In a certain kingdom, in a certain province, in a certain town, lay a certain castle, within which a certain noble pondered whether his assassin was late in returning or dead already. Certainly, it had not been long. The deed should have been done by now, perhaps the assassin was delayed. He pondered these questions as he paced around his room impatiently. A man stood at the ready beside a family portrait of the noble in question standing beside his wife and daughters. The girls were fairly young, but the portrait was quite old.
"What's taking so long?"
"Rest assured your assassin is alive. No one sent by us can die without us knowing it." The man in the room said in a whispery voice that filled the room. if silence could be loud then the hush that falls over the room when he opens his mouth is deafening and the voice that proceeds the silence is piercing, as quiet as it may be.
The nobleman wide and slow stopped for a moment when he heard this response. "Is it possible we've been betrayed?"
"By the same means we use to know one is alive we can also kill traitors. No one can oppose us once they've joined us. Not even you."
"I've told you before I won't join you, I just need your aid on this matter."
"So long as we both profit, I see little difference just know that if you don't join us, you'll receive no guarantee that one day we might not be paid to come for you."
"As frightening as you yourself may be unless you come personally, I see no need to fear, your minions are currently failing to kill a small family."
"While the price of my direct involvement may be something few can afford know that your enemies are not just those you steal from."
The noble stops pacing around for a bit and begins contemplating his political rivals, how other members of the nobility were scrambling to get achievements so their king will promote them to positions of greater power. Many of which are very angry with his own method of achieving his position.
The wide round man sat at his desk after growing tired of pacing about. "Can you call him?"
"I have tried, he seems to be in a separate plane of existence that's interfering with communication, perhaps he's fallen into a trap."
"Then how can you know he's alive?"
"Because we know his heart still beats." He pulled from his cloak a rather wide glass vial within which was a still-beating heart, beneath which a number was carved. "This is the assassin you hired is it not?"
"I believe that was the number on the sheet I paid for."
"If you'd like I can kill him now before he reveals any secrets."
"Perhaps he's not in any danger of revealing any secrets he knows the punishment for treachery if he's found out."
"Or perhaps he's lost his means to take the initiative, so we now have to." The lid was removed from the vial and a single finger was lowered in to touch the heart. A faint light glowed from beneath the robes of the quiet man and in a certain labyrinth, a certain person collapses onto the floor for a few minutes.
"I don't sense any treachery in this one's heart, perhaps we should just be patient."
"I don't like this. Can't we send another assassin?"
"We already have one watching over the boy at his school."
"But all he ever does is read his coded books, even the girl you sent can't read them."
"She did return a drawing of what was written in his favourite book though." The man returned the vial to his robes and pulled out a small scrap of paper with letters both foreign and familiar. "This boy can read and write in the language of the ancients. And he's using this language to keep secrets from even his closest friends."
The man seemed to glow darkly, and he began to tell him what it says. "It seems this boy knows our actions better than we do."
"You mean?"
"This may just be the most powerful oracle the world will ever know. We'll have to send someone unpredictable, but we'll need him to arrive when he believes he will."
"What does the paper say?"
"The next assassin will arrive after the weeklong holiday." The fat noble looked perplexed.
"So, should we send another assassin now?"
"No, we'll let them think we still don't know. It seems as accurately as he can predict the future, he doesn't know about us yet. The girl in their school can't read this language and hasn't once reported his book having any mention of us. So long as we don't draw his focus by showing we know more than him he won't be able to stop us."
"How do you figure?"
"So far from her reports the only people written about in his book is people he's made direct contact with. People who are directly correlated to his life. As long as we stay far enough away, he won't even know about us until it's too late."
As I read their cautious little scheme, I laugh to myself. "I merely need to know of you in order to see you. You merely need to be directly impacting my future for me to find you on my own but since I've learned of you your indirect schemes have become direct for I will now go after you as you have gone after us." I spoke into the darkness of my empty room as the sun began to set for the day. My parents weren't back yet, but book says I should… oh wait.
I teleport over to a certain field in which I once had a nice picnic with my parents after moving here. They were surrounded by too many monsters to face head-on and while their wounds were regenerating due to the spell, I had made them cast, because they are impatiently killing the enemies that strike them, they are dying before the spell can make them suffer the damage they were supposed to take instead. Seeing this turn of events I grabbed them both and teleported them back home.
After waiting for the necrotic fire, I noticed another drawback to this spell, your enemies can't take the damage for you if they're dead. I sighed and took out the radiant grimoire and healed them their injuries before asking them, "would you like to finish your fight or do you want to have dinner." They seemed a bit confused at first but answered honestly.
"Dinner."
After our meal we went back and killed the rest of the monsters and brought back their materials to sell, some of the claws and fangs now have three enchantments from the self-defence spells cast on me. We're keeping the ones that looked cursed or like the ones that seem more like an amalgamation of the three attributes my spell circles hold. The space-time ones look strange like it's been replaced by a strange mist that is somehow solid when you perceive it to be and fluid when you perceive it to be.
This could be very useful once I learn transmutation. After we got our stuff together and counted the monster pieces that could be sold, I kept the ones that got changed by our passive spells as spell components and made for myself a laboratory in the labyrinth that is inaccessible except if you have the teleportation pendant and have been there before.
My space-time grimoire has a really strong teleportation spell but it's really awkward to read because I keep thinking there are hidden spells in its formula when I realize there are none and it confuses me because every other spell in the book has the majority of the spell's theory not even being its own spell. It normally wouldn't be a problem for me if the conclusion itself wasn't also subject to this annoying code.
I've also learned that if I read through the spell normally before I read the conclusion my spells are more effective. This was learned through trial and error, but I still managed to figure it out. Conclusive Spell Learning works best when you've read the spell once already as now you know what it says and then you know what it means.
With magic, you technically only need to know what it means in order to cast it but it works better if you know both. I checked book to see how many imperfections were left in my copy of the vice president's radiant grimoire and made the corrections. I'm ready to return hers to her. Actually, the second I fixed the last error my copy looked exactly like hers. The copy's cover changed to look exactly like her book's cover.
The copy of the space-time grimoire I made didn't look like the original when I was done with it, must be something like, "it's effective but not perfect." Though that assumes spell theories can be perfected to make spells even more effective.
Before night fell, I teleported out of my perfectly enclosed room in the maze after giving it a vent so I can still breathe in it and found my pet lich. I silently lifted myself an inch off the ground with my telekinesis spell as that's as far as it would allow a living creature to be lifted and floated over behind her silently. She was torturing the intruder though he wasn't dead.
I dropped myself on top of her, so my arms were around her neck and dangled from her back for a bit. She was going to try to swing the radiant blade I gave her at me, but it stopped short, and she realized who I was. "What do you want?"
"Are you going to kill this person?"
"Did you want him alive?" I looked down at him his pitiful form lay bloodied and bruised on the ground, his eyes pleading for death.
"He seems to want to die."
"That's why I'm torturing him."
"You want me to make you a torture room? I can furnish and change basically anything in this labyrinth at will."
"Then why didn't you change me up some clothes?"
"Because even I'm not that cruel."
"What do you mean?"
"If I did that, you'd think the clothes were real and try to leave and when you did you'd realize the clothes are only real when you're in the labyrinth. This isn't some naturally occurring dungeon where monsters bring in stolen things from unlucky adventurers and collect for themselves treasure. This is a manmade labyrinth meant to trap stop and deter intruders into my house. But I'm not here to explain all this I came for you."
"You want me to take this robe off and get it over with?"
"Not what I meant, and you know it."
"So why are you here?"
"The information you gave me about your employer, as little as it is, has borne fruit and I being the gracious and generous pet owner that I am-"
"You see me as a pet?"
"The amazingly generous and benevolent pet owner that I am! Has come to grant you one wish within my power… besides freedom." She snapped her fingers and turned away with spite in her eyes. I have yet to stop hanging off her back.