Chapter 10

"Motohama."

With toast in hand, I was getting ready to say goodbye and head to school. The serious tone of Mr. Sato was very noticeable and caught my attention.

"Yea?"

"Be careful on the way back home. Police are still investigating the death of the 12-year-old girl at the arcade yesterday. They don't know if this is linked to the serial murders of that dark magic cult or not."

"Don't worry. I can take care of myself."

In recent months there has been a series of murders in Japan, the locations are varied and totally random and it seems to change cities from time to time.

Whether the girl's death had anything to do with the string of murders or not I wouldn't know. But I was pretty sure of one thing...

Probably this 'so-called' cult of dark magic had no involvement with the supernatural.

Hardly the inhabitants of the supernatural world would let such a case run wild in the media of the common human.

It was probably just a crazy psychopath or a bunch of them.

"Something else?" I asked feeling that Mr. Sato seemed to be holding back to tell me something.

"Nice music class," he says and holds out a bucket in my direction.

Ugh. Really?

"I kind of gave up on joining the club, you can have it. I'm not very good at music after all." I replied as I rubbed my cheek awkwardly and a sweat broke out on my forehead. "I'm leaving then. See you later."

Mr. Sato lets out a sigh of relief, there was still hope.

# # # # #

"Heyyy- Motohamaa," A voice shouted from afar.

I turn to look and see a brown haired teenager running towards me.

"Huff uh-huff. Wait- Huff- Regaining strength," the said teenager, who is obviously Issei, is bent over with his hands on his knees in front of me and very panting.

It was hard to believe that in a short time this one would be responsible for carrying the weight of the world and protecting it. How is this possible? Maybe it has something to do with a legendary hack dragon that multiplies his power as easy as pissing.

"Are you sure you're okay?" I asked.

"Huff- I ran all the way from my house to," He stops midway through his words as he remembers something and adopts a despairing face, "No!!! We can't let our dreams die. Let's go inside, we can't be late - Because if--"

"What time do you think it is now?"

"Eh?" He blinks his eyes a few times in confusion and, "Seven o'clock?"

I shake my head from side to side and say, "It's not even six-thirty yet."

After brief seconds of incomprehension, he notices something with a blank face.

"Nooo," Issei clutches his head with a horrified face. "My clock is forward half an hour."

I confess I was confused. I thought he would be relieved to know he wasn't late, but that seemed far from the truth.

"Thirty wasted minutes," he says with tears in the corners of his eyes, "My alarm clock woke me up in the best part of the dream, that damn one. I was squeezing some opp-"

Okay, I already knew where this conversation was going, and worse, Issei's voice was quite audible. It seems that the boy's lapse in separating from his 'oppais', even if they were only in dreams, made him forget about the people around us.

After a while, in which Issei had finally gotten tired of declaring his frustrations out loud. He opens his eyes and looks around, "Huh? Motohama?"

The brown haired young man was left talking to himself and no sign of me anywhere.

# # # # #

"That's why it's important for us to understand that simple things like--" As the teacher spoke in front of the classroom, I confess that I was very bored.

Classes didn't seem interesting at all, and the idea of ​​having to go through high school again didn't appeal to me.

So my focus in class would be coming up with ideas for how I could implement my hack of not using mana in spells.

It was too OP for me not to invest time in it, the only problem was that last time it backfired and so I should be cautious.

I could still feel someone's gaze boring into my back, it was Issei still mad at me for leaving him alone.

My thoughts didn't stray and I continued on my hypotheses of how to successfully implement my hack.

I had over 121 books of magical lore recorded in my memoirs eidetically. Many of them are magical theories, failed spells, and unorthodox spells.

Why study failed spells? The answer is simple, if you find out where the stumbling blocks are, you can avoid going down that same wrong path.

For example, I now know that there are certain magic formulas that are the antithesis of each other and that cannot be placed in the same spell. Several mages have died in the past while playing inventor of new formulas.

"Sato-san," the teacher said grimly, before flashing a smile to the class and saying mockingly, "You seem so uninterested. Why don't you explain to the class how the end of the shogunate period was marked?"

I look at my book on the table and use Appraise Magic on it.

"No reading the book, Sato-san. I want your answer to that question."

'Don't worry, teacher. I've read everything I need to,' I told myself internally and got up from my desk.

"It was a period of strong political and economic isolation from the country and strict internal control known as sakoku. In 1868, the period ended with the Meiji Restoration, when the imperial government (tenno) regained its authority, marking the end of feudal dictatorships and the beginning of Japan's modernization."

The teacher's eyes were wide, the other students were talking about what had happened.

Motohama was never an outstanding student, although he didn't get bad grades, they weren't good either. He was such a typical mob character that even his grades were average.

"Umm, Cough, sit down, Sato-san. Thank you for your answer," The teacher took a while to regain his composure and then said, "Make Sato-san an example and study like him, class. It's important that you dedicate for your futures."

"Ehhh???" People screamed in unison when they heard the teacher tell them to mirror me.

Truth be told, even with my demonstration of knowledge, the girls in the class, who make up over 90% of the class, were not at all pleased with the teacher's statements.

They see me as their natural enemies and think that my display of knowledge was probably a childish attempt to impress one of them.

"So disgusting," I heard a female whisper.

"Death to the perverts."

"Ugh. I feel dirty just being compared to this." another whisper sounded.

My reputation was earned by a lot of hard work from the previous Motohama, people wouldn't forget that easily.

Not that I really cared what these girls thought, most of them were nosy and gossipy. Not to mention that I had no intention of getting involved with any of them. I want the best this world has to offer.

At least my goal was achieved, the teacher didn't bother me any more, leaving me alone to my own thoughts.

# # # # #

The first day of school was as I thought it would be, nothing out of the ordinary and very stressful. I purposely avoided getting close to any of the devils and luckily I succeeded.

Now that I was home, I needed to put into practice what I had been thinking all day.

Upon entering my room on the second floor, I stop in my tracks when I see something quite ridiculous.

"Oh? PxG, it's you," said Hikimage lying face down on my bed, both legs dangling as he seemed to be calmly reading a magazine.

His figure was twice the size of my bed, and I wondered, what the hell was he doing here??!!

"Hey, don't look at me like that, I just wanted to come here to learn more about my favorite student," Hikimage said before going back to reading the magazine.

"H-How did you get in?"

"Mr. Sato was kind and let me in. You had to learn some manners from him." He replied in an accusatory tone.

Was Mr. Sato here? I hadn't found him downstairs and thought he was still on the job.

"That-that," I stare at my bedroom floor with a blank expression, before gritting my teeth and saying, "Is that MY packets of potato chips?!? YOU ATE THEM ALL!! You don't deserve to live! I going to-"

He looks a little surprised by my reaction and stops reading for a moment and says...

"Mm? Sorry about that. Ummm-- The soda, and the peach cake in the fridge also ran out. The cake was really good by the way, congratulations to whoever made it."

I had to hold my breath and count a lot of numbers to keep from throwing a fireball at him.

"I forgot to ask you --- Your father wouldn't work at the energy company, would he?"

"No, he's a travel agent." I answer frowning.

"That's a relief then," Hikimage sighs in relief.

Seriously, I didn't understand Hikimage's problem with service companies.

"That's how you like them then," muttered Hikimage as he rubbed his own nipple in a rather strange way.

My stomach churns at the scene and as I approach to see what he's been reading, I see it's my secret porn magazines.

"Well, I understand you and share the same tastes. Gremory-san's breasts look wonderful and soft. Ahhhh!!! just thinking about being able to have that beauty in--"

"No! Stop! Stop! I want to see you talking about Rias-senpai like that."

I didn't have the patience to listen to his fantasies with a certain redhead, so I quickly cut the subject.

He seems to shudder a little and asks, "You're not going to tell her that, are you?"

"Not if you help me with something."

"Umm? Say it then." He closes the magazine and sits on the bed, listening to what I have to say.

"I've read a couple of books that caught my eye in your library, which talk about adding conditions to a spell. The book considered this a failure. Any reason for this?"

"Conditions in a spell?"

"Yea."

"You already have trouble doing quick casts on ordinary spells. Why would you complicate your life even more?"

"What do you mean by that?"

"Simple -- You would take even longer to cast and it would simply be inefficient for direct combat. That's why this technique is considered a failure, as you spend a lot of time embellishing a spell that soon disappears."

He slams his palm onto my bed and after a long 10 seconds, a brown magic circle has formed.

"Take this spell as an example," He leans his weight to the right and four magic circles lit up over the foot of the bed and the whole bed began to slide in that direction.

He bent the weight to the left and the bed shifted in that direction, as if it were a small car.

"This was a simple spell from the first sphere called glide. I applied a second spell to pushes the bed on condition that it is in the same direction my body leans. It took me a total of 13 seconds to do this and keep in mind that I've studied all my life and that's all I can do."

"Amazing," I said excitedly.

"Hey, are you listening to me? I said this is impractical and a waste of time and--"

Before he could finish saying...

"That's like using programming in a spell," I say, eyes twinkling, "You can delay activation or control other minor effects with body movement or keywords. How can you call that useless?"

"As I said before, the difficulty level is too high and not worth the effort. The spell's power remains the same and the mana expenditure is four times as much. The gains do not outweigh the losses."

Needless to say, I didn't care about all that.

With my hack all that would be irrelevant.

"Sigh. Anyway," Hikimage stands up and says in a serious tone, "Tomorrow meet me around midnight at my house."

"Huh? What's the point?"

"Hmph, don't question your teacher," He says as he turns his back and a magic circle lights up and simply disappears in a teleportation.

Not caring about Hikimage's departure, I started to focus on what I wanted to put into practice right away.

I close my eyes and begin to shape the formulas of a spell from the first sphere, an ordinary fireball. Very carefully I start replicating the two mysterious formulas that allow the spell to be uninterrupted with no mana expenditure.

Time passes.

My forehead starts to sweat a lot because I've been trying to organize a multitude of formulas for many hours.

Finally I would start the step of programming the spell's conditions.

{ If said the word, 'Firebolt';

Activate formula saved for 0.01s, after -> turn off automatically.

endif

}

After finishing the formula I open my eyes and lie on the floor tired. The headache was screaming. It had been much more difficult than the last time. After all, this was a spell from the first sphere and therefore much more complex.

Without wasting any more time.

Even though it was late at night I sneaked out of the house, until I was sure I was alone in front of a tree.

My heart flutters with excitement and anxiety.

I extend my right hand in the air...

And I scream, "Firebolt!!!!"

My right hand lights up an orange circle and a ball of fire the size of a clenched fist flew towards the tree.

boom.

The tree ignites on the impact of the fireball

Because it's night, the glow of the flames reflects in my crazy eyes and I open a giant smile and scream.

"Firebolt! Firebolt! FIREBOOLLLTTTT!!!..."