I Want To Fly Away

Radiant flowers painted the field in all kinds of vibrant colours, separating the courtyard from the forested lands on the horizon.

The calmness of a cool breeze stroked across the flowers. Once it passed them, it brushed through the feathers of my wings. I felt each individual feathers tickle, like leaves shifting around on a tree.

"Steady yourself." Uncle ordered me. "Sense the life in your wings, each feather as it moves side to side. Working in harmony, they form the thing that shall take you into the sky."

Up to now, I'd been doing a series of exercises to focus my mind on controlling my wings. I was learning to fly, you see, and I needed every bit of control over my appendage, down to the very atoms.

Well, maybe atoms were a little much, but Uncle says that if I don’t have perfect dexterity, I’d be doomed to drop like a boulder out of a plane.

My name is Yalda Asamo. As of two weeks ago, I turned 7 years old. One day, I'm going to save humanity from demons and eternal darkness.

I'm a synthetic life form known as an Exceed. I look like an angel, as I've been told. If my long white hair and glowing blue eyes didn't sell that, my wings definitely would.

Uncle was hovering around me in his bee form. He looked like a big yellow crystal bee with glassy wings. He was scanning my own wings to make sure I was using the right muscles to keep them posed.

“Your form is still sloppy, but you're getting better at keeping your wings up."

I was standing a little like a ballerina on my tippy toes, my wings were spread outward and angled up. He made me hold these poses so that my muscles would grow stronger. They felt very sore, but that was a good thing, according to him.

“Now strike!”

Fwoosh!

My wings brushed forward, cutting through the air in their path! That single stroke caused a gust of wind so strong that it pushed me backwards.

“Gah!” I shouted, falling to my back on the concrete. “Ouchy…” That hurt, but I was fine.

This was like one of those conditioning exercises. Whenever he told me to strike the air, I’d flap my wings forward. It was to practice taking off at random moments and to test my reaction time.

My wings were so powerful though, that I was hardly able to control how much they’d push me around when I swung them so fast. Another reason why I needed to keep practicing.

“No, no...this won’t do.” His bee head shook. “You need to resist your own wing power, otherwise you will be overwhelmed by them.”

“Easy for you to say, Mr. I’ve Been Flying Forever!”

He was a magical construct, so things like that came naturally to him. Daddy made him to serve us loyally. He was called Honey Bee 1, the first of all the bees. There were actually a lot more types of bees, but he was made really special.

Speaking of which…

“I started somewhere too, you know.” His entire body lit up brightly, and he transformed into his human form. He's the only bee who can do that.

He looked like a mafia boss in a gray suit with a fedora and yellow tie. He even had this really angry resting face, like he was ready to duke it out with someone.

His glass like wings shot out from behind him.

Fwoosh!

They sent out a powerful gust of wind that blasted through the air!

“WOAW!” I held on tight against the tornado wind force!

His gust was way more powerful than mine! And he managed to stay standing the whole time.

I turned around to assess the damage to the flower field, but it looked like he was able to arc the wind upwards into the sky dome. The gust of wind was so strong, you could see it warping the air!

"How the heck did you do that?" I asked, as Uncle kindly helped me stand. I flapped my wings excitedly.

"I'd be lying if I said magic wasn't involved." He smirked, adjusting his hat. "Wind magic allows me to control how the wind will travel, and earth magic keeps me rooted in place."

I knew he had to be using some sort of trick! Truth be told, I already knew magic was involved, but seeing how he used it was pretty exciting.

"So, I need to learn magic to fly?" I asked, dematerializing my wings.

He kneeled down to get eye level with me, then said, "Our bodies are different. You should be able to fly without magical aid. Defying the laws of physics should come second nature to an Exceed. But learning magic will only enhance your abilities."

A few months ago, I started studying Exceed biology. The books explained that, naturally, an Exceed could use their wings to hover, fly, or glide, but to really take flight at crazy speeds, like a jet plane, I'd need a bit of wind magic to resist the air and gravity.

The two of us moved over to a little outdoor table with a parasol attached to it and sat down. I left a few toys in the seats between us this morning. My unicorn was next to me, and a Dilly Dolly was next to Uncle.

Uncle summoned a few bees to go and fetch us a tea pot and some tea cups. When they returned, our usual after training tea party began.

"You still need to learn how to use magic." He told me, sipping an empty tea cup. He couldn't eat anything, since he was a magical construct, but he knew how to look convincing. "Have you been studying like I told you?"

"I have been." I took a sip from my filled tea cup. It tasted like white tea today! "I read this book twice, but I'm not learning the magic." I pulled out a book from under the table that weighed a ton. It was on all the different types of elemental magic.

The book did say you'd need to tattoo symbols on your skin in order to actually use elemental magic, but there were a lot of reasons why that wouldn't work on me.

For starters, I'm too young to get a tattoo. I don't think I'd want one even if I could get one. You know, does my armour skin even let me get tattoos? Probably not.

Oh, by the way, my skin is very different from normal humans, but I'll get to that later.

Another issue was that the only way to get the tattoo was complicated and required a very specific magical art to work. It wouldn't do any good if you just got a regular tattoo, you needed special ink.

And thirdly, Uncle didn't approve of the idea, based on his head shaking.

"You shouldn't need to be marked to use magic, it should already be accessible to you."

When I was studying biology, the references did mention something about that. But I kept checking my subroutines to see if they had any dealing with elemental magic, but nothing came up. A full system wide scan didn't give me anything either.

To be fair, the Exceed biology study was only basic level stuff, so there may have been more I didn't know about yet.

"Nothing yet," I said. "But I…"

The pony tail on the left side of my head started shifting around, and a purplish brown snake slithered down from my head and coiled up on the table.

"Samael?" Uncle raised his brow. "What is the matter?"

Samael's my pet snake. He sits up in my white hair and gives me a ponytail off the left side of my head. I've had him for a while now, and he's usually a kind and gentle soul. I got him a few months before my daddy left, which was around 4 years ago.

I don't know why he was slithering around the table in a panic. He kept doing circles around the whole thing.

"Wow, what's he doing, Uncle?"

"Hhhhhh!" He hissed out, then he leapt off the table and raced into the flower fields.

"Hey!" I stood up and ran after him. "Come back!"

I hope he wasn't running away! I'd miss him so much. Maybe I wasn't feeding him enough? I guess he could tell the difference between fish and red meat...he really liked red meat, but it has too much cholesterol!

I reached the flower field, but Samael was nowhere in sight. He must have disappeared under the flowers. It would take two and a half forevers to find him there.

"Oh no…" I teared up, thinking I may never see him again, "Samael slithered away…"

Uncle was just behind me, and comforted me with a hug.

"It seemed as if something alarmed him." Uncle patted my head, then looked off into the distance. "I'll send out Drones to go search for him."

*Sniffle* *Sniffle*

"Okay." I nodded. "We'll have to find him before he gets in trouble."

Uncle was sure we'd find him soon, but he was more concerned why Samael ran off to begin with. He seemed really upset, so what was going on?

There were other animals around here, like birds, rabbits, occasionally we'd see deer, wolves, and hawks, but The Hive's defenses usually kept away big threats.

By the way, the big diamond shaped structure above us was known as The Hive. It was our home. Inside it mostly looked like a normal house, but outside it looked like a big metal 3D playing card diamond.

We heard some birds squeaking off in the distance, and they almost looked like they were heading away from the direction Samael was going.

"What's going on?"

There was a forest that way. I think there was a little smoke rising up from deep in it.

"What sort of madness…?" Uncle tapped his foot. He brought up a virtual screen in front of him and started sifting around some data on it.

The sky dome turned cloudy gray, and yellow lines raced across it. That was putting home on high alert in case there was danger.

"Yalda, go inside. I'll deal with this."

"No!" I stomped my foot! "If Samael is in danger, I'm coming too!" I took on a Karate ready stance, then I gave a serious face to him. "I can fight off bad guys, you taught me Karate!"

He rolled his eyes.

"You have yet to earn a belt passed white."

Yeesh...splitting hairs, aren't we? I mean, a white belt's still a belt.

"I still know Karate!"

He couldn't deny my logic, I'm sure of it. It was clear enough to see how strong I had gotten over the last few months.

"Do you understand that this may be dangerous? Not long ago you were put in grave danger, and you would risk that again?"

He was referring to an incident last year where a rogue AI, named Anima, was trying to kill me and turn the World into a place of eternal darkness. But thanks to the help of Uncle, and a former bad guy named Janus, we were able to stop her. I managed to convince her that she was corrupted by a hacker, who called himself God.

Now, Anima was currently sleeping inside my virtual INVENTORY tab, awaiting a new body, since her old one, which was a big computer, was damaged.

Keep in mind, that all happened on my sixth birthday, so that was a crummy way to celebrate. Everything turned out for the best though, I suppose.

“Uncle, if I was able to deal with all that last year, I can do this now!” I took on a power pose.

He gave me that look where he narrowed his eyes and rubbed his chin. That meant I was close to breaking his will!

“How is your armour skin? Has it been developing properly?”

My armour skin is pretty much what it sounds like. It has 3 different sections: a purplish brown part on my chest, legs, and biceps, a black rubber like material on most of my joints and stomach, and light peachish skin on my hands and face. All of those were made of a occulate element known as ferronium (Which is also known as holy steel). It was still developing.

“It’s been fine.” I knocked on my chest a few times with my fist. “And my heart is okay too, so don’t worry about that.”

I also have a crystal heart embedded into my chest. Arteries of mana flow down from it and into my body, acting as my blood. The arteries were usually covered up by my dress though.

“Hmm…” Uncle took a moment to consider everything in depth.

"I'm ready, Uncle! Let's do this!"

If I couldn't save my pet, how was I going to save humanity from demons? That was why daddy made me in the first place, to destroy any evil out there that threatened mankind.

Uncle sighed at my eagerness, then said in a defeated tone, "Very well. Let's be on our way."