The Blink That Almost Killed Me
The next day, even though I’d told myself to take it easy… urgency was urgency, so I tried to keep practicing. In the end, though, I stopped.
That idiot Bruno had gone out of his way to worry about me, even pulling that cringey tsundere act. Sure, a guy doing tsundere was both horrifying and disgusting, but the fact that he was genuinely concerned was still true.
Blindly hammering away at practice wasn’t going to solve anything. Even if I wasn’t going to fully “take it easy” like Bruno suggested, I probably needed to give myself some breathing room.
First, I decided to calmly review the basic premises.
Why had Blink failed?
Was it a lack of mana?
That didn’t seem right. If anything, after practicing it several times a day for the past month, I had more than enough mana. It was practically overflowing.
A problem with the spell formula?
If the formula was the issue, that would mean the book Inti gave me was flawed… but I’d never had any trouble with the other spells I’d cast from it.
Besides, if the book itself was defective, I should have hit a wall with an earlier spell. Why would it suddenly fail now?
So that wasn’t it either.
Then… was it ultimately an issue with my visualization?
‘…That’s actually surprising.’
The only remaining conclusion was that I had failed to properly construct the image. That was a rather unfamiliar result for me.
Up until now, the imagery I’d drawn from 21st-century content had always helped with building spells, never hindered them. And yet here I was, failing at image construction?
Hmm… what exactly had I been picturing when I cast Blink?
Right. I’d based it on a famous AOS game I used to play a lot with my friends in my past life. The spell and Blink were basically the same thing. Both were called “point blink” in Korean, after all.
Anyway, I’d visualized it as a short-range movement ability, thinking there wouldn’t be much difference. So what exactly had gone wrong?
As I sat there groaning to myself, I eventually started wondering what the point of all this was. A hollow feeling crept over me.
I’d just sworn to take things slow, yet here I was getting impatient and pushing myself again.
This wouldn’t do. If I kept this up, I’d only narrow my own field of thought.
In the end, I stopped thinking entirely and flopped down onto the grass. The cool autumn breeze gently swept across my forehead, which had been drenched in cold sweat.
“Haa… If only my mentor were here right now…”
The complaint slipped out before I could stop it. The moment I let go of my train of thought, words seemed to bypass all mental filters and tumble straight out of my mouth.
Still… if Inti had been here, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten so stuck?
After all, she had appeared when I was struggling even to break through the 1st Circle, and thanks to her I’d shot straight up to the 3rd Circle.
Those days felt both nostalgic and enviable at the same time…
‘Wait a second…? Now that I’m thinking about my mentor, did I actually read the magic book properly when I started practicing Blink?’
The memory of skimming only the spell formula and then tossing the book aside suddenly resurfaced.
…In my defense, up until now I had succeeded every time I simply memorized the formula, so it had become a habit to just read that part and move on.
‘Then maybe if I go back and check the book again…?’
I immediately got up and headed for my room.
What an absolute moron. I’d spent an entire month bashing my head against a brick wall without even considering that?
If this fixed it… well, what else? It’d be Magical Parkicephalus Returns.
Stupid idiot. Braindead moron. Gullible black-and-white cow bastard. I should change the title from Magical Parkicephalus to Magical Chicken Brain.
“Blink!”
Whoosh!
The sensation of air splitting in every direction brushed across my skin, and the scenery before my eyes changed in an instant.
…Success.
“The world’s biggest dimwit. Even after regressing to the past, you still wouldn’t buy that fucking coin. Inti spoon-fed you everything in that book and you spent a whole month doing this without even reading it properly! Are you even human?! Aaaaaaaaagh!”
Oddly enough, the self-loathing hit me harder than the joy of success.
Kindly enough, the magic book Inti had left behind included detailed explanations for each spell.
And for a spell like Blink, there was even a special warning written in what looked like Inti’s own handwriting.
Hahaha… Tlqkf. I really wasted an entire month without seeing that?
“Aaaaaaaaaaaagh!”
In that month, I could have helped the unit members improve their artifacts, reviewed their magic, done so many things… Ugh…
…It really is an incurable flaw from my past life. Once I get obsessed with one thing, my vision narrows to an extreme degree.
Whether it’s stubbornly feeding in lane until I die, or spending a whole month practicing the wrong thing when the answer was right in front of me—what’s the difference?
Looking at myself now, I could only let out a hollow laugh at how pathetic I looked.
“Um… Captain? Are you alright?”
It was Hans’s voice.
When I turned my head, I saw not only Hans but the entire unit gathered around.
…This was the training ground in front of the lord’s residence, so of course they’d all be here. Which meant they’d probably heard every bit of my earlier meltdown.
“…I’m fine.”
“But… you were just screaming like that earlier——”
“I! Said! I’m! Fine!”
“U-understood…”
Then came the sound of the unit members quietly retreating.
“See? I told you the captain has meltdowns like this all the time. Just leave him alone and he’ll get over it.”
Bruno, you seemed almost likable yesterday, but today you’re back to your usual insufferable self.
Grind.
I’ll deal with you later.
…Anyway. I had successfully used Blink.
Now that I’d succeeded and reviewed it, the most important factor turned out to be how one perceived space. That perspective was key.
The awareness of space within all the senses and mana I could feel, that sensation. I needed to refine it far more precisely.
Of course it wouldn’t work if I just treated it like a simple point-blink and slammed into it. It was like trying to drive with a sleep mask on.
And thank goodness I hadn’t caused an accident. If I’d messed up, I could have phased into an object or gotten trapped inside one. The thought of such gruesome possibilities sent a chill down my spine.
It was honestly a blessing that I hadn’t grasped the concept at all. If I’d half-understood it and somehow succeeded in a sloppy way, I would’ve starred in my own real-life slasher movie. Just imagining it made my back crawl.
Anyway, now that I’d succeeded, it was time to practice other spells, right? While the momentum was still there, I’d conquer the rest of the 5th Circle spells!
“Blink is done… Should I move on to Fly next?”
Fly. The flight spell. It was the second magic I’d wished for most desperately while being chased in the dungeon.
The first was obviously Blink. If I’d known how to do even short-range spatial movement, I wouldn’t have had to gamble my life so recklessly… probably.
In any case, this spell was also excellent for creating distance from knights.
Knights mainly used close-range cold weapons. Naturally, they didn’t account for aerial combat.
Bows? To knights, they were basically a half-useful weapon at best.
If you tried to infuse arrows with mana the way you coated a blade with aura, the mana would peel off before long. So to maintain power, you could only use them at awkward mid-to-close ranges.
Sure, a knight’s strength would let them shoot harder than a regular archer… but why bother when you could just train several proper archers in that time?
Or if someone reached Sword Master level, they could probably wrap arrows in Aura Blades and shoot with otherworldly power. But at that level, they could probably just close the distance with their body anyway.
Since my own father is a Sword Master, I know this all too well. The thought that I could somehow compete with him just because I learned flight magic? Not even a speck of that idea exists in my head.
Whether he sends out long-range aura slashes or chases me down with insane leg strength and beheads me mid-flight, he could do pretty much anything.
Setting that aside, excluding the rare exception of Sword Masters, flight magic was an extremely effective tactic against knights. That’s why it became the second spell I most wanted to learn right now.
Since I’d finished number one, it was time to learn the next. So once again, I focused my mind and activated the spell.
“Fly!”
The image I used was… right, like a bird flying swiftly and high…?
Shuuuuuuung!
“Uwaaaaaah?! The speed?! It’s way too fast?! I can’t control———!”
Shuuuuuuuuuuuuuuung!
…I nearly died.
This time, the image worked too well and that became the problem.
I might have underestimated flight a bit. I’d been thinking of it like the airplanes from the 21st century and paid the price.
I learned firsthand what it really meant to fly with nothing but your body against the wind, and just how terrifying that speed could feel.
From what I could tell, it felt like over 100 km/h. Next time I’d have to come up with some countermeasures before using flight magic. If I kept using it like this, I’d either freeze to death from hypothermia or die in an accident.
Using flight magic in its current state was… yeah, it needed some serious improvement.
“Kek, kek. Hans, give me some water.”
“Here you are, Captain.”
Whew. After drinking some water, I finally felt a little more alive. I’d been screaming my lungs out the entire flight, so my throat felt like it was splitting apart.
“So… should I congratulate you?”
“Huh? For what?”
“It looks like you’ve reached the 5th Circle.”
“Oh, right. I did. Thanks.”
Come to think of it, when I succeeded with Blink earlier, they’d only seen me throwing a fit and probably hadn’t realized I’d actually succeeded.
…Looking back, this was definitely going to be another black history entry I’d want to erase.
“What will you do now?”
“Hm? I was thinking of messing around with the other 5th Circle spells. Why, is something up?”
“Well, about that…”
Hans held out a letter. It was sealed with the Third Prince’s personal insignia. The seal was still intact, meaning it had come directly to me.
A letter that hadn’t even gone through Lord Essenhart… What on earth was going on?
Rip.
I broke the seal and read the contents.
“…This is!”