He planned to keep his head down for a week. At most, he’d leave his room to buy a cold sandwich from the cafeteria—then crawl back and rot in peace.
His “hibernation plan” died on day one.
Mira and Boris were already waiting outside Room 13—like they’d been camping there with a stopwatch.
He couldn’t dodge them forever, so he faced them.
Rein invited both of them inside, intending to speak plainly.
“If you stay close to me,” Rein said after explaining what happened with Marcus Crown’s group, “you’ll be in danger. At least for now.”
Boris stood with his arms crossed, silent, his back against the wall—thinking.
Mira frowned so hard her forehead nearly creased.
“Last month it was the Viremonts,” she sighed, rubbing her temple. “And this month you went and smashed the Crown family’s ringleader—from Elemental Magic, no less.”
“The Crowns have real influence inside the Academy,” Boris added, voice grave. “One of them even holds a seat on the student council.”
Rein listened without showing any sign of alarm, and Boris could tell he still didn’t fully grasp how messy things could get.
“It sounds like a student election,” Boris said. “In reality, it’s the nobles’ nerve center. Their heirs use it to build networks, trade favors, and control the Academy’s mood.”
He paused, making sure Rein was actually listening, before his voice hardened slightly.
“They handle discipline. Unless someone nearly dies, most cases end on their desk—and the Masters rarely step in.”
Mira shifted restlessly on the wooden chair. “So Rein beating them down… falls under the council’s jurisdiction too, right?”
“Yes,” Boris nodded. “And that’s exactly the problem.”
“Last time you fought, you got suspended for a month,” Boris said. “They got the same punishment—then the council quietly shaved it down to a warning.”
Rein gave a small nod, accepting the ugly truth of the original owner’s past.
“This time,” Boris said, concern sharpening his tone, “you didn’t just hit Marcus. You made an example out of him.”
“The council won’t let it end there.”
“And more importantly… finals are coming up. If you get suspended again and it becomes a record, you could be forced to repeat the year.”
“Or worse—expelled.”
Rein let out a quiet breath.
Then he fell backward onto the bed, sinking into the mattress. His right hand kept spinning a black pen in a steady rhythm, like his thoughts were turning gears.
“Thanks,” he said softly. “But the council is tomorrow’s problem. And I can’t undo what’s already done.”
“That’s why I want you two to stay away from me for now. If something happens, you won’t get dragged down with me.”
“How can you say that?” Mira’s voice trembled. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”
“I appreciate it,” Rein replied. “But if you really see me as a friend, then listen to my reasons.”
He propped himself up with his elbow against the headboard. His deep blue eyes turned serious.
“No matter what happens, I can survive on my own,” Rein said. “And if I can’t… then it’s my problem to die with.”
“But what I’m not confident about is protecting both of you, if something happens again—something beyond control.”
“Like that cabin.”
Rein fell silent for a moment.
The room tightened with an uncomfortable stillness before he spoke again.
“Maybe we won’t always be that lucky.”
“So you’re planning to carry it alone,” Boris said, staring him down.
“Not exactly,” Rein answered with a faint smile, trying to ease the tension. “I don’t even have a plan yet.”
“I was just going to keep quiet for a while.”
Then he tilted his head slightly.
“So here’s the deal,” Rein said. “If you really want to help me, I’ll transfer you a week’s worth of food money. Buy it for me, bag it, and hang it outside my door.”
“And if it’s food from the Kingdom Zone, even better.”
“I’m getting sick of those cold cafeteria sandwiches.”
“That’s your plan?” Mira raised an eyebrow, half-amused and half-disbelieving. “Lock yourself in your room and never see daylight again?”
Rein nodded without hesitation.
“Yeah,” he said simply. “That’s my specialty.”
When the door finally closed and their footsteps faded away, Rein went to handle his own business, changed into something more comfortable, and lit the fireplace.
Orange flames pushed back the cold that had begun creeping into the Devil’s Den.
He returned to the bed and lay down, letting his thoughts drift across the dim ceiling.
[LIZ: You do care about those two, you know.]
“I don’t,” Rein shot back, stiff and stubborn. He laced his fingers behind his head and exhaled.
“I’m just sick of cold sandwiches.”
Then his voice softened, almost against his will.
“Whatever… tomorrow’s basically Schr?dinger’s cat,” Rein muttered. “Until you open the box, you don’t know if it’s alive or dead.”
A moment later, he shut down his external senses and sank into the Mana Realm.
Rein stepped into the familiar white laboratory.
This time, something was off.
The control monitors had been modified—floating in midair, untethered, as if the room’s rules had been rewritten.
And the strangest part…
LIZ was sprawled on a recliner, long legs propped on the control platform like the lab belonged to her.
One monitor was playing footage Rein recognized instantly—blue light, humming blades, a duel cutting through darkness.
She looked completely absorbed. So absorbed she didn’t even notice him enter.
Rein was about to speak—
but LIZ beat him to it, eyes never leaving the screen.
“Jedi,” she said. “Heroes, right?”
“Knights of light?”
Rein froze.
His gaze snapped to the monitor—Star Wars. A lightsaber duel cutting through darkness.
“Jedi?” he echoed. “Wait—did you just raid my memories to watch movies?”
“Sneak?” LIZ replied lazily. “Your memories are data files. They’re stored in that room.”
She pointed toward the glass chamber. Its walls were lined with rectangular crystal blocks—an archive built from light, geometry, and ruthless order.
“I was organizing them. Verifying them. Sorting them properly.”
“That’s my job.”
LIZ turned her chair toward him. The floating control platforms drifted back down into their original positions, slow and obedient. A colorful lollipop rested between her lips.
“You get to go outside,” she said lightly. “You get to see things.”
“I don’t.”
“It gets… boring.”
Her eyes dimmed, just a fraction.
Then she looked at him again, and her voice dropped quieter.
“Your memories are the only way I get to travel, Rein.”
The complaint on Rein’s tongue died before it could become a word.
Only then did he realize it.
While he fought to survive outside…
LIZ had been trapped here the entire time.
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
“Still,” she said, brightening as she stared at the screen, “their weapon is cool.”
“It kind of resembles the Sword of Light of Goddess Lumina.”
“Uh…” Rein’s expression went awkward. “That’s… just a movie.”
“I know,” LIZ replied cheerfully. “It’s a recorded image from your world.”
“Arath has something similar. Recorded magic. People watch it through communication crystals.”
And as if she’d been waiting for an excuse, she started explaining the mechanism—swinging the lollipop like she was genuinely enjoying herself.
“Forget the lightsabers,” Rein cut in, rubbing his temple. “How’s the Dragon’s Speech research?”
LIZ tilted her head slightly, then snapped her fingers once.
A wall panel slid open, revealing a reinforced glass chamber hidden behind it.
Under the clean white light, a massive black door stood inside—towering and wrong. Thick chains wrapped around it, engraved with ancient runes.
The door exhaled waves of pitch-black mana at irregular intervals, like the slow breathing of some caged beast.
And worst of all… a muffled moan seeped through the cracks.
“I kept it in there,” LIZ said, dropping into a chair. “Leaving it outside wastes processing space. And it won’t stop whining.”
“At least in there, I don’t have to listen to it screaming all day.”
“As for progress…” She sighed. “Honestly, Rein, I’m stuck.”
“I’ve thrown every algorithm I have at it, but it’s like we’re speaking completely different languages. I can’t even touch its logical structure.”
Rein walked up to the glass wall and stopped.
His deep blue eyes stayed on the black door, unblinking, as if stubbornness alone could pry truth out of darkness.
He didn’t speak. He only looked away slowly, then turned and walked back to the main control platform.
The silence in the lab shifted—no longer empty, but heavy. A puzzle with no key.
“But it’s not all bad news,” LIZ said, flashing a sly grin.
Her fingers began flying across the holographic keyboard at an inhuman speed.
“I decrypted most of the Ekhosar’s structure,” she said. “Rewrote over seventy-one percent of its spell-code.”
She pulled the lollipop from her mouth for a moment, then hit Enter like she was signing a verdict.
“And this… is the result of solving that dimensional expansion equation.”
The Time Dilation graph of the Mana Realm jumped instantly—its ratio climbing from 1:2 to 1:3.
One week outside.
Three weeks inside.
“Before, we only had double,” LIZ said, winking. “Now the Force boosted it to triple.”
Rein nodded, satisfaction settling deep and quiet.
His mind immediately recalculated new schedules, new chains of experiments, new contingencies. The exhaustion from the student council pressure thinned the moment he held the most valuable resource in existence again.
This was the time heist he needed.
A gap like that was enough to grow teeth.
Rein walked straight to the central table and summoned a complex holographic diagram into the air. It rotated slowly, layered and intricate, like a living equation.
LIZ drifted in beside him, eyes fixed on the structure spinning in midair.
For the past month, Rein had poured everything into Prototype Haste—especially the backlash: that brutal recoil that punished his body the moment it ended.
It could grant him speed comparable to a Stratosphere-tier spellsword…
but the cost was unacceptable.
A week in bed after one use wasn’t a “side effect.”
It was a failed design.
“Haste Version 1.0…” Rein murmured, studying the new structure. “This time, it won’t just be acceleration.”
He had fused Haste with Strength Enhancement and Vortex—a Troposphere-tier wind spell.
But it wasn’t a chained sequence, wasting time stacking spells one by one.
Instead, it ran through a three-dimensional topology of nodes he’d named—
CUBE.
CUBE was their new architecture: a six-faced spell carrier. Each face held a command set, linked by logarithmic equations through three-dimensional transfer nodes.
The goal was simple: maximize efficiency—and bleed as little heat as possible.
“The principle is…” Rein said, eyes narrowing. “If my Core Mana Circle resonates with lightning… then lightning spells should give the highest output.”
“That’s what mages call an Affiliate,” LIZ said around her lollipop, clearly enjoying how annoyed he looked. “A fire mage with high Affiliate can output nearly double.”
“But that also means they’re locked inside one framework.”
“But not me,” Rein cut in. “An element shouldn’t cage my build. Trading flexibility for raw damage is idiotic.”
“Thermodynamics doesn’t care about elements.”
He reached out and rotated the glowing cube with two fingers, watching its faces catch the lab light.
“And this CUBE… is the key to breaking that wall.”
LIZ leaned in until her hologram nearly overlapped his face—then stole the CUBE from his hand and tossed it lazily between her palms.
“I like this way more than those flat, boring magic circles,” she said. “It’s a Holocron. From that movie.”
“Hold on,” Rein muttered, snatching the CUBE back. “I wasn’t even thinking about Holocrons.”
He turned and headed for the lab door that opened into the testing field.
The Mana Realm’s testing field now ran past the horizon line.
It was Engage Mode: LIZ siphoning excess mana from nearby dimensions to mint more simulated space.
What used to be the size of a basketball court…
was now wide enough for two full-sized football fields laid end to end.
Rein stepped out and stopped at the center of the empty field, drawing one steady breath.
“LIZ,” he called, “ready?”
Inside the simulated command tower, LIZ pulled her lollipop out for a moment—then, with maximum attitude, put on sunglasses and crossed her arms, watching him through a giant monitor.
“More than ready. Let’s go.”
“Improved Haste V1.0 test—attempt seven. Execute.”
Rein held his breath.
The previous six attempts had ended the same way: catastrophic failure—no pain, but enough that LIZ had to print him a new body until she started complaining.
But this time…
He wouldn’t fail.
The CUBE in his right hand began to glow blue, rotating slowly.
“Initializing spell-code loading into CUBE,” LIZ’s voice echoed.
“Face 1: Vortex.”
One face flashed. A wind-pattern ignited across it.
“Faces 2 through 4: Might Enhance, Haste, Levitate… online.”
Each command lit another face in sequence—clean, precise, engineered.
“Final package: MiDAR—Mana Imaging Detection and Ranging—online.”
The top face ignited with the most complex pattern of all.
A HUD floated into existence in front of Rein’s eyes.
[SYSTEM: CUBE PROTOCOL]
Thrust (Engine) | Vortex | Ready
Damping (Shock) | Levitate | Ready
Aero-Spike | Levitate | Ready
Structural Integrity | Might Enhance | Ready
Flight Data (Sensors) | MiDAR | Ready
Thermal Control | Vortex / Internal | Ready
Pulse Activation | Haste / Pulse | Ready
Visual HUD | LIZ / Interface | Ready
Autopilot | LIZ | Ready
Fail-Safe Protocol | LIZ | Ready
…
All green.
The CUBE lifted from his palm and began spinning at high speed, slicing the air with a sharp whine.
“Entropy Optimization and logarithmic-node transfer… ninety-seven… ninety-eight…”
A beat.
“One hundred.”
LIZ’s voice in his ear was calm—certain.
On the right side of his vision, the graph spiked upward—clean and violent.
“Parallel Vector Summation… complete.”
[CUBE Symmetry Balanced]
The moment LIZ confirmed it, the CUBE in Rein’s right hand flashed—
and the light surged through his body like a live wire.
As the CUBE Protocol entered full execution, the air pressure around him warped—like the atmosphere had been overwritten.
“Vortex Thrusters… ignite!” LIZ shouted.
Her finger slammed down on the floating Enter key.
The air detonated—thunder cracking across the field.
A colossal thrust erupted beneath Rein’s feet. Compressed Vortex mana blasted outward and launched him skyward in a straight, brutal line.
He wasn’t running anymore.
He was flying—cutting the air apart.
At 280 kilometers per hour, the world stopped being a place—and became a calculation.
MiDAR swept the field and rebuilt it as a three-dimensional point-cloud inside his vision.
[Latency: 0.002ms]
A glowing blue flight path—calculated in advance—drew itself ahead with merciless precision.
[Angle of attack: adjust // Aero-Spike: online]
Front-facing Levitate compressed the air into an invisible needle-cone, splitting resistance before it could tear him apart.
Inertia clawed at him, trying to pull him apart—
but Might Enhance—rigid-body reinforcement—held bone and muscle in place like forged steel.
He tilted, then rolled.
He barrel-rolled midair, crisp as a fighter jet.
Thin white jets flared from his palms and soles, vectoring under LIZ’s control. Every sudden correction slammed him with crushing G-force—
yet the Levitate plating beneath his joints bled the shock away before it could shatter him.
Four laps blurred past—one breath, then another, then the world snapped back into focus.
Then Rein saw it.
A target marker at the center, highlighted by LIZ as a red circle.
“Pull up—decelerate! Reverse thrust!”
Rein twisted midair, firing Vortex jets backward to counter his momentum. At the same time, he flattened the Levitate air-sheet into a wide plane—an air brake made of invisible pressure.
The wind’s high-pitched scream swelled into a roar.
He descended—still far too fast.
But at the last moment—
He hit the ground hard.
Left knee. Right fist. Both hands driving into the stone.
Dust and fragmented mana burst outward in a wide shockwave.
The impact should’ve shattered his leg.
Instead, the Levitate plating beneath his foot and knee absorbed it cleanly—completely.
Rein stayed frozen in a perfect superhero landing, smoke thinning around him.
He rose.
And when he lifted his head, deep blue eyes burning, the triumph in his chest finally found a voice.
“Incredible…”
“So this is what Tony felt like,” Rein breathed. “The first time he flew.”
Green metrics lit up across his HUD.
Average: 280 km/h
Peak: 320 km/h
Theoretical ceiling: 400 km/h
This wasn’t Haste V1 anymore.
By principle, it wasn’t even the same spell.
It needed a new name.
LIZ’s voice cut in, smug with satisfaction.
[VORTEX DRIVE — Designation registered.]
Rein paused—then the corner of his mouth lifted.
“...Vortex Drive,” he repeated. “Fine. That works.”
These entries expand the lore and mechanics introduced in this chapter.
Completely optional—read only if you enjoy diving deeper into the system.
Magic & Spell Techniques
CUBE
A groundbreaking spell architecture developed by Rein, designed to replace conventional chained magic casting. Instead of sequential casting, it employs a 3D structure—a cube with six operational faces—each inscribed with different spell functions.
– Purpose: The Entropy Optimization & Parallel Vector Summation.
– Design: Each face carries a separate command (e.g. Vortex, Haste, Levitate).
– Core Concept: Uses logarithmic-node transfer and entropy optimization to maximize output while minimizing thermal waste.
– Result: Rein achieves flight and high-speed maneuvering while managing G-force, thermal, and structural damage.
Vortex Drive
The official designation for the upgraded version of Rein’s Haste spell. Built on the CUBE Protocol, it combines:
– Vortex: for propulsion
– Levitate: for damping and aero-spike (shock absorption and drag reduction)
– Might Enhance: for skeletal/muscular protection
– MiDAR: for real-time scanning and navigation
– Haste Pulse: For short-burst neural and muscular synaptic acceleration
Flight Metrics:
– Avg: 280 km/h
– Peak: 320 km/h
– Theoretical Ceiling: 400 km/h
The spell represents a leap beyond traditional speed spells, merging magical and aerodynamic physics into one coherent system.
MiDAR–Mana Imaging Detection and Ranging (Update)
A magical counterpart to LiDAR, MiDAR scans the environment using mana pulses instead of light.
– Used in navigation systems during high-speed flight.
– Generates 3D point-cloud maps of terrain in real time.
– Provides ultra-low latency (e.g. 0.002 ms), allowing Rein to calculate trajectories at extreme speeds.
Affiliate
Describes how well a mage’s core mana circle resonates with a specific element.
– High Affiliate = increased spell efficiency and damage.
– Most mages specialize in one element.
– Rein rejects this limitation, aiming for element-neutral flexibility using optimization and structural enhancements.
Location
Mana Realm: (Time Dilation Update)
Using knowledge extracted from Ekhosar Def’vor, LIZ boosts the Mana Realm’s time dilation ratio from 1:2 to 1:3.
– Before: 1 week outside = 2 weeks inside.
– After: 1 week outside = 3 weeks inside.
This effectively gives Rein more “time” to work on research, experiments, and spell development—a massive advantage in magical academia.
Research Project
Dragon’s Speech (Research Update)
Still largely unreadable. The ancient structure remains resistant to LIZ’s logic parsing. Kept locked behind reinforced containment due to its unstable mana output and muffled cries.
Pop Culture Reference
Jedi / Holocron
While watching a lightsaber duel from Star Wars, LIZ draws comparisons between:
– Lightsabers and the Sword of Light of Goddess Lumina.
– Holocrons and Rein’s CUBE design.
A Holocron is a data cube used by Jedi in Star Wars to store ancient knowledge. LIZ describes the CUBE as more advanced and fun than standard flat magic circles.
Meta Commentary
“Like Tony Stark”
After Vortex Drive’s success, Rein references Iron Man:
“So this is what Tony felt like—the first time he flew.”
This nod highlights the DIY genius inventor trope, mirroring Rein’s experimental, high-risk approach to spellcraft.