While we waited for Ainash to wake up, we decided to see how Distortion Strike worked when it came to altering Erani’s appearance. So, she toggled it on, and…
“Woah.”
Index had been right, it certainly changed her appearance to a point where she was unrecognizable. But it wasn’t anything like a simple makeover. The moment she toggled the Spell on, it felt like a cloud of darkness overtook her, turning her skin an ashen shade of gray and replacing her eyes with hollow pits of darkness. Her face was gaunt and I somehow felt a sinister energy radiating from her, despite her not actually doing anything different.
Her entire body looked cloaked in smoke and shadows, but when I looked down to actually focus on the smoke, I saw that there was nothing there. Like an illusion that only existed in your peripheral vision, fleeing from sight whenever you attempted to look at it. In fact, it felt difficult to really focus on any individual feature of her body, face, anything. Any time I tried to, my mind swirled and my eyes seemed to automatically drift away from whatever I was attempting to look at. An extremely disorienting feeling.
“What is it?” Erani asked.
Her voice was like a loud whisper, somehow deathly quiet while being able to be heard perfectly well. I had a feeling she was trying to talk normally, only the Spell was renovating her speech, as well. She looked down at herself, that illusory smoke drifting off her hair in a way that made it sort of look like she was underwater, with it lingering, suspended wherever it had been before she moved. But still, whenever I tried to actually look at the smoke, it disappeared from my vision as though it had never been there, and I was crazy for having seen it.
“Is it working?” she continued. “I don’t see anything different.”
“You don’t see anything?” I asked. “Yeah, you definitely look different. Like a…completely separate person. Not even a person, really. Like a monster.”
She leaned back, surprised at my words. “Really? I feel like I look the exact same.”
“Do you at least hear how your voice is different?”Now she brought up her hand to her mouth absentmindedly, as though feeling to make sure her lips were still there. Which they were, however shadowy and distorted they looked. “What do you mean? How’s it different? Do I sound bad?”
I laughed. “No, I guess it isn’t a bad change, just…kinda scary. When you talk, it feels like you’re right behind me, whispering directly into my ear. Honestly, if I had my eyes closed and couldn’t see you, I’d have no idea how to tell where you are based just on where your voice is coming from.”
“I seriously can’t feel any difference.”
“Yeah. ‘Harder to notice in the dark’ is the understatement of the century,” I said with a chuckle. “I mean, I get what it means. None of these changes make you any more concealed when it’s bright out—even when it’s halfway between day and night, like right now. But if it were pitch black out? I mean, your skin, the smoke…you’d blend right in.”
“Wait, it’s changing my skin color? Smoke?” I could just barely see Erani’s eyes widen through the murky pits that currently made up her eye sockets.
“Yeah, yeah. So, like, you look…gray, now. And if I don’t look at you directly, it almost seems like there’s this mist, or smoke, surrounding your body. Again, if it were dark out, you’d probably complement the environment so well, I’d never think there was a person sitting in front of me unless I looked directly at you. Oh, and obviously, you look totally different. No way I’d say you were the same Erani I knew,” I chuckled.
“I mean, I guess I’m glad people won’t recognize me, but…do I really look that bad?”
“No, no, like I said, you don’t look bad,” I said, leaning over and wrapping an arm around her. When I did so, I found that most of the new elements like the smoke and gaunt features were illusions, just like the Spell said. My hand touched her true body and pulled her close. “It looks cool. Just different. Like, you’ll probably scare off a few people, but you’ll look awesome doing it.”
“How does that work?” she laughed.
“Well, Ainash put those sentries on-guard from how she looked, right? But you don’t think she looks ugly, do you?”
“...I guess,” Erani said hesitantly. “I’d really like to look in a mirror or something, though.”
“Would it even show up in a mirror? If you can’t see it now, I don’t see why a reflection would contain the Spell’s effects for you, either.”
“Well, I don’t know, I’ll get someone to paint me or something, then,” she sighed, exasperated.
“I don’t think we’re going to have the money to spare for that,” I chuckled. “We’re kind of, y’know, completely broke, currently.”
Now it was like I could feel her rolling her eyes. “Okay. Sure. Fine.”
“You gotta get those expensive tastes in check, rich girl,” I said with a wink. “We’re gonna be roughing it for a while.”
“Oh, yeah, like I haven’t been getting used to it this whole time?”
“I don’t know, you were out there eating out at fancy restaurants every day, I’m just making sure you don’t bankrupt us when you get back into old habits.”
“As if,” she chuckled. “You’ll probably be the one bankrupting us, with all of those Spells you need to Upgrade. All of those Crystals, we’ll be saving up for them for months.”
“Well, not really,” I said. “I can just use them and go back in time to before we even bought them, remember? Even if they have them locked up so I wouldn’t be able to just steal them and go back in time, we only actually need enough money for one before I can effectively Upgrade all of them.”
“Oh, right, I forgot about that,” she said. “So disorienting to remember you have all of these experiences that I’ll never see.”
“Actually,” I said, remembering I’d never told her about what Index had told me, “it might not be forever.”
She frowned. “What?”
“Let’s wait until Ainash is awake, so I can explain it to both of you. It’s definitely something you should both hear. But I think there’s some serious potential in our future.”
We waited a few hours before Ainash awoke, and then headed out, down the road and to the city. It was solidly into morning by now, and over the time that’d passed, I was able to spend my Mana on Noxious Grasp rather than Expedite, since I was sitting and not moving around. The spell passed 1000 Spell XP during that time, so it was now over halfway to its next Rank. At this point, I felt a bit of urgency in Ranking the Spell up, since, once it got to Rank 20, I’d actually be able to Upgrade it instead of getting stuck there. And a second Upgrade on an already solid Spell would help my build quite a bit.
Once we began walking, I went ahead and explained to Erani and Ainash what Index had told me about Time Loop’s Upgrade. Specifically, about how we might be able to use the Bond to keep everyone’s memories throughout Time Loops.
“Wait, really?” Erani said when I was done. “I’ll be able to remember?”
“That’s what it sounded like. Index said the method to get it to that point ‘won’t be obscure,’ so presumably we just need to keep doing what we’re doing and then we’ll get there naturally? Or maybe once I get to a certain point with my Familiarity with the Bond or whatever, it’ll be able to give us some more info on what, exactly, needs to be done.”
“Holy shit,” she said under her breath. “Time travel.”
“Did you not think it was real before?” I laughed. “Wouldn’t have thought the possibility would be so shocking.”
“No, it’s just…” she shook her head. “I didn’t think that would ever be something I could do anything more than hear described to me. To think that I might be able to experience it…”
“Mother, it is very cool!” Ainash said. “Is all like, wow! Remember! Dragon! Humans! Nauseous! Want to throw up! Bad guy! And then can do stuff because remember!”
I laughed at Ainash’s excited explanation of her own experience with keeping her memories. She certainly made it sound exciting.
“So, how do we get it?” Erani asked.
“Well, Index couldn’t actually say that,” I shrugged. “But I guess the method will be revealed to us? The way that it spoke about things, I have to assume it’ll either be tied to the Bond reaching a certain Rank, or to Ainash reaching a certain Level.”
“So, what? We just…power-Level her?”
I laughed. “I can’t believe we’ve gotten to a point where power-Leveling has become a normal, acceptable suggestion.”
“Okay, sure, maybe that’s a bit far. But we can’t really speed up pushing the Bond to higher Ranks, so the only thing we really can control is her Level. So we just push that as far as we can, and see if it works.”
“You’re really eager to get this done, huh?”
“Of course I am. It’s time travel! How could I not want to experience that?”
“It certainly is an interesting experience. We’ll have to go on a time date, or something,” I laughed.
“Time date?”
“Yeah, yeah, like, a date where we just do whatever we want, and then go back in time, and boom. No consequences. Rob a bank just to see if we could get away with it. That sort of thing.”
“That seems like a…great idea, actually.”
“You were about to say it was a horrible idea, and then you changed your mind?”
“Well, I’m not sure I want to rob a bank specifically—that sounds awful and stressful—but maybe it could be nice.”
“Man,” I sighed, “I can’t believe you’ll get to remember everything now. I won’t be able to do all that weird stuff to you and then go back in time and you’ll forget it.”
“Wait, what weird stuff?!”
I laughed. “Nothing, relax. I’m joking.”
“You better be.” She backed away like a threatened maiden, but I could tell she was playing into the joke, too.
I looked forward to the long road ahead of us. I was so used to either being in a thick forest or a massive mountain range, it was strange to be able to see so far in every direction, plains on every side. I could even spot more of those Gloomspur things that Bon had fought before in the distance, roaming the fields and killing all the grass they touched.
But either way, the road stretched to society. What was on either side of it didn’t matter. People, housing, food. I’d have to use Expedite on myself so I could walk on my own, meaning we wouldn’t be able to travel any faster than a normal group of people, but even then, we’d definitely reach those town walls by the end of today. So we pushed onward.
Hours passed uneventfully. We talked about what we wanted to do once we got to town—I personally wanted to show Ainash what a bed was, but Erani wanted to take a bath—but other than that, most of our journey was made in silence. No monster attacks or ambushes, we didn’t even pass any travelers along the road. But I did still keep Dark Plate on at all times just in case we saw someone, and Erani was sure to have Distortion Strike ready to activate at any time. No sense in taking needless risks when it came to our identities—those border guards knowing Erani’s face was already pushing it.
So the time passed to midday, to afternoon, to evening, until finally, once the sun began to set behind the rolling hills in the distance, I began to be able to make out some detail in the town. As we approached it, I saw that the walls looked relatively normal, protecting the core populace while some farmers stuck on the outside to utilize the vast land to cultivate their crops.
Farmers tended to be old, retired Classers, since the extra Stats could help them care for their fields and the power could keep them safe from any threats that got past the adventurers clearing out local monster populations. Some of the Magic-Types could even use Spells to accelerate their crops’ growth.
At least in Koinkar, lots of the bigger cities didn’t actually have farms outside their walls, however. Since they’d naturally have higher-Leveled individuals in their midst, some of those Magic-Types could specialize so far into the crop cultivation path of Spells that they could single-handedly feed an entire district off of only a couple houses worth of land.
Sometimes, when one of those powerful Classers feeding so many people died, they’d have to spread out into the outside land and the city would have to up its spending to fend off monsters much more aggressively because of this, but generally speaking, the ideal scenario would be for everyone to be safe within them, so then the city could focus on only hiring people to kill the ones that could threaten to actually break through those walls, greatly helping the financial situation of the settlement.
So, when I saw the sprawling farms outside the town, I knew this place probably wasn’t the wealthiest of settlements. But I didn’t care too much about that. A town was a town, and a bed was a bed.
As we crested a hill, I spotted down below, the gates leading inside. There wasn’t even a line to get in. Just a couple guards standing outside.
“Okay,” I said, “Erani, turn on your Spell. Let’s make a new home.”