Chapter 132: Everything Will Be Mine in the End
Many things had happened that night. Freya, now in the grip of her sin, had eyes for nothing but avarice.
Life’s ups and downs, relationships and even doubts no longer occupied her mind. In that moment, she saw them as nothing more than trifles scattered along the path to her design.
She moved forward without wasting a single second. On the first floor, her replica fought and gathered experience and knowledge, taking the time to watch the adventurers use their techniques before killing them.
Meanwhile, her real body, the one on the last floor of the dungeon, had turned into a bookworm. Or rather a spellworm, except that her books had legs, screamed a lot and usually ended up cut in half.
She had spent several hours training on one very particular type of quantimanas, the lightning kind, the kind belonging to the man she had quite literally sliced in two.
The hardest part had been finding the right shade of blue among all the quantimanas floating around her. Without Aria’s help, that was what had taken the longest.
And once again, even in the grip of her sin, she realized just how important and useful her servant was to her.
Once she had found the right shade, she trained relentlessly for hours, with little to show for it.
She reproduced the man’s movements perfectly. She gathered the lightning quantimanas in the center of her chest, then tried to spread them through her body, but they had barely left their starting point before they scattered in every direction, crackled on her skin for an instant and died out. She took the same charging stance, blade low at waist height and knees bent, and nothing followed. A few sparks ran along her arms and raised the hairs on them, then nothing more. None of the three enhancements held for longer than a second.
She told herself these had to be high-rank spells. After all, the man had seemed to be a veteran, and these were surely spells he had spent his whole life learning and refining.
But she also knew that with her perfect memory, knowing the precise movements, the exact number of quantimanas and everything else, it would be possible for her. It was only a matter of time. These spells he had spent a whole lifetime forging would end up belonging to her, like everything else.
It was while replaying the night’s events that she remembered the words of the woman she had spared.
"Without an incantation..."
Then she remembered the way Zoyra used her spell, a spell she still hadn’t managed to copy either.
Incantations?
The man had only spoken the names of his spells. Zoyra, on the other hand, recited actual chants. And Freya could cast a spell however she pleased, whether by speaking the skill’s name, as she had with her fireball, or in silence, as when she had cast it at the man who raised his sword.
What are they for? I already know they aren’t required, since Aria, Kaguya and I can all do without them. So what are they for? What makes them do it?
Was it a habit of this world’s inhabitants, or more precisely of its humans? Because monsters didn’t do it, or at least not in any language she could hear.
She asked herself several questions like these without finding a satisfying answer, all while continuing to gather quantimanas for her next attempt.
So she went back to the very beginning and started taking everything apart.
What is magic?
A variable that made a perfect world imperfect. But she knew that to understand things, she had to look at them from another angle, and more precisely from the angle of these humans.
For a human, what would it be? What changes between an ordinary human and me in the way we perceive magic?
She thought for a few moments without ever stopping gathering her quantimanas.
No, those aren’t the right questions.
The truth was that she simply couldn’t understand what magic meant to a human in her current state. So she set that aside and came at the problem from the other end.
What makes me superior to an ordinary being?
And then, all at once, everything became much clearer.
She already knew. First, her memory was infallible and let her recall any spell at all. Second, whenever she imagined a spell, it helped her conceptualize it perfectly, thanks to her knowledge of this world and of the old one, including the most scientific parts of it.
She could effortlessly recall any spell and its design down to the molecular level, at least as it would have worked in her old world.
𝙛𝓇ⅇ𝒆𝚠𝗲𝙗𝓃𝐨𝙫𝑒𝖑.𝑐𝚘𝗺
When she had cast her fireball, for example, the Freya of before hadn’t noticed. But the Freya of today, who picked apart every corner of her flawless brain, knew: at the same moment, she had recalled the oxygen feeding the combustion, the energy needed to break its bonds and the heat released in return, intense enough for the flame to burn pure and smokeless.
She didn’t know whether it worked the same way here, or even whether it truly helped. But all these elements gave her something stronger than any other being had.
The imagination of a spell.
She could conceptualize it perfectly. Nothing about it was vague, and thanks to her enhanced brain, it all unfolded on several planes at once: physical, aesthetic, quantimanic and even molecular.
So incantations would help mages imagine? Force their minds to recall every moment they spent training? Something like that?
Then maybe the key to unlocking these spells is to borrow their incantations?
She thought a little longer, then reached a conclusion.
That simply makes no sense.
It wouldn’t help her, since she could already conceptualize the spell perfectly in her mind.
Then what am I missing?
She didn’t know, and time was up. She had gathered enough quantimanas, so she refocused on her training, determined to make one attempt anyway.
She closed her eyes and saw the man again as her memory had kept him: the lightning bursting from his chest, the way it coiled around him, the split second in which his muscles swelled all at once.
It wasn’t the whole body that needed filling. Muscles contracted in response to tiny electrical signals, and it was those signals that had to be amplified, at their source. So she guided the lightning quantimanas to her sternum, then sent them one by one down along her nerves, to the points where those nerves met her muscles, in her shoulders, her arms, her thighs and her calves. Only there did she transform them.
"Thunderous Augmentation."
A bolt of lightning burst from her chest and coiled around her with a sharp crackle.
This time, it held.
She slowly opened her eyes. Bluish arcs ran along her arms, and beneath her skin she could feel her muscles taut, swollen with a strength she had never had. She raised her hand in front of her face, closed her fingers and opened them again, then lowered her eyes to the rest of her body, where the electricity crackled without fading.
Then...
"Ow..."
The word slipped out between her clenched teeth, barely audible.
All her muscles had just contracted at once, at the same moment and without any restraint. Her legs gave way beneath her and she dropped to one knee, one hand clenched on her thigh and the other pressed against her side. She could feel the fibers pulling, stretching past their limit and then tearing one by one, while her nerves burned beneath her skin, from her fingertips to the back of her neck.
She clenched her jaw so hard her teeth ground together. The taste of iron flooded her mouth, and a thin trickle of blood slipped from the corner of her lips and ran down her chin.
She canceled the spell.
The lightning died out, her muscles all went slack together, and she stayed motionless for a moment, short of breath, her gaze fixed on the grass beneath her knee. Then she raised the back of her hand to her chin, wiped away the blood with a slow motion and looked at it for a while, without the slightest emotion.
Then she stood up.
She did it in a single motion, without hesitating and without the slightest wince, as if the pain had never existed. It was still there, somewhere beneath her skin, but it didn’t matter. It was just one more detail, one of those trifles scattered along the path to her design, and Freya stepped over it without even looking.
Day was breaking, her replica would soon calm down, and she had a great deal to do today. So she didn’t waste any more time.
She raised her arms above her head and stretched long and slow, cracking her shoulders and her neck, then rolled her wrists to shake off the last of the tingling.
"Then let’s not waste any more time than necessary. Let’s do things the way they ought to be done!"
She smiled, and a gleam of pure avarice shone in her yellow eyes before she went on.
"Initiating Subspace."
[ INVITATION OF THE 358 MEMBERS INTO THE SUBSPACE SENT. ]
[ TRANSPORT OF PARTICIPANTS IN PROGRESS. ]
As the notifications appeared and her body and soul were carried into the subspace, time, unlike during the Overlords’ Summit, kept flowing in the world.
Her body therefore fell to the ground, an empty shell, without her paying it the slightest attention or caring about it in the least.