"So, in theory, infrared interference might turn the same spell into a teleport again?" Konrad asked, choosing each word with the utmost care. He didn't want to incriminate himself.
If his opponent didn't realise he was trying to kill him with his microwave, he'd rather not tell.
Midori-kun scowled. But whether from the question, or for thinking he was an idiot—
"That's not how interference works," he said, rubbing his forehead. Yeah, it was the latter. He pointed at his calculation. "Besides, that much heat would've cooked me alive."
Why, yes, it should have.
But they were both alive, and not where they should have been.
"Could you rewrite the original rune to account for it, then?" Konrad tried a different angle.
Not that he wanted to return so much—but the challenge?
The chance to learn a spell from the very person he wanted to mentor him from the start?
Now, that seemed exciting.
But the Green Mage—Midori-kun, the schoolboy—was shaking his head.
"What kind of amateur wizard are you, child?" he asked. "Runes are delicate. You must build failsafes into every syntax—and you want me to ruin one on purpose?"
Amateur was about right. But child? Come on.
Sure, he still remembered his very first invisibility spell in Ejtyangard.
He was lucky it was a weak rune, and Konrad had almost no mana back then.
Zoltan's first attempt with a fireball left him in a coma and burned a forest down.
That's when this very mage restricted him to light magic only. And once he disappeared—in time—that scruffy sorcerer became a master Illusionist. And, well, a scamster.
One unsafe spell could cause a domino effect. The outcome was unpredictable.
He understood that well. But there must have been a way to teleport again.
"Can't replicate mistakes like that," the mage claimed. If Konrad didn't know he had no mana, he would have suspected mind-reading again. "Many things could've gone wrong in a battle."
Right. There was a lot more going on than his Isekai Microwave cooking him in a vacuum.
What if it wasn't even his spell that interfered, but the heat making the Demon Lord fumble?
"Can't be sure what caused this shift," he said—again, as if Konrad was thinking out loud. Were their minds so much alike? This kid wasn't what he expected. "Plus, it makes no sense."
Konrad raised an eyebrow.
"Make sense how?" he asked. "So many things make no sense, you have to specify."
Midori-kun looked him in the eye, then took a deep breath.
"Child, I've spent two centuries trying to travel between words. To perfect the portal spell. To turn it into a real teleport, as you say—and believe me, it's not that simple."
Well, duh. If it were, he wouldn't cared about the answer, either.
"Okay, but this accident might've done it," he noted, looking around the still messy room.
He wrote all these notes in the three months since their duel?
Was he looking for the key, too?
Or was it some generic Demon-Lord-world-domination kind of research?
He would have loved a peek into something like that, too.
How much could he learn from them? And what could he do with such knowledge?!
"Impossible," Midori said. "Would take an insane amount of mana."
Right. He mentioned the dungeon cores. But during their fight, it felt like the floodgates broke open. He recharged his essence faster than he could spend it.
And neither of them held back.
If interference could alter a spell, then the residual mana could have amplified one, too.
"Let's suspend that disbelief," Konrad urged him. "Could that cause it?"
Another sigh, but this time, he could tell the wheels were turning inside Midori's head.
"Assuming it did—and we'd even replicate it—you can't teleport at random," the kid claimed, which made sense. "You'd still need a target, unless you baked it into the spell itself, but—"
"Then no matter how much we tried, we'd always end up here," Konrad finished it for him.
"Exactly. We can't go into this, expecting everything to work out in our favor."
Okay, okay, fine, but—
"What are the odds, though?" Konrad asked. "I'm from here—well, from the other side of the planet. But for me to return here at random? Feels like the chances are one in a billion."
The ancient wizard kid scoffed.
"Try quintillion; too many variables to keep track of. Even the fact that you're from this world could have influenced it. But that spell still wouldn't turn into a teleport in a thousand years."
He didn't say why, but looking over his notes, the kid grabbed one to shove it in his face.
"Here, this is more likely," he said. "Could've turned into a temporal trap. But into a teleport?"
Konrad looked and looked, but the messy scribbles told him nothing of value.
"Remember disappearing from the Halaima Pass?" Midori-kun asked. "And before ending up here? Not sure if we all had the same experience, but that void felt exactly like this."
The description did sound familiar.
"A temporal trap?" he repeated in a quiet mumble. It also reminded him of that grey void from earlier. The time-space bubble. "Like the one you used on the Silver Mage, Zoltan, and me?"
Now, they could be finally onto something.
"What?" the kid asked, scowling. What, what? "That paper's a theoretical study. I've never—"
"Oh? Nope, yes, we're theorising. It's all a theory," Konrad interrupted as soon as he realised.
His heart was about to explode.
This Maou Midori wasn't the one who trapped them back then.
He might've kidnapped the king, but the one to take him from that swamp was—
A future self.
Of course. He talked to at least two separate Demon Lords during that time loop. It happened right before he met Zoltan and the old mage in the grey void.
So as the visions suggested, they'll fight again, no matter what?
Considering how this odd chat started today, he was half expecting it already.
So he had to find answers without his questions revealing too much.
If the kid learned how they escaped the void—
He'd choose a different trap in the future that Konrad's past self wouldn't survive.
But holding the blueprint of that thing in his hands now?!
It could have been the key to everything.
"Would it be possible to use a portal inside here?" Konrad asked, trying to reconstruct his last few void-experiences as best as possible. Why did he have so many of those nowadays?!
"If you somehow stabilised the flow of time, then I guess—"
While he had no idea how to do that, he already used one to get the Silver Mage's staff.
It opened within the void itself, since even if they saw each other, they were far apart. But the second time, he tried to cast one to go home before his mind started to wander.
"Fuck." Konrad wanted to scrape his own face off. How could he be this stupid?!
He built that portal but never dismantled it.
Talk about amateur, and ignoring safeguards.
Rather than finishing the spell, he was thinking about his past life, this world, and—
"What is it now?" Midori-kun asked, peering over his shoulder to double-check his notes.
"I might've brought us all here," he blurted out before he could stop himself.
But that was the best explanation he had so far.