A/N : Some readers who have read my previous story may be spoiled on some things but rest assured I'm not taking more than 10% information from that story...
Anyway the update schedule will remain wrecked 🥀.( I'm also not answering my crimes of abandoning my previous story DxD: Actually Satan )
I just gre too far from the story the one and half month I've spent actually writing on paper and experiencing life has made me grow disconnected to the story as a whole I just don't have the heart to announce it in hopes I'll regain the connection.
Thanks for reading the Author note now onto the story... The chapter is a bit of a bottle one where information dump is given but given the previous three chapters were spent on exposition and all it's fair ?
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A gentle warmth stirred him from slumber.
For a moment Nero thought it was the sunlight, but no...this warmth was familiar, wrapping him in a cocoon far softer than the night chill of the roof.
There was a hum, faint and steady, vibrating against his ear.
A tune he could call familiar enough that his heart seemed to remember even if his mind didn't.
His lashes fluttered open.
The first thing he saw was a cascade of golden hair, brushing against his cheek. The second was the face of his mother, serene and unguarded, her eyes closed as she hummed. One of her hands threaded lazily through his golden locks, the other holding him firmly against her, as though daring the world to try and take him away.
He blinked, all his sulking from last night forgotten...
As if sensing his stirring, her humming faded. Her lashes lifted, and warm eyes met his.
"Ah… you're awake," she said, voice soft, loving, and unshakably sure.
Her smile was faint, but to him, it was brighter than the morning sun.
Seeing him just staring at her with those wide, half-dazed eyes, Abigail chuckled softly.
Her hand left his hair to tug gently at his cheeks, stretching them until Nero squirmed and muttered incoherently in protest.
"Don't just stare at me like a startled kitten," she teased, before leaning down and planting a kiss on his forehead.
Her lips lingered there a moment longer than usual, as if she wanted to press something deeper than just affection into him.
"Come on," she said, finally releasing him. "Wake up properly and get dressed. Today's going to be a lot different from usual."
Still blinking sleep from his eyes, Nero pushed himself upright on the bed. He rubbed his face with both hands, hair sticking in every possible direction. "...Different?" he mumbled, his voice heavy with grogginess.
Abigail stood gracefully, smoothing the wrinkles from her dress, but her gaze never left him. The warmth of her smile softened her words.
"Yes," she said simply. "From today onwards… I'll be the one teaching you."
That woke him up more than any splash of cold water could have.
Nero froze, blinking up at her, golden brows furrowing. "...Teaching me?"
Her lips curved upward, this time into a confident smile.
"Yes," she repeated, stepping closer to ruffle his hair once again. "You've trained under others long enough. But there are things only I can show you....Things you'll need."
This instantly put a wide smile on Nero's face.
His eyes lit up, all his frustration melting away in that single moment.
But just as quickly, his excitement shrank into a frown.
He lowered his head, his voice dropping to a mutter.
"…But I don't even have a nature attached to my magic…"
He didn't get the chance to wallow.
Flick!
Her finger tapped his forehead, sharp but playful, making him jerk back with a little yelp. Abigail's smile turned almost smug.
"Let me worry about that," she said firmly, her tone leaving no room for doubt. "And besides...who exactly do you think you're talking to? I'm one of the most knowledgeable mages alive." Her hand rested on her hip, her golden hair catching the morning light.
"In fact, there's no one more fit to teach you than me."
Nero pouted, rubbing the spot she flicked. "Then… why didn't you do it sooner?"
That caught her. Her confident smile faltered, her lips parting as if she had the answer ready...only for it to die halfway in her throat. She blinked, looking uncharacteristically flustered.
"I… had to get rid of my duties first," she managed, waving a hand like she could brush the subject away. "Yes. Duties."
Nero squinted at her, unimpressed. He wasn't the sharpest when it came to secrets, but he wasn't blind either.
She wasn't telling him everything.
Mama, you liar, he thought, though he kept it locked inside his head.
---
Clouds drifted lazily, the morning sun painting them gold.
High above, two figures cut across the horizon.
Abigail glided effortlessly, standing atop a broad blade of gleaming steel, its edges humming faintly with magic.
Each tilt and shift of her weight carried her forward with the grace of someone who had spent her life mastering flight.
Her long golden hair fluttered in the wind, like a banner declaring her presence to the world.
Trailing beside her was Nero.
Soon, the sprawling silhouette of the Kira Research Centre rose into view.
Though publicly called the largest magic research institute in the Clover Kingdom, the name hardly captured what it truly was.
It was no crowded laboratory of magecraft, nor a place echoing with the clamor of experiments.
Rather, it was a sanctuary of knowledge...an immense archive that stretched both upward and deep below the earth.
Its halls held something that few places in the world could claim: records.
Not just of current spells, but of the past...grimoire excerpts, research notes, carved stone tablets, copied scripts from fallen kingdoms of the past, and even oral traditions painstakingly transcribed.
The collection was so vast, so meticulous, that some claimed it contained at least one record of almost every magic that had ever been known in Clover since the age of House Silva-Million...before that great line split into the branches now known as Silva, Vermillion, and Kira.
In a sense, it was less a research institute and more a time capsule of magic's history as a whole.
Generations of Kira heads had treated it as a legacy, preserving what others dismissed.
While the rest of the kingdom threw resources into battlefield innovations, the Kira family alone had poured their fortunes into saving fragments of knowledge that would otherwise have vanished into dust.
That was all Nero knew about the place.
But, he was sure it wasn't the complete truth.
The Kira family wasn't known for sentimentality, if they had kept something alive for generations, then there had to be a reason.
Clouds parted as they descended.
When Abigail's feet touched the ground, The gates of the Kira Research institute creaked open at her arrival automatically.
Nero followed her through the gate without saying anything..., his gaze darting from wall to wall as they entered.
The inside of the institute looked like something pulled from different times.
Light spilled softly across tall marble pillars, bookshelves stretched endlessly into the shadows above, and the air seemed to be saturated with mana.
But what truly caught his breath was the massive crystal at the heart of the building.
It shone gently, its deep blue glow reflecting across the polished floor like ripples on still water.
The crystal was almost as tall as the tower itself, veins of gold running through it like lifeblood.
"Surprised?" Abigail asked, her tone teasing.
Nero nodded dumbly, still staring. "How… how was this even made?"
A proud grin spread across her face as she placed a hand on her hip. "The crystal that used to stand here was already the largest on the continent," she said, eyes glinting. "But this one " she gestured toward it " is my recreation. I enhanced it myself using creation magic."
"It powers everything in the building," she continued, puffing her chest a little. "Even the automatic movement system. Watch this—"
She tapped the floor lightly, and a circular platform slid out beneath them, glowing faintly with complex magic circles.
Nero blinked in awe as it began to descend smoothly through the air, no ropes or gears in sight.
Abigail beamed, clearly enjoying his reaction. "I designed it too. Neat, isn't it?"
He nodded again, eyes wide. "You made this… all of it?"
"Mm-hm," she said, tone almost smug. "I've always preferred inventing and studying over fighting....Guess I'm just a bit of a nerd at heart."
The lift came to a stop at a wide hallway below.
Before the doors opened, Abigail knelt and pricked her finger, letting a drop of blood fall onto the glowing floor.
Before stepping onto the lower floor, Abigail paused and turned to face him.
The light from the mana crystal bathed her in a soft glow.
"So," she began, tilting her head slightly, "by now you must have some questions."
Nero blinked, caught off guard.
"Like," she continued, smiling faintly, "why would a family like ours keep something like this running an institute that doesn't seem to hold any real value?"
He nodded once, his face calm, almost expressionless.
But to Abigail, that small, serious nod only looked adorably earnest... the kind of expression that made it hard for her not to ruffle his hair again.
"You see," she said, turning back toward the crystal as it pulsed gently, "unlike the other two branches Silva and Vermillion ... the Kiras have always had a… problem."
Her voice softened. "Our magic tends to be abstract. Harder to define, harder to measure it's boudaries... What we have often exists between those things....concepts and ideas that even we don't fully understand."
She placed a hand on the smooth, glowing surface of the lift's railing, tracing the runes as she spoke.
"But that isn't something wholly undesirable," she said, glancing back at him with a knowing look.
"Tell me, Nero," she asked, crouching slightly so their eyes met, "what is magic to you?"
"Magic…" Nero began slowly, thinking back to the lessons he'd memorized over the years. "It's a phenomenon conjured using mana."
Abigail smiled faintly. "Hmm. That's true," she said, "but only at the surface."
Her gaze drifted toward the crystal, its soft light reflecting in her eyes. "At its core, magic is recreation."
Nero tilted his head. "Recreation?"
"Yes," she replied, turning back to him. "Magic is the recreation of what already exists.... the imitation of reality itself."
She lifted her hand, and a faint light gathered at her fingertips, and in the next moment, a small flame flickered to life above her palm.
"Think of it," she continued, her tone quiet "When someone casts fire, they aren't creating it from nothing," she continued. "They're channeling mana into a form their mind already understands. Their element acts as a filter, a shape, a path."
The flame danced for a moment before she closed her fist, and it vanished in a soft whisper.
"Magic is the process of turning mana into the realization of what we desire to manifest," Abigail said, her voice echoing softly through the quiet, crystalline chamber.
She turned to him. "That means all magic, fundamentally, is its user expressing their will onto the world ... changing it to match into a reality they wish for."
"Think of it like this," she said. "Mana is like water. Your attribute, the element you're born with, is the pipe it flows through. The narrower and more defined that pipe is, the easier it becomes to channel that flow. A Water mage doesn't have to understand what water is to create it...its memory exists within the element itself."
Nero frowned slightly. "But… isn't that just how magic works?"
Abigail's smile softened. "It is," she said, "and yet that's exactly what makes it so strange."
"Think about it, ..... We take it for granted that we can summon flame, or shape wind, or move water as we please....But none of us truly understand how we do it. A human mind shouldn't be able to weave together the amount of information needed to make a single droplet of water real. And yet we do."
She turned. "Why do we have access to something that surpasses what our minds are capable of? It's as if the knowledge is already there....engraved into us. A peice of some matrix passed down through generations..."
"If you look at it that way, it almost feels… unnatural....As though our kind was once touched, altered....by something else...."
Nero's eyes widened as the realization struck him. He had never thought of it in such a way.
"These questions," Abigail continued, her voice soft, "were first raised by the earliest members of our bloodline.....Questions that led to a dream… passed down from heir to heir through the centuries."
"The dream to reach that source. To achieve a magic that knows no bounds. A magic beyond attributes, beyond form… something akin to Godhood."
Nero's breath hitched.
She turned slightly, her eyes hughlited in the crystal's pale reflection. "The process was crude, at first. The soul of every heir was altered before birth...molded while still in the womb. Each generation broke another wall, pushing closer to that ideal. And as we evolved, our magic grew broader, more undefined. Until, finally, it reached a point where it became… unusable by humans."
"but…, you use it so easily." Nero said with apprehension.
Abigail smiled faintly, the expression not quite giving the same feeling as before.
"Do I?" she murmured. Then she stepped forward outside the platform onto the lower floor.
At that instant, Leo froze.
His mana flared instinctively blue veins instinctively forming accross his body, reacting to something wrong....terribly wrong.
The air itself grew hewvier, vibrating with a consciousness that was not his own.
The entire crystal… no, the entire building suddenly began to fill with what could only be called as....." life? " and a presence eerily familiar.
It felt like her....No,It was her.
Abigail's eyes slowly bled into a deep crimson, the veins of color spreading like cracks across her irises.
Black markings unfurled across her face and body ... twisting, coiling...like rose vines etched into her flesh.
And as they did, the same markings flared across everything.....
"You see, Nero…" she said, her voice hollow ....stripped of its warmth, replaced by something mechanical.
It was unmistakebly her but not her at the same time.
"Since Creation Magic cannot be wielded by the human mind, a way was devised to transcend humanity."
She extended her hand toward the crystal. The markings on her skin and those on the crystal seems to glow crimson in synchronisation, the room lit up in veins of blood-red light.
"This building… and I… am one. The same mana.... The same thought."
Her voice,, now sounded polluted... stripped of all humanity.
"All the magic stored within these walls can be cast through me....This is the complete, True and the only manifestation of my creation magic."
The silence that followed was suffocating.
Nero's body trembled before he even realized it.
His thoughts tangled, slipping through the cracks of his clouded mind.
His mana ... normally calm and disciplined.... was pouring out uncontrollably, surging around him in wild, chaotic streams.
He couldn't think.
He couldn't breathe.
His instincts screamed to move, to run, but his legs felt as if they were chained to the ground.
Her crimson eyes weighing on everything... As if she was looking down on everything indiscriminately.
"Are you scared…?" she asked softly.
Her voice was calm, but the question sank into him like a dagger.
Nero's lips parted, but no sound came out.
The pressure in the air crushed every word before it could leave his throat.
"It's natural," she continued, stepping closer, her tone almost gentle... like she was explaining a lesson rather than acknowledging his terror.
"Fear is the first and most honest reaction… when faced with the strongest form of magic."
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Power Stones and Reviews please