The task was straightforward on paper.
Solve the problems displayed on her cubic yai circuit, one every two seconds, for two hours straight, with more than eighty percent correct answers. No breaks, no pauses, no margin for hesitation.
'Well, that is something easy for me,' Zelaine thought. 'Atiya and I had a knack for problem solving involving mathematical equations. What makes the task hard is that I have to solve the problems in two seconds, I cannot take a break, I have to do it for two hours, which means I have to solve three thousand six hundred math problems in two hours without a break, and more than eighty percent have to be correct.'
It was a hectic task. However it aligned perfectly with the skill she had coded.
The skill was Precognition. There were two types of clairvoyance, one to exactly see the future prepared by fate, which was normally a fixed inescapable future, and a second which was to calculate everything that happened around her, taking in data from fate itself to calculate an outcome based on it.
Zelaine had coded for the second one. Even so the skill would only activate at specific times, generally when she was in danger or in combat, to predict people's moves some time ahead. The distance she could see into the future would only increase over time.
'The reason I coded this skill is to prevent any unplanned situations, and second, it works well with my other sets of time skills.'
For her time yaicraft she already had her Rewind skill, which basically rewound specific parts of her body. If she got wounded or bruised she would simply rewind it and it was back to normal. She also had her Accelerating skill, which she constantly used to accelerate her yai recovery rate.
'And for offense I have the skill of Cause and Erasure, the more I use Time Yai the more I would be able to use this skill's effect at a larger scale, it is basically to erase the time spent on a specific path, like if I throw a ball and suddenly it vanishes and hits the net, one would call it teleporting however I just erase the time on the path and leave the time where it reaches its destination, this is a great skill however it uses a tremendous amount of Yai.'
By pairing it with this new skill her combat potential would be on an entirely different level.
'And for my cubic crystal yaicraft, heh, it is mainly for defense and offense, it would work well with these too.'
Zelaine's eyes crinkled as she grinned. She was planning to complete the task real soon.
She sat cross legged on the bed, her cubic yai circuits hovering before her like glowing translucent monitors, the air in the room carrying a low static as the first equation flickered into existence.
342 x 18 / 6 + 157 = ?
'Easy.' Her mind snapped to the answer, one thousand one hundred and eighty three, and the circuit flashed green.
The next one appeared instantly and the difficulty spiked sharply.
Calculate the determinant of a 4x4 matrix where the diagonal is (4, 7, 2, 9) and all other elements are 1.
'Four hundred and thirty seven.' Green.
The pace was relentless, not just arithmetic, the cubic circuits began throwing complex calculus, probability matrices and yai flux variables at her, each problem appearing for exactly two seconds before vanishing, and if she hesitated for even a heartbeat it counted as a failure.
Thirty minutes in beads of sweat were rolling down her forehead, her brain feeling like it was physically heating up, the hot liquid of her yai circuit circulating faster to keep up with the processing demand.
Find the local maximum of f(x, y) = x³ + y³ - 3x - 12y + 20.
*Point is (1, 2), value is 2.* Green.
By the one hour mark her vision had started blurring at the edges, but her internal coding logic kept her hands and mind moving in a rhythmic mechanical trance. She was not just calculating numbers anymore, she was teaching her mind how to process the variables of the universe at speed.
Solve the second order differential equation: y'' + 4y' + 5y = 0, with y(0)=1, y'(0)=0.
'e to the power of negative two x, times cos x plus two sin x.'
'Two thousand problems down, sixteen hundred to go,' she gritted her teeth, eyes wide and bloodshot, fixed on the blue light. 'I am not missing the eighty percent mark, not after all this work.'
The equations shifted, becoming more abstract, transitioning into the data from fate she had designed the skill to interpret, multidimensional vectors, probability of impact, variables that did not exist in any standard framework and had to be solved through the logic she had spent four years building.
A 5D Tensor contraction: Tᵢⱼₖ × Uʲᵏˡ where indices range from 1 to 10.
'Resulting in a second order tensor with one hundred components.'
In the final ten minutes the room disappeared entirely. There was only the blue glow and the numbers, her fingers moving through the air tapping invisible keys, her mind screaming through the last stretch on nothing but stubbornness and the four years of work sitting behind every answer.
3598.
3599.
3600.
The last equation, a massive multi variable string of triple integrals and complex residues, dissolved.
The cubic circuits pulsed white, vibrating hard enough that the furniture in the room began to rattle, the light filling every corner until the walls were gone and there was only the circuit and the result.
Then a notification appeared, written in her own coded script across the surface of the cube.
[ENACTMENT COMPLETE: ACCURACY 94.2%]
[SKILL OBTAINED: PRECOGNITION]
Zelaine slumped backward onto her pillows, chest heaving, her mind feeling like something that had been run at twice its intended capacity for two hours straight and was now simply refusing to do anything further.
She closed her eyes.
Instead of darkness, a faint shimmering outline of her own hand appeared, moving to scratch her nose, three seconds before she actually did it.
She let out a laugh, tired and jagged and completely genuine.
"Ta-dah."
Then, at a volume entirely disproportionate to the quiet of the room and the late hour and the sleeping building around her:
"I FUCKING DID IT!"
****
The demonness Atiya had seen the second time inside Kallar's memories was different from the first.
She stood with a cold practiced elegance, moon pale hair cascading over her shoulders, and beneath the sharp arc of her brow her eyes were the color of fresh arterial blood, holding a haughty stillness that weighed the worth of everything they fell upon. She wore a blouse of deep bruised magenta with voluminous sleeves and a high waisted black skirt cinched by glinting gold chains, her silhouette as regal as it was predatory.
Her height varied from what he had seen before. But the face was unmistakable.
It was Leishna's face.
That was the moment Atiya had confirmed it, though the clues had been accumulating long before the cave.
She had mentioned a survivor, and yet when pressed she had claimed to know nothing about them. But if she truly knew nothing then how had she made contact with the survivor in the first place, how had the letter reached Atiya at all, there had to be a means and the means pointed directly back to her.
Then there was Screja.
She had raped him, that was true, and even through that she had retained something resembling consideration in how she handled him afterward, a residual professionalism beneath the cruelty. But the version of Screja who had returned after going to see Leishna off was a different creature entirely, wild and without restraint, as though something had been switched off in her that had previously kept the worst of it contained.
Leishna had set it up.
The antidote had been ready before Screja made her move. The coded message had been prepared in advance.
The timing of every piece of information Leishna had fed him across their time together had been too precise, too conveniently sequenced, to be anything other than deliberate.
She had been managing him from the beginning.
There was something else that had been sitting at the back of his mind for longer than he had let himself examine it directly.
The villagers kept forgetting about Leishna.
Not once or twice, consistently, across every dangerous situation they had been in together. Kellen had forgotten her entirely during the spider attack, her focus narrowing to Atiya alone as though Leishna had simply ceased to exist in the room.
The two speedsters in the cave had fought him with their complete and undivided attention, neither of them sparing a single action toward the unconscious girl right there.
It was as though she occupied a blind spot in every hostile mind around her, present but unregistered, a detail the eye kept sliding past.
She had been pulled under by the gargantuan, that much was true, but thinking back on it the creature had not gone for her directly, its attention had always returned to Atiya, and when it had her in its grip it had not simply eaten her the way it would have eaten anything else.
As if something had told it not to finish the job.
Then there was the cold.
She had gone into freezing water, been held under by a creature in the deep, resurfaced, and at some point simply stopped shivering.
She sopped chattering her teeth. The physical distress had seemingly vanished.
Logically she should not have been walking at all.
And the Ascension 3 skill that supposedly bound her.
She had mentioned it, referenced it as the reason she could not defy the village, and then never explained what it actually was or who had coded it. From everything Atiya had seen in Kallar's memories, Kallar was the only Ascension 3 yai user in the village at the time. So whose skill was it.
Where had it come from. The question had no clean answer unless the answer was that there had never been a skill at all, that she had simply made the villagers believe there was one, made them believe she was bound and cooperative and harmless, the same way she made them forget to look at her when it mattered.
A skill to make herself invisible to hostile attention. A fabricated binding to explain her compliance.
An act maintained across however many years she had been playing the role of the frost child, the half human bait, the girl under someone else's control.
She was not under anyone's control.
She had never been.
And he had asked her directly, lying bound against the altar stone with the chant of the villagers filling the mountain air around them.
"Don't lie to me! You are the demonness, aren't you, Leishna chan."
Leishna's expression did not change. Her grin simply grew wider, her eyes drifting upward to the sky with the particular ease of someone watching something they had been expecting for a while.
"Oh my. He has hatched and come too."
The spatial distortions that had spread across the altar area vanished. All of them, simultaneously, without a sound.
"What."
Fredo's frown was the deepest Atiya had seen from him. The disappearance of the distortions pointed to a single fact, the barrier had not merely been breached this time, it had been deactivated entirely, shut down completely, every layer of it gone at once.
The demonness herself would not do such a thing. That much seemed certain to him.
But who else could.
There was no answer that made sense and no time to find one, because the poisoned arrows were still closing in, the trajectory unchanged, bearing down on him with the momentum of something that had already committed to its destination.
Fredo was neither conceited nor careless. He activated his yaicraft to counter them.
Then the first one caught him anyway.
It had barely missed his vitals. With a poisoned arrow that distinction was largely academic. The impact unbalanced him, his treasury refusing to open cleanly in the fraction of a second after the hit, and the remaining arrows were closing with too much force to deflect with a blade at this angle, too many of them, the swarm tightening as he staggered.
The moment stretched, the kind that felt longer than it was, when it seemed to everyone present that Fredo Nelljan was about to fall.
A sword came out of nowhere.
It passed him close enough that he felt the air of it and struck the incoming arrows, the yai energy shrouding the shafts deflecting outward with a thunderous crash that shook the altar stone. A second and third shaft had already found his arm and leg, the poison beginning its work, but the rest of the swarm had been stopped.
Fredo's eyes found empty air and held there, already sensing it before it showed itself. A presence that had been concealed with considerable skill, emerging the instant the arrow had struck him, as though it had been waiting for exactly that moment to stop hiding.
"The disgrace," Fredo said, his voice carrying something that was not quite anger and not quite grief. "The fallen ripper. You have finally decided to return."
A third voice came down from the sky above the altar.
"Fallen? How rude. It seems I need to punish you again, son. All these years and you never once came to visit me."
A man floated out from behind a nearby structure and descended slowly, his presence landing on the gathered crowd like a physical weight, every face turning upward as the recognition spread through the villagers in a wave.
Atiya stared from the altar stone.
"Kallar Nelljan."