Two seconds after the mysterious silver-haired girl called Morning Star vanished, the entire world returned to normal.
The wind in the forest began to move again, and the obscured ambient presence returned to perception. Light and shadow flickered through the dense woods, restoring that dusky state where evening was near but darkness had not yet fully fallen. The ranger soldiers who had vanished from sight were now standing guard around them. These focused soldiers seemed never to have left at all, still maintaining the positions and postures they had held in Maggie's memory at the final moment. None of them had noticed anything unusual in the forest.
The Great Adventurer Modir stood before Maggie, weaving an abstruse and complex Rune Array in his hands, apparently having just reached the final step of the Memory Extraction Technique.
Yet the next second, Modir, who should have noticed nothing at all, suddenly blinked. The Rune Array in his hands abruptly changed configuration, and the nearly completed Memory Extraction Technique was forcibly reversed by the Legendary Mage into some kind of mental protection spell. Maggie felt the magic in the air churn, gather, then be forcibly suppressed and reshaped by a powerful force at a terrifying frequency. Layer upon layer of protection was instantly imposed upon her mind. In that moment of sluggish thought, she heard Modir's voice directly in her head: "What happened? I just sensed another consciousness in your mind... but I don't think I caught that intruder."
Only then did Maggie truly realize what a powerful Legendary Spellcaster this harmless-looking, ever-cheerful old man really was. The "consciousness injection" that had appeared in her mind for less than one-hundredth of a second had not escaped his notice. The instant he detected something amiss, he had even built layers of defenses within her