The strangely familiar succubus jumps at Ghost and hugs him tightly while sniffling and muttering incomprehensible things under her breath.
"Ghost it's been so long since you left a lot of things happened." She finally gets over the rush of the cross world teleport and looks at Ghost carefully and starts to stare in shock the unfamiliar face that is in front of her. "That is you, right?"
Ghost thinks of saying no just to see how she would react, but part of him realizes that the shock she would go through wouldn't be worth the joke. So, he takes off his mask and his body starts to revert back to its original features.
The first thing that changes is his eyes and hair since it's just a color change to their familiar azure and crimson. Then his face starts to revert back to his original youthful face with naturally sculpted eyebrows. He then hugs her back to stop her shaking from both shock and teleportation.
"It's okay Alicia you won the bet and found me. Now I am your genie and three wishes are yours to command."
Ghost says while grinning more and more not caring that her race isn't human but a demon. He couldn't be bothered to ask why she looked different since it was probably the god of travels fault, to begin with.
Her beautiful face lights up with the brightest smile that Ghost has seen in a long while. "You remember our promise! I knew you wouldn't forget about me! With your personality, you probably wouldn't have made that many other friends, so I just knew you wouldn't forget about me."
She kisses Ghost right on his left cheek out of sheer joy and then blushes intensely. "Wait, you aren't going to ask me why I'm a demon nor are you going to abandon me because I'm different from your memories?"
Ghost moves some hair away from her face and replies, "of course I'm not going to bother asking you why you look different. You naturally would grow up after it being so long away from each other. As for your race change that's even more simple."
"I was summoned to be a hero of your people so of course, you wouldn't look like demons or else I wouldn't have helped you. It doesn't matter what you are as long are you are the same girl who ended up as my first friend."
Ghost honestly shares his feeling with the confused succubus, whose face grows more and more intense by his nonchalant attitude.
She starts crying on his shoulder while sobbing out loud, "after studying the return spell I found a weird magic symbol that served no purpose but to disguise people."
"So I was constantly debating if I should also use it in mine, but I didn't know if it was there to hide your race or mine and I couldn't bear to hide my race from you. So, I was debating whether or not to activate it. Just in case you suddenly started hating me because I didn't look like the girl you remembered." She had a bad case of the sniffles while telling him her inner struggles.
"Why would I hate you when your still one of the kindest people I know? How can I dislike someone's looks when they still are so cute no matter the wings or tail." She starts to blush after being called cute but her head is still on Ghost's shoulder so he doesn't notice.
"If I hated you then I'd have to hate myself. From one of my adventures, I found out that I might not even be human either. I mean what full blood human can naturally breathe fire and control blood?"
Alicia has a very shy yet confused expression on her face. She also seems to be debating on telling him something be it important or minor.
"Now that I think about it when we were younger and you bragged about breathing fire I didn't think it was weird. But, from a human standpoint, it should be considered difficult for fire to come out of your throat. Even if it had a layer of magic protecting your throat it still shouldn't have been so instinctual."
Ghost noticed her earlier expression so he decides to push her more towards that direction since he was curious why she still wanted to leave to him after all those years without him. "So, how are your parents doing and was my sacrifice in vain or are the unknown being treated well?"
"Unknown? Oh, it might have translated it to that they are called halflings. Are halflings important in your culture or are they just not viewed as evil so it decided to change their name? As for my parents… I kinda ran away from home after a big fight with them and haven't talked to them for at least half a month." She looks more and more depressed the more she thinks about it.
Ghost looks straight at her and tells her, "What happened you can tell me no matter what happened I won't blame it on you. I believe that you would try your best for any one of your beliefs. I mean your here now aren't you?"
She looks up and sighs, "it's not their fault per se. They just hated how I was always worked up about, well you. They didn't like me mentioning how they should change things and slowly make the truth known to the world. You see they ended up becoming the new demon queen and king, but after they gained the territory we started to not see eye to eye in their way of ruling. They called me to soft and gentle for a demon."
She seems to not be telling the whole story about why she left her folks, but that is naturally after all it is hard to move away from family.
"My mom was a bit better than my dad and a lot nicer, but he slowly forced her out of power and took a concubine."
Depression overflows her once cheerful face, but she continues onwards wanting Ghost to know part of the truth.
"Honestly it's a longer story than I want to tell. Lets just put it this way they thought I was too human to be a demon princess, so they took away my position unless I stopped researching the return spell and my dad wanted a son to be the king."
Ghost suddenly hugs her yet again ignoring the wings on her back and squeezes her tightly.
"It's okay if you're a bit too good for your parents. I view that as a compliment, so what if we both aren't 'human' if we aren't inherently evil and our views aren't world ending then who cares. You have always been a very kind girl when I was with you."
She starts crying yet again but this time tears of joy, while she is crying she tries to get out a concrete sentence. "This might be an easy first wish, you might even think of it as stupid, but I want you to promise me this, okay? Can you promise to never abandon me in this new world and that you will always stick with me through the thick and thin?"
"You idiot, I Ghost Shinigami will gladly accept this as my first owed promise to you. I would have fulfilled it without it but now it's cemented into both of our hearts because I can only fulfill my promise if you also do the same."
Ghost confidently accepts her vague and misunderstandable wish, while his heart beat increases almost thinking it was a marriage proposal.
-She probably is just lonely and feels afraid that she might be abandoned in a brand new world. She was my first and only friend in that strange world, so I shall not misunderstand and be her first friend in this one.-
Alicia's face lights up at the end of his promise and can't help but have a rare grin shown on her depressed face.
"There is a bit more I have to tell you about other less important things. By studying the return magic circle I've figured out most of its uses, which led to an interesting discovery. This planets god has planned 3 things with this one summoning move."
Ghost slowly puts two and two together to understand that a god of this world is the reason for Jana's suffering. He still can't help but listen onwards to try and figure out what was gained for all of the sacrifices that have already been made.
"Every time the portal opens it swallows a massive amount of mana way more than it would be needed to perform the summoning. This mana is brought to this world, which is how it became so in riched in it. The second thing is that by bringing one of its residents to the other world this world can take one of the other worlds as well."
Ghost suddenly slaps his forehead and inwardly complains about his stupidity.
"The beast kings that now exist aren't from this world. That's how the beasts grew so fast. The god doesn't care if your a human or a beast it only cares about the strongest existence in its world. How couldn't I have figured that out by now? I should have been the one that came the most in contact with gods and their system."
Ghost starts to tell her the story of the doppelganger and how it mysteriously died. "Well, there are ways for people to put a curse on someone like that, but the question is why would someone bother with doing it. What information did it have that some powerful being didn't feel it was right for you to know?"
"We can guess all we want but the truth is we don't know why someone is targeting me. All we know is that someone has a grudge against me. How about we do something productive instead of just sitting here guessing about imaginary enemies. Show me how much you've grown throughout all these years!"
Her face lights up from her pondering expression and yells, "yes!" She first starts using wind magic but Ghost grabs her hand and stops her.
"Let me guess while you've been making progress it wasn't as much as everyone was expecting?" Ghost can't help but sigh as he realizes she is still listing to him after all these years. No matter how strong Liz really was she still had some errors in her theories.
"This is all my fault, after adventuring for a while I've figured something important. The thing that is holding you back all this time was my naive advice. I'm flattered that you stuck to my training plan all these years, but it's wrong!"
"Destroy all your wind and earth mana foundations. Water and fire can still work together, but not all four can there are hidden conflicts that are affecting your ability to control the elements. If it wasn't for my advice I'm positive that you'd be a whole rank higher than you are right now. I'm so sorry."
He gives her a heartfelt apology as he starts to worry that he accidentally destroyed a potential genius by his idiotic teachings. Who knows what rank she could have been by now if it wasn't for him being so 'knowledgeable' when he was younger.
"Don't worry about it not even my mom or dad knew that it would be a bad idea to do what you said. I feel like there is still plenty of hope and that this mi