Fairy Tail: Dawn of Change by Melissa Nichols (fantasy novels to read .TXT) 📖

target. Once it starts at a certain distance," say, thirty feet, since that was about as far as he could reasonably expect a kid her age to throw, "I'll put the target on a track to make it a moving target. I'll explain more at that point."

 

Roxanne nodded again as she absorbed this new information. Her head spun, and she felt terribly intimidated—could she live up to his expectations? It was just throwing a snowball, but for some reason it felt enormously more important than what she'd done before, as if his earlier praise would mean nothing if she failed. She wasn't sure why she felt like that, but she was still scared.

 

She took a deep breath, in and out, letting the nervousness flow away like water. She was going to try her best. That was all she could do, try her best every day and tackle her training one step at a time.

 

Satisfied and reinvigorated, she nodded once more and picked up a snowball, dimly noticing that it was too big to hold well. At this distance, hitting the bullseye was theoretically easy, but that theory was soon proven false. Roxanne threw the ball, subconsciously pulling from her memories of movies and baseball games on the TV since she had no experience of her own—

The snowball didn't even come close to hitting the target. Instead, it went too high and to the left.

Roxanne bit her lip and breathed, letting disappointment follow nervousness.

 

"It's okay, Roxanne" Gray said, standing back to observe. "Try again."

 

Roxanne breathed a little more, and picked up another snowball. She weighed it in her hand, feeling how dense and well-packed it was, the slight moisture from where the sun melted little bits of snow, drop by tiny drop. The snowball was much lighter than a rubber ball, and definitely not as bouncy, but it didn't just crumble in her hand, either. The snowball was built for Gray's hand, too, not hers; it was a little too large to grip easily or firmly. There were a lot of factors as to why her first throw had gone so awry despite the short distance, but inexperience and hastiness were probably the biggest.

 

Once she was comfortable with the snowball, she eyed the target critically, making a few throwing-motions to get herself used to the motion. Then she took a breath, hauled off, and let the snowball fly.

 

She missed again, but this time it was much closer, clipping the upper left edge of the target. Roxanne felt encouraged, especially when she saw Gray nodding approvingly. Now I know that I tend to miss up and left, so if I aim down and right—

 

She grabbed another snowball and tried again, making sure that she moved her arm instead of just staring at Natsu's face and expecting her body to correct itself. This time it flew too low, but was centered enough to strike the target's supporting base.

 

Okay, try a little higher.

 

The fourth snowball fared better, striking the outer ring of the target only a little to the left of the center. The fifth try struck the bullseye, making Roxanne shriek excitedly.

 

"I did it!" A glance in Gray's direction saw him smirking with amusement, but it wasn't a mean smirk, and his eyes were pleased, so Roxanne quickly scooped up another snowball, determined to hit the bullseye twice more and move the stick back.

 

To her dismay, she missed the bullseye, snowball shattering on the left side of the target instead. But she didn't give up, taking a moment to calm and center herself, she lined up her next shot carefully. She clipped the right edge of the target. Her next two did find the bullseye, followed by one that missed. So close! After two more throws, she finally got her three-in-a-row streak, and shrieked with excitement, jumping up and down while Gray chuckled and moved the stick back.

 

Despite his amusement, Gray was once again impressed with Roxanne. Sure, she wasn't as good at throwing snowballs as himself, or Natsu, or even Romeo, but it was pretty obvious that she'd never tried anything like this before, never had the kind of rough-and-tumble childhood that came with snowball fights and ball games with friends, or even any kind of more structured training.

 

But she makes up for that lack of experience through observation and analysis. Not only does she figure out what she's doing wrong, but she fixes it on the next try, and she doesn't give up when it isn't perfect. She doesn't quite have the hand-eye coordination to hit whatever she aims at yet, but she's observant and stubborn enough to compensate for her limitations, and she gives her all to the task at hand, regardless of what it is.

 

Still, as she got farther from her target, things would get harder. She'd learned the basics of how to aim; now she'd need to account for the ballistic arc as well, since she simply wasn't strong enough to flat-throw a snowball fifteen feet. Not yet. He could get about forty-five or fifty feet of distance before the force of throwing it hard enough to counter gravity's pull also broke it up. If he was throwing something sturdier, like an ice-ball, he could get much farther, maybe even a good hundred-fifty feet, but that would be stupidly dangerous right now. If he set her goals that were too far ahead, her determination might be broken. He couldn't have that. She did have a long way to go, so she'd need every scrap of determination, spirit and stubbornness she possessed.

 

Roxanne's first try at the fifteen-foot mark proved him right—it didn't even reach the target, shattering on the grass a foot in front and to the left of its base. The second snowball was no better, wobbling wildly off to the side, though at least it passed the target. The third was a bit better, but didn't even brush the target's rim. Four more snowballs flew in increasingly erratic arcs as her frustration built, until finally Roxanne stopped, scowling in concentration at the next snowball she'd picked up, clearly trying to figure out what she was doing wrong. She glared at the snowball as if it was the ball's fault she couldn't hit the target, but Gray could tell she was thinking because he could practically the gears in her head working.

 

Gray decided that it was time to step in. "Roxanne," he said, stepping closer as she turned wide, near-frantic, watering eyes on him. "Relax. Remember, it's your first day. This is as much about figuring out what you can do already as it is about learning to improve."

 

"But I can't figure it out!" she protested shakily, accidentally squashing the snowball as she gripped it a little too hard. She dropped the clumps of snow to the ground, dusting flakes off cold-reddened fingers that trembled with worry and frustration. "I don't know what I'm doing wrong."

 

"And that's okay," Gray said, shrugging. "Look, I had trouble with this too."

 

Roxanne blinked up at him, eyes wide. "Really?" she asked, surprise and wonder overcoming her fear that she was going to be a failure, that she wouldn't measure up, that she'd let her teacher down. "I didn't know you had to throw snowballs at a target." That had never been covered in the flashbacks. What else didn't she know, that had been deemed too unimportant for the anime to show?

 

"Yeah," Gray shrugged, crouching down to look her in the eye. Maybe that was why Gramps got along so well with kids; he was fun-size too, unless he used magic. "That's why I picked this, since it's something I'm familiar with. I know how it works, and that it does work. Do you want me to tell you what you're missing?" He respected her determination; he wouldn't undermine it by giving advice that she might not want to hear.

He needn't have worried.

 

"Yes, please," Roxanne said fervently, grabbing his hands. She wanted to do it right, wanted to succeed, to show him she could do it the way he wanted her to.

 

Gray smiled and gently pulled his hands free, ruffling her hair again. "You're not letting go of the snowball in the right spot of your throw," he said as he turned to the target and pointed at Natsu. "See, when you're further away, the snowball has more time to fall, so you can't just throw it straight at the target—not unless you're throwing really hard, and that makes it a lot more difficult to aim properly. Here, watch." He picked up one of the snowballs, absently reinforcing the magic on the pile while he did so, to keep them from melting any further. A little bit of heat softened them just right for molding, but they were right on the edge of becoming slushy.

 

Standing straight at the target, he wound up and slammed the snowball right in Natsu's stupid, terrified face. "See, I'm a lot stronger and taller than you are, so I can just slam it from here with no problem. But if I was you, I'd have to throw more like this." He crouched down to her height, picked up another snowball. This time he threw it more slowly, almost letting the ball roll off of his fingers in the end. It still shattered against Natsu's face, but it was a clumpy puff of snow-dust instead of a shower. "Did you see?"

 

Roxanne had watched both throws intently, and while an inner part of her wanted to squeal with glee as Gray hit the target hard enough to make the snowball basically explode, she held that part back in favor of trying to see what he did the second time that she could imitate. "The snowball was spinning?" she asked hesitantly.

 

"Exactly." Gray nodded. "See, if the snowball is rolling up and back towards you like that, it counters a little bit of how gravity and air drag it downwards." He twirled his index fingers around each other for emphasis. "Plus, since you can't throw hard enough to make a straight line yet, you have to throw sort of in an arc, and changing where you let go of the ball changes the angle of your arc. Here." He moved over to crouch next to her again, gripping her wrist and elbow to move her arm through the motions as he spoke. "You were throwing like this, when you should have been letting go right here, and letting your fingertips kind of graze the ball as it sails away to give that a bit of a spin."

 

"Oh!" Roxanne lit up as understanding dawned. "I see! I get it now!" It was like putting a spin on a bowling ball, so it stayed in the middle of the lane instead of wandering off into the gutter.

 

Gray smiled and backed away so she could practice, retrieving the shirt he'd somehow managed to shuck out of before, and pulled it back on. As he'd thought, Roxanne took a few false-start practice throws to get used to the form he'd shown her, before taking aim at the target and actually letting fly. When she finally threw the snowball, it still didn't hit the bullseye, but it did hit the target. Twenty snowballs later, she still hadn't managed three bullseyes in a row, but she'd managed to hit the target repeatedly, and gotten a bullseye at least twice. Finally, Gray decided they'd practiced enough, and told her to stop while he sublimated the snowballs and target.

 

"That was good," he said as he made his way back over towards her.

 

She smiled and raced to him, bouncing on her toes and thrilled by his praise, even if she hadn't managed to move the stick back a second time. "That was kinda fun!" she exclaimed, quite pleased with her own progress. "Can we do that again tomorrow?"

 

"Absolutely," Gray chuckled. He'd already told her that, but he couldn't blame her for wanting confirmation. "But, for now, let's take a short break, okay?" He checked his watch again. "Say, five minutes