I awoke to... what? A kind of paradise? It was closer to an empty field, but I could tell there was depth to it. I looked into the distance, spotting the shadows of mountains, looming thousands of meters high.
I looked down. The ground was coated in a red, shiny, liquid.
Right. I'm still bleeding. But it didn't hurt.
I turned around, only to see... me?
Yeah. That was me. Just not this me.
It was the me from what looked to be moments before my fight with The Demon King. Or was it after? I couldn't tell.
What I did know though, is that that was me. From two thousand years ago. In the modern age.
This was going to be a hassle wasn't it?
He—or "It"—sat on a lawn chair, reading a book I had previously had in my room.
"Who are you?" I shouted, reluctant to approach him
He didn't look up.
"Your left pinky is tense. You're losing 0.0074% of your kinetic output through a nervous twitch. Fix it, or I'm going to throw a pebble at your forehead and kill us both." He flipped the page, the slick 'slirp' of the paper echoing, a not-so-subtle reminder that this guy really just did not care.
"I almost just died. Give me a break—my eyes haven't even stopped bleeding." I shouted back, my hands raised in front of me to emphasise my point.
"Standard Tuesday. Pick up your sword. You're getting drool on the sub-space."
Sword?
I looked around, and a shining silver sword had been placed to my immediate left, almost ripping my trouser at the ankle.
"Wait, sub-space?" I realised a moment late what he had said.
"Yeah dude, I created this immediately after defeating The Demon King, it's useful for resting." He glanced over the back of his chair as he said this, looking back at something I apparently couldn't see.
"Uh huh..." I responded, deciding that I wouldn't even start thinking about the ways that messed with causality.
I could do this. I was strong in my past life, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't so far out of reason that I stood no chance.
Right?
Since in this subspace, the biological limits that had... killed me? I'm not sure how I was here, but I digress.
The limits that had prevented me from moving as fast as I could potentially have were gone, along with the reduced, if not completely removed physics.
So I should, in theory, be able to accelerate to roughly Mach 10-ish with my mana control and capacity.
How was this thing actually existing?
"Stop thinking, moron, pick it up."
'I/He/It' snapped me out of my thoughts.
This was going to get confusing immediately.
'Prime Me' (I had made the executive decision to call him that going forward) forced me back to reality
"Give me a moment."
"You're leaking mana from the ball of your left foot. It's embarrassing. Pick up the sword." He still hadn't looked up.
Was he proposing a fight with me without moving?
I pummelled mana into my feet forcefully, launching myself forward, sword in hand.
This was going to be a good lesson to myself, or Prime Me, on respect. I'm technically older than you, y'know?
A sonic boom exploded behind me. So drag still exists here. Good to know.
Instead of standing up like a normal person and fighting me, he simply shifted his chair just out of reach.
"Careful, it took me about 0.7 milliseconds to form that chair and I don't want to do that again." He still hadn't looked up from the damn book.
The book is not that good, I assure you.
What was the title of the book?
It was some kind of magic guid—
Oh god.
If this guy gets his hand on modern magic it's actually over.
He finally stood up.
"Done. Let's begin."
Great.
I launched another strike, my sword following a perfect arc.
He reached out two fingers, not even moving from his spot. Where the chair had gone? I had no clue. I just hoped he wasn't fast enough to move it away without me even being able to tell.
He, instead of parrying, his two fingers grabbed onto my skull as I was mid-step, and rotated me 15 degrees to the left.
He didn't just 'move.' He didn't even blur. One moment he was in the chair, and the next, a trail of electric-blue light—ghostly and haunting—snapped across the grass. It wasn't even mana anymore; it was the atmosphere screaming because he had moved faster than the light reflecting off his skin. I saw him arrive at my side before I saw him leave the chair.
As my skull was rotated those fifteen degrees, my momentum didn't just vanish; it redirected. It didn't help me hit him. I corkscrewed into the red liquid on the floor, spinning like a drill bit while he just stepped over me.
"Check your trajectory," he muttered, the slirp of another page turning. Was that another book? Why? When? How?!
"You're aiming for where I was, not where I'm going. Basic geometry, Aren. Even a toddler—well, a different toddler—would know that." He continued.
The worst part? I couldn't even feel malice. This guy actually thought he was helping me. Is this how I was?
"You're getting blood on the guide. Stop ricocheting everywhere. Page 42 on Mana Circuits is actually quite insightful, despite the author's clear lack of a soul. Stop leaking for a second, will you?"
True to his word, a drop or two of what could only be my blood was on the page.
"I'm trying, it's just not quite easy when you fling over 170 megajoules of energy into the floor for no apparent reason." I was still mid tumble, and it took almost everything I had to shout this at him.
"Your center of gravity is in your throat. It should be in your gut. Let me..."
THWACK.
"There. Now try again. And this time, try not to scream. It's bad for the acoustics." He wasn't even coaching anymore.
Could I consider this bullying? A grown man bullying a poor, innocent eight-year-old.
I dragged myself to my feet.
A one-off, I got this.
Another lunge.
I saw a literal blur circle me, probably over a thousand times before I could process anything.
He was analysing me like a judge while I was mid-step.
"Your leading shoulder is too high. You're catching the wind. You're not a bird, Aren, you're a brick. Fix it."
"Grraagh" I shouted, emitting an explosion of mana in a sphere around me.
"You're doing that thing again," Prime sighed, leaning against the empty air. "The 'screaming and bleeding' thing. It's dramatic. It's unnecessary. It's very... eight-year-old of you."
The explosion hadn't even moved him.
I tried to manage a mana core.
I seemed to be impervious to physical strain at some level.
"Ooh Mana Engine. If you can really call it that. It's a bit pathetic to be honest." He didn't even try to mask it with soft words.
It didn't matter though, the second core should be at least a few times more efficient.
The next step smeared space.
The world around me stretched into a kaleidoscope, the red on the floor bleeding into ultraviolet.
The world itself seemed more like one, infinite frame. The sky warped around me like a concave lens.
I was moving fast enough that the sound of my first step would be left miles behind me in seconds. Mach probably like forty.
"That's not impressive, neither was that dumb stunt that caused you to be here." He seemed a little peeved now, a vein or two forming on his head.
"I made a trench of glass! From dirt! That was my limit!"
I was trying to run a circle around him to get my speed to the absolute maximum of what was possible.
"You hit a wall of air because you have the aerodynamic profile of a barn door. You're not 'breaking' physics; you're just annoying them. And mildly at that. Watch."
He turned around briskly, and he flicked his finger.
"Pshhh, what's that gonna do?" I almost laughed.
BOOM!
I looked forward.
Th-there had just been a mountain there? Right?
Where there had once been a mountain, probably four thousand meters high, was now a literal circular vacuum from the base upwards. It had annihilated it entirely, along with about a quarter of the two mountains beside it.
"See? No trench. No glass. No 'screaming and bleeding.' Just a clean displacement of mass. You're trying to be a meteor to a training dummy, Aren. I'm trying to be a scalpel to a mountain. I didn't 'hit' that mountain, Aren; I withdrew the universe's permission for those atoms to exist. That wasn't a shockwave—it was pure mass-energy conversion. Scale matters."
I stared at what was once a glorious pillar of rock, a testament to the planet's fortitude.
"You... you just killed a mountain."
I was shook. There was no other way to sugarcoat it. Who does that?
I knew I was strong, but my memory had become fuzzy over the last eight years I had been in this new world. Was it really to this extent?
"It was in the way of the light. Page 45 is very small print. Now, pick up the sword. We're going to work on your 'Stutter.' If I see you hit the ground like a hydraulic press one more time, I'm going to rotate your skull 180 degrees instead of 15. Do you want to see if you can fight backwards."
"I'm throwing 170 megajoules into the floor! Do you know how hard that is?!" I tried to reason with him at some level, fully aware that he both could, and would snap our neck.
More than the apparent threat of a double suicide, when had he found time to read three pages?
"170 megajoules? Aren, that's the kinetic energy of a semi-truck hitting a wall. It's cute. It's a 'big number' for a flea. But that flick? That was twenty-two zettatons of TNT. You're bragging about a firecracker while I'm holding the Tsar Bomba, just four hundred trillion times over. Every second. You fight air resistance while I tell atoms that they can't exist in that coordinate. Fix your pinky. We're starting over. From the top."
It continued being that. I would sprint towards him, dozens of times faster than sound, and this guy would forcefully adjust my positioning while I was mid-air.
How fast was he moving? And was my form so incredibly wrong?
I thought I had it down perfectly, I had been practicing at some level since I was two.
And what did he mean after The Demon King? I hadn't survived that fight. Had I? How was he well... here?
"By the way, your heart is currently beating 278 times a minute in the 'real' world. Elena is currently trying to figure out why your skin is literally steaming, the room's filling with smoke and the smell of burning child. If you don't learn to stabilize your core in the next three minutes, you're going to wake up as a very fast, very hot, very dead puddle."
Is he exposition dumping me?
Amazing. Just spectacular. How am I supposed to adjust to this while this guy's trying to actually kill me? I can't tell what's going to kill me first, overheating, or this lunatic.
"Wait one second... you said after the Demon King? I died! I felt the light! There was no 'after'!"
The chair had remanifested into existence, and he had placed himself back onto it.
Slirp. Another page. Of another book.
Actually. There were a stack of books, probably over a dozen. From the modern era. This was created 2,000 years ago. How does it exist right now and how does he have my books from the modern era?
"We 'disappeared' halfway through the fight—no, actually we didn't. It took an extra six days, crossing two oceans incidentally, and a very annoying amount of paperwork afterwards. You're the 'Vanguard'—the part of us that likes to charge in and explode, literally and metaphorically. I'm the 'Result.' Now stop thinking. Your temporal lobes are starting to smoke, and it's making the air taste like copper. It's really annoying and if you don't stop I'm killing us both."
Really dude?
That's your biggest concern?
"This is getting a bit more than mildly inconvenient. One moment."
[Infirmary—Present]
Elena's hands glowed with a frantic, golden light, her mana desperately trying to knit together the ruptured capillaries in Aren's eyes.
Then, the temperature dropped sixty degrees in a single heartbeat.
The steam rising from Aren's skin didn't just stop; it imploded. The red-hot glow of his veins vanished into a frost-blue chill so sudden that the water basin on the nightstand shattered from the thermal shock.
Elena recoiled, her breath hitching. He wasn't dying. He was... being drained. Something was reaching into her son and pulling the heat into a void she couldn't see.
"He's... he's freezing!" Her voice sounded like it was being played through a broken radio. "Elias, his heart—it's not beating, it's shivering!"
[Subspace]
"There," Prime said, waving a glitching hand at the massive cloud of steam now billowing across our floor. "Crisis averted. I've stabilized your core. For now. But your hardware is still cheap. If you try to hit Mach 45 again before you're ten, I won't just let you handle the heat—I'll let you cook. For that matter I might dump more into you. It's a good lesson in thermodynamics. Now about that pinky..."
Somebody save me.
Please.
Actually, a bigger issue than the pinky is your Mana Engine. It's leaking. Stop it. Close the damn circuit you idiot, that glowing cyan veins you saw earlier was basically your blood evaporating in your veins."
Huh?
Now he mentions it, why hadn't that stuck out to me?
That was slightly more than a 'minor issue'.
"Pull the mana into your muscles and bones to power them, don't let it into your bloodstream like that."
Alright.
I let my mana run while, and then pulled it back in. The glowing veins had disappeared, leaving my body feeling strengthened.
I transferred some upwards, to my brain. I interwove mana in between the neurons, locking it in place. Like wiring a circuit directly into my skull.
I didn't want my brain to do whatever that fiasco was again.
I did the same with the rest of my body, using mana to hold my entire body into place, a 'Mana Lattice' of sorts.
"Good, you're finally at the level of a proper five-year-old."
What was he talking about? We had been horribly weak until we were about 15.
There was a 'thunk', the distinct sound of a book being casually closed by a god being careful not to annihilate the book, and about half the planet along with it. And that's with its increased durability. The scary part? I don't think I'm exaggerating to say that.
"How did you not destroy the planet during your fight with the Demon King?" I asked, closer to a whisper of the fear of God before me.
"Oh yeah, I held it together with mana, the same thing you just did. What did we call it. A Mana Lattice? Yeah, just that, but on a planetary level." He waved his hand, the glitching from earlier having become far worse. It was half like he was actively trying to phase out of reality.
He stood up once more, having spent more time sat down than stood up during our 'fight'.
"You're still a brat. But at least you're a brat that won't melt the bedsheets. Go back. And Aren? If you lose to that seven-year-old again, I'm deleting this subspace so I don't have to watch. Scrap that. I'm killing you. I'll melt your brain myself."
That's... something.
"Don't forget your 'hardware' is still fragile," Prime added, his voice starting to distort like a record playing at the wrong speed. "And I'm keeping the books. The chapter on 'Singularity Vectors in Aetheric Compression' was amateur, it treated a mana singularity like theory, whereas It's entirely realistic to do it. Developed it while fighting The Demon King, along with half of my abilities to be honest. I'm getting off track." He snapped his neck towards me.
"Wake up, Aren. Your mother is currently trying to drown you in holy water, and it's getting on my nerves. Bad."
The white field didn't fade; it fractured. One moment I was staring at a man who could delete geography with a flick of his wrist, and the next, the "Result" of my entire existence simply turned his back and walked into a crack he seemed to have created in the air.
***
The first thing I felt wasn't pain. It was a terrifying, crystalline clarity.
My eyes snapped open, no longer clouded by the red film of burst capillaries. My breath didn't hitch; it flowed with the mechanical precision of the 'Mana Lattice' I had just woven into my chest. Elena was slumped over the edge of the bed, her forehead resting against my hand, her mana exhausted to the point of a faint, trembling amber glow.
I sat up. My movements didn't have the "Stutter" of an eight-year-old. They were silent. Efficient. Calibrated.
The water basin was a jagged collection of shards, the water frozen into a single, jagged block of ice from the thermal dump.
Where was I? The infirmary? A hospital? I didn't particularly need to know.
I looked at Elena. Her breathing was shallow, the rhythmic pulse of her mana core flickering like a candle in a draft. She had spent herself entirely to keep me from detonating. I reached out, my fingers hovering just an inch from her temple. I didn't touch her—I didn't want to wake her—but I let a microscopic sliver of my newly stabilized mana bleed into her, a "thank you" in the form of a sedative to deepen her rest.
I stood up.
My feet touched the cold stone floor, but there was no grit, no friction. The 'Mana Lattice' held my weight before my muscles even had to engage. I didn't walk; I simply displaced myself toward the door. Every step was a calculation of force and wind resistance.
The hallway was silent, the shadows of the estate stretching long under the moonlight. I passed a suit of armor, and for a split second, I saw my reflection in the polished breastplate. I looked eight, but my eyes... they weren't right. They were too still.
I reached my bedroom door and slipped inside, the hinges not even daring to creak under the precision of my grip. I needed to see it. I needed to know if the "Result" was a liar or a thief.
I approached the nightstand, my heart thudding once—a slow, deliberate heavy beat.
The space beside it—where my Modern Magic Guide and three other textbooks had been—was empty.
In their place, the dark wood of the nightstand was scorched in a perfect, rectangular brand, as if the books had been burned out of existence. And right in the center of the char, caught in a splinter, was a single, shimmering white thread, hair that looked like me, just from 2,000 years ago.
Had he... taken my books from the real world? Like actually created a wormhole with sheer brute force across dimensions?
Y'know what? Sure. It wasn't worth asking questions anymore.
"Six days..." I whispered, my voice raspy but steady.
I looked at my hands. The "Hero" had disappeared along with the Demon King. But the "Result" was still out there, reading my books and watching my every mistake.
I closed my eyes and felt the mana in my bones. Lonan was seven. The Academy was seven years away. I was here. I existed.
I had a lot of work to do. And apparently, I had a very impatient version of myself making sure I didn't slack off.