Chapter 152 : Chapter 152
Chapter 152: Specter of the Past (2)
Ibi immediately tried to pick up and raise Rine, who was lying down.
“……No.”
The moment she turned Rine’s body over, she paused for a moment.
The slim possibility, which she hoped wasn't true, kept popping up in her mind.
“…Hey, it’s not that, right?”
It couldn't be helped, as Rine, who was in Ibi's arms, showing no reaction and quietly closing her eyes… looked as if she were sleeping.
“No, no…”
Not in the sense of slumber, but in the sense of eternal sleep.
“Hey! Rine! Snap out of it!”
The person who came to her senses at Ibi’s urgent shout was actually Lily.
Lily, who had been frozen stiff, pale with the frightening possibility that had momentarily flashed through her mind, just like Ibi, quickly knelt down in front of Rine and began to check her pulse.
“…!”
And then.
“Thank goodness… Her pulse is fine.”
She let out a sigh of relief, visibly appearing reassured.
At her words, Ibi's taut expression instantly relaxed, and she sighed with relief, "Phew."
“Hey, you damn… are you trying to scare a person?”
Then, she lightly slapped Rine’s cheek with the back of her hand as if protesting that Rine had scared her half to death.
“Hey, wake up, Rine.”
She then started shaking Rine’s shoulder, but.
“…Hey?”
No matter how much she shook the completely limp and powerless body, Rine showed no sign of waking up.
“Wha, what’s wrong with her? Hey!”
Ibi, sensing something was wrong, tapped Rine’s cheek once more, but Rine still showed no flicker of movement.
“Why, why is she like this? Hey! Rine! Come to your senses!”
It was as if time had stopped just for her.
“Why is she doing this?!”
Ibi looked back at Lily desperately again, but Lily seemed just as flustered.
Lily briefly checked Rine’s condition once more, then started reciting a prayer for 「Healing」.
But there was still no response.
Thinking that Rine might be afflicted with a status effect, she also cast 「Purification」, but it also had no effect.
“Why…”
In other words, it was a problem that Lily couldn't solve.
“Is it mana overload…?”
Toric, who was watching the scene from the back, suddenly muttered.
“I've seen fellow mages… sometimes fall into a state of suspended animation after overstraining themselves with magic.”
As expected of the most experienced veteran, he must have realized it immediately.
“The fact that we are here now, having escaped from Lord Pariah… must be thanks to this friend's magic, wouldn't you say?”
That it was Rine who brought us here.
“Now that you mention it…”
At Toric’s words, Miki, who was also watching Rine with concern, suddenly stroked his chin and thoughtfully recalled his memory.
“I think I saw Sister Rine casting some kind of magic… for just a moment.”
She did.
“And when I came to, we were all here…”
“…I saw it too.”
“M, Me too…”
And everyone saw it.
“The moment Sister cast the magic… it was like, all the time around us stopped…”
Everyone confirmed that they hadn't seen it wrong and that they all witnessed the same thing, but.
“But, stopping time…”
That’s precisely why it was even harder to believe.
“How could that be possible…”
“Why? What’s going on?”
Ibi, who had absolutely no knowledge of magic, didn't seem to understand why Lily was suddenly trailing off and reacting that way.
“W, Well…”
In fact, even Lily, though proficient in sacred magic, wasn't very familiar with the system of magic Rine used.
As I briefly explained before, using one's own mana is different from borrowing the power of a god.
But even so.
“「Time Stop」 is… magic that an ordinary person can absolutely not use…”
She knew this fact well.
Because, it was magic related to a ‘God’.
“As far as I know, 「Time Stop」 is… magic created by Lady Shurine, the God of Time, and only she can use it….”
Meaning it was practically a type of divine magic.
“So, this girl used magic that only that god can use?”
So even Ibi, who usually had no interest in things like gods, could immediately understand what that meant.
“…Then what.”
Perhaps, precisely because of that.
“Is this girl… a god or something?”
“That is…”
On the other hand, Lily, a devout cleric, unlike Ibi, must have felt hesitant about calling a ‘person living on this earth with us’ a god, even though the story wasn't about Sistina, the god she worshipped.
Unlike Ibi, who could just blurt out such an idea, it was something Lily couldn't even dream of.
“Of course, I could be wrong, and even if it looked like that, there’s a possibility that it wasn’t that kind of magic at all…”
So she started doing whatever she could to deny that possibility.
“…No, surely that’s it. Yes. There must have been some mistake.”
Of course, there was a time when gods also lived with humans on this earth.
The ‘Age of the Gods’.
“But, that was a very long time ago in the past…”
Lily, having said this, glanced sideways toward me.
To be precise, she was looking toward the ‘Primordial’ that I revealed was residing within me.
Because the ‘Primordial Demon King’ was the catalyst for the end of the Age of the Gods.
It was known that after the war with the ‘Primordial’, the gods who barely survived thought this land was not a suitable place for them to live, and one by one, they left this ‘Earth’ and ascended to ‘Heaven’.
Though the order differed, it was clear that all the gods eventually left.
That's how the ‘Age of the Gods’ came to an end.
So, there were no gods left on this earth anymore.
There shouldn't be.
“A very, very long time ago…”
But Lily looked back at Rine’s quietly closed eyes, then began to trail off again.
An unknown Elven mage who understands the language of the Age of the Gods and can interpret the magic of the Age of the Gods.
Someone from whom an impossible possibility kept being seen.
“…I don’t know if that magic was truly 「Time Stop」, but it’s certain what kind of magic she used to move us here.”
At that moment, Toric intervened as if summarizing the situation.
“You mean 「Teleport」?”
“What else could it be?”
Coincidentally, Rine had learned 「Teleport」 upon reaching level 14, and the companions knew that fact.
However.
“…Didn’t that move people one by one?”
Ibi was the one who, as soon as she learned Rine had mastered 「Teleport」, was so fascinated that she became a ‘test subject’ herself and asked me to try it on her.
So she would know better.
“Does it make sense that she moved all of us at once with that…?”
This, too, suggested it wasn't an ordinary 「Teleport」.
「Mass Teleport」.
While not as grand as 「Time Stop」, it was magic that the current Rine could absolutely not use.
Because she hadn't learned it.
It was a skill she could never acquire at her current level, having just mastered 「Teleport」.
In Rine’s case, she was closer to having ‘recalled’ it.
“So, isn't that why she fell into a mana overload?”
In short, Toric's conjecture was that she was overloaded from using magic that her ‘body’ was currently unable to use.
And that conjecture was correct to some extent.
“Then what should we do? Will she get better if we just leave her alone?”
To be exact, he was half right and half wrong.
“I remember that in cases where life is not endangered, sufficient rest often leads to a natural recovery…”
The reason, ‘overload,’ was correct, but this symptom was not a symptom of ‘mana overload’.
“How about we let her rest first.”
“I, I think that would be best too.”
Perhaps because she heard that there was a possibility of her getting better, Ibi, who once again looked faintly relieved, then began to look around.
“But where are we anyway?”
She had been too focused on Rine until now to check, but now it finally came into her view.
One thing was certain: it wasn't Tiaria.
You couldn't find a dense forest like this in Tiaria at all.
“Considering the distance of a typical 「Teleport」, isn't it still near Tiaria?”
“…‘Eastern Woods’.”
“What?”
At my muttering, everyone's gaze turned to me.
“Toric is right. This is the forest north of Tiaria.”
But by the standards of the entire continent, it was located to the east, just like Tiaria.
That's why it was also called the ‘Eastern Woods’.
…Yes.
The damned ‘Eastwood’.
The place where Rine, unable to offer any resistance, was captured by slave merchants and became a slave.
“How do you know that? Have you been here?”
“Yes.”
Strictly speaking, I had never been here ‘in this body’, but I had visited many times anyway.
“For now, let’s set up camp nearby for today. Pariah probably won't be able to follow us here.”
At least according to the ‘event’ I knew, that would be the case.
Of course, that event started too early compared to my prediction, but the ‘flow’ itself—that he wouldn't immediately find us after we suddenly vanished—wouldn't have changed much.
It wasn't that I was complacently judging that the event would unfold this way because it was a ‘predetermined event’; it was that the physical distance from Tiaria to this place simply made it so.
***
To put it bluntly.
“Rine won’t wake up.”
“……!”
As I said before, this was no ordinary symptom of mana overload.
“You, what the hell are you talking about…”
“Of course, I don’t mean she’ll be like this forever. Just that she won’t wake up just by getting some rest.”
“D, Do you know something about Sister's condition…?”
I nodded.
“It’s an intuition.”
“Intuition?”
“To be precise, the ‘Primordial’ residing within me has an intuition. It said this is no ordinary mana overload.”
……What the hell are you saying now?
Naturally, the ‘Primordial’, who had never said such a thing to me, showed a greatly bewildered reaction, but fortunately for me, the ‘Primordial’s’ voice was only audible to me.
“As everyone knows, the ‘Primordial’ is an entity that actually lived during the Age of the Gods, right? So it would know better.”
In other words, I could use it as an excuse.
“The ‘Primordial’ said that what we saw was definitely 「Time Stop」.”
No, I never said that…… You bastard, are you going to use my body as an excuse just to casually drop an assumption?!
Correct.
Well, it wasn't exactly 'just to drop an assumption,' though. It was 100% fact, after all.
“Does that, mean…”
“Yes, that’s right.”
……Haa.
Fine, I was thinking something similar.
Sure enough, the ‘Primordial’ also sighed heavily instead of strongly protesting and immediately admitted my point.
That magic was definitely 「Time Stop」.
That much was certain.
“Hey, now that I think about it…”
At that moment, Ibi, who had been too busy to remember but was suddenly reminded by my words, added.
“That, that bastard Pariah… definitely called her, I mean…”
“‘Shurine’, he called her.”
“……Then what.”
That Elf is definitely ‘Shurine’.
Or, her shell, perhaps.
“Is that girl… truly a god?”