The steady, repetitive sound of my feet pounding the dirt as I jogged through the forest filled the air. Well, to me it was jogging. For people who lived in the ordinary, Bystander world, it would’ve been considered a staggeringly fast sprint. My version of a leisurely pace, at that moment, approached something like sixty miles per hour. I could go almost twice that if I really put my heart into it, and that was without shifting into my lion form. And without using my acceleration rings. With all that added in, I could move pretty ridiculously fast if I really wanted to. My top speed at that point, if I used everything I had, was something like three hundred miles per hour. Four hundred for a few seconds if I Seosten boosted. Percy had timed me.
The current boost to my speed came courtesy of my Necromancy training. Over the weeks since Ehn had left me here to practice, I’d learned a lot. And one of the main things I had learned was to prepare. All magic in this world–okay, the vast majority of what I knew anyway– involved preparation, and Necromancy was no different. The more effort I put into being ready when something happened, the better off I would be.
In this case, preparation meant spark-charging my ghosts. That was what Doctor Manakel called it. Essentially, the idea was to give each ghost a specific spell that would gradually summon more energy to them from the surrounding environment. I used a little bit of my own energy to put that spell on them, then they would go out and do their own thing. Over time, ambient energy from the air, the sun, everything, would slowly fill them. Then, when I needed it, I could summon the ghost to me, take some of the energy the spell had given them, and use it for my own ends. Yes, it took hours, if not days, for the ghost to gather all the energy depending on where they were and what was going on. But it was still useful if I gave them the time they needed to charge up.
I had a lot of ghosts with me. Several hundred by that point, all of them completely voluntary. I’d made it clear they were all allowed to leave any time they wanted. I was quite firm about not being anything like Fossor. It took a lot of power and time to charge all of them even with the spark-charge spell. But I had both in spades. Not needing much in the way of sleep, I could spend an hour or so doing nothing but spark-charging any ghost who needed it. After that, they could go off and do their own thing (even using some of the power from the spark-charge to pick things up when they needed to), until I called for them. It was like having a bunch of batteries I could use for any spell I wanted to, whenever necessary.
So that was how I had so many ghosts that could give me power. The reason that power translated into speed was the Amplification spell. That one came from Percy. She showed me how I could use that spell to temporarily boost a single physical attribute. Strength, speed, stamina (if I needed it), reflexes, that sort of thing. It was sort of like the Seosten boost but for a single thing. And it lasted longer, almost a full minute. All I had to do was make the rune for the spell appear on my body somewhere using my inscription power, summon one of my spark-charged ghosts to siphon energy off of, then activate the spell with that energy. For the next minute, the physical attribute that I had connected to the spell when I drew the rune (speed in this case) would be boosted. And if a minute wasn’t long enough, I just summoned more of my ghosts. Eventually, I was supposed to be able to juggle summoning multiple ghosts at the same time to boost different attributes. We were still working on that part. But hey, at least I had the time to actually do that ‘working on’ bit. I might’ve had a lot of qualms with the way Ehn worked, but he had been right about using time travel to give me an opportunity to actually learn and practice all this stuff without the constant interruptions that came during my day-to-day life.
Technically, I had already been able to use power from my ghosts to empower myself without the spell Percy had taught me. Fossor had made certain I knew how to drain ghosts for my own use. But this was better and more efficient, because it allowed me to take just a bit of the extra energy from them and get a better boost. Fossor simply summoned all the ghosts he ever needed from his own planet and squeezed them like juice boxes until they were completely used up. Obviously, I didn’t want to do that. Thus, this little solution. I gave them time to charge and then they shared that energy with me whenever I needed it. Instead of squeezing them like juice boxes, they sort of… held the juice and handed it to me.
So, as the sun came up over the horizon, I continued on my early jog, which also doubled as practice time so I could become more efficient at using my ghosts to empower my speed. Every minute, I would reach out with my power. But it wasn’t as simple as just pulling the nearest ghost. No, that wouldn’t work for this sort of training. Instead, I reached out to Grover, who was with a cluster of Seth and a few other ghosts back in the village. Grover, in turn, would give me the mental image of another of my ghosts. From there, my job was to reach out even further with my Necromancy, search through all of the ghosts who had very intentionally spread themselves out as far as they could, and find that single one that Grover and the rest of the group back in town had chosen. Only once I located that one could I summon the particular ghost to me and use the speed-boosting spell.
Oh yeah, and I did all of that while continuing to jog at a relatively decent highway speed. Well, if highways had existed at this point.
And yet, even that wasn’t enough for training. Percy, Seth, Doctor Manakel, hell even Grover agreed on that. All my ghosts did, even the ones I had just met back in the haunted forest. Maybe especially them, considering they, and the haunted forest itself, had apparently been created by some future version of me. And yes, that was still a real doozy of a thing for me to wrap my mind around.
But in any case, they agreed that I needed to train even harder. Thus, the ghost-missiles. At least, that’s what I was calling them. Essentially, a couple dozen of the ghosts that weren’t part of the ‘spread out and wait to be the one Flick is supposed to summon to empower herself’ squad were taking turns waiting to ambush me. They would use up the power they had, fly straight at me from any direction (including straight up through the ground), and try to ‘hit’ me before I managed to react and catch them with my own power. They won points every time they were able to touch me first. Thus far this morning, they only had three points. Which was a big step up from the nine they’d gotten by this point the first day we’d tried this test. I was getting better.
That was how I spent a couple hours that morning. Jogging at a good sixty miles an hour in a wide circle all around the forests and plains of Wyoming while constantly splitting my attention between reaching out for specific ghosts who were spread out in every direction, and catching other ghosts who were trying to ambush me. Not to mention using the right ghosts to empower my speed with spells that I had to keep recreating. Yeah, that was another rule in this whole thing. I had to create each speed-boosting rune from scratch every time I used them, which was one more thing to focus on. And given how exacting magic was about every tiny detail on the runes you were trying to use, the slightest mistake made the spell not work. Sometimes painfully so, given the couple times I’d gotten it wrong and set off a backfire on my own clothes. It was like getting zapped with electricity. And yet, I was getting better about that too. All of this, the training, was adding up. I was steadily improving with every day that passed. I was improving in a way that felt real and tangible.
Eventually, my long jog brought me back around to the town. As I drew closer, I could smell all the breakfasts cooking in everyone’s homes, which made my mouth water a bit. I might not get tired as easily, but I absolutely did still get hungry, especially after a run like that where I was constantly using so much energy.
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The loud crack of an axe slamming into a log to cut it in half might have made me jump–okay, had made me jump back when we first got here. But now, I didn’t even glance that way. “Hey, Edgar!” I called instead, slowing my jog down to something far more reasonable for a normal person while giving a wave off to the right where the man in question was already setting another log up to be cut.
Edgar, a gruff man with a beard that reached his stomach, called his own cheerful greeting. “What’s the tally this morning, Felicity?”
“Three!” I called back the number of times I’d been tagged by my ghost-missiles, hearing him give me a loud whoop of encouragement before passing out of his line of sight on my way into the town proper. There was a wooden wall around the main area where most of the homes and other buildings were, with a couple lookouts keeping watch from the top of it. They too called out greetings, which I returned.
Yeah, I had settled into a bit of a routine in this place. I was still worried about… well, everything. But being several hundred years in the past from all the people and problems that meant so much was… freeing, in a way. Again, I could focus solely on my training. We were out in the middle of nowhere both in time and location. I couldn’t interfere with anything else that was going on in this time period without causing problems, and we were so isolated out here in the wilderness that there was basically nothing for me to run into anyway.
I missed my family. I missed Tabbris, Valley, Shiori, everyone. I missed all of them. But now more than ever, I knew how important this training was. I knew exactly how important it was that I use the time I had to become as strong as I could. Because I knew what was waiting for me. I had destroyed Maestro’s plans, the ones he had spent centuries working on. Not only that, I had made it so he could never use that spell on this world again. He wouldn’t forget that, not even in my own present day. When he found out who I was, when he found me, he would absolutely make his displeasure known. He was worse than Fossor. He was stronger and more dangerous. And I had pissed him off personally. He was angry at me because of me, because of what I had done. Fossor was an enemy I had essentially inherited. But Maestro was all mine. I had earned his wrath myself.
All of which meant that, as much as I missed everyone I cared about back home, I needed to be ready. I had to take advantage of this opportunity, all of it. Because once I was in my own present day, things were going to get more dangerous than they had ever been. So, I did my training regularly. And I helped the people around town. Not with life-or-death stuff, just with their ordinary lives. I did chores, talked with them, learned about their lives. I just… lived here in this town, with these people. I knew them now. I’d learned their names, their pasts, their dreams and fears, and more. Over these weeks, I’d learned so much about the people who had created Laramie Falls. They only knew me as Felicity, of course. I figured I was tempting fate enough just by doing this much. If there ever existed anything in the town’s history about a blonde girl named Felicity Chambers hanging around… yeah, that might complicate things at one point or another. Between the Bystander Effect erasing all the details of how this town got here, and the hundreds of years between this time period and when I was born, I would probably be okay as long as I didn’t let them build a statue of me or anything dumb like that. And no, that was not a random hypothetical, a few of the people brought up the idea before I quashed it as politely yet firmly as possible.
As I made my way through town, greeting everyone I saw by name, my stomach decided to remind me one more time that, unlike ninety percent of my need for sleep, it still existed. So I angled my jog (the actual normal person jog rather than the teenager on a joyride in his first car sort of ‘jog’ I’d been doing out in the forest) toward the house where Persephone, Cerberus and I had been living. Well, Cerberus lived outside, but still. It was our home, at least for now.
Before I could get there, however, another figure stepped into view. He was a small, green-skinned and slightly overweight man with a bald head that had two long devil-like horns rising from either side. He wore a fancy dark suit with a bright blue ruffled shirt, and carried a gleaming ruby-colored cane with a small black skull as the handle. Without a word or motion of warning, he stepped right into my path, holding up the skull-head cane with the diamond-eyes facing me.
“Hey, Salumson,” I greeted him casually while skidding to a stop. “What’s up?”
Salumson, or Alder Salumson to use the man’s title, was one of the town’s leaders, alongside Sheriff Dune and a couple others. but those two were the main people in charge.
“O-oh, ah, yes hello, Felicity. I trust you are doing well this ahh, this fine morning?” The man’s pitch-black eyes, devil horns, and even the forked tail that extended through the back of his tailored pants might’ve made plenty of people think he was evil. Not to mention the skull cane. But he was a pretty great guy. That whole stepping out in front of me thing wasn’t an intimidation tactic, though I might’ve thought so back when we first met. He just didn’t think that sort of thing through. He was more of an absent-minded professor than a scheming devil.
And yes, I might’ve had a handful of ghosts spy on the guy for awhile just to make certain of that. Between that and all the conversations we’d had, to say nothing of the fact that Ehn had felt safe in leaving me here, I was as certain as I could be that Salumson was on the up and up.
Okay, maybe that last bit wasn’t the best reasoning. If Ehn thought leaving me in town with a monster would help me in the long run, he’d totally do it. But still, I had checked this guy out as much as possible. I believed he was one of the good ones. All these people were. After all, Maestro didn’t want anyone who might’ve caused a problem for his little spell, and ‘ordinary folk just living their lives’ were far easier to predict than evil people with ambitions.
It was just slightly possible that I had spent far too long overthinking this whole thing in all the time we’d been here.
“I’m good, just heading back for some food,” I confirmed. “But speaking of breakfast, something tells me you didn’t drag yourself away from Helsenmia’s cooking just to ask if I was okay. If you did leave food that good sitting on the table for something that pointless, I’d have to check if you were possessed.”
Giving a visible shudder at the very idea, Salumson quickly replied, “Yes, well it seems Millersby hasn’t returned from his fishing trip last week. He should have been back yesterday. His ahh, his wife is worried about him and it would mean oh so much if you could… maybe… go and check if he’s alright? We really hate to impose, it’s just–”
“It’s okay,” I assure him. “He’s two days north, right? I can head up along the trail and see if I run into him.”
“Oh thank you, thank you so much.” From the way Salumson visibly relaxed, it was a huge weight off his shoulders. “I’m sure Millersby just got held up, but you know how Katya worries. She’ll be happy if she knows you’re taking a look.”
“Hey, it’s no big deal,” I insisted. “We’ve been here for… how many days now?” He was better with numbers. Never forgot them, actually. It was a gift of his species.
“Sixty-four,” he informed me promptly, sure enough. “Ah, sixty-five once the sun goes down tonight.”
Sixty-five days, just about. I’d been here for about two months, going through my lessons without any huge interruptions. That really was a record for me these days. Hell, going out to check on Millersby would be the most unusual thing I’d done this whole time.
Okay, well, given everything I was and did, ‘unusual’ was a pretty high bar. Regardless, I’d spent these past couple of months living a relatively normal life as far as that went. I did my training, exercised (Avalon would’ve killed me if I let that slack), talked with everyone in town, just… did the things any casual up-and-coming world-class Necromancer teen Heretic who had been sent back in time to the founding of her own hometown would do.
Promising again that I would look into it as soon as I ate something, I made my way to the house. There were great smells coming from there as well. Unsurprising, considering Percy had been doing everything she could to feed me three course meals at least twice a day. She said I was using up a lot of calories with all the training, especially those runs. All the stuff I was doing used up energy, so she did her level best to feed it back into me as quickly as possible. Emphasis on feed.
“Flick!” Turning to me with a bright smile as I entered after giving Cerberus a morning snuggle, Persephone gestured to the table where she had already laid out this morning’s feast. As with every other morning, she was wearing an apron with the words, ‘You Better Eat All This Food Cuz All I Want Is Your Brains.’ “I tried some new recipes today!”
“Thanks,” I replied with a gesture over my shoulder. “Maybe we can put some of it in a doggy bag.
“Cuz we’ve got something to check out.”