed to be growing so... intense?" Selia asked, using whatever words she found fitting when she realized she didn’t really have the right ones to describe what was happening before her eyes.

And burn, the kiln’s fire did.

With each passing second, the dry and easily combustible fuel in its center continued to feed the flame. And with the limited space constraining its size, it was forced to grow vertically, pushing it to burn through the remaining padding as it stretched in the two directions the air came from—above, through the open hole in the kiln, and below, where the air shafts fed fresh air to the bottom.

"Don’t worry," I shook my head as I carefully observed the flickering flame. "That’s how it begins. We need to give it some time now, so that the fire properly spreads to the wooden blocks. Once I’m sure it has, we will cover the top and the air intakes to smother the flame and cut off the airflow."

Shifting back to my explanatory mindset, I squatted down while pinning my eyes on the dancing flame.

Its color could tell me a lot about what was happening inside... if my knowledge about charcoal making and kiln operation wasn’t limited to what little I remembered from a Wikipedia article and an Outdoor Boys YouTube video.

"And then?"

More than happy to shift the focus of the moment to the kiln rather than the weird moment from just before, Selia inquired further.

"Then, we will wait. Until late evening should suffice."