Chapter 109.

PART 1.

Hatori is reading the manual on advance manipulation of lightning elements. He is referencing something for the spell creation. However, he is lost in the sidenote about a sorcerer who could turn into lightning from the usual physical body, and can turn back into his human form.

‘That is worth to strive for.’ Thinks Hatori.

Taking note of the info that he wanted to reference, Hatori carved some symbols on the nearby board. He won’t try to turn himself into a being made of lightning. He doesn’t even know how to put a spell together yet, he can’t think of how to keep himself together in that state, instead of dispersing like the normal electricity.

All of which he did while levitating instead of walking around. He is trying to get used to moving in the air as much as he can. Hatori has searched for this in three of the libraries he has access to, those being Zeko’s, the library of the castle, and the giant archive of the Academy. but he has not found anything that could explain his magic acting on its own. There are some unclear and some obscure mentions of it, but nothing concrete to understand himself and his magic.

‘Oh well, I’ll just keep listening to it. it hasn’t led me into trouble so far.’ Thinks Hatori.

The symbols start to flow around him, as Hatori tries to form his new spell together. He occasionally touched the board to see a symbol and made adjustments to the symbols floating around him.

The door of the room of frozen time opens, and Josh enters. “Hey, how’re you doing?” he walked through a symbol, destabilizing the spell. both of them suffered shocks, and after getting up from the ground, Hatori flies after Josh.

“Can’t you knock before entering a room? let me teach you a lesson which you’ll never forget.” Said Hatori, chasing Josh who is also floating to escape him.

Both of them have turned into ghosts, though they are quite visible to the people around them. they are capable of going through the walls and doors but are unable to touch the ground for some reason.

PART 2.

Raven looks at his board, trying to solve this puzzle. his opening game is very strong, but he needs to improve his middlegame and endgame. So, he is practicing to find the checkmates. He fully plans to beat Suresh this year and take that championship for himself.

Though trying to find the right move in a puzzle may stress out some people, Raven enjoys this activity. It is relaxing to look at the board, play some moves, and counter that move to find the right move to checkmate the king of the opponent. Before this, he used his connections which he formed last year to help out Josh with his election, telling the students that they should vote for him.

Raven does not consider himself to be a popular student. but ever since the events of last year, where he effectively united the students of the lower class against the now-former council’s policies, they have started to look up to him, especially the younger students.

So far, Josh is the one who has announced his intention to fight in this election. But Raven is certain that soon enough other people will start throwing their hats in the ring. ‘It’ll devolve into a battle royale. A multi-people chess game.’

But that is not his battle. He can only play a supporting role. Josh must struggle, and find victory by himself. However, the battle over the board is his own, and no one can help him there. ‘Except Hatori. I should ask him to be my sparring partner.’

Though he is certain Hatori won’t refuse, if he does, he has ways to make him “Obey” this request. That is the hallmark of a true strategist, never approach a problem with one plan or solution in mind.

PART 3.

“I’m gonna stab you…” sang the mad boy behind him, as Josh enters through a wall, and still fails to lose Hatori from his tail.

It wasn’t even his fault. Why must he always experiment with dangerous things? “I’m gonna stab you…” sang Hatori, as they appear in a bathroom where several girls are showering, causing them to shriek in surprise. Josh gaped in open-mouthed shock, the sight before him was beyond his wildest dreams.

“It’ll be quick and over: I’m gonna stab you…” sang Hatori, ignoring the heavenly sight before him, and causing Josh to flee.

“Boys, they just don’t have any shame.” Said one of the girls.

“I don’t think it was planned.” Said another girl.

“Did you notice how the second one didn’t pay any attention to us?” the girls have miserable faces.

“Aren’t we beautiful enough?” they cried together.

“It will be full of blood: I’m gonna stab you…” sang Hatori, as Josh appeared in their dorm, where Raven scattered all of his pieces on the board from surprise.

Watching the two ghosts disappearing from the room, he grumbled. “Now I must set up the position once again.”

“I promise it will be full of pain,” sings Hatori. It would be a wonderful experience to listen to his voice if he was not chasing him with murder in his mind.

They enter into professor’s quarters, where professors Amelia and Amrita are talking about some things. Due to his terror, it all sounds gibberish to Josh’s ears. “I’m gonna stab you!” declared Hatori, nearly catching his prey.

As they both leave through the wall and Josh’s cry for help disappears from the room, both of them look at each other. “It is your influence. They learned this madness from you.” accused Amrita.

“Me? More like they learned that from you.”

Josh hears the sound of a fistfight breaking out behind him, but he has no time to look behind and check. For Hatori is still on his tail. “I promise you will scream blood: I’m gonna stab you…” trilled Hatori.

“Oh my.” Said Corvus, as these two ghostly figures come through his office, and leave through the other side. “That was strange.” He ignored the occurrence completely and went back to the work of snoozing.

After all, he is quite old. He might retire in the next five years. The keyword is might. His boy Porus needs his support as long as he can provide him, lest the termites take over the country.

How long the goat’s mother can pray? Josh is caught in the secret ground. At this same place underground, their chase began. But James who was not there before they came out of the tunnel at first is now here, and he is watching the spectacle. “Help me, for the love of magic, help me!” he said, as Hatori twists his arms, and prepares to stab him with a conjured knife.

James wonders what could he do. He then applied an array to reverse the state of these two, and it worked. Both of them are now back in their original body. Hatori drops the knife, as he finally remembers what happened a month ago, and he remembers Shin. Josh also goes through the shock of suddenly remembering Shin, and James is puzzled as to why they are standing like two statues displaying some ancient grappling maneuver.

They try to hold on to his memory, but it soon escapes from the grasp of their brains. However, Hatori and Josh remember enough to know that they have a fifth friend, and he is in trouble. “We need to help him,” said Hatori.

“Agreed.” Said Josh, and they both go out of the ground with a new purpose.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

James left them to their devices; he needed to modify himself as quickly as possible. He adds some more runes to protect his mind from getting altered. He will never let someone else take control of him like the last year. The work on that detection yantra helped a lot to come up with these runes. Of course, this is just another way that Yantra has helped them, aside from its sales.

James creates another circle near the one that was created by Raven a few weeks ago. Removing his clothes, he lies down in that circle, and the knife hovers, ready to carve the new symbols on his body.

PART 4.

Josh and Hatori devise an idea to gain the attention of their fifth friend. They wrote a simple letter and left it on the fifth bed of their room, which has remained untouched and unacknowledged ever since his disappearance. But these two boys see signs all around the room of living with a fifth person, whose name they cannot remember.

Shin comes into the room. true, none of them know that he exists, and he doesn’t feel the comfort of his bed. But he rather sleep here than anywhere else. It gives him the feeling of peace to sleep here, which he does not get anywhere else in the school.

He finds a note resting on his bed. Looks like everything associated with him is also suffering the neglect. But this note is a new thing. He reads it, and with some effort, writes his response on the other side of the page.

He mentions the potion which left him in this state, the name of which he learned from Lavanya. “I didn’t have anything else to do, so I found out what caused me to end up like this.” She said when Shin asked how does she know about this potion.

PART 5.

Hatori focuses on his palm, and his hand jerks as if he fired a gun. The stream of electricity connects to the wall, where it disperses harmlessly. This is his first spell, now completed. He decided to name it Thunder Shock. It delivers a stream of current to his opponent’s body and has a small chance of paralysis. Hatori has trouble understanding how exactly the electricity causes paralysis, but he plans to create more spells, so he is sure he will be able to incorporate it in future spells.

Going deeper into the room, where the effects of slowed time are more evident, Hatori brings out an enemy student. he uses his new spell on him, making his body spasm from the electricity. “Hmm. a fine spell, though I must test it with shields, and with protected clothing.” He mutters, banishing the tortured student back to the deeper part of the room, where five of them are kept to perform such experiments.

‘It is really sad that I wasn’t strong enough or lucky enough to find this place. Instead of killing all those students, I could have used them for my experiments, especially since people are not inclined to pick fights with me now.’ Thinks Hatori.

Hatori then levitates to the table at the center of the room, where he looks at the notes he has collected about the ghostly state which he experienced yesterday. Some other mages have also achieved this state, and this is actually recorded and documented. not the process itself of course, but the properties of the state. They call it the neutrino state, and mages who achieve this form can go through any object, doesn’t matter whether it is magically enchanted or not. As a result, they are very difficult to capture.

Hatori, having been kidnapped twice in his life, likes being hard to capture. So, he remembers how the symbols twisted yesterday, and experiments in creating this state again. During this process, he realizes slowly that he does not need to carve these symbols on his body with a knife. They can appear on his body automatically, (he smirked when he thought of that phrase), and in fact, this applies to any new symbol he wishes to use for himself, no matter the effect. even the older symbols can be updated without the use of a sharp object, something which Hatori appreciates. The ritual of carving these symbols can be quite painful.

Hatori is snapped out of his deep contemplation with a knock at the door. “Hatori, are you ready or not? we have to go to Professor Dhiraj now.” Said Josh.

Touching the ground which felt like hours, Hatori walks to the door. ‘I must practice daily intensive walking, lest I become lazy, and fly and levitate all the time.’ he thinks and opens the door.

PART 6.

Dhiraj is just getting done with the classes. Today was a relatively calm day in the class, no one managed to bungle up their potions. His apprentice (that lazy bastard) has left him to clean the room, saying that he never cleans after himself. As if he, the master should clean the class. Apprentices are supposed to clean, dammit.

The door opens, and Josh and Hatori march in. “Professor, we need your help,” said Josh.

“What now?” he asked, unable to keep the bite out of his voice.

“Do you know this potion?” asked Josh, giving him the note.

His face gets suddenly serious, and all the tiredness is gone. “Where did you find this potion?” he asked.

“We have a reason to believe that a person whom we know has been subjected to this potion recently.” Said Hatori.

Josh wanted to keep this hidden, but Hatori persuaded him to tell the truth to the professor. Besides, he thinks this way, they will get more honest answers out of Dhiraj.

Finding his chair, Dhiraj drops down with a sigh. “I would like to call it a bluff, or a bad joke, but I cannot do that when this potion is involved,” he said. “The Time Stopping Potion, created by Samay the sorcerer, has been a headache for the alchemy community for over a thousand years. Because instead of freezing the time itself, it makes anyone who gets splashed with this potion disappear, and the world itself starts to ignore their presence. They do not age, and are trapped in an immortal existence, forever doomed to live their lives as ghosts.”

“That is horrifying.” Said both the teens.

“That is nothing. You take astronomy, right Fernandes?” At Josh’s nod, Dhiraj continues. “You should know that the sun is getting brighter, and one day when it starts to expand, what will happen to our planet?”

“Yeah?” said Josh, not liking where this is going.

Hatori can follow this logic, only because he watched all those shows about stars and their lives on Discovery back when he was a kid. (He is not a kid anymore, he is a teen now, thank you.)

“People affected by this potion still won’t die.” Said Dhiraj. “Our entire planet is going to hell, and they still won’t die.”

“But that is billions of years.” Said Josh, unable to imagine living that long, trapped in that ghostly form.

He was a ghost yesterday, and he is sick of it in just a few hours. “That isn’t all. When the stars start to go out, trillions of years later, these people will still live, unable to interact with the world. though maybe by that point, some of them might come up with a solution to their problem.”

“You were right professor; this is indeed a hellish life.” Said Hatori. “Though I want to know, how does anyone know about the effects of this potion? I mean, you can hardly test it.”

“Because one mad sorcerer was willing to test it, and document its effects. Thankfully, he wasn’t mad enough to use it on people, just on some objects. He tried to reverse the effects, but he failed.” Explained the professor.

“Thanks for your time, professor.” Said both boys and then left.

Dhiraj wished them luck. If a person is suffering from this potion, they will need all the luck they can get.