“Hey, can we talk for a second?” I was asked right after opening the door to the room I shared with Isabelle. The person who did so was Lucy, smiling like she always did.
“For sure. Isabelle, you can go ahead.” I said and let Isabelle go past us. “So … what is it?”
“Right …” Lucy said, closing the door behind herself right away. “… Louis told me about your past yesterday.” Shocked, I couldn’t help but open my mouth slightly, especially because we agreed nobody should know who we really were, not even an angel like being like Lucy.
“He … he did?” I asked, nibbling on my lower lip. Well, if she said so, then he probably really told her everything.
“He did.” Lucy gulped a little and stepped right in front of me. Carefully, she looked into my eyes and probably chose her words calmly. “And he also told me the letter you received was probably real in which case … I could understand if you chose to at least hear him out.” She said, leaning a bit forwards with her hands hidden behind her.
“Hear him out? Out of all people, you should hate him the most. I will never ever forgive him for what he had done! He had plunged a whole continent into chaos, just for some petty reason he couldn’t even tell us!” I said, a bit confused why she was even saying such things. She was incredibly kind, but I always assumed she was also incredibly bitter about her past because she really didn’t tell us much.
“I see … that’s regrettable.” Lucy said, leaned to the side and brought her right hand into my vision. In it was a curved dagger, its blade as sharp as it could get. I could only stumble backwards a little until I realised she was actually aiming for my heart. Wholly confused, I found far too little time to stop her dagger from reaching me completely, and thus decided to block her attack at the last possible second. Concentrating on my blessing given to me by my patron god, I created a little impenetrable barrier right in front of my heart which changed the course of the strike a little.
She must have realised that as she pulled the dagger out swiftly, aiming for another strike at my neck but this time, I was faster.
“Barrier.” Around me, a complete Barrier was formed, blocking me from being attacked by her at all. “HELP!” I screamed right away, but her annoyed gaze told me it was useless. I was already loosing too much blood anyway and couldn’t really put up a fight as I had no weapon to attack and the pain numbed me.
“How annoying.” She said and pushed against the barrier with her left hand. Surprisingly, my barrier cracked within seconds which gave her an attempt to stab me once more. This time though, I was prepared and blocked it with my blessed barrier successfully.
“Shit … listen closely. You will die within a few minutes anyway, so how about we make a little deal? I won’t kill your friend Louis, and you don’t resist anymore.” She said, spinning the dagger around in her hand.
“You …” Screaming already didn’t work and I was way too weak to reach the door already. Blood was still spilling out of my chest slowly, only hindered by the hand I had on my wound.
“Sounds like a nice deal, doesn’t it.” I had to save Louis somehow. If he really was Lucy’s next target for whatever reason, then I had to do something. But I was powerless.
“Alright …” I said and noticed how she gave me a rather cruel smile, something I had never seen on her lips before. Grabbing towards her back, she retrieved a rope and a gag from a backpack she definitely didn’t have as she entered the room. Lucy was truly a powerful being, that was especially clear once I had her against me for whatever reason.
Just like she said, she bound my hands, feet and gagged me appropriately. The only thing keeping me alive were the barriers I could conjure without chanting anyway, so I wasn’t too worried in giving that up.
“And now …” I thought she would try to stab me a third time and was already prepared for it, but she merely pushed me backwards into the open wardrobe. “Have a great one.” Lucy said and shut the door close in front of me. Right away, I used my gift to seal the wound to the best of my abilities and waited a little while. After ten or so minutes, I started screaming into the gag, and tried to push against the door to the best of my abilities. She must have locked it from the outside with magic though because it didn’t even move an inch. All I could really do was to hope she would keep her word and continue to scream loudly.
Sadly, it took far too long for anyone to realise what happened which also gave me enough time to think about what just happened. I couldn’t discern Lucy’s motivation at all, except that it may have something to do with my past. But never in my life the thought cross my mind that it wasn’t actually her who attacked me.
At least, until it was her together with Isabelle who got me out of the wardrobe and a teacher told me I was with the class the whole day … which was not possible unless someone replaced me to get closer to Louis.
I needed to do something. But nothing crossed my mind. I was far too weakened to be of any use and I also didn’t have a plan on how to save Louis. I didn’t even know where he was. The only hope I had was to ask for permission to accompany Miss Dove, which she would obviously reject. And thus, I asked Lucy directly, which she also rejected right away.
Well, at least it gave me a lot of time to think about what had happened and what I could have done better while the two were searching for Louis and this impostor.
And I waited. And I continued to wait. I waited for Louis the whole day outside until I could hear animalistic screams further away. But I was still hesitant to move from this spot, at least until a guard approached me hastily right as the sun went down.
“You are form the academy, aren’t you? Get all those who can fight to the northern gate immediately. We need your help against hordes of undead.” He said and continued to run to the next hotel right away. After blinking a few times in utter confusion and worry, I collected my thoughts and ran back inside.
Sadly, we were only around twenty who could fight, together with a few teachers, but some of us knew how to pack a punch. After relaying the message to everyone, we changed clothing into anything that could protect us a little more than our usual school uniform and dashed towards the northern gate.
Going by the sounds, it was already under heavy attack, especially because the iron bars were bending dangerously as some demonic rhino kept charging into it.
“Are you the guys from the royal academy? Those who can do magic go on top of the walls! The close combatants stay down here!” A guard with a sword at his hip said right away after seeing us approach.
“I’ll help at the gate!” I shouted at him, trying to overtone the screaming in front of the gate.
“What can you do?” He shouted back.
“A barrier!” I said and pointed over towards the gate which could fall any minute.
“Come with me.” He said and took my arm tightly. “Any minute you can buy us helps.”
We were right in front of the gate as that rhino crashed against the gate once more, bringing it dangerously close to the breaking point. Hastily, I put my hand on top of the gate and concentrated hard. Once the rhino attacked once more, I gauged the general area he was about to hit with his horn and activated my blessing.
A thin barrier, small in size but infinitely more powerful than anything else I could make appeared right where the gate was hit.
I had a rather complicated blessing which didn’t help me at all during my first few years of living. It was simply called infinity. I didn’t know what do do with it until I learned the art of creating barriers and realised that I could also creat a little space right in front of me in which time and space were frozen, or rather, time moved infinitely slowly and thus came to a near halt.
To everyone else, it might have looked as if the barrier simply stopped the demonic rhino, but I knew that it was vastly different than that. The demon was stopped by the impenetrable barrier created between two different passages of time.
Creating such a barrier, no matter how powerful it was, was sadly quite hard for me at this point. I could already feel my mana running dry quickly after the second attack from the rhino.
“Here, take this.” A guard said and handed me a blue potion. Just like in the few games I played in the spaceship, it restored my mana right away, allowing me to stop the rhino a third, and a fourth time before the next potion wandered into my mouth.
Slowly, I was grinding through their stack of mana potions and was even prioritised because I was the only one holding that wave of monsters back.
“Hey, nice magic.” I was sweating and close to puking because of all the potions I drank as a very sick Schwarz walked right next to me and pointed at the rhino. “Can I?”
“Do what … do what you need to.” I mumbled and nearly puked onto him.
“That’s nice.” He said, held his hand out a little as the rhino prepared for another charge, covered by a multitude of animals that used their bodies to block most of the magical attacks raining down on him. As he got closer, Schwarz closed his eyes and conjured a tiny, tiny cloud of pitch black darkness in front of him. It shot out from his fingertip, aiming right at the powerful demon and hit him at the head. At first, I couldn’t see any difference until the demon stopped in it’s track.
“So there is a dark side in all of us.” And then, the demon started trashing around violently, trampling over his fellow undead creatures and and slamming into the relatively unharmed wall from time to time.
“And now I’m going back to bed.” Schwarz sad and sneezed violently. He was honestly quite the oddity on the battlefield as he stepped back from the mayhem and walked back to his hotel slowly. Steadying himself on the seethed blade he had.
But my battle was far from over. The gate seemed secure for the time being as the goblins attacking it had no way of getting through the sturdy iron, which allowed me to step back a little and lean against a nearby house wall. Looking through the gaps in the gate, I saw thousands of wild animals, goblins and other demons, mindlessly throwing themselves against the walls, piling themselves up in the process. It went so far that some of the close combatants were ordered on top of the walls and shortly afterwards, fighting broke out for real wherever these undead creatures managed to create these bloody stairs.
I heard screams. So many human screams all around me. But I couldn’t help them. All I could do was to keep an eye on the gate, because our thin lines would break right away whenever they got through.
Time went on relatively quickly. I saw a friend of mine being transported away injured, barely hanging onto his life as his right arm was completely bloody. I saw how a goblin was completely smashed into pieces by a huge war-hammer from one of the adventurers. And I witnessed how our numbers dwindled down slowly. More and more undead demons climbed the makeshift stairs and less and less humans stood against them.
It went so far that out lines were completely broken and I was forced into a nearby house with a few other completely spent guards.
“Oh holy saint … please grant me this wish and guide me to salvation.” One of the guards mumbled quietly as a demon kept banging against the door from the outside. There was very little hope we could survive this, that much was obvious for everyone. The ones who could still fight were still in battle, surrounded by all kinds of undead, while we couldn’t do anything but hide.
“You keep bringing up that saint of yours. Is she really that special?” I asked quite inappropriately, but luckily, the guard didn’t seem to mind.
“She is the reason we can stand up to these demons in the first place. She is still in coma for all of humanity…” She was … but other than that, what did this saint ever do for humanity? I knew her stories, but I still couldn’t discern why she was held this high.
“It must be nice to have someone you can pray to.” I said and thought for a second about praying to my own patron god, but chose against doing so in the end. It just felt … wrong?
“She is our hope. And our hope will never die.” He said, right as a goblin climes through a window. That one must have realised how to get inside and as we had just a few spears around, there was little we could do with our exhausted bodies. Still most of the guards picked up their weapons once more and pointed them at the lone goblin who already set his sight on me.
“Saint Lucy, please guide me through this horrible night.” The same guard said and brought the spear in the way of the goblin. Before the demon could impale himself though, he went limb and fell onto the ground unspectacularly.
The sounds of battle outside also vanished completely, over-toned by hundreds and hundreds of bodies falling to the ground at the same time.
For a little while, it was completely silent in the house until some of the guards started to cheer up a little.
“What the …” I asked and pushed myself up from the chair I was sitting on.
“It’s a wonder!” The faithful guard said and stumbled towards the door, only to open it and look over the field of corpses, lying around and doing nothing.
“We did it!” Some we’re still sceptical, especially the battle hardened adventurers, but others started cheering right away … at least until they were smacked on the head by their superiors and told to behead all the corpses.
Nobody wanted them to resurrect as third time after all.
“Hey, can we talk for a second?” I was asked right after opening the door to the room I shared with Isabelle. The person who did so was Lucy, smiling like she always did.
“For sure. Isabelle, you can go ahead.” I said and let Isabelle go past us. “So … what is it?”
“Right …” Lucy said, closing the door behind herself right away. “… Louis told me about your past yesterday.” Shocked, I couldn’t help but open my mouth slightly, especially because we agreed nobody should know who we really were, not even an angel like being like Lucy.
“He … he did?” I asked, nibbling on my lower lip. Well, if she said so, then he probably really told her everything.
“He did.” Lucy gulped a little and stepped right in front of me. Carefully, she looked into my eyes and probably chose her words calmly. “And he also told me the letter you received was probably real in which case … I could understand if you chose to at least hear him out.” She said, leaning a bit forwards with her hands hidden behind her.
“Hear him out? Out of all people, you should hate him the most. I will never ever forgive him for what he had done! He had plunged a whole continent into chaos, just for some petty reason he couldn’t even tell us!” I said, a bit confused why she was even saying such things. She was incredibly kind, but I always assumed she was also incredibly bitter about her past because she really didn’t tell us much.
“I see … that’s regrettable.” Lucy said, leaned to the side and brought her right hand into my vision. In it was a curved dagger, its blade as sharp as it could get. I could only stumble backwards a little until I realised she was actually aiming for my heart. Wholly confused, I found far too little time to stop her dagger from reaching me completely, and thus decided to block her attack at the last possible second. Concentrating on my blessing given to me by my patron god, I created a little impenetrable barrier right in front of my heart which changed the course of the strike a little.
She must have realised that as she pulled the dagger out swiftly, aiming for another strike at my neck but this time, I was faster.
“Barrier.” Around me, a complete Barrier was formed, blocking me from being attacked by her at all. “HELP!” I screamed right away, but her annoyed gaze told me it was useless. I was already loosing too much blood anyway and couldn’t really put up a fight as I had no weapon to attack and the pain numbed me.
“How annoying.” She said and pushed against the barrier with her left hand. Surprisingly, my barrier cracked within seconds which gave her an attempt to stab me once more. This time though, I was prepared and blocked it with my blessed barrier successfully.
“Shit … listen closely. You will die within a few minutes anyway, so how about we make a little deal? I won’t kill your friend Louis, and you don’t resist anymore.” She said, spinning the dagger around in her hand.
“You …” Screaming already didn’t work and I was way too weak to reach the door already. Blood was still spilling out of my chest slowly, only hindered by the hand I had on my wound.
“Sounds like a nice deal, doesn’t it.” I had to save Louis somehow. If he really was Lucy’s next target for whatever reason, then I had to do something. But I was powerless.
“Alright …” I said and noticed how she gave me a rather cruel smile, something I had never seen on her lips before. Grabbing towards her back, she retrieved a rope and a gag from a backpack she definitely didn’t have as she entered the room. Lucy was truly a powerful being, that was especially clear once I had her against me for whatever reason.
Just like she said, she bound my hands, feet and gagged me appropriately. The only thing keeping me alive were the barriers I could conjure without chanting anyway, so I wasn’t too worried in giving that up.
“And now …” I thought she would try to stab me a third time and was already prepared for it, but she merely pushed me backwards into the open wardrobe. “Have a great one.” Lucy said and shut the door close in front of me. Right away, I used my gift to seal the wound to the best of my abilities and waited a little while. After ten or so minutes, I started screaming into the gag, and tried to push against the door to the best of my abilities. She must have locked it from the outside with magic though because it didn’t even move an inch. All I could really do was to hope she would keep her word and continue to scream loudly.
Sadly, it took far too long for anyone to realise what happened which also gave me enough time to think about what just happened. I couldn’t discern Lucy’s motivation at all, except that it may have something to do with my past. But never in my life the thought cross my mind that it wasn’t actually her who attacked me.
At least, until it was her together with Isabelle who got me out of the wardrobe and a teacher told me I was with the class the whole day … which was not possible unless someone replaced me to get closer to Louis.
I needed to do something. But nothing crossed my mind. I was far too weakened to be of any use and I also didn’t have a plan on how to save Louis. I didn’t even know where he was. The only hope I had was to ask for permission to accompany Miss Dove, which she would obviously reject. And thus, I asked Lucy directly, which she also rejected right away.
Well, at least it gave me a lot of time to think about what had happened and what I could have done better while the two were searching for Louis and this impostor.
And I waited. And I continued to wait. I waited for Louis the whole day outside until I could hear animalistic screams further away. But I was still hesitant to move from this spot, at least until a guard approached me hastily right as the sun went down.
“You are form the academy, aren’t you? Get all those who can fight to the northern gate immediately. We need your help against hordes of undead.” He said and continued to run to the next hotel right away. After blinking a few times in utter confusion and worry, I collected my thoughts and ran back inside.
Sadly, we were only around twenty who could fight, together with a few teachers, but some of us knew how to pack a punch. After relaying the message to everyone, we changed clothing into anything that could protect us a little more than our usual school uniform and dashed towards the northern gate.
Going by the sounds, it was already under heavy attack, especially because the iron bars were bending dangerously as some demonic rhino kept charging into it.
“Are you the guys from the royal academy? Those who can do magic go on top of the walls! The close combatants stay down here!” A guard with a sword at his hip said right away after seeing us approach.
“I’ll help at the gate!” I shouted at him, trying to overtone the screaming in front of the gate.
“What can you do?” He shouted back.
“A barrier!” I said and pointed over towards the gate which could fall any minute.
“Come with me.” He said and took my arm tightly. “Any minute you can buy us helps.”
We were right in front of the gate as that rhino crashed against the gate once more, bringing it dangerously close to the breaking point. Hastily, I put my hand on top of the gate and concentrated hard. Once the rhino attacked once more, I gauged the general area he was about to hit with his horn and activated my blessing.
A thin barrier, small in size but infinitely more powerful than anything else I could make appeared right where the gate was hit.
I had a rather complicated blessing which didn’t help me at all during my first few years of living. It was simply called infinity. I didn’t know what do do with it until I learned the art of creating barriers and realised that I could also creat a little space right in front of me in which time and space were frozen, or rather, time moved infinitely slowly and thus came to a near halt.
To everyone else, it might have looked as if the barrier simply stopped the demonic rhino, but I knew that it was vastly different than that. The demon was stopped by the impenetrable barrier created between two different passages of time.
Creating such a barrier, no matter how powerful it was, was sadly quite hard for me at this point. I could already feel my mana running dry quickly after the second attack from the rhino.
“Here, take this.” A guard said and handed me a blue potion. Just like in the few games I played in the spaceship, it restored my mana right away, allowing me to stop the rhino a third, and a fourth time before the next potion wandered into my mouth.
Slowly, I was grinding through their stack of mana potions and was even prioritised because I was the only one holding that wave of monsters back.
“Hey, nice magic.” I was sweating and close to puking because of all the potions I drank as a very sick Schwarz walked right next to me and pointed at the rhino. “Can I?”
“Do what … do what you need to.” I mumbled and nearly puked onto him.
“That’s nice.” He said, held his hand out a little as the rhino prepared for another charge, covered by a multitude of animals that used their bodies to block most of the magical attacks raining down on him. As he got closer, Schwarz closed his eyes and conjured a tiny, tiny cloud of pitch black darkness in front of him. It shot out from his fingertip, aiming right at the powerful demon and hit him at the head. At first, I couldn’t see any difference until the demon stopped in it’s track.
“So there is a dark side in all of us.” And then, the demon started trashing around violently, trampling over his fellow undead creatures and and slamming into the relatively unharmed wall from time to time.
“And now I’m going back to bed.” Schwarz sad and sneezed violently. He was honestly quite the oddity on the battlefield as he stepped back from the mayhem and walked back to his hotel slowly. Steadying himself on the seethed blade he had.
But my battle was far from over. The gate seemed secure for the time being as the goblins attacking it had no way of getting through the sturdy iron, which allowed me to step back a little and lean against a nearby house wall. Looking through the gaps in the gate, I saw thousands of wild animals, goblins and other demons, mindlessly throwing themselves against the walls, piling themselves up in the process. It went so far that some of the close combatants were ordered on top of the walls and shortly afterwards, fighting broke out for real wherever these undead creatures managed to create these bloody stairs.
I heard screams. So many human screams all around me. But I couldn’t help them. All I could do was to keep an eye on the gate, because our thin lines would break right away whenever they got through.
Time went on relatively quickly. I saw a friend of mine being transported away injured, barely hanging onto his life as his right arm was completely bloody. I saw how a goblin was completely smashed into pieces by a huge war-hammer from one of the adventurers. And I witnessed how our numbers dwindled down slowly. More and more undead demons climbed the makeshift stairs and less and less humans stood against them.
It went so far that out lines were completely broken and I was forced into a nearby house with a few other completely spent guards.
“Oh holy saint … please grant me this wish and guide me to salvation.” One of the guards mumbled quietly as a demon kept banging against the door from the outside. There was very little hope we could survive this, that much was obvious for everyone. The ones who could still fight were still in battle, surrounded by all kinds of undead, while we couldn’t do anything but hide.
“You keep bringing up that saint of yours. Is she really that special?” I asked quite inappropriately, but luckily, the guard didn’t seem to mind.
“She is the reason we can stand up to these demons in the first place. She is still in coma for all of humanity…” She was … but other than that, what did this saint ever do for humanity? I knew her stories, but I still couldn’t discern why she was held this high.
“It must be nice to have someone you can pray to.” I said and thought for a second about praying to my own patron god, but chose against doing so in the end. It just felt … wrong?
“She is our hope. And our hope will never die.” He said, right as a goblin climes through a window. That one must have realised how to get inside and as we had just a few spears around, there was little we could do with our exhausted bodies. Still most of the guards picked up their weapons once more and pointed them at the lone goblin who already set his sight on me.
“Saint Lucy, please guide me through this horrible night.” The same guard said and brought the spear in the way of the goblin. Before the demon could impale himself though, he went limb and fell onto the ground unspectacularly.
The sounds of battle outside also vanished completely, over-toned by hundreds and hundreds of bodies falling to the ground at the same time.
For a little while, it was completely silent in the house until some of the guards started to cheer up a little.
“What the …” I asked and pushed myself up from the chair I was sitting on.
“It’s a wonder!” The faithful guard said and stumbled towards the door, only to open it and look over the field of corpses, lying around and doing nothing.
“We did it!” Some we’re still sceptical, especially the battle hardened adventurers, but others started cheering right away … at least until they were smacked on the head by their superiors and told to behead all the corpses.
Nobody wanted them to resurrect as third time after all.
