Free Web NovelChapter 200: The Holy Grail of Time Powers
-Ding!
{Very well. Here is my second offering in exchange for dissolving the charging ability of all future Conjuration Magic.
This is Unquantifiable in rarity.}
"Boy oh boy..."
And then the System displayed a Magic whose very first line made his jaw drop.
-Ding!
{
Outer Flow (Unquantifiable)
Description:
Allows entry into the Outer Flow of Time.
A monochrome reflection of reality existing upon the outermost boundary of temporal space. Outer Flow appears as a fractured mirror of reality itself, rendered in black, white, and shades between.
Living beings in reality manifest as distorted silhouettes, while sounds from reality continue to echo through the temporal boundary.
The user may traverse the Outer Flow and re-emerge at the location occupied during exit.
.......
Warning:
The Outer Flow is inhabited by entities designated: Wraiths of Hubris.
These wraiths will know Host’s general location within the Outer Flow and will actively converge upon it.
Wraiths are invulnerable to all known forms of damage.
They are blessed to be as strong as the entity they target.
Soul-corruption and assimilation upon capture are inevitable.
.......
Notes:
The user cannot physically interact with reality while inside the Outer Flow.
Objects may be observed but not manipulated.
Example: Closed doors cannot be opened. Items cannot be collected.
Magic cannot be cast inside the Outer Flow
.......
MP Consumption:
75 MP upon entry.
75 MP upon exit.
Cooldowns:
5 Minutes after entry.
10 Minutes after exit.
}
Nico’s expression moved through several distinct phases on its way to wherever it was going.
Curiosity, around the first paragraph.
Confusion, somewhere in the middle of the second.
A genuine horror at the Warning section.
Then that horror faded into tactical possibilities.
Then those possibilities hit the notes at the bottom, and the horror came back.
He read it again from the top.
Then a third time.
By the end of the third pass, he set the interface down mentally and looked at the forest for a moment.
"Okay..." he said. "Let me make sure I understand this correctly."
-Ding!
{Ask.}
"I enter the Outer Flow, which is basically a black and white mirror dimension of reality. I can move through it, see into the real world, and exit wherever I currently am. Correct?"
-Ding!
{Correct.}
"So, hypothetically, Pantheon... or Entropy has us surrounded," Nico said slowly. "I can pull both Peko and Nom-Nom into the Outer Flow with me... We can walk for five minutes... exit two kilometres away. Nom-Nom then piggybacks me, and we’re at hypersonic speeds before Pantheon Or Entropy even registers what happened."
-Ding!
{Correct.}
"A castle vault..." Nico said, and the pace of his thinking was audible in how the words were arriving. "I enter Outer Flow. Walk through the walls to the vault room. Exit. Wait for the cooldown. Blast through the vault with my shotgun while inside reality, take what I want, then re-enter. Walk out. Exit outside the building. And done. I just robbed the royal treasury."
-Ding!
{Correct.}
"Secret meetings..." Nico said. "I sit down cross-legged on the table and listen to the whole thing, and nobody has any idea I am there."
-Ding!
{Correct.}
Nico pressed his back against the tree and stared upward through the canopy while his brain ran through scenarios at a pace that was not quite frantic but was definitely generating heat.
"Okay," he said. "Holy shit, this is genuinely insane."
-Ding!
{Correct.}
"Now the wraiths..." he said, voice dipping an octave. "They really can’t be killed?"
-Ding!
{No.}
"Not even Nom-Nom can do it?"
-Ding!
{No.}
"Peko? She’s got a spell for just about everything..." freeweɓnovēl.coɱ
-Ding!
{No.}
"What if the strongest person alive entered the Outer Flow?"
-Ding!
{The answer is unchanged.}
Nico looked at the canopy.
"What if a god entered?"
-Ding!
{The answer is unchanged.}
"Right..." he sighed. "So they’re unkillable... and they scale to their target. So if I bring Nom-Nom in, the wraith hunting her is as strong as Nom-Nom."
-Ding!
{Correct.}
"Which means bringing stronger allies produces proportionally stronger problems."
-Ding!
{Correct.}
Nico sat with that for a moment.
"And they know my general location when I enter."
-Ding!
{Yes. Entry and existence within The Outer Flow create a detectable disturbance. Wraiths will begin converging immediately.}
"But they can’t hear me... can’t smell me. Don’t track mana either."
-Ding!
{Correct. They track the disturbance of your presence within the Outer Flow. Fast and abrupt movement amplifies the disturbance.}
"So every step I take inside there is essentially... like rippling the water," Nico said. "And the wraiths are following the ripples."
-Ding!
{That is an accurate way to phrase it.}
"Damn..." he sighed, hanging his head low. "That’s somehow worse than reading about it."
Rubbing the bridge of his nose with his one hand, he looked at the stump where his leg ended.
"And magic is completely out."
-Ding! freeweɓnovēl.coɱ
{Correct. The Outer Flow does not have the concept of magic or mana.}
"So I’d be going in there with one arm, one leg, no Ice Reinforcement, no Temporal Step, no Manifestation, no Ice Pebble, nothing... while unkillable monsters that match my exact strength come at me slowly, surround me from every direction."
-Ding!
{Yes.}
"In theory, it’s the perfect infiltration tool," Nico said.
-Ding!
{In theory.}
"In practice, a nightmare realm designed specifically to punish anyone who panics."
-Ding!
{You’ve been very accurate so far, Host. Applauds. }
Chuckling, Nico leaned his head back against the tree and looked at the light coming through the leaves overhead, the afternoon gold of it catching in the moving canopy in slow, shifting fragments.
Temporal Entanglement. Outer Flow.
Neither of them blew anything up.
Neither of them doubled his offensive output nor gave him something he could point at a problem and use to make it stop existing.
Both of them were survival architecture instead. Escape routes, information channels, positioning tools, ways of staying alive when the situation moved past the point where staying alive became a luxury.
The System had picked powers that made him harder to kill rather than better at killing.
And the thing was, Nico did not mind that at all. These represented options.
And to him, options were more valuable.
The explosions he could already produce.
"Deal," he said.
-Ding!
{Host Authorization Required.
Purpose 1: Dissolution of Ferrum Knight Charging Function.
Purpose 2: Dissolution of Future Conjuration Charging Functions.
Root Access Required.
Remaining Root Permissions: 3.}
"Consider yourself authorized~"
-Ding!
{Accessing Root.}
Several seconds passed, yet nothing visible happened.
No light show, no rumble, no dramatic indication that reality for him had changed.
The forest looked identical, the tree was still a tree, and his leg was still missing.
Then-
-Ding!
{Root Access Successful.
Ferrum Knight Modified.
Future Conjurations Modified. Charging Function Removed.
Remaining Root Permissions: 2.}
Nico waited a moment, but still nothing visible happened.
Just the forest, and the canopy, and the stump of his leg, and somewhere deeper in the world a rule of magic applying to him that had been rewritten without so much as a flicker.
That felt stranger than if reality had cracked.
Nico pulled his attention back to the Temporal Entanglement interface and did the math.
His current MP capacity was 65. And out of that, he allocated 60 of it upfront.
That was 6 seconds of temporal suspension. The most he could manage.
And with that and a giddy grin, he activated the spell, and the forest lost its color instantaneously.
Every shade of green and brown and gold was turned monochrome in the same moment, the world became rendered in perfect monochrome stillness.
A leaf that had been midway through falling from a branch eight meters ahead paused mid-air
.
Dust hung motionless above a patch of churned earth where his earlier movement had disturbed it.
A small beetle was frozen in mid-flight three meters to his left, its wings locked at an angle that looked like a photograph taken at the precise worst moment of a wing-stroke.
And then he looked up.
Far overhead, an eagle hung completely motionless in its own sphere of monochrome reality, its wings spread and its head angled downward, toward him.
The eagle had been observing him, and when he activated Temporal Entanglement, the effect had propagated.
The Observer Node, now an egale, had created its own thirty-meter domain.
Nico stared at the frozen eagle.
[It got an eagle...] he thought. [... that was looking at me from a hundred meters up.]
And then the six seconds ended.
Color returned in the same instant it had departed. The leaf continued falling. The beetle continued flying. The eagle banked lazily in the sky and moved south.
-Ding!
{Cooldown: 6 minutes.}
-Pffft-!
Nico immediately burst into laughter.
A genuine, bright, slightly exhausted laugh.
He sat under his tree and laughed at the frozen eagle, the leaf, the beetle, and the six minutes of cooldown. The System that had very deliberately calculated the exact amount of utility Nico would realistically need before putting the brakes on.
And it added that cooldown specifically to prevent Nico from spamming and abusing Temporal Entanglement and Outer Flow.
-Ding!
{Host. What do you want in exchange for agreeing not to recklessly and unethically exploit Infinity?}
The laughter that had been sitting on his face faded as he took a deep breath.
"A promise."
The System waited.
"One day. Just one time. No questions, no arguments... You trust me blindly and do exactly what I ask."
The System was quiet long enough for the silence of contemplation to begin feeling like hesitation.
It understood what was being offered and what was being requested, and for the System, Nico’s request seemed to carry more weight.
And then-
-Ding!
{Very well. I promise.}
"Deal." Nico smiled.
And with that, he got himself back onto his feet, ran Ice Reinforcement through his leg until the ice leg had rebuilt itself around the stump, and started walking toward Shinkotsu, with steps that were significantly lighter than they had been when he sat down.
-Ding!
{Are you not going to test Outer Flow?}
"Ah, hell naw..." he chuckled, shaking his head without breaking stride. "That thing is terrifying. I’m not running that one without Peko standing next to me,"
The System had no counterargument.
Nico walked for another minute before the realization arrived.
He had a meeting this evening with the owner of the Hollow Cinder Mine, with the Chief accompanying him.
And he was currently wearing the clothes he had been wearing since this morning, which included the forest floor, the aftermath of Nom-Nom’s spar, and a general sustained encounter with dirt that followed the spar.
Opening the Shop interface, Nico scrolled to apparel and looked at what was available.
[System...] he thought, feeling the grin come back. [Let’s pick out some cool drip. We’re going to buy ourselves a house~]
-Ding!
{What did you have in mind?}
There was something easy in the way System said that.
No longer was there the strained civility of two parties who needed each other and had been managing the friction of that necessity since day one.
Now they were just a cosmic entity and a potentially cosmic disaster that had been through a great deal together, talking about clothes in the late afternoon forest without either of them waiting for the next argument to start.
