"Quillin Drop, Kraken's Tears..." Azalea muttered, scanning the ingredient list for his first potion.
"Haah... haah... haaa..."
A pink-haired figure crawled out of the smoking cavern on hands and knees, gasping with every movement. Anna's usually neat appearance was completely ruined, her uniform hanging in tatters, her face covered in soot, her hair singed at the ends. She looked nothing like the composed, put-together girl who had made his life miserable for months.
Their eyes met.
"You're late," he said. "Don't breathe for an hour, then we can go."
"AZALEAAAAAAAA!"
Her scream echoed off the mountainside before she collapsed, clutching her throat. He continued floating, not bothering to look at her. She was already falling apart, and he hadn't even started yet. The thought brought a small smile to his face.
"The Elven Empire," he mused, thinking through where he could source the remaining ingredients. The list was getting complicated.
"No, wait." A better idea came to him. "What if I just..."
He closed his eyes, running through the possibilities.
Vivian.
If the timeline was still following the game's storyline, she was being abducted to Morntelia right now, taken by that psychotic king who had orchestrated an entire massacre just to get his hands on her. She had been on her way to a border town to treat a curse, but the king had found out and launched a coordinated operation to take her, sending tier-five beasts to cause chaos, using internal sabotage to overwhelm her guards, and making her disappear without a trace.
If he could intercept them before they reached Morntelia, that would solve several problems at once.
"Alright, that works better," he told himself, already working through the details.
The abduction had taken place outside Albion, near the border with Ezram. The kidnappers couldn't go through Ezram directly since the security there would expose them immediately, which meant they had to take the longer route through the Jarel-infested forests. Given how dangerous those creatures were, getting through without casualties would take roughly ten days.
The event had happened a week after Vermillion Academy closed.
"No, they're already past that point," he muttered, recalculating.
They were already halfway to Morntelia, then. Teleportation devices weren't an option for the kidnappers since those required registration and identification, and an investigation would eventually trace it back to Morntelia, and even a psychotic king couldn't afford that kind of exposure.
He closed his eyes, worked through the variables, then opened them.
"Got it."
Below him, Anna stared up with wide, hollow eyes, looking like she hadn't fully processed what her life had become.
"You can breathe," he said, landing beside her.
She stopped gasping and managed to get her breathing under control. "Please, just let me go, please!"
"Funny," he replied, without any real sympathy in his voice, "I seem to remember a young man who said something similar to a sadist not too long ago. Get up. Take me back to the hotel."
Anna closed her eyes, letting mana wrap around them both, and whispered the transportation spell.
"I won't lie, this really is convenient," he commented as the hotel room materialized around them.
"Go get me something to eat."
She stared at him, her expression cycling through disbelief, anger, frustration, and finally settling on something that looked like reluctant acceptance. "Alright," she said, and left the room with slow, dragging steps.
The moment the door closed, his breath gave out.
"Haah... haah... haah."
He'd suspected the side effects would come, but knowing something was coming and actually experiencing it were two different things. He clutched his chest and gritted his teeth, trying to circulate ether, but it only made it worse. He collapsed, holding on, waiting for it to pass.
Eventually it did, but when the pain faded, something else took its place, a strange sensation, like a piece of himself had quietly slipped away without warning.
"What exactly is the price here?" he muttered through his teeth.
[#$%^&*()_]
[No price is too great for revenge.]
[An evil entity smiles at you.]
He stared at the message. An evil entity, so whatever had granted him this ability wasn't exactly a benevolent force. That wasn't surprising, but it wasn't a problem he could solve right now, so he filed it away and moved on.
Click.
Anna returned, still looking like she'd had a terrible day by any measure. "Here's your food," she said, doing a poor job of hiding her frustration.
"Who said it was for me?" he asked.
Her eyes went wide as the implication settled in.
"Eat it fast. We're leaving," he said, and she went completely still.