Chapter 52. Above the Night City

After learning that the belt would have no side effects on Fick, Shulia said goodbye to the old president and pushed Fick into her own office. Then she carefully placed the tools she had brought with her onto the wooden desk one by one.

Three Black Crystal needles of different lengths lay quietly among the dark brown velvet, giving off a deep, dim glow. There was also a narrow, elongated scalpel. The dark cotton thread wrapped around its handle had been rubbed until it was warm and glossy, while its thin blade was sharp yet understated.

Several thumb-sized ceramic bottles were plugged with tight wooden stoppers. Their faded labels were blurred, and only a very faint medicinal fragrance drifted out. A roll of gauze already had frayed edges, yet it had been folded into a neat square, just like her usual meticulous style.

“These are the surgical tools the Witch Association issued to me.” Shulia reached into the cabinet and took out a roll of thin pitch-black cord. “Next, I’m going to inscribe bone pathways for you. Since you’re immune to Magic Crystal hallucinations, this will directly reduce the cost of using magic for you. But this will hurt ten times more than inscribing the skin, and you can’t use Magic Crystal for pain relief.”

“A real man never cries out in pain.”

“Tch. Stop pretending.” Shulia gently shook open the thin cord and slowly walked up to Fick. Her eyes lowered, and her voice softened a little. “All right. My room has silencing magic. Relax your hand, baby.”

I guess I get to be a medieval Guan Yu this once, folks. Good thing the Magic Crystal keeps healing me at all times.

Fick held a Azure Crystal in his mouth and obediently lay down on his stomach.

Shulia wound the black cord around his spine. The knot gradually tightened, strangling his skin until it turned pale. Fick soon felt his spine go numb, and his senses dulled.

Just as Shulia reached over with the needle, the belt around Fick’s waist suddenly lashed out like a snake. Sensing that the belt wanted to shoot toward Shulia, Fick hurriedly patted it, and only then did the belt settle back down.

...

The night was like thick ink from an inkstone, staining the entirety of Saint-Denis in darkness. The noisy streets and alleys of the day had sunk into silence. Only the evening wind, carrying a chill, swept past the brick-and-stone streets and pointed rooftops with a low howl.

After Fick’s bone-pathway patterns had been rapidly healed and stabilized by the Magic Crystal, he was now standing side by side with Shulia beside the enormous bell at the top level of the Notre-Dame Cathedral of Denis.

This Gothic cathedral, standing in the center of the city, towered into the clouds. Beneath their feet was the massive bronze bell, while gears clicked and bit together in the darkness.

The two of them leaned against the railing and gazed into the distance. Half of Saint-Denis City lay before their eyes—

The low, crowded, dimly lit slums and the slightly brighter Weaving District, where a faint textile scent drifted in the air, spread out in interlacing layers. The winding streets were like dark veins. Patrol knights moved slowly in squads, holding bright yellow torches. Specks of firelight linked together in the night like flowing golden threads, distant and tiny.

When their gazes lifted higher, at the end of the city, atop the mountain ridge, the silhouette of Saphile Palace stood towering and majestic in the night.

The violent night wind swept toward them without the slightest obstruction, blowing their robes into a wild flutter. The fabric stretched taut under the wind and made a sharp, flapping sound.

Fick tilted his head slightly. Against the howling wind, he raised his voice and smiled at Shulia. “Maybe I should change my name to Louis Wayne. Or maybe just Louis V.”

At that, the corner of Shulia’s eyes lifted. A sly and deranged glint flashed in them. Before Fick could react, she suddenly reached out and lightly hooked her arms around Fick’s neck. Then she deliberately kicked both legs upward and leaned her entire body backward with effortless lightness.

Fick reacted extremely quickly. He stretched out his long arms and steadily supported the bend of her knees and the small of her back, catching her in a clean princess carry.

Shulia tightened both arms around his neck. Her cheek drew closer, and her smile was flamboyant. Her voice was broken apart by the wind. “Hold me tight, all right? I may always be insanely reckless, but I don’t want to fall down and turn into meat paste under some passerby’s feet.”

“Good thing I’m pretty crazy too. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have agreed to come here with you to test the bone-pathway pattern you’ve been holding back for more than ten years and never dared inscribe on a living person.”

Fick lowered his head. A warm, smooth Azure Crystal was still in his mouth. The cloying aura of energy spread over the tip of his tongue, but fortunately, he had long since gotten used to that taste.

Sandevistan, activate!

Fick closed his eyes slightly and entered a shallow meditative state.

In the next second, he clearly sensed the pure energy within the Azure Crystal in his mouth slowly flowing out. It passed through his throat and blood vessels, accurately pouring into the bones of his spine where the pattern had already been carved, perfectly merging and resonating with the bone pathways.

In that instant, the world around him seemed to have been forced into slow motion—

On the distant streets, the patrol knights, tiny as ants, suddenly froze along with the wavering firelight in their hands, barely moving at all. Meanwhile, under the drive of the Magic Crystal energy and the bone pathways, his body and Shulia’s began to flash at extreme speed, so quickly that only blurred afterimages remained. Even Shulia’s face, right in front of him, became hazy and unreal.

“Hold on tight. The two of us don’t exactly have any safety measures,” Fick warned in a low voice.

“Please trust in your girlfriend’s strength as a once-in-a-century genius witch. If I get smashed into mud, I’ll definitely be more evenly spread out than you.”

“Sis Shu, at a time like this, can you say fewer auspicious things...?”

“Mhm, mhm. I’ll try.”

Before she had finished speaking, Fick leaped decisively from the top of the nearly hundred-meter-high Gothic spire of the Notre-Dame Cathedral of Denis with Shulia in his arms.

The acceleration of gravity from their mad descent seized his entire body in an instant. Blood surged and sped wildly through his veins. His eardrums buzzed from the roar of the wind, and the weightless sensation of falling swept through every limb and bone.

With a thought, Fick immediately triggered the resonance between his bone pathways and the Magic Crystal energy inside his body—

The gravitational air currents that had been violently crushing in from both sides suddenly changed direction. They reversed wildly above and below his body, and an upward thrust erupted with a roar.

His body, which had been plummeting at high speed, abruptly halted. In an instant, his vision was yanked madly upward from the ground, shooting straight into the night sky.

By relying on the power of the bone pathways and the Magic Crystal, he had truly broken free of gravity with Shulia in his arms. In the heavy night, he rose into the air and flew freely.

At the mouth of a dim alley in the slums, a low-ranking knight who was crouched on patrol suddenly looked up.

His pupils shrank violently. The spear in his hand almost slipped free. Pointing at the strange dark silhouette in the sky, he roared in a trembling voice, “Report, sir! There’s a guy flying in the sky!”

That cry instantly tore through the night’s silence. The patrol officer had been leaning against a wall, wiping his visor. When he heard it, he abruptly straightened and narrowed his weathered eyes, accurately locking onto that high-speed speck of light in the night.

“Another false knight using an unregistered private ability. A street rat dares run wild over Saint-Denis.”

He turned to the squad behind him and ordered in a deep voice, “Go. Bring me the bow and enchanted arrows! Today, we’ll let this night owl taste royal law!”

A moment later, a knight came sprinting over with a longbow embedded with Magic Crystal. The patrol officer took the bow and nocked an arrow with practiced movements, his eyes locking onto the figure in the sky that was freely adjusting its posture.

And a hundred meters up in the sky, Fick’s perception had already been elevated to its limit by the resonance between Magic Crystal energy and the bone pathways. His brows abruptly furrowed. He clearly detected a malicious air current rapidly approaching him.

It was a spell arrow! Unlike an ordinary arrow, it was not affected by gravity. Instead, it kept accelerating through the air, carrying precise tracking intent as it shot straight toward them!

“Woohoo! We’ve been discovered,” Shulia said, her voice trembling with excitement. She lifted her head and looked at the arrow tearing through the air, then reminded him with a smile, “It was fired by a patrol officer who has mastered the archer pattern! It’s a guaranteed-kill technique against intruders below C-rank!”

Fick reacted extremely quickly. He tightly locked one arm around Shulia’s waist, then swung his other hand forward with no technique whatsoever.

Clang!