'Is there really nothing that I can do?' I thought, watching how the Dragon flapped its wings only to turn into just a single dot of black in the vast, blue sky.
If I allowed my momentum to carry me away, there would be no way for me to get back to the city in time. Yet, stuck in mid-air and without any wings to make the difference, what could I actually do?
'Should I just give up?' I thought, my eyes moving towards the direction I was moving in. 'It did threaten to attack Mia after all. Even if it does it again, there will be nothing I can do instead of rushing after it again,' I thought.
My instinct told me to bite my lips... But I was moving too damn fast for even a single muscle of mine to twitch.
'How the hell am I supposed to do anything now?' I thought, despair starting to kick in.
The fight just now proved that without that city, our chances of survival in this broken world would decrease by a whole lot. And as if to punish my willingness to go outside, a threat to the city appeared the very moment we stepped outside of it!
'Wait a second,' I thought, suddenly struck by the idea.
It was just a random way in which my brain highlighted some words from what I was already thinking, bringing forth a new possible meaning of them.
'If I can't move my body at all, then the only things that I can move are outside of my body!'
I saw the dragon flap its wings to change its paths in the sky.
'But you lack wings!' someone could say.
But didn't that very Dragon already showcase several times how easily one could overcome this problem?
'Let's see if I can do it too!' I thought, ramping up the power of my engine even further, beyond any limits of what kind of energy I could infuse into my body.
I didn't allow this energy to go to waste, though. Rather than that, I continued to gather it all up in a single blob, all the way to the point where I couldn't hold it any longer.
'FORM!' I screamed out in my thoughts, hoping for this mental exercise to ease the task. At the same time, I attempted to shape the blob of magic into something that would resemble a wing.
Only to fail in the instant I infused more magic into the blob than I could control.
BOOM!
The resulting mana explosion of my blob escaping from my grasp only served to add more momentum to my leap, making it even harder to turn around.
'So it won't work, huh?' I thought, clenching my teeth as I realized that I was quickly running out of time.
It would take only so long for the Dragon to reach the city. And I not only needed to find a way to turn around mid-air with no footholds but also catch up to it in this short time!
'I guess I don't have any other choice,' I realized, preparing myself for what could end up as a flashy suicide.
And then, with a single word appearing in my mind, I closed my eyes.
'Disturb.'
I didn't throw the spell at the Dragon. It was way too far for normal attacks of mine to reach it, not to speak about the improved version of disturb that only worked within the range of my mage's tower.
In the end, there was only one target that I could use my disturb on. And it was me myself.
SNAP.
The space around me cracked and gave up under the attack of my spell, forcing me into a weird world where physical laws didn't work.
'I need to think,' I thought, using my extensive amount of mana to protect myself from the influence of this strange world.
I kept my eyes closed, worried that I would go simply insane if I dared to open them.
Yet, with my magic sense, I could tell that at least one element of the normal world had disappeared in this strange space I landed myself in.
'Again,' I thought, pushing out the spare power of my magic engine, doing my very best to shape it into the form of a wing.
My skin started to crack, and the blood in my veins refused to follow its natural pathways.
'Break!' I thought, freeing myself from the disturb-created space only to emerge back into the normal world.
I opened my eyes... But the magic that managed to form into the shape of a wing... dispersed the moment I did so.
"What the hell..." I muttered, heavily disappointed. I then feel to my knees, spitting out the blood on the ground.
'Huh?' It took me a short moment to realize what just happened.
"What the fuck?" I uttered a small curse as I raised my hand to my eyes.
In it, outside of the thick blood that I had just spat out, there were traces of dirt. And as I moved my eyes down, I realized that it wasn't some sort of a dream.
I was actually on the ground!
"What the fuck?!" I screamed out, shocked to no end by the unexpected result. Yet, before the shock could get the better of me, I shook my head and looked around.
The place where I landed was slightly familiar to me. While the trees and patches of grass were just the same as everywhere else, I could recognize the general lay of the land around me.
It was exactly the same as what I saw below me right before slapping myself with disturb!
'Does this mean I lost all the momentum?' I thought, trying to come up with a rational explanation for the event. 'Still, that would leave me hanging in the skies, wouldn't it?' I thought, only to force myself to stand up and then look around.
And there it was, the simple proof of concept that was, at the same time, the simplest explanation of how the fuck did I manage to get from the sky to the ground just by losing my momentum.
The place where I landed... was actually a small, only a few-meters wide crater. And I just happened to stand right in the middle of it.
'I guess I simply didn't feel the pain of landing,' I thought, a small smirk quivering on my lips.
Used to the mind-shattering pain of exceeding the limits of the mana that my body could hold, the pain of falling from hundreds or tens of meters wasn't anything that I could be bothered with!
I shook my head. Right now, there were too many thoughts going through my brain, and I had way too little time to sort through them.
But what I learned was that entering this shattered dimension created by my disturb spell would effectively kill my momentum. And that alone was enough for a new plan to hatch in my head.
'I need more energy,' I thought, ramping up the swing of my mana engine as far as I could without self-disintegrating my cells from mana overdose.
I then wasted just a little bit more time calculating the size and shape of the space that my skill would disturb. And then, with a single thought and a prod from my mana, I send both myself and all the air around me flying.
This time, however, I didn't bother to gradually raise my speed, lingering at the edge of what acceleration I could handle. Instead, the second I released the tension in my muscles and propelled myself forward, I uttered one word again.
"Disturb!"
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