Moon of the Murdered Singer, 1067 AR

  ***

  “Do we really need to hold hands for this?” Mana complained. Her and Arisu currently stood in the courtyard of Madame Bille’s castle, and their host graciously animated half a dozen marionettes for the training they intended to do.

  “Don’t you want to hold hands, darling?” Arisu teased and Mana cringed, even more so as the girl interlocked the fingers of her left hand with Mana’s right. The two of them had turned Mana’s assumption that Arisu was her future wife into very efficient ammo to make each other uncomfortable at irregular intervals, and it was a critical hit every single time.

  “I told you that I need to be hit or need to touch the magic energies or the caster to learn the spell.” Arisu continued.

  “Then touch my shoulder?”

  “You’re wearing robes, and I need to touch your skin. Now stop complaining!” Arisu puffed out her cheeks and Mana had to concede that she looked kind of adorable doing that. She took a deep breath and let out a sigh before she pointed her left hand at one of the marionettes.

  “Best I’ll show you all of the spells I can do – then we can train.” Mana explained and Arisu nodded.

  She went through them one by one, starting with Portal. She created a barrier, blasted a marionette, hit it with an arrow, accelerated time and more. By the end of it she had shown Arisu all of her spells from her books and even the ones she learned to cast herself.

  “I’ll need to learn to use counterspell in time to counter Stasis… and Doppelg?nger doesn’t even need to use the verbal component anymore. Will you be able to do it?” Mana looked at Arisu who grinned confidently at her.

  “Oh, trust me, I’m a force of nature! I can do this in my sleep!”

  ***

  Arisu couldn’t even do it with her eye open. She had to use the invocation, defeating the purpose of their exercise. Mana’s patience was already stretched thin enough, and this didn’t help.

  “You need to practice the spell properly! It won’t help me if I can counterspell the normal use! I need to be able to feel her intent to use Stasis before she gets to!”

  “Uuu…” Arisu let out a pathetic little whimper – she looked at her hands and her eye looked like she was about to cry.

  “I’m sorry, Mana! I never really practiced magic, I just copied it or use the abilities I was born with…” Arisu sniffled, and Mana sighed quietly.

  “It’s fine. I’ll teach you Stasis properly, then.” She stepped behind Arisu and put her hands on the strange girl’s, bringing them into the correct position.

  “Here. Magic is channeled by using your body as a conduit and it’s easier if you bring your fingers in the ideal position. By bringing the energies into a predefined shape you make it easier on yourself to cast the spell.”

  Arisu let Mana guide her – she was strangely timid in that moment.

  “But I have to be able to cast it without speaking or moving, how’s that going to help?”

  “You familiarize yourself with the energies of the spell first, then you can make adjustments until you’ve mastered it,” Mana kept instructing her. She kept adjusting Arisu’s fingers absentmindedly until they were just right. She could see Arisu’s ears redden, but right now her thoughts were occupied too much by getting her ready for their mutual training to care about the reasons for that.

  “Here we go. Freeze that marionette over there!” she pointed at one of the wooden men which was being commanded to pace up and down the courtyard. Arisu furrowed her brow and pointed her hand at the creature, holding her fingers just the way Mana showed her earlier – and soon after she shouted “Stasis!” and the marionette stopped in its tracks.

  She grinned, looking at Mana. “I did it!”

  Mana only nodded in response. “That much is to be expected, you copied the spell after all. Do it again! And again! Until you know what the magic feels like when it flows through your hand!”

  “Ehhh?!” Arisu didn’t look like she cared much for Mana’s sudden drill instructor cadence, but she obeyed, stretching out her hand and firing off Stasis spell after Stasis spell. The marionette started to look like a very choppily animated cartoon as it was trapped and released from stasis in rapid succession. It took another hour for Arisu to be able to cast Stasis with just the hand gesture – but Mana knew that Marisa went further than that.

  Just how much of her alone time in her hideout did she spend practicing magic?

  ***

  Arisu finally managed to cast the spell with only her mind after three hours – meaning that Mana could start her training in earnest. She was impressed with the speed at which the girl learned to cast the spell without incantation - she was almost as skilled as Mana herself when it came to learning magic, but the problem was her complacency due to her copying ability. Mana placed herself in the middle of the courtyard, looking at Arisu.

  “Now that you can do it, I want you to try and…”

  Arisu suddenly stood next to Mana and touched her shoulder.

  “…yeah, that,” Mana said with a sigh. She reached out and patted Arisu’s shoulder who grinned from ear to ear, visibly proud of her magical mastery.

  “See! I can do it! I can be useful!”

  Mana cringed a little at those words. Arisu turned into Marisa for a split second in front of her mind’s eye, causing her to avert her gaze.

  “Yeah. You’re useful,” She mumbled under her breath. “Let’s try it again. Maybe start slow, with the hand gesture.”

  She quickly shooed Arisu back to her starting position and she eagerly prepared her spell – Mana could even see the energies wafting between her fingers.

  “Slowly this time! I need to get a feeling for what Stasis’ magic energies are like on the receiving end!”

  “Okay, Mana! I’ll vocalize it and then we go from there!” Arisu replied, and Mana nodded. She braced herself, looking straight at the other girl – in a way she felt like they were two cowboys dueling, with one waiting for the other to make a move, even as one-sided as this was right now.

  She saw Arisu move her hand and moved her own in time. She could feel the magical energies accumulating in Arisu’s hand and heard her shout “Stasis!”. Now it was only a matter of counteracting the flow of energy that came her way. Maybe next time, as she now felt Arisu hugging her from the back.

  “Got you again!” the girl happily announced, and Mana let out a little sigh – though even as she vocalized her annoyance, she felt the corners of her mouth rise. She was smiling in response to the strange girl’s gesture, and she didn’t know what to make of her reaction.

  ***

  Their training continued for at least another hour. Mana was frozen multiple times before she figured out how to counter the stasis spell just in time, and then Arisu executed it faster, first getting rid of the vocal component, then the gesture. By the end the two circled each other and Mana wasn’t relying on her eyes or ears at all, just her sixth sense which let her feel the movement of the surrounding magic energies.

  She narrowed her eyes, and Arisu returned the gesture with the one eye that was visible. She gave Mana no hint when she was going to attack, and she appreciated it – it meant that the training would be effective.

  The standoff came to an end as Mana felt a sudden surge of magical energies coming from Arisu. She responded with a wordless and gesture-less incantation of her own. Counterspell’s magical energies permeated the spell that was about to hit Mana and nullified it with a perfect countersignature of magical energies.

  “…I did it!” Mana exclaimed with a grin. Arisu ran over to her with a big grin of her own and hit her with a running hug, which knocked the wind out of the witch for a second.

  “Careful, Arisu!” she wheezed, patting the girl’s back before she sat down, staring at the sky in contemplation.

  “It’s harder than I thought it would be – I need to know exactly what a spell is like before I can counter it.”

  Arisu nodded, placing a hand on Mana’s shoulder. “So, it won’t work on every spell?”

  “Not without training for it specifically, no.” Mana replied with a bitter smile. She at least had a counter now, albeit a very situational one, for the spell that humiliated her yesterday.

  “Well. We still have time. Maybe we can practice to counter one more spell?” Arisu suggested now, and Mana nodded. She contemplated her options. Marisa had a lot of spells at her disposal – all the books Mana picked up during her travels in the library, as well as a few monster summoning tomes. She also learned proper magic – imitating most of the spells Mana taught herself during her work with Nicola. It should be exceedingly difficult to find one spell that Marisa relied too much on, and yet…

  “I’ll practice countering Portal,” Mana concluded before she got back on her feet. Arisu nodded and stood up next to her, before she furrowed her brow.

  “Wait… if we’re practicing that now… why didn’t your older self use it when we confronted Marisa in the past?”

  The question hung awkwardly in the air between them and Arisu made eye contact to an uncomfortable degree, causing Mana to avert her eyes.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m getting some information in the future that letting Marisa leave is beneficial somehow.”

  Arisu narrowed her eye and stepped closer to Mana, keeping up the uncomfortable stare.

  “I think I know why. You love her. Even with everything happening… you’re letting good chances of defeating her get away because of your feelings for her.”

  Mana swallowed hard and turned her head back to face the girl in front of her. She balled up her fists and took a deep breath – but then she had enough and shouted her feelings into the courtyard.

  “Of course I love her! We finally understood each other after Doppelg?nger tried to absorb me! We embraced each other when we felt lonely on our own, we explored strange worlds together and would talk about our experiences afterwards!”

  Arisu took a step backwards and observed as Mana continued.

  “I love her, and I want her back. I don’t want to go back to exploring the library and other worlds on my own! So yes, I am certain that whenever in my future I’m put in that situation, when we save my younger self from being absorbed by Doppelg?nger, I will let it leave so I can go and fall in love with Marisa, and not just because of the cycle – but because that’s what I want! Is that so wrong?” Mana looked at Arisu who wore an inscrutable expression before it melted into another one of her radiant smiles.

  “Seeing how much you love her… I’m almost jealous of my past life!”

  Mana grumbled and looked away, crossing her arms.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well…! I’m supposedly your future wife!”

  “Please stop…” Mana gritted her teeth and cut the conversation short there – not just out of embarrassment, but because she could tell that Arisu’s smiling exterior hid some kind of pain as well. “Let’s practice counterspell on Portal, and then…” Mana stopped – she got a sudden idea – or rather, she was about to come up with a contingency plan for her second confrontation with Doppelg?nger.

  “We’ll have some preparations to make.”

  Month 6, Year 34 of Chief Technocrat Castor’s Rule

  ***

  The ‘Alter Memory’ ring was locked in a little metal grabber and lowered into a console. Various lights on it lit up and a stream of data scrolled across a screen, of which Mana understood nothing. She didn’t need to, at the very least, since it was Meryl, the ‘glasses woman’, whose job it was to inspect these readings and form conclusions from them.

  “Interesting. How did you get that again?” she asked as she turned towards Mana, adjusting her glasses as she gave her an inquisitive look.

  “I copied it. It’s a spell that was used to brainwash an entire magic academy in another world,” Mana answered truthfully, and Meryl furrowed her brow, turning her head to pierce the young witch with her gaze.

  “You’re getting around,” she commented before she looked at the screen again. “Anyway, this looks good. You said it’s single use, but I already see a way to keep it going indefinitely.”

  Mana blinked and stepped a little closer. “Really? You can do that? How?”

  Meryl adjusted her glasses and glanced past Mana, to Arisu who looked around the large room full of strange devices and storage elements with wide, curious eyes, but then she kept going, ignoring the strange girl for now.

  “By supplying it with magical energies of the correct frequency. You see, this isn’t just a one and done item, it is essentially the blueprint of a magic spell stored in the ring’s structure itself, with the jewel serving as some kind of battery. It just barely doesn’t have enough magic energy, so the energies of the ring’s gold supply the necessary rest and hence,” Meryl snapped her fingers. “It crumbles to dust after using it once.”

  She turned towards the console and tapped on some of the buttons, making a blue glow encase the ring.

  “If you supply the magic energies like this, however, you can indefinitely keep using the ring and its associated spell,” Meryl completed her explanation.

  “Wonderful. We’ll hopefully only use it once, though,” Mana commented dryly.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend over there?” Meryl now commented – her eyes were narrowed, so Mana could tell what she really wanted to say.

  “You can’t just bring more kids in here.”

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  Mana cleared her throat and looked to Arisu, waving her over to the pair. “That’s Arisu. She’s going to help me capture Doppelg?nger.”

  “Hm, is she? Very well, then.” Meryl nodded, visibly satisfied with the answer as Arisu arrived and beamed a smile her way. “Hello! I’m Arisu Takeuchi, nice to meet you!”

  “At least she has good manners. You can call me Meryl, young Arisu.” Meryl commented and looked at the console. “I’ll have it integrated with the containment unit we prepared for your clone. Is there anything else you wanted to discuss?”

  Mana took a deep breath and posed the question she prepared – the reason she even brought Arisu with her in the first place.

  “You once told me that you already have some captured wizards… do you maybe have some in red robes, who wielded spell books?”

  Meryl furrowed her brow and stared at Mana for a long time, casting quick glances towards Arisu ever so often. It felt like an eternity before she responded with a question of her own.

  “Why?”

  ***

  “Here he is, prisoner I-8462. No need to worry, we confirmed that without his spell books he is quite harmless.” Stevyn announced to Mana and Arisu – the glasses-wearing head researcher left it to her large colleague to bring the two visitors to the person they wanted to see, while she lost herself in the analysis of the magical ring. The three stood in front of a large window made out of bulletproof glass – at least as far as the writing on the edges informed Mana, it was bulletproof. The room on the other side was a cell. Small, not dissimilar to a Japanese apartment. Bookshelves lined the walls and a simple, but not uncomfortable-looking bed was placed in there. The back featured both the heavy steel door of the cell as well as a door leading to a smaller room which Mana assumed to be the bathroom. A man wearing a simple green jumper sat on the bed, currently deeply immersed in a book he was reading. Stevyn knocked on the glass to make him raise his head.

  “We have visitors wishing to have a look at you,” Stevyn simply announced, and the wizard’s annoyance was clearly visible.

  “I am not an animal in a zoo, Stevyn.”

  Nevertheless, he got up from his bed and approached the glass – he still only looked at the researcher and showed him a grin.

  “We should really play chess again one of these days. Your tomes of knowledge are fascinating, but I itch for competition.”

  “We have video games,” Stevyn suggested.

  “Bah! My mind is far too great to rot it with such banalities!” the man replied. Mana furrowed her brow as she kept looking at him: if it wasn’t for the manner in which he talked and her knowledge about him, he just looked like a regular prisoner in his green jumper.

  “Hmm, alright then. I’ll come and have a round with you after my shift is over, how about that?” Stevyn suggested and kept their conversation going. Mana, meanwhile, looked at Arisu, who narrowed her eye and stared straight at the man.

  “Can you see it? Where he’s from?” she asked quietly, and Arisu nodded.

  “Great! Can you tell it to Portal somehow?” Mana fished the book out of her sleeve and Arisu put a hand on it.

  “I have received the coordinates.” Portal confirmed and Mana nodded – the large scientist and the wizard were still engaged in playful banter while Mana raised a hand.

  “We’re done, thank you!” she announced, much to Stevyn’s visible confusion.

  “Really? But you haven’t even asked a single question!” he protested, but Mana gave him a dismissive wave.

  “Well… all right, then.” Stevyn turned back towards the imprisoned wizard. “I’ll come by, and we can play chess after my shift ends in three hours.”

  “Wonderful!” the wizard replied – he appeared oddly content with his imprisonment in this facility, but Mana didn’t feel the need to inquire any further.

  “So… what did you need those coordinates for?” Arisu asked with a curious look in her eye.

  Late Summer, Year 1012 of the Immortal Sorcerer King’s Reign

  ***

  Mana and Arisu stepped through a portal into the unknown world ahead of them. Right now, they stood in a large, golden field, tended to by various humans in rags. Chains rattled with every movement they made, as they cut the wheat with sickles and loaded it onto wagons. Mana and Arisu quickly ducked into the field and tried to avoid being spotted – though it was for naught and unnecessary as they soon found out. The people working in the fields wore hollow expressions and their eyes didn’t have any shine at all, and most noticeably they didn’t even notice the intruders. They kept working, moving like zombies as the witch and the strange girl in the school uniform stepped out of the field.

  “Where is this?” Arisu asked, and Mana turned around to face her as she answered.

  “This is the world in which the infinite library was created. At least I think it is. We’ll know for certain once we’re in there.”

  Mana pointed towards a castle in the distance. Built from black stone with iron spikes to finish its sinister appearance while it was surrounded by opulent buildings made from marble, and those were surrounded by a large city wall – and outside of the proper city limits, much more shabby looking wooden buildings dotted the landscape. A clear-cut division between the classes, and Mana had a hunch that these classes were separated by who could use magic books and who could not.

  “Oh! And… what do you want to do here?” Arisu asked as Mana walked ahead, down the cobbled road leading to the castle and the surrounding city.

  “I’m going to steal something,” she answered and Arisu furrowed her brow.

  “Something?” she asked, looking around as they passed more of the lifeless people in rags who continued to harvest the wheat, fully unbothered by the otherworldly visitors. “Mana… I don’t like this place. Someone did something terrible to these people…”

  “This is the land of an evil sorcerer king, so I’m sure they’re under some kind of brainwashing,” Mana drew her conclusions and even Portal spoke up.

  “This looks like the work of ‘Dominate Minds’. One of the few tomes that were retrieved by the wizards.”

  Mana looked around again, at the various people who shuffled around without a will of their own. She felt pity deep inside, but she decided to keep going for now.

  “Mana… don’t you have ‘Break Spell’? Shouldn’t we help them?” Arisu spoke quietly, tugging on her sleeve.

  Mana let out a sigh and turned around, facing Arisu.

  “I wish I could, really. But no, not now.”

  “Don’t you feel sorry for them?!” Arisu asked with a bit more intensity.

  “I do. And that’s why I won’t break their spells just out of the blue without a plan or time, Arisu.”

  She could see surprise in the girl’s face as she took a step back and let out a little “Huh?” to vocalize it.

  “Think a little ahead, Arisu: let’s assume we spend half an hour here to free everyone from the spell they’re under. Where will they go? What will their masters do once they find out the spell was broken? Helping them without a plan can do more harm than good.”

  Arisu looked at the ground and Mana sighed, stepping closer to pat her head.

  “You’re a good girl and your heart is in the right place, but more often than not we need to have a plan before we go in and save people.”

  Arisu leaned into the hand and closed her eye, smiling at the gesture and Mana caught herself staring at her.

  I can kind of see us being married.

  She shook her thoughts off and turned around, away from Arisu to hide her slowly blushing face and kept walking towards the castle, clearing her throat.

  “…tell you what. Let’s make a promise. One day, after you’re born and we meet again, we’ll do this together. We’ll make a plan to free all of these slaves and then we’ll come back and execute it.”

  That appeared to lighten Arisu’s mood. She quickly ran to Mana’s side and hugged her again.

  “You’re a good person, too, Mana.” Arisu whispered, causing Mana’s face to take on a deeper shade of red. She quickly tried to distract herself from her racing mind by skipping to the next phase of their otherworldly visit.

  “Anyway… speaking of plans… I don’t really have one for this,” Mana admitted and gave Arisu an awkward grin as the girl responded with an incredulous expression.

  Still, Mana raised her hand and pointed it at the highest tower of the castle.

  “Let’s hope he’s keeping it next to his throne…”

  ***

  After Mana opened a portal, the two girls didn’t waste any time – they hopped through the glowing ring hovering in the air and found themselves in a lavish throne room. Banners depicting the heraldry of the sorcerer king lined the walls and the throne itself was cast from some dark metal, with spikes sprouting in every direction from its backrest. It was currently unoccupied, and Mana could see the object of her desire on a satin pillow on one of the armrests. It emitted a brilliant glow and wasn’t larger than a regular glass marble, but this was undoubtedly a universe, created through generations of labor from mages, heroes and slaves, stolen by its current owner. A universe containing an infinite library with infinite books, all for the purpose of finding powerful spell books rather than having to craft them.

  “It’s her!” someone shouted.

  “It’s the thief!” another voice joined in.

  Mana and Arisu turned their heads and saw half a dozen red-robed wizards at the entrance to the throne room – they stood in a half circle, like they were discussing something before the arrival of their strange guests. Mana recognized them and even saw the man she kicked in the face among them; his nose was a little more crooked than before.

  The two girls and the robed men stared each other down for what felt like an eternity, then all hell broke loose.

  The first man moved a hand, so Mana instantly blasted him against the wall and he let out a pained grunt. Mana erected a barrier as fireballs soared her way from the rest of the wizards and the throne room was engulfed in flames.

  Arisu jumped out of the way as a wizard attempted to hit her with a magic arrow and quickly transformed. Her green glowing form appeared to come as a shock to the wizard she was facing, giving her enough time to rush towards him and knock him out with a well-aimed punch to the gut before she summoned a bow made of green light and had multiple arrows soar towards the remaining wizards. They broke their barrage of fireballs against Mana’s barrier to instead protect themselves from the arrows. Mana hurried to the downed wizard who was still leaning against the wall and groaning, trying to get up. She cast ‘Bind’ on him, wrapping purple glowing chains around his body, similarly to what Celia did to Mana last month.

  She blasted another wizard as the group was distracted by Arisu’s projectile barrage, flinging him into a nearby wall before tying him up as well.

  That was when one of the wizards ducked behind his colleagues, leaving them to deflect Arisu’s projectiles and went straight for Mana – it was the man she kicked in the face, who leapt at her with a maddened scream and even managed to grab her by the throat.

  “You wench! Do you have any idea how many humiliations I endured because I lost that tome?!” he screamed, and his eyes almost appeared to pop out of his skull. Mana choked, unable to breathe as he closed his hands around her throat with the clear intent to kill her – her trachea felt like it was going to deform under the pressure until she hit him with another spell. Paralyze hit the man without a vocalized incantation and his muscles went limp, causing him to collapse on top of her until she pushed him off with some difficulty. He looked at her with intense hatred in his eyes as she placed more chains around him.

  “I burned that tome, by the way.” She said and saw the shock in his eyes.

  “To release the soul that was trapped inside,” she added, though she was certain that he didn’t care much about that – he just kept staring at her with pure, undiluted hatred.

  Just as she finished talking she heard a crash and saw Arisu tackling both of the wizards, launching one into the nearby wall with a superhuman punch while she kept the other restrained on the ground by placing her knee on his back. She summoned chains as well – Mana had her copy that spell before they set out. With that, the two girls stood triumphant atop the wizards, piling up their spell books in a corner, away from them.

  “That was one hell of a welcome party!” Arisu declared with a wide grin, hugging Mana from the side. “So, what did we come here for?”

  Mana pointed at the glowing marble on the armrest and walked closer.

  “We’ll steal the library!” She announced and stepped closer to the shimmering light, reaching out for it.

  Her body froze. She was unable to move, speak or do anything else – a faint blue glow encased her body, and she knew someone must have paralyzed her with magic. Her body was unable to keep its balance, and she painfully fell over and rolled on her back, unable to do anything but stare at the ceiling. She couldn’t see Arisu, if she was also frozen or if she somehow escaped whatever hit Mana. She heard the heavy rattling of plate armor as someone stepped closer. Finally, the person approaching came into view, and Mana’s blood froze in her veins.

  The man wore a helmet, with its faceplate shaped like a skull, while a green flame burned in a brazier on top. Blood red eyes sat behind the eye holes and regarded the witch with disdain. The armor he was dressed in was sharp and angular in multiple places and even serrated where it could be used to ram opponents. He looked Mana in the eyes, appearing to savor her fear.

  “The little thief who eluded us for so long. My men told me about you… Zarg-Urtax in particular hated you so much. After he receives his caning for failing me yet another time, I’m sure he will be… delighted to receive you as a plaything.”

  He reached out and ran his gauntlet’s fingers through her hair, filling Mana with revulsion of the likes she had never felt before.

  “Foolish little witch. What did you hope to achieve coming to my castle? Stealing my library?” He stood up and pulled Arisu into view, holding her stiff body by the nape – she was similarly frozen, just like Mana, in a pose that showed that she was about to turn around and face the king and was about to shout a warning. As she was brought into view, the two made eye contact.

  “You and your friend will wish that you died right here once we are done with you. If we don’t simply strip away your wi-”

  A fiery explosion engulfed him from the side. The moment the two girls established eye contact, Mana was able to project ‘Break Spell’ towards Arisu, who in turn used a fireball in her palm, combined with one of her powerful punches. The sorcerer king growled in response, stumbling away from them as his skull-shaped helmet was dented.

  Arisu quickly stretched out a hand towards Mana and shouted, ‘Break Spell!’ before she turned towards the sorcerer king. Luckily for them, he was above freeing his underlings, making him the only adversary inside the throne room right now. But still…

  “I don’t think we can beat him right now!” Mana cautioned Arisu as she got on her feet and grimaced. Pain radiated through her from her side where she fell on the hard floor without the ability to cushion herself.

  “Just try to keep him off our backs while I get us out of here!” she shouted as the sorcerer king focused her with his cruel eyes and drew the sword which had been dangling from his hip. Right after drawing it, blue flames engulfed the blade, and he walked towards Mana with large steps while she hobbled towards the throne. She used Blast, but all she achieved was for him to temporarily stop, as if the spell was hitting him no harder than a sudden gale of wind. Arisu flying in from the side and punching his head had more of an effect, though it was similarly limited. He stumbled again and growled, turning towards her and swinging his sword her way.

  Arisu parried with a green blade from her wrist but lost her footing, helplessly stumbling to the side as the sorcerer king followed up, keeping her on the defensive. Sometimes Arisu attempted to visibly counter with her spells, starting with Stasis, but they didn’t appear to have any effect – Mana could only guess that the sorcerer king knew a spell similar to counterspell which rendered Arisu’s attempts to utilize magic to her advantage useless. The sorcerer king kept swinging his sword down at Arisu, even as she was lying on the floor and barely held on. Mana grimaced and froze in place, unable to decide between running towards the marble on the throne or assisting Arisu. She was only torn out of her thoughts as she heard Arisu shout.

  “What are you waiting for?! Grab it!”

  This was when the sorcerer king slashed off her arm and she let out a stifled scream, holding the stump as he grabbed her by the throat and raised her into the air.

  “A demigod. How amusing,” he snarled and finally turned towards Mana. “Drop the library, or I will make her suffer!”

  He froze as he saw Mana holding the universe-containing marble. With an arrow spell pointed right at it.

  “I think you don’t want me to do what I’m going to do if you hurt her any further. You’ve invested so much into this library that you’ve stolen, I know you can’t just give it up.”

  She gave him a self-assured grin, but it faded a little as he stomped towards her with large steps, still holding Arisu – whose arm had already begun to regrow.

  “You won’t destroy it. You came to retrieve it for some purpose. I won’t be fooled,” he announced in a cold voice as he stepped closer, his armor rattling with every step. As he was close enough to take a swing at her, Arisu used her newly reformed arm to punch him again, making his head buck to the side – and Mana used the distraction to open a portal under the three of them, which they all promptly fell through.

  September 12023 SC

  ***

  Mana immediately caught her fall from the ceiling with her ‘Brake’ spell. The sorcerer king, completely surprised and still dazed from Arisu’s punch, however, fell to the ground with a loud, metallic clatter and a groan. Beneath that imposing appearance he was still human, it appeared.

  Arisu fell to the ground next to him, rolling over the floor until she hit a bump– a puddle of molten metal which had by now hardened was firmly stuck to the floor and refusing to budge. They were inside a simple, rectangular room, with lingering heat like they were in a desert, and the air smelled like ash, while a red-tinted light fell into the room from an open door.

  “Where are we…?” Arisu asked with a groan, but Mana was by her side immediately and pulled her along.

  “No time to explain, let’s get out of here!” she shouted, and a fireball crashed against a barrier she erected in front of them. The sorcerer king was on one knee, his labored breath rattling inside his metallic helmet as he got himself back up, one hand extended towards them to keep firing off spells. Fireballs, icicles and green energy that Mana didn’t know the nature of, nor did she plan to find out, crashed against her barrier and made cracks appear on its invisible surface. Mana pulled Arisu along and hurried through the open door before she slammed her fist on the control panel next to it.

  The door closed with a hiss, but was immediately replaced with a portal – the sorcerer king was on the other side and shuffled ever closer – until Mana extended her hand.

  “Counterspell!”

  The portal disappeared, leaving behind the cold steel of the door. Mana lowered her hand and shared a relieved sigh with Arisu, before they both let out a startled scream as the blue, burning blade of the sorcerer king’s sword broke through the door and was slowly dragged across its surface, starting to carve a rectangular hole into it.

  “Should we just take a portal somewhere else?” Arisu suggested quickly, but Mana ran towards a skeletal corpse in a security uniform next to the door. She pushed it aside and feverishly looked at the console in front of her until she found the ‘Open Observation Deck’ command and slammed her fist down on it. The sword kept wandering across the door’s alloy, leaving behind a molten trail and as it was almost done with a complete revolution it was suddenly pulled out. An eerie quiet followed, then the duo heard the firing of multiple spells and loud, otherworldly curses before things went entirely silent – and then, an impossibly bright beam of light shone through the new gaps in the door, melting any more sensitive machinery it hit.

  Mana averted her eyes and breathed heavily for a few more seconds before she turned around, leaning against and sliding down the side of the console, quietly laughing to herself.

  “What happened, Mana?” Arisu asked with genuine confusion as she hurried to her side.

  “…I exposed that room to the sun.” Mana answered with a grin. “The pure, unfiltered power of the sun. The people who lived here used this room to turn their enemies into ash.”

  Arisu blinked and looked at the door, then back to Mana. “You mean he’s dead?”

  Mana shook her head. “No. I could only counter his portal when he tried to get to us, but he probably fled back home or somewhere else. But it doesn’t matter…”

  She pulled the shimmering little marble out of her robes.

  “I got just the thing I wanted. Insurance for when I face Doppelg?nger.”