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Chapter 145 - Gravitation
🕑 Added 2020-04-14 15:32:46 +0000 UTC
"Dear principal." I state in a sarcastic tone. After the siege of Erbilan, we parted on a more amicable note, but we can't be considered reconciled. After all, I killed some of the professors, and he was complicit in killing my mother.
"Miss Marcott!" Jumping up from his chair in surprise, Thorvadis stares at me through his rectangular glasses. He's unexpectedly nimble for his advanced age, moving like somebody who has seen half as many summers as his physical appearance suggests he has. "What are you doing here?"
"I've come to learn gravity magic from you." With a nonchalant statement, I look around his office. The last time I was here, I stabbed Basarab through the throat and was knocked out the window onto the field outside. "You may or may not have noticed what happened yesterday."
Right now, I have only Flann with me. There's nothing left among the humans that could hurt me now, so I didn't need to take anybody else to help me in case a battle happens. But I'm not here to start anything, only to learn the concept behind gravity magic. With the right knowledge, I should be able to use it up to the limits of the Imagination Engine.
"I saw the moon falling, and a goddess stopping it." Thorvadis replies honestly. So Tokomaha was visible even halfway across the globe. It's early in the morning here, as opposed to evening in Arkaim, so he must have had the opportunity to sleep over that divine sight if he could.
"Well, the moon is going to leave this planet's orbit in less than a fortnight if we don't do something about it." Shrugging as if it's not that big of a deal, I pace around the room and take in the sights. The repairs to the wall haven't left a single mark, and the stone looks just the same as it did before. "But before that comes a greater calamity."
"Greater than the moon falling?" Raising a bushy eyebrow, Thorvadis asks with a skeptical glint in his inquisitive eyes.
"The sun falling." I look out the window. It's facing east, so the sun is just peeking above the Kongensgrad. It may just be my impression because I know what's happening, but it looks brighter than usual. Massive solar winds can't be equated to the entire sun coming toward Earth, but for all intents and purposes, the result will be the same. Explaining the concept of celestial activities to people from a medieval society will just take too much time.
"And you believe that gravity magic can stop it?" Now the principal looks even more skeptical. He should have gotten a good idea of the size of the moon and of Tokomaha, who stopped its fall.
"It's not so much gravity magic but the understanding of gravity itself." I return my gaze to the old man standing behind his desk. We explained the Imagination Engine to him, but it's hard for people of this age to come to terms with the concept of a machine that can turn thoughts into physical phenomena.
"Then, let me recommend you some books from the forbidden section." Motioning to round his desk, Thorvadis states with an attitude that suggests he's aware of the fact that I broke in there before to learn transportation magic. But I raise a hand to stop him.
"No, there is no point in learning from the books at this point." I gesture at the tea table between the two couches and make the vase fall upward before catching it with my hand. It's an application of the gravity spell I learned by copying the principal's when he launched me into space, but that's the extent of what I can do. For that, I need a surface and already existing gravity, which I merely reverse.
He stares at me in confusion. Then he sits down, lifts his glasses, and rubs the bridge of his hawk nose as if irritated about something. Looking at me put the vase back in place, he shakes his head and sighs.
"If you can so easily achieve what took me decades to master, there is nothing more I can teach you." His voice sounds annoyed, and I can understand why. But he shouldn't think of me as some youth that just comes along and does something he has been practicing all his life better at my first try. We're literally worlds apart.
"That's not true." I give Thorvadis a wry smile and glance back at Flann. "I need to know how gravity works. It's more than moving something with one's thoughts."
Wind magic is the closest to gravity insofar that it's causing physical phenomena with invisible forces. Thus, somebody incredibly proficient at the wind element could use it like telekinesis. But whereas air will have a harder time moving objects, the heavier they get, gravity isn't limited by such things. By reversing gravity, even the most massive object can be launched into space.
I need Thorvadis to give me a quick lesson in its more delicate applications. Then I'll be able to use it on any scale I can imagine, as long as the Imagination Engine can handle the energy requirements. That way, I should be able to reverse the gravity of the solar winds and send them back into the sun.
At least I'm working under the assumption that this is the same way Areteniha sent them toward us in the first place. If that assumption turns out to be wrong, I don't know what more we could do. That's why I can't think about this too deeply and only press forward.
"When will it happen?" The principal asks while adjusting the glasses that became crooked from his earlier movements.
"Three days from now." I reply calmly, causing him to stare at me with his eyes wide open. He used to be exceedingly calm even under pressure, but I've surprised him twice today. I consider that a win. "We're going to the sun and speak to the false god responsible for this in the evening. Until then, I would like to learn all there is to know about gravity."
Leaning back in his chair, Thorvadis seems to shrink from the stress piling up, and he looks more wizened than ever. Closing his eyes as if deep in thought, he breathes in and out a few times to come to terms with my demands. Then he opens his eyes again and stares at me as if I'm an alien.
"It took me decades to understand the principle behind gravity and its application in magic. There is a reason I am the only living human in the world who can command it." He's close to hysteria, but his voice remains firm. There's a hint of pride in his tone, but he's aware that there have been others throughout history who achieved gravity magic. Otherwise, there wouldn't have been any books written about it in the library's forbidden section. "I cannot teach you in a day what took me most of my life."
"I know. I'm not asking to learn everything about it. I only need to know the core principle." Waving off the principal's concerns, I look at him with an intent gaze. Then my face softens, and I give him a confident smile. "Tell me what it feels like."
Standing on the field outside the academy, the place I was launched into space from last time I came here, I prepare to put into practice what Thorvadis just taught me. It wasn't much, but the principle behind gravity is surprisingly simple.
The windows of the academy are filled with students staring at me, and more of them are gathered at the edge of the field. They rarely get to see their principal outside his room or the dining hall, but he attracted even more attention by ordering everybody to make way for me, who appears to be a new student. They're right to think that a spectacle of some kind is about to unfold.
I could have easily had Flann teleport us to some deserted place elsewhere in the world, if not to the moon itself. But I'm using this opportunity to get a look at the students and new professors. Maybe I'll get a glimpse of Ninlil over at the dorms, too.
Then I remember that I can't waste too much time fooling around when the moon is drifting away, and the solar winds will fry this planet in just three days. Gesturing at the center of the field, I raise a giant ball of mud and transmute it into stone. There's no way wind magic could lift that boulder, so I can be sure that I'm doing it right instead of using an alternate method subconsciously.
As before, I reverse the gravity of the object, causing it to fly up and accelerate quickly. Stopping it, I let it drop back down before waving my hand at it from the side. Nothing happens, and it falls back onto the grassy field with a thud, creating a small crater on impact.
I don't glance at Thorvadis next to me, but somehow I get the feeling that he feels vindicated. But I know he isn't such a petty person, or he wouldn't have taught me anything. After the siege of Erbilan, he sat down to talk to me even after everything that happened between us. If he held a grudge back then, he was able to swallow it for the sake of the survival of the human race. He should be able to do the same now.
More and more students gather, thinking that I'm undergoing a test of my abilities to enroll at this academy. There's a murmur rising from the open windows when they realize that I'm not speaking any incantations to cast magic. Only Chosen Knights are supposed to be capable of that, so they already treat me with reverence.
Thinking back, I had some pleasant memories here. One mistake on my part brought it all crashing down. If everybody involved had reacted more calmly back then, what would things look like now? There's no real point thinking about it so long after the fact, yet I can't help but try to picture my life if I had stayed here instead of getting teleported to the Khurut Sultanate.
Then again, I wouldn't have met Asoko or gotten to see Hestia with glasses. I wouldn't have encountered a dragon and gained its template, or had any reason to go into the Lost Tombs and find Aurelia. I would have learned a lot more magic and eventually left the academy with a lot of books to present to Maou-mama on my return.
Maybe then Maou-mama wouldn't have had to die if I had remained here in the academy. Then I would have never been teleported to Adanak to find out that I had twin children. Without going there, I wouldn't have met Awhina, Tahiri, Tokomaha, or Korenga.
I would have been blissfully ignorant of the truth of this world until Chaos-Juzual or Mataku eventually destroyed it.
"What is the matter?" Flann asks while looking up at me, seeing how I stopped trying to cast magic. The Royal Academy is such a nostalgic place that I've gone down memory lane a bit too deeply and forgotten my main objective.
"Just reminiscing." I smile at her and pet her hair. Then I remember a question I've been meaning to ask. "Oh, before I forget, when were you born?"
"The winter after Aldeath died." She replies, not at all looking surprised at me suddenly bringing up this topic. I calculate in my mind for a moment to come to one realization.
"You're my older sister, then." I lift my hand off her head as if I was scalded. All I know from my Japanese upbringing is that I should show respect to my elders. Even though I was an only child, I knew from classmates that they would never dare to treat their older siblings like I did. "Again, I'm sorry for my attitude toward you all this time..."
"It matters not." Staring at my hand hovering above her, Flann states in a level tone. Maybe she was enjoying it?
Turning back to my task, I notice Thorvadis watching us from the side. His eyebrows are raised as high as physically possible, and under his beard, it looks like his jaw is slack. The revelation that Flann is my sister seems to have shocked him deeply. The image of a wise old master that I had of him is crumbling before my eyes.
Ignoring him, I gesture at the boulder in the middle of the grassy field again, making it fall upward before trying to apply a slight pushing force. But instead of going the way I want it to, it merely drops back and impacts the ground with a loud thud. It buries itself into the dirt a bit, and I realize that it moved a few steps away from the initial impact crater in the direction I wanted it to go.
It's working, even if only slightly. Where did my ridiculous and uncontrolled output from back when I first started here go?
Repeating the process, I launch the boulder in the air and push with a physical motion of my hand. As if my remembrance of that time I summoned a pool of water with a spell meant to create a bucket worth of it affected my ability, my target flies off toward the dorms.
"Uh oh." I watch the boulder fly and quickly gesture at it to pull it toward me. But with my concentration broken, it doesn't react.
In the next moment, I see a small figure jumping more than a dozen meters high into the air and meeting the projectile. A heavy impact sounds across the field before the boulder flies back toward me. It rolls across the grass and falls into the crater it left when it landed the first time.
"Hole in one." I comment with a whistle as I watch Ninlil land gracefully with her oversized hammer in hand. She then runs across the field with an angry expression on her face, looking ready to pounce.
But when she notices me, her eyes narrow into slits, and she hops back with her tail puffed up in fear. It seems she's still not over what Asoko did to her and isn't aware of the fact that it was another me. I look at her with a wry smile, then turn to Thorvadis.
"How was that?" I ask nonchalantly. His furrowed brow tells me that I achieved in a few tries what most likely took him years of his life. But he wouldn't be a teacher if he didn't take pride in his students going above and beyond his abilities.
"You require more practice, but you are going down the right path." He remarks with a genuine smile that makes me feel bad for all I've done to him and his academy in the past.
"Thank you, Grand Master Eklundstrom. For everything." In a heartfelt tone, I bow to Thorvadis to express my gratitude for what he did when I was still at the academy. Neither side can truly forgive the other, but I'm not sure I'll ever come here again, so I want to make peace with the past. "I believe that what you just taught me will save this world."
With these words, I turn to Flann. The principal doesn't say anything in response as if contemplating the right answer. Before he can find it, we already teleport away and back to Arkaim.
The silver plate flies off my control halfway across the room and hits Korenga in the head. It bounces off harmlessly without the towering woman noticing the hit, but she still stops her meal to look around in surprise at the sound of impact. Luckily, there wasn't anything on the plate, or it would have scattered across several people.
"What are you trying to do?" Aurelia glares at me disapprovingly. For a moment, I think she's talking about my lack of table manners and about hitting Korenga. Then I realize that my choice of object to train with has a deeper meaning than I would have ever considered.
Is she worried that I'm encroaching on her territory of telepathic object manipulation but with silver instead of gold? Or is that her way of making a joke?
"Gravity." I reply with a shrug and flick a finger at the plate that landed on the table behind Korenga, causing it to fall upward. Then, with another flick, it moves toward me and accelerates. Catching it in my hand, I look at the small dent left behind by the hit to the Black God's temple.
Senka taught me a bit more about the physics of gravity. For one, it moves at the speed of light, which is also the reason a black hole's gravity can stop even light from escaping. But she also explained the concept of inertia, which works even in the vacuum of space. That's what causes an object with mass to start slowly and accelerate over time, instead of having the same instantaneous burst that light has.
To be honest, she said that there's no way to teach me everything about gravity in a matter of days or even months. In my time, it took physicists years to learn everything humanity knew at the time, and there were still many things unknown to science.
For now, I can only practice what I already know. Before heading to Armeria to find Asoko and my children, I'll visit the Khurut desert and experiment with gravity on a massive scale there. It will be practice for when I try to slow down the moon and have it get caught by Earth's gravity again.
We discussed through the night how Chaos-Juzual might have caused the moon to fall at the speed that it did. According to Senka, even at a full stop of its angular momentum, the moon should take about five days to drop onto Earth. But to achieve it in thirteen hours would have needed some means of acceleration.
Maybe the Witch of the End had a deep understanding of gravity. It would explain how she was able to make Aurelia and me zoom through space when I first met her, and then again when she sent us back to Earth. With our tiny mass and no air resistance, we accelerated so quickly that it felt instantaneous.
"This is what will bring the moon back under control." I drop the plate in my hand, but before it reaches the ground, I reverse the gravity acting on it. For a split second, it floats in midair as if weightless, but then quickly accelerates toward the ceiling. I catch it out of the air and get the strange feeling of the weight tugging upward rather than downward before I undo the gravity on it.
Unlike the telepathy-like control that Aurelia has over gold, gravity requires much more effort to make it move as intended. For all intents and purposes, all it can achieve is momentum in a single direction at a time. Complex movements would need an insane amount of fine-tuning of vectors that I'm simply not capable of. I think no living being could achieve that with the limited calculating capabilities of their brains.
"Gravity, huh?" Exla comments while leaning back on her floating cloud chair. Her huge fluffy hair is a reflection of the morning sun's orange glow illuminating a band of clouds from below. Even though we're in a room without windows, her hair is like a screen that shows only the most beautiful of skies. "The Juzual I know didn't have much of an imagination. All she was ever able to do was seemingly erase things from existence. Nobody understood how she did it, but that's why she fit the concept of the Witch of the End."
"Erase?" I place the plate on the table in front of me and ask with an interested gaze.
"Maybe her imagination wasn't as weak as you thought it was." Senka suddenly chimes in and speaks with her arms crossed. She glances at me, then returns her gaze to Exla. "The Imagination Engine uses the thoughts of its users to converts the sun's energy into phenomena on Earth. As we all know, E=mc²-"
"You lost me there." I raise my hand, only to be shut up by a glare from the doll girl. I've heard that formula before, but I have no idea what that means.
"Energy can be converted to mass and vice versa." Exla takes over the explanation, deliberately putting it into simpler terms for me to understand. I appreciate the sentiment, but I also feel somewhat belittled by a girl that looks a lot younger than I do - even if she's much older. "But nobody has ever achieved that through imagination alone-"
Suddenly, the cloud girl stops and turns to Tokomaha, who is eating without following our conversation. She notices the eyes on her and looks up with a blank expression before it turns to confusion when she sees Senka and me staring at her as well.
"What?" She swallows her food and asks, unaware that we only now realized just how incredible her feat of stopping the moon truly was. She used the Imagination Engine to turn energy from the sun into mass. And when she was done, she turned it back into energy. After all, there isn't a massive pile of new dirt where she grew to titanic proportions.
It's the same principle her clones are made by; the little earth she always uses could never make up for creating physically complete bodies of her size. They seem to be more of a mental catalyst for her than the actual ingredients.
I inadvertently break out into a smile when I find myself appreciating just how incredible the little goddess is. Not only can she make plants sprout, create clones of herself, and grow to the size of the moon, but she may have given us the key to the creation of matter itself.
"Are you making fun of me for something?" Growing irritated from confusion, Tokomaha frowns at me. I only shake my head and keep my smile on, causing her bushy eyebrows to furrow even more.
"So you're saying that Juzual was able to erase matter by turning it into pure energy?" Exla doesn't sound too convinced. She always prided herself as the one with the most potent imagination among the Old Humans - or at least the most flexible. To realize that she considered Juzual to lack imagination even though she achieved what nobody else could at the time must be shocking.
"And vice versa." Senka adds. "Maybe that's how she stopped the moon's orbital velocity and used that energy to push it toward Earth."
"That means one should be able to do the same in reverse. Stopping its momentum away from Earth and using that to propel it back along its regular orbit." The cloud girl scratches her chin and theorizes with a thoughtful expression.
This talk is already beyond me. All I can tell is that they're on their way to finding a solution to this celestial problem. But does that mean I don't even need to use gravity for that? If Exla can figure out how to do that energy to mass transfer, she should be able to not only recapture the moon but also stop the solar winds.
"So, you got the solution?" I ask the cloud girl innocently. But she only spins her head to me with an annoyed expression.
"If you can help me sift through a million scientific papers to find the right ones that explain the mass-energy formula in a way that I can understand, I'll do it." It's the first time she's talking in a tone about as sarcastic as Senka's. "This isn't something you study in a few days."
"I learned gravity in a few hours." Demonstratively launching the silver plate on the table before me into the air with a gesture of my hand, I state with a shrug.
"Then you should stick to that plan." Senka mocks me with a cynical shrug. "I'll help Exla with that other problem then. Call on us in a few decades to see if we've figured something out."
"Alright, alright." The sarcasm pelts me like hail, and I duck under it apologetically. "I get it already. This isn't something that will be ready for the solar winds or the moon's escape."
I look across the gathered girls, who watch our exchange in confusion. Korenga doesn't seem to care and continues to eat her meal, but the others have stopped and seem to be trying to understand what we're talking about. Especially Tokomaha is still peeved about my earlier behavior and furrows her brow again.
Then my eyes fall on Kamii and Hestia. From here on out, things are getting way out of their league. This isn't even a matter of the power of their imagination anymore. Even Exla and Mataku, who had millennia to experiment with the Imagination Engine, are incapable of overcoming problems on this scale.
Only Chaos-Juzual, who specialized in mass-energy conversion, could pull off the moonfall. And Areteniha, a scientist working on a station near the sun and with direct access to the root system of the Imagination Engine, is most likely using a manual approach for the solar winds.
All I can do is hope that my imagination for gravity will prove strong enough.
Comments
They should be right below this one. EDIT: Oops, forgot to set this to Tentacle Target and above.
Jamie wood
What happened to chapters 142, 143 & 144? Where are they.
