Four years had passed in the quaint countryside where the Hammerwulf Family had lived. The trees looked the same. The sky looked the same. And the lake looked the same. However, the same could not be said of the poor, poor landscape.
Craters, rows and rows of them, lined the fields. Fault lines zigzagged through these craters like a silly game of dots and boxes. Gravel patches, where an attempt had once been made to fill these craters in, were omnipresent. Day in and day out, new gaping craters desecrated the landscape. The Hammerwulf family had given up trying to preserve their once pristine property.
The culprit, of course, was me. Phoenix Hammerwulf. And it wasn't all my fault. I was growing exponentially by the day. My entire arsenal was chock full of advanced magic. I'd even figured out how to bend the space-time around me to my liking. Having a place to store items that I could always access was nice. Though sometimes a normal bag was faster…
Well, I was around 85% of the damage. The other fifteen percent was mainly Leora, with a hint of Krisven thrown in there too. Leora, with her monstrous physical strength as well as her advanced wind magic gave her the strength of a gorilla with the speed of a roadrunner. That was a potent combination. Oh, and please don't tell her I said that. I will actually perish. And then the whole world will perish. I am apparently the chosen savior after all.
Speaking of being the chosen one, I almost forgot about the bright mind who decided I was fit for that. Snuggling up in one of those craters over there is a pet fox, which grew. A lot. Her name is Sakura. And the one inhabiting her soul is Sakurai. That airhead goddess who decided I was fit for the task. Idiot. She used to sit on my head. If she did that now, my neck would snap into multiple unsalvageable pieces. And then the whole world will perish.
Back to my humanoid family, there's Krisven. Who I call Kris, mainly because I'm too lazy to say her full name. But she likes the nickname, so there's that too. The whole reason why she got herself kicked out of her clan was because she was adept at spirit arts. A tad too adept. While most of her attacks don't actually cause physical harm to the environment (though some do), they cause mental anguish. If she truly wanted to make me sad, she could. I probably wouldn't perish, but I'd wallow in whatever sorrow she decided to put me through. And then the whole world will perish.
Then, there's my mother. Freya Hammerwulf. An energetic woman, who, in her prime time, was a formidable mage who was a special-class diamond ranked adventurer. Her specialty was Ice magic, or rather a mix of water and wind magic, and that gave her the nickname of Ice Queen. Apparently, she was cold to every man who hit on her, so the name stuck for other reasons. And she sucks at cooking. Last time I ate her home cooked charcoal briquettes, I gained a resistance to advanced poisons. So there's that. Her cooking can kill. And if her cooking kills me? The whole world will perish.
My father, Steele Hammerwulf, was the only man dense enough to not realize the Ice Queen's offhand remarks of him. Dense as Osmium. But I guess that's his charm. If you can even call it that. He was adept in sword arts and body strengthening, so my parents ended up working together. My dad could have killed me with his shoddy craftsmanship as a child, but luckily, Lilith had it remade. Properly. If she didn't secretly do that, well, you guessed it, the whole world would have perished.
Finally, there was Lilith. My absolute savior. I owe her my life more timed that I could count on my two hands. Multiple times as an infant, she saved me. While being the family maid, she was treated more like a family member. Which I was all for. Her cooking, unlike my mother's, was to die for. And she knew how to take care of me. In retrospect, I think if Lilith wasn't around, well, the whole world would have most definitely perished. I have no doubt about that.
By this point in time, I was reaching my tenth birthday. Sakurai had long ago said that I would probably have to start my journey at around age 10, so there was that. And that I pushed for. It took a decent amount of convincing, but I was able to get the greenlight to start a journey. After I turned 10, I'd be allowed to explore the world. It was a tad early. And so I'd start planning my journey to explore the world around me.
In the quaint frontier, the Hammerwulf family house will eventually become less and less utilized as each family member would set out on their own journeys for the foreseeable future.