Re: Love & Magic

Morning 5 AM….Zevien woke up as his eyes opened slowly.

All of his exhaustion was swept away, feeling refreshed like never before.

“Oh, you woke up,”

Zevien looked to his left, and he saw a nurse sitting there looking at him with a magazine in her hands. She stood up and left the lab.

In the hall outside the lab, four people including Touma were discussing about the experiment when the nurse entered the hall and told them that Zevien had woken up.

“Inform Cargil, or he will get mad,” the man with short dark-blue hair spoke to the middle-aged woman with wavy blond hair wearing a coat while he followed Touma inside the lab with another woman who had short black hair and sharp eyes.

…

“How do you feel, Zevien?” Touma asked as he sat on the stool beside the bed. Zevien was also sitting on the bed, crossed-legged.

“I feel stronger,” Zevien said as he moved his hand.

“Bring that machine,” the middle-aged man spoke as he ordered the nurse. He then looked at Zevien and said, “punch in the machine so we can check how physically strong you are.”

“Fine,” Zevien nodded as he got out of the bed and jumped a few times, and stretched his body.

The nurse arrived with the punching machine and put it in front of Zevien.

After taking a deep breath and getting into the punching stance, Zevien threw a punch with the maximum physical strength he could exert.

‘Nice form,’ the short black-haired woman nodded. She wore a tight suit with high heels and a pair of black-crystal earrings.

*PAWW!*

830 units

“830 units of physical force. That’s 300 higher than average people who had just awakened their magic labyrinths,” the middle-aged man spoke.

“He knows how to punch perfectly, so that counts as well,” the woman spoke with a nod, “but we can conclude that his body had indeed gotten stronger. The question is…how?”

“Zevien, what did you experience after disappearing from here? How did your physical body get strengthened? There are strange elements in your physical body that we can’t grasp as well,” Touma asked.

‘Strange elements should be referring to how my body was changed that it now can go inside a magic labyrinth with magic eidos body,’ Zevien thought before he nodded and started speaking.

“Wait!” a loud voice resounded before a white beard old man appeared, the one who told Touma to prepare two serums again.

‘City Lord Cargil,’ Zevien thought as he looked at the old man, ‘the officially known 1st class magician of Starling City.’

The old man entered the glass chamber before gesturing to Zevien with his hand, “now you can start speaking. Tell us everything without missing out on a single detail of your experience.”

“I’ll make it short and simple,” Zevien spoke plainly, “first, I disappeared from here and entered inside my magic labyrinth with my physical body.”

Hearing that, everyone was startled.

“Continue,” the old man nodded and didn’t let anyone interrupt by saying that.

“The reason for my physical body getting stronger is that after killing normal magic beasts inside the magic labyrinth, they started to decay and turned into motes before entering my body, fundamentally making it strong.”

“That’s basically refining one’s body with mana, but now you can make it stronger by killing magic beasts,” the old man spoke with interest, “we have to check if this phenomenon still occurs when you kill magic beasts in our world. We will go to the forest outside the city after this. Now continue.”

Zevien stretched his hand forward slightly and poured out his mana in the hope that it wouldn’t go out of control.

Touma looked on with an intense gaze while speaking, “this is another thing. Zevien had some problem in his magic eidos body, and his mana goes out of control once it goes out of his body. The effects of Mana Rever Crystal and Eidos Magic Roots had an effect on magic eidos body to increase the control of mana as well.”

Zevien nodded with a smile, “my control of mana is even b-…It’s perfectly fine now.”

“Great,” Touma said with a joyous smile and patted Zevien’s shoulder, “now you won’t have to worry about getting expelled.”

Zevien grinned, “yep. Anyway, this is all that I know.”

“That’s all?” the old man squinted his eyes, “young man, I hope you don’t withhold any information because it is very important.”

“Of course, that’s all,” Zevien smiled, “what would I gain by hiding information? After all, you will do the same experiment on other people as well, right?”

“Indeed,” the old man nodded with a somber face, “however, the effect might be different on different people because you had a problem in your magic eidos body, and it was fixed after this experiment. On the other hand, the next person taking part in this experiment is a completely normal 5th class magician.”

“So try to think about more or whatever you experienced and tell us about it in case you forgot to tell us about it,” the old man spoke.

‘Damn, so persistent,’ Zevien thought before he decided to play with them and showed a thoughtful expression for full five minutes as they stared at him, waiting for him to speak.

“Now that I think about it, there is indeed a slight feeling nagging me,” Zevien slowly spoke as he looked at everyone and adopted a grave expression. He spent those five minutes cooking about a plot to shove them in their brain. A logical plot.

“As you can see, my magic power didn’t increase after the experiment, right?” Zevien asked as he turned to Touma.

“Indeed,” Touma nodded, “the Stone of Pristine had the effect of increasing the potency of magic core, thus, increasing the magic power of the user by a certain margin depending on factors that I am still not aware of since we didn’t experiment on it due to limited amount of them.”

“Right,” Zevien nodded quickly, “I felt my magic power increasing at first, but it reduces afterward.”

‘Although it probably reduced after the reaction to my body. The magic power was probably used with another catalyst to allow my body to enter the magic labyrinth just like my magic eidos body,’ Zevien thought.

“So what?” the old man asked with a frown, “what does that entail?”

“I feel like….know that this is just my feels, gut feeling telling me that if someone with powerful magic power, like say 5th, 4th, or even stronger magician goes through this experiment then they will likely weaken and their magic power might get lower than 500, basically, less than 5th class magician,” Zevien said unhurriedly.

“Look, this is just my feels, and I am not sure about it, okay?” Zevien spoke carefully, “you can proceed to check it with that 5th class magician but don’t blame me later if I am wrong since I have no proof of that. And this is all I have to say.”

Actually, Zevien doesn’t remember his encounter with Euclion at all. So he had indeed said everything he knew to them.

[A/N: Vote with power stones and add it to the library for more chaps. Support is appreciated. Thank you.]