Absolute Defense

According to the text of the Book of the Night Sky, the book had been created in the Old Belka Kingdom.

It was called "Old" because the Belka Kingdom had long since ceased to exist. It belonged to the distant past.

The book bore witness to the Belka Kingdom and recorded a vast amount of knowledge that no longer existed elsewhere. It could be considered the sole surviving record of a lost civilization.

After that, successive owners of the grimoire had guarded this civilization's tomb, constantly adding new knowledge to the book as they traveled through the various planes of existence.

With people, history, and a legacy, Belka had, in a sense, never died out.

Until one owner grew sick of the duty of guarding the embers of a civilization with no future and turned everything into hatred.

With her infinite mana, Huo Lin could forcibly keep the grimoire dormant.

But her current mastery of magic was nowhere near enough to alter the malicious code in the grimoire.

That was fine, though. She had plenty of time.

If she had no suitable Device, she could make one herself. That supposed relative with the foreign name would send her materials anyway.

Huo Lin was not quite sure what that "relative" wanted, but the other party was clearly happy to see her master magic.

"Huo Lin, can I really use this Changing Stage too?" Hayate was a little unsure of herself, but mostly curious. This was magic!

They were in Huo Lin's room.

After dinner, Huo Lin had called Hayate into her room and told her that the Device named Changing Stage was a success. She wanted Hayate to try it too.

"Of course. Anyone with mana in their body can activate it."

That was precisely the problem. All her life, Hayate had thought she was an ordinary person. Magic was something that only existed in fairy tales.

Yet Huo Lin had turned into a magical girl right in front of her. Not only that, Huo Lin had said that Hayate had mana too-that she was a born Mage.

Should I give it a try?

How could I possibly refuse?

"How do I use this?"

"The command is 'Changing Stage, activate.' Just say that out loud. It'll guide your mana for you."

That sounded simple enough.

"Changing Stage, activate!"

The instant she finished speaking, light enveloped Hayate, and a startled cry came from within it. Four or five seconds later, the light vanished, revealing Hayate in a tracksuit.

Magic really worked! Hayate suppressed her astonishment, but when she saw what she was wearing, she felt baffled all over again.

"Why is it my school tracksuit?"

She had thought she would get a pretty outfit, like the "magical girls" in stories.

This ordinary tracksuit had nothing to do with "magic" at all.

"It's just outfit-changing magic. You can store a whole wardrobe in it. Isn't the important thing that you can use magic? Ordinary people can't activate it, which means you're a magical girl."

That made sense too, so Hayate cheered up again.

"Can I use other magic too?"

"Hmm... That'll have to wait until I make some more Devices."

Getting Hayate to cast magic on her own without a Device would be rather difficult.

After all, she still could not solve linear equations in two variables after studying them for a week.

Perhaps Huo Lin could choose some spells with simple structures, ones that only required rote memorization and could be used once they had been practiced enough. Defensive spells, for instance.

She could raise a fixed magical Defense Shield in front of herself, with no need to calculate trajectories or consider how to counter an enemy. Just a simple shield.

A basic Defense Shield did not have many runes either, only a few hundred characters. Although they were in a "foreign language" Hayate could not understand, there were only a few hundred of them. Surely memorizing the shapes of those characters would not be much trouble?

Huo Lin herself could memorize them after a single look. However stupid other people were, surely they could manage it after five or ten readings?

Speaking of the Defense Shield, Huo Lin remembered an advanced defensive spell recorded in the Book of the Night Sky.

Though it was called "advanced," its underlying principle was not particularly complicated. Unlike ordinary defensive spells, it was not true "defense," but a technique for distorting spacetime.

If "distorting spacetime" sounded a little too sophisticated, then put simply, it meant gravity. After all, gravity was fundamentally the distortion of spacetime.

It created powerful gravity around the caster, making it difficult for enemy attacks to reach them.

In theory, ordinary single-target spells had an effective range of less than ten kilometers. As long as the distance between the caster and the enemy was distorted and stretched beyond ten kilometers, the attacks would no longer reach the caster.

That was the principle behind the spell.

What made it advanced was its enormous mana consumption. More precisely, that consumption had no upper limit.

The more mana fed into it, the farther space would stretch. According to the experimental data in the book, an AAA-rank Mage casting it at full power could stretch the distance by roughly ten kilometers.

With S-rank mana, that distance could stretch beyond fifty kilometers. Even against an extremely long-range attack that could not be completely exhausted, the caster would have enough time to dodge. At the same speed, stretching the distance naturally meant stretching the time as well. Attacks would become exceedingly slow in front of the caster.

What this spell meant for Huo Lin, however, was that her mana had no upper limit.

Which meant that, in theory, if she cast this spell, stretching the distance to a hundred or a thousand kilometers would be effortless. She could even measure it in light-years, or extend it to infinity.

If I stretch the distance between us to one light-year, even if you attack at the speed of light with no energy loss, it'll still take a year to hit me. What are you going to do about that?

As long as she hid inside that "turtle shell," no attack could hit her. It truly deserved the name "Absolute Defense"!

The only drawback was that, while using Absolute Defense, her own attacks would have to cross that same enormous distance to reach her opponent. Distorted spacetime did not distinguish between friend and foe.

In other words, it was a skill that did not allow simultaneous attack and defense. She would have to abandon attacking while she "crouched down and covered her head."

But it was already an incredible lifesaving skill. There was no reason to demand more.

Tokyo had been rather unsettled over the past few days. The news had even captured footage of a "giant bird" formed from a Wind Elemental flying through the sky. The report described it as an optical illusion caused by some kind of cloud formation during a hurricane.

But Huo Lin knew perfectly well that it was a giant Wind Elemental bird. It had actually appeared in Tokyo in plain sight.

She thought of the card she had acquired a few days earlier. In terms of the nature of its mana, it felt like something similar. More than one card had scattered that day.

So was a card responsible for this?

The giant Wind Elemental bird had not caused any harm afterward, however. At least, the official reports Huo Lin had seen about that "hurricane incident" said there had been no casualties.

Which meant it had already been dealt with.

Clearly, the authorities also had forces capable of handling magical matters. In that case, she had no intention of sticking her nose into it. She just needed to mind her own business and stay out of trouble.

One day later.

As it turned out, Hayate could not even memorize a few hundred characters.

According to her, most people could not remember hundreds of symbols they did not understand.

Even after Huo Lin used translation magic on her so she could understand what the characters meant, Hayate spent half a day memorizing them before firmly declaring that she was going to do her math homework.

Just two letters, X and Y, were much easier on the eyes.

For the time being, her curiosity about magic was gone.