Chapter 56: I Believe I Can Fly!
“Sky Armor! Activate!” Robert struck a pose. The arcane stone Alicia had charged inside the armor glowed. He took a deep breath, and as he moved his foot, the armor lifted off the ground.
Elidranthia was amazed. How could Robert control the armor like this? In movies, such armor was usually operated by an AI—but there was no such thing here.
As he rose higher and higher, the armor began to tilt. Robert tried to steady himself, but he overcorrected. The armor spun wildly in the air.
“Argh!! Stop! Stop!” Robert screamed as he slammed the stop button.
The armor obeyed, shutting down all systems—and promptly dropped him to the ground. He squealed like a crushed frog.
“See? This armor is way too hard to control,” Alicia said. “Robert still couldn’t do it even after four months of trying, and he is the creator.”
“It was better before! I swear!” Robert groaned. He popped open the helmet, unclasped the armor, and slithered out. Alicia helped him, and together they packed the armor back into its box.
“Maybe he shouldn’t try to fine-tune it so much?” Eli said. “It’s like riding a bicycle—you have to keep moving forward.”
“I see! We should be brave! Thank you, Mage Elidranthia!” Robert said.
“That’s Lady Elidranthia to you, peasant,” Clarissa snapped, smacking the back of his head.
“But the armor can barely fly for five minutes. Last time he tried this, he crashed into a tree. And how does he even land? Does that mean he’ll destroy the armor every time he touches down?” Alicia sighed. She had fantasized about wearing the armor herself, but after watching Robert, she realized reality wasn’t so kind. Besides, she didn’t really need it—she could already fly using wind magic.
Well… not yet. She had a bit of acrophobia, but she planned to work on that later.
As expected, Alicia was lazy.
“Five minutes? That’s not ideal, but there’s a lot you can do in five minutes,” Eli said, frowning. Five minutes was enough to bombard an enemy or extract key personnel from a besieged fort.
“More like two minutes,” Clarissa corrected. “That armor’s already at half power.”
“The flight control took most of the power. It used to last one hundred fifty-four seconds!” Robert said.
“That’s not even three minutes!” Eli exclaimed. Five minutes had already been bad, but three minutes was completely impractical. Moreover, if the armor required someone at Alicia’s level just to recharge it, that made things even worse. And that was the best-case scenario? Eli finally understood why Alicia had spoken so harshly about his invention. She hadn’t been rude—she had simply been honest.
“Ugh…” Robert clenched his teeth.
“Hm… say, Robert,” Alicia said, “does it really have to be armor? Can’t it be something else? Like a plane—or balloons?”
“What’s a plane? And balloons? You mean the toys children play with? That’s just a ball, right? It can’t fly,” Robert said, tilting his head.
Eli and Alicia both forgot that this world had no airplanes. Robert had assumed armor because he had once seen a high-level wind mage fly and wanted to imitate him. The armor was meant to protect him in case of a crash. Balloons, on the other hand, were toys—usually for young girls. They were different from balls, which were made of leather. Balloons were made of paper or rubber and filled with air.
Light bulbs went off above both Alicia’s and Elidranthia’s heads at once.
“That’s it! You can just make a balloon—or even an airplane!” Eli said, pumping her fist. How could she have been so stupid? She should be pioneering this world’s technology! She was a reincarnator from Earth—a mage and a noble. This was her duty as a herald of the gods!
“As I said, what’s an airplane? And balloons are just balls. Sure, they’re light—you can throw them into the sky—but they don’t provide any lift,” Robert said, frowning. As a scholar, he had read nearly every book in the library on wind magic and mage flight. There was no mention of flying balloons or anything called a plane.
“Ahem. Let me explain,” Elidranthia said.
She gathered several sheets of paper and glued them together. Then she tied strings to the edges and fastened them all to a rock, forming a crude parachute. She turned to Alicia.
“Alicia, could you cast a gentle upward breeze?”
“Not fire?” Alicia tilted her head. Eli shook hers. For now, she just wanted a simple parachute. With magic, a parachute could be made to fly without relying on a hot-air balloon.
“We’ll consider that later,” Eli said.
Alicia cast a gentle gust of wind upward. Like a leaf blower, Eli placed the parachute into the airflow, and it began to float. However, without any control mechanism, it drifted sideways. Eli adjusted the wind, trying to keep it stable.
“See? This should be better, right? It uses less mana too,” Alicia said.
“Ooh! Wonderful! It’s certainly much slower, but this is a viable method. I see… I never thought of this,” Robert said, eyeing the armor thoughtfully.
Eli was suddenly overcome with anxiety. Was this man a genius—or an idiot? Would she really have to employ him in the future?
A leader—or in her case, a noble—had to choose subordinates carefully. An incompetent subordinate was worse than an incompetent enemy. Such a person was poison, capable of disrupting an entire county.
“Well, at least he’s passionate,” Eli murmured. Even if he was a bit dense, as long as he followed her orders, she could do damage control.
Alicia, getting carried away, raised the wind higher and stronger. The gust swept through the garage, kicking up dust everywhere. Robert hopped around in excitement. They were peas in a pod.
Eventually, the lazy maid grew bored and stopped casting. She wandered over to Clarissa, who offered her butter cookies with reverence. Alicia had become something of an idol to the group. Meanwhile, Robert feverishly scribbled notes.
“Thank you, Alicia. Lady Elidranthia. I owe you one,” Robert said, dropping to one knee. He then hurried back to his desk, jotting down ideas before running off to fetch another mage and a laborer to help carry the armor.
“Um… do you think you could look at my diamond maker too, Lady Elidranthia, Mage Alicia?” Julius approached them after witnessing everything. His eyes were filled with hope, wondering whether these two saints might share some wisdom with him as well.
But he was soon disappointed. Eli and Alicia knew that diamonds could be made from carbon, so his idea was technically plausible. However, they also knew how difficult the process was. It wasn’t something a single undergraduate student could achieve. Magic could bend the laws of physics, but the laws of physics still existed.
If this world possessed the knowledge of modern Earth, it might be possible. If a scientist understood the process and had the blueprint for a modern compressor, they could potentially do it. But alas, let alone making diamonds, this medieval world lacked even a basic periodic table. Chemistry was a field this world had almost completely abandoned.
“Um… sorry. I don’t know how it could succeed. I don’t know how to turn rocks into diamonds…” Eli said. She had tried before. She had poured all of her magic into a piece of coal, but no matter how much mana she used, the charcoal never changed. Alchemy was a myth in this world.
“...I see.”
“If making diamonds from rocks were that easy, people would’ve done it already. Even a rank-eight earth mage in history couldn’t do it,” Clarissa said.
“I see.” Julius dropped to his knees. He stared at his work, crestfallen.
After that, Alicia spent the rest of the day lazing around the laboratory and the plaza, occasionally earning pocket change by charging arcane stones.
Her eyes were glued to the various pastries and tarts, but she restrained herself. She had already eaten almost half a tin of butter cookies from Clarissa. She needed to rein herself in, or she’d gain weight. Being an ugly woman was worse than being an ugly man. She had been blessed with a pretty face and magic—she wouldn’t squander that. She had to put in effort to preserve her beauty.
The capital was a massive city, housing more than a million people. It sprawled outward endlessly. Alicia noticed how luxurious restaurants and jewelry stores gradually gave way to simpler buildings. Some areas were even dilapidated. Her eyes then remembered a certain organization from the NovelPhoenix.
Most people would have turned back at this point. Alicia might have been a commoner, but she was a high-ranking mage. She had no financial troubles and now lived among high society. The academy uniform she wore felt increasingly out of place as she finally reached the slums.
The slums—the place where hopeless people ended up. The dark side of every large city. This was somewhere Alicia was never meant to go, a place where crime ran rampant. It was also where a certain organization she had forgotten resided.
An organization from the web novel.
The Reapers.
Alicia hadn’t forgotten the Reapers entirely, but her small brain could only recall their name. Eli was a good girl now. She rarely left home and didn’t seem like the type to wander into places like this. Alicia couldn’t even remember how Eli had met the Reapers in the first place.
Of course, Alicia’s attempt to contact them was in vain. No matter how she wandered through the slums, she didn’t encounter the Reapers—she didn’t even run into petty criminals like pickpockets or robbers. She asked around, even offering money, but everyone simply shook their heads.
The dark side of the capital was subtle. You couldn’t find criminals just by walking the streets. If it were that easy, the knights who occasionally patrolled the area would have caught them long ago. Moreover, there was another problem: Alicia’s status.
Everyone in the capital knew the academy. It had three major courses—the Scholar Course, the Nobility Course, and the Mage Course. If you crossed nobles, knights would hunt you down and deliver capital punishment. If you crossed mages, they might retaliate by burning you to a crisp, drowning you in a puddle, slicing you apart, or burying you ten feet under.
They recognized the badge Alicia wore.
Any criminal with a shred of sense stayed far away from her.
In the end, Alicia bought some potato chips from a dilapidated stall and went home.
Little did she know—just because she couldn’t find them didn’t mean the Reapers didn’t exist.
They were watching.
And somewhere in the shadows, an agent lurked.