"We're finally leaving," Lyra murmured, staring blankly into the distance.
Amelia remained silent beside her, also gazing at nothing in particular.
Noticing this, Mikael understood that the girls had received the same notifications as him. The last remnants of his anxiety faded away. He hadn't been too worried before, but the earlier scare had left him a little paranoid.
The minutes ticked down until less than a full minute remained before their departure.
During this time, Mikael had been scanning their surroundings, and he couldn't help but think, 'Honestly, these last hours have been… smooth? Yeah, that's the right word. Considering everything that happened in the past 24 hours, I didn't expect the end to be this "easy."'
'Of course, it wasn't truly easy, but it wasn't overwhelmingly difficult either. It was about the same level as before. If I were some kind of main character, things wouldn't have gone this smoothly. No, the last few hours would've been filled with relentless battles. And the end? The beast attacks—or maybe even Nexorian entities—would've intensified at the worst possible moment, turning everything into pure hell.'
'Finding five uninterrupted minutes to extract from this world would have been nearly impossible. The only way out would've been through the automatic extraction, forcing me to leave the girls behind in a tearful goodbye or something equally dramatic. And then, I'd escape, vowing to destroy Nexoria or some cliché like that…'
A shiver ran down his spine. 'Yeah, thank god I'm not a main character. That kind of thing doesn't happen in real life. It wouldn't even make sense. If I survived for 23 hours, why would the last hour suddenly become exponentially harder for no logical reason? If the difficulty had spiked like that, I'd have already been dead long before this point.'
'And even if the worst-case scenario did happen—if I were incredibly unlucky and something attacked me at the last second—it would have to be strong enough to overpower me, but not instantly kill me? That would be… ridiculously convenient in the worst way possible. Sure, it's possible, but the odds of that happening are way too low to worry about.'
As Mikael lost himself in thought, time continued to slip away.
Before he even realized it, the countdown reached zero.
A brilliant flash of light engulfed the three of them, and in the next instant, they vanished—leaving behind a doomed world.
The moment space shifted and Mikael felt solid ground beneath his feet, and notifications appeared before he could even take in his surroundings—though he already knew they were back in the Hub.
[Extraction from Dirarnia World confirmed]
[Quest: Emergency Mission completed.
Reward: Survival
Optional Reward: 10 MP]
Seeing the reward listed in Military Points, Mikael's eyes widened in surprise. This was the first time a mission reward wasn't in LP like usual, but in MP!
This revelation caught him off guard, but before he could dwell on it, the clamor of the bustling Hub pulled him out of his thoughts. Realizing now wasn't the time to get lost in contemplation, he refocused.
Without lingering any longer, the trio quickly made their way toward the 'infinite stairs.' Tired and exhausted, both mentally and physically, all they wanted was to return to their apartment, rest, and recover from this grueling ordeal…
Three days passed…
At this moment, Mikael was sitting on the floor of his bedroom, holding the aura and mana generator in his hands. Blue strands emerged from the device, flowing into him and being absorbed by his body.
His aura and mana cores expanded at a speed that would have been incomprehensible to a native of Dirarnia, even to someone with monstrous talent and the best possible training array!
But Mikael didn't care about that. He was focused on strengthening his cores, each passing hour making him stronger. His two cores grew by 50 units per hour, already reaching E+ and quickly approaching D-.
This progress was incredibly fast, and normally, Mikael would have been at least pleased—if not outright overjoyed—but he couldn't bring himself to feel that way. Every time he acknowledged his rapid growth, his thoughts drifted toward Nexoria and the invasion of Dirarnia.
At those moments, he would ask himself, 'Could I have stopped it?' The answer was a resounding no. And that crushed any sense of pride or joy in his progress, especially considering Shadow's sacrifice, which weighed heavily on him.
It was the first time someone had sacrificed themselves for him, even if he wasn't particularly close to her, and the guilt gnawed at him. But he kept it to himself, never expressing it. He simply continued training, not letting it show…
Yet, as difficult as it was for him, his struggles paled in comparison to Amelia's. She had lost nearly everything she knew.
Now that she was out of immediate danger, she had the time to reflect on her emotions, and that introspection only fueled the fire of hatred burning inside her. In the past few days, her hatred for Nexoria had grown into a consuming passion.
That hatred gave birth to an impossible goal—she wanted to destroy the entire Nexoria dimension.
Her newfound purpose pushed her to train relentlessly. But she quickly ran into a problem—her aura core had stopped growing. After discussing it with Mikael, she realized it was because there was no aura in the air for her core to absorb.
Understanding her struggle, Mikael worked on a solution. Using his own mana and aura generator as a base, he crafted a weakened copy with the limited materials he had in his inventory.
The device he created was a small generator, similar to his own but capable of generating only aura. With it, Amelia could grow her core at a rate of 30 units per hour.
The final result was what Mikael himself called 'supar'—a playful but telling word—mainly because he lacked both a runic inscriber and magical ink. These two essential resources had been left behind in the world of Dirarnia, and the few materials he had on hand were far from ideal. Because of this, the generator ended up considerably weaker than the one he used himself.
After receiving Mikael's gift, Amelia threw herself into training with relentless intensity, using it as a way to drown out her emotions.
The other three—except for Kiara, who didn't talk much since, well, she was Kiara, and anything unrelated to Mikael failed to catch her interest—regularly spoke with her, offering their support and ensuring she didn't lose herself entirely to her hatred.
Honestly, the situation worried all of them. Even Kiara, despite her usual detached attitude, didn't want anything to happen to Amelia—because Mikael would be sad if it did.
However, at that moment, Mikael's thoughts weren't on Amelia. No, his mind was focused on everything he had 'learned' during his meditation sessions.
In truth, his meditation wasn't traditional—he was simply absorbing aura and mana from his generator. It required some concentration, but his mind had long surpassed human limits, allowing him to think freely even while doing so.
His thoughts wandered to many topics, but they always circled back to one thing—the Nexoria invasion. After hours of contemplation, he had formed several theories based on what had happened.
But theories were all they were. Each time he tried to confirm them or ask the Records for clarification, he was met with the same response—his military rank was too low to access that information.
Still, he had formed some hypotheses.
The first was that all the worlds he had visited were likely under the Records' control. Not in the sense that the Records had created them, but more like how a citizen lives under a mayor's authority…
He had multiple reasons to believe this, but the main ones were tied to what happened at the start of the Nexoria invasion. When he received the emergency mission, the description stated: The Dirarnia world you are currently on is under attack. The Obsidian Covenant sacrifices have successfully summoned entities from Nexoria, creating dimensional breaches in the Akashic Records' defenses surrounding Dirarnia, allowing Nexoria to invade.
The part about dimensional breaches forming in the Akashic Records' defenses led him to believe that Dirarnia was under the Records' control.
And if he took that reasoning a step further, he theorized that all the worlds he had entered were probably under the Records' control as well. The exceptions, he believed, were the worlds where information wasn't accessible—those where, upon entering, he would face immeasurable danger.
Another category of worlds he suspected weren't under the Records' control were the ones he was sent to for military missions. But on this point, he wasn't certain. It was just a theory, and a less probable one than the others.
The second thing he learned was that he believed the Akashic Records and Nexoria were at war—or at the very least, they didn't have the best relationship. This could be inferred from the fact that Dirarnia, presumably under the Records' control, was invaded by Nexoria.
Another thing he deduced about Nexoria was that its strength should be similar to that of the Records. Of course, nothing was certain, and there was a possibility that the difference between their power levels was immense. But for now, this was his best assumption.
He didn't know their exact strength, but he knew one thing for sure—Nexoria was a lot stronger than him. A lot, lot, lot… lot stronger. In Dirarnia, Tier 3 entities—or whatever other names they went by, since their exact classification was hidden—had participated in the attack. That much he was certain of; otherwise, the Emergency Mission wouldn't have been classified as Tier 3. But that wasn't what really caught his attention.
What truly stood out was the notification stating that the Records had used a space lock to prevent entities that were too strong from joining the battle.
So yeah, everything he inferred only reinforced how insignificant and weak he was in the grand scheme of things. Even if, compared to a normal human, he was incomparably strong, when placed beside these two colossal behemoths, he was nothing.
This realization only pushed him to train harder.
After some time spent meditating and growing his core, he finally stopped. He checked the time and knew it was nearly time.
Earlier in the previous days, they had decided that today they would hold a small, private ceremony—a symbolic funeral for all their loved ones who had died in Dirarnia.
This ceremony was primarily for Amelia, as she was without a doubt the most affected by the Nexoria invasion. She had lost not only her loyal bodyguard, Shadow, but also her best friend, Aria, and her father, Cadmus.
All of this together had taken an enormous toll on her, and that was why they had decided to hold this funeral—to give her some form of closure.
But it wasn't only for Amelia. The others were also affected to varying degrees.
Mikael was the second most affected. While he didn't show it outwardly, Shadow's death had left an impact on him. She had sacrificed herself, saving not only his life but also Amelia's and Lyra's. For that, he was immensely grateful, and that was why her death weighed on him.
As for Aria and Cadmus, he hadn't been particularly close to either of them. At his core, he wasn't an sentimental person, and he had grown accustomed to death from a young age. Normally, their loss wouldn't have affected him much.
But knowing Amelia… seeing the pain she was going through… that changed things. Through her, their deaths affected him as well.
Lyra's state of mind was similar to Mikael's. But even aside from Amelia's grief, she should have been mourning her own loss, as she had family in the Dirarnia world…
However, considering that her relationship with the royal family of Mystoria had always been distant and cold, their deaths didn't weigh on her much—if at all.
As for Kiara, she normally wouldn't have cared in the slightest about the lives lost to the Nexoria invasion. But because of Amelia's connection to Mikael… she did.
Each of them carried their own degree of grief, and that was why they had decided to hold this small ceremony.
—--------------
End of Volume 2: Chronicles of Dirarnia
Author Note:
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