Anna was aggravated by this change. How can she even begin to deal with it? How could she even expect that in the first place?
She shook her head. Worrying would lead to nowhere. She had to take action, get to learn the girl, and observe Holly Lavestine, the protagonist of this world. But first!
“Where the hell even are they?” Anna mumbled in dismay. She stood at the edge of the rooftop, her eyes and spirit friends trying their best to use their meager senses to locate the targets she had in mind, but there were virtually no results!
She clicked her tongue. The longer this went on, the more changes would occur, effectively changing the future she knew.
…
Deep into the afternoon, a trio, one boy and two girls walked along the edge of what appeared to be the ground. Past the edge, one would find a vast empty nothing, and looking down, one would also realize they’re high up in the sky, high up in the air!
Clouds moved past the ever-so-close sky. It was still far, but much closer when looked down at the ground. Even though the three were so high up in the sky, it wasn’t as windy as it would normally be, and there was still plenty of air to breathe - courtesy of the power of magic.
“Why are we even here?” Elaine asked curiously as she teetered at the edge of the sky island. According to Rob, this is merely one of the multiple sky islands belonging to the school, acting as a sort of natural habitat for rearing some magical monsters and animals. There was a wide variety of reasons they existed, but Rob was too lazy to explain all of them.
“It’s simple,” Rob yawned as he grabbed her collar and pulled her back from the edge of the floating island. He didn’t want to have any accidents happening any time soon. “We’re here to practice magic.”
“But why here?” Elaine once again asked, pushing Rob’s hands away from her collar with an annoyed face and fixing her robe from the dirt that had stuck on the bottom.
“It’s peaceful, that’s why,” Rob explained as he rubbed his neck, both annoyed and lazy to explain his reasonings. “There are no humans around, probably, there are also monsters we can experiment with if we want to. There are even magical plants that we can play around with.”
“But most importantly, the ambient mana here is high enough to aid in your training, but not high enough to dull your mana-sensing abilities,” said Rob. “We’re gonna work on your basics, Elaine. Mana sensing, mana control, and stuff.”
“What about time magic? Isn’t that the reason I’m here in the first place?” Elaine asked. There was a hint of excitement to her tone, but also nervousness. Time magic - the name alone and its rarity made her apprehensive of its difficulty to learn and master.
“Yes, I’ll teach you a couple of spells I found in the library, the same goes for you, Holly,” Rob answered. “Now, let’s not waste any more time! I’ll only be entertaining you two till 6:30 pm, so we have like an hour and a half.”
Not willing to miss out on such an opportunity, Elaine and Holly hurriedly followed from behind toward the place Rob deemed an okay-ish learning environment.
…
“What?!” Anna almost had her eyes bulged out in shock from the exaggerated price needed to go to the sky island Rob and gang were in. It wasn’t that exorbitant, but it was definitely something she wasn’t willing to pay.
Anna didn’t have many problems in regard to money - she was filthy rich, in fact, but her mindset as a normal woman from the modern world still had a dominant hold on her monetary expenditure.
She shook her head upon hearing the price of using the teleportation obelisk. It doesn’t matter, it was merely an option for convenience anyway. After finally finding where Rob and Elaine were, and spying on them for a while, she was shocked to see him going to the teleportation obelisk with Holly and had her curiosity piqued.
She had to know what they were doing. Perhaps it would serve a paramount use in the future. Sadly, the price for the service was a bit too steep for her liking, especially when she could go there on her own.
A while later, up in the sky, a girl tore through the air at breakneck speeds as invisible wind spirits surrounded her body. She shouted with the roaring winds clouding her hearing, “Thanks, guys!”
The spirits of wind swirled around her body as if transmitting their thoughts to her.
It’s not a problem!
We’re happy to help!
Anna herself wasn’t sure why she has excellent talent with Spirit Magic - according to her ancestor, Van Hisprite, talent in spirit magic was determined by a person’s affinity with the spirits, and her affinity with them was terrifying. She assumed it was due to her otherworldly soul or something along those lines, but her research had bore no fruit in regard to that mystery.
Well, it wasn’t a problem anyways. She’s talented, and that’s that.
In a couple of minutes, Anna found herself high in the sky and hovered a few meters away from the edge of a certain floating island. She had passed by other floating islands along the way, floating islands that each held their own little gimmicks and secrets in the game, but they didn’t matter to her for now.
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Anna landed on the floating island and felt the tidal wave of winds calm down as if blocked by an invisible barrier.
“Where are they?” she mumbled and connected with the spirits living on the island. It took a short while, but she easily found where the three were staying at. They were inside a relative clearing, with no trees or grass on the clean dirt ground, sitting on makeshift earthen chairs and tables.
It was a relief for sure, but also a bit creepy. She chuckled in a helpless sigh, wondering how things had turned out like this. Crime or not, she didn’t want to be a stalker, but Anna didn’t have the luxury to follow what she wanted and instead had to do what she needed to do.
Her life was on the line. The entire world was on the line. A drastic anomaly like Elaine Fortune was something that would definitely cause changes in the original storyline, and it’s up to her to keep tabs on what kind of changes would happen so that her little advantage remained as an advantage.
Knowledge was key here. If she didn’t know about the incoming descent, then she might have been dilly-dallying already and would have been a powerless ant when disaster strikes. What she needed to do now was grow strong, and progress as fast as she could while gathering info about the changes in the world.
…
Rob waved his hand, and from a distance, a patch of dirt rose up into the air with a flower rooted inside. The soil beneath the white flower shifted and morphed, splitting into two layers, one being the soil and the other turning into a dark brown pot. It was a nifty spell, and easy to create too.
Even if his supreme truth was sealed, and some of his knowledge restricted, he could still create spells with a mere thought in relative ease. Memories are experiences and eons upon eons of experience is a lot. His foundation alone in terms of general knowledge would cause entire universes to chase after his life and pry open his brain.
As foreign as this power system may be, the Higher Existences aren’t exactly that original, and similarities would inevitably appear. So, his progress in magic had simply been astounding in terms of technical skill.
“Go on,” he said and smiled at Elaine.
She breathed in deeply and focused on the potted plant. Rob conjured a sharp mana scissor in the air, controlling it to arrive at the plant and snipping it in half from the step.
In the next moment, Elaine stopped breathing as she activated her spell. A small sphere less than a hundred centimeters appeared around the potted flower and the floating mana scissors, with the surface of the sphere appearing as warped light.
Inside the sphere, space-time continued to shift and move as she tried to activate the spell, but the mana scissors inside the spell resisted and swiftly broke the spell. Elaine coughed profusely upon the failure of her spell as a cloud of dust rose up into the sky, destroying the mana scissors and fracturing the pot with the small explosion of mana.
“Why didn’t it work?!” Elaine wiped her face as she stared at Rob with a bewildered gaze.
“Is it because of the mana scissors?” Holly asked, having her own theory as to why it failed. She calmly grabbed the snapped flower and released a warm holy light from her palm, reattaching the flower to its stem and effectively healing it to tip-top shape.
“Yep,” Rob nodded his head in agreement. “All spells in this world, from the most simple to the grandest of magic, use mana as its focal foundation to manipulate the world through the arcane arts. While a normal mana construct like the scissor wouldn’t have broken your spell, I added in a bit too much mana for what the spell could handle and caused it to fail.”
“You asshole!” Elaine shouted. “So that’s why it failed!”
“It’s your fault for not sensing the mana as I told you to do. That rewind spell is pretty flexible, and perhaps if a mage is strong enough, could even revive the dead… if the human doesn’t die from all the weird space-time shifting and warping that is.” Rob smirked and doused all of the grandeur thoughts brewing inside Elaine’s head. As grand as a rewind spell might sound, it lacked enough finesse and control to heal someone back from the dead since the extreme conditions within the boundary of warped space-time would kill the target, perhaps from radiation or cosmic forces beyond their current understanding.
Rob did the same as before. He created a glowing blue scissor, snipped at the plant, and placed it a little close to the plant so it would get included within the rewind area of effect.
Elaine, now armed with new knowledge, carefully sensed the amount of mana that was used to create the mana scissor and adjusted the potency of the spell in accordance with the magical object within it. But, when she activated the spell, it started to wobble and shake.
A while later, Elaine stared at the cracked pot and the white flower that had turned into a weird green paste.
“Tsk tsk tsk,” Rob clicked his tongue thrice to annoy her further. “Too much power would sacrifice too much control - imagine if that plant was a limb instead! Oh, rewind spell might serve as a potent attack spell now that I think about it, a wide area attack spell!”
“Argh, again!” Elaine slammed her palm on the table, not willing to resign from the challenge.
“Haste makes waste, Elaine,” Holly warned with a teasing smile.
“That’s right, that’s right!” Rob agreed.
“Just do it again already!”
…
Anna carefully flew through the air, relying on the spirits to sense if anyone else would notice her. If she was outed as a stalker, then she couldn’t even begin to imagine the disastrous effects it would have on her social life.
Just as she had that thought, she suddenly felt her connection with a few spirits disappear. This had never happened before, so she didn’t think much of it for a second before realizing what it meant. if they forcefully disappeared, then-
“Who do we have here…?” an intrigued voice called out from all around, echoing and reverberating in the endless expanse of trees. One by one, her connection to her spirits disappeared, and a strange barrier was then erected, encasing her inside it.
The familiar voice, the sheer ability to counter her spirit magic - which is a magic that had effectively been lost to the annals of time, and the overwhelming magical ability, this could only mean one thing!
From the shadows, the darkness converged to form the vague silhouette of a young man, with a lanky build and wearing a plain black robe. A pair of shimmering rainbow-colored eyes gazed at her in curiosity and intrigue, and an echoing voice once again called out, “I wonder why you’re trying to stalk those three, hmm? And what’s with this magic of yours… To actually borrow the power of spirits and command them? Now that’s…”
“Now that’s just piquing my interest,” the voice said once more as the young man finally came into full view.
He was tall, much taller than Anna. He had snow-white skin, rainbow-colored eyes glowing in magical radiance, and long jet-black hair. He wore the uniform for boys in the academy which consisted of a button-up white shirt, a golden necktie, a black robe, and black pants. He wore an amused smirk as if he was telling her that no amount of her struggling would do anything significant, and she knew that.
Against this monster? No way.
After all, he’s the monster from the days of old who had performed the greatest miracle of them all! He’s the legendary Archmage of Miracles - Noel Crowley, revived from the dead a few hundred years after his death, and one of the male leads to have existed in the game.
So, with utter helplessness, Anna found herself being swallowed whole by the shadows beneath her feet, going to who knows where, and for who knows what reason.
All she could tell was that her life might be in slight danger because this guy might have a few screws loose.