CH734

“Killed itself,” Ben repeated, pinching his brow. “Myriad, how far out from it are we?”

<If you increase your pace then only a few minutes. At the speed you were going then a bit over six.>

That was the main issue. Even though his goal of reading its memories had been lost they weren’t actually out of options but assuming they had no reason to speed up, that meant whatever was pulling the strings could potentially see up to six minutes in the future. That was an outrageous amount when gauging something as specific as how a group might attack it, far above his worst estimates.

If they were dealing with an awakened time magic user then he was assuming they were dealing with something that had an advanced variant of the magic instead of just the standard high version but even then he’d been prepared for at worst, three minutes of precognition. Six was an eternity that pointed to a far more worrying sign. Unless it had a combination of time skills helping it and an awakened time magic variant as out of the norm for that affinity as his unnatural mind was when compared against other mind skills, that meant the thing they were facing hadn’t just awakened their time magic, it had leveled it.

But that’s impossible. I know I can’t exactly be one to judge but I have the benefit of a pile of jobs and blessings to go with any natural talent I might have for my skills, the only benefit this thing would have is the structure given by the job system. There’s no way it managed to awaken its magic and then also level it a few times in the two months it could have been here.

Hell, that’s two months if it got through on the first day, this has to be something else. Did the one able to control others snag one of this world’s awakened time mages then? God, if they’re this good at it then I’d be expecting someone on the level of a contender but I feel like I would have heard about someone like that going missing so what is it? I guess it’s possible they got someone with an already high awakened variant and then they got a level after they were taken over, but… No, there’s too much I don’t know, let’s hurry up and get answers.

“Pick up the pace, we’re moving,” Ben told his group as he activated his shoes to propel him forward with each step he took, feeling them throw him through the air and giving him a burst of speed beyond what he’d ever normally manage as the other three did their best to keep up.

By all accounts, he could at least say that no matter how far into the future their enemies could see, they’d made a mistake in how they’d done things. They’d made a choice by having that demon kill itself that in turn selected the future Ben would choose to follow, creating results beyond whatever it could predict, even if it created a new danger for them as well.

He had no doubt that they’d been found, with more things coming their way, the fact they hadn’t seen fit to use Pato to help the creature escape was their blessing and one he was going to take advantage of for all it was worth by the time they reached the corpse, nodding to Azeezol as they did.

“You’re up. Push your skill to the limit ‘cause I don’t know if we’re going to get another shot at this.”

She knelt down by it without a word with the order given and began using her magic while Ben connected to her, seeing in her mind as it activated to reveal the life of the demon, with an unexpected mana requirement behind it.

Corpse song was a magic that let the user see a body’s history, with a higher mana cost the farther one wanted to look back that would only be increased with the age of the body it was acting on but the price was already well beyond what anyone had expected as her mana drained due to the intense weight of experience.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

She wasn’t just seeing the past as she used it, through the power that had been at play the entire time, she was also forced to feed her mana to see all of the potential futures it had looked through in its last hours, creating so much more for her to process and try to work through because of it.