"Oh, there you are!"
As soon as we returned to the track field in realspace, we were greeted by a whole gaggle of our classmates clustered together in the middle. They weren't the only ones, as all the classes were gathered there, forming a relatively orderly mass while waiting for the winners of the sports festival to be announced by Mrs Applebottom.
It wasn't the end of the programme, because there were some games and leisurely activities planned after this, plus there were the stalls, but it was the end of the inter-class competition.
"Seriously, guys! Where have you been?" a placeholder classmate griped with his arms crossed. "You can't just up and disappear in the middle of the scavenger race like that!"
That also applied to Josh and Angie, but they weren't present at the moment, so the complaint was clearly aimed at me.
"Give me a break. I had a rough time and I'm not in the mood for this," I told John Stevenson… Or was it Steven Johnson?
I squinted at the guy and started to feel a bit awkward. I was feeling pretty good about being able to tell all our placeholder classmates apart as of late, yet the longer I looked, the less confident I felt about who he was.
…
Wow. Phasing to Ottawa did a number on my brain, didn't it?
Of course, he didn't know that, yet after a long beat that was anything but silent, courtesy of the crowd around us, he looked over my dishevelled girlfriends and I could almost see the proverbial light-bulb light up over his head.
"Had it 'rough', eh? Lucky sunovabitch…"
I didn't have the energy to correct the misunderstanding, so I just waved him off with a dismissive, "Yeah, sure, whatever," and glanced at the stage, where Mrs Applebottom was already holding a mic and raring to start her announcement. The rest of the 'faculty' were nowhere to be seen, which was understandable.
While I was still far from being able to piece together the full timeline, by this point I had a rudimentary understanding of the events that unfolded here, in my absence. The footnotes version was something like this:
I left to pick up Ambrose and the broken Grimoire Key (which was a whole other bugbear I couldn't be arsed to care about at the moment). Right after that, future-me hijacked the School's permanent Purple Zone, similarly to how Crowy did it way back when, and dragged in a select group. It included the childhood friend couple, my girlfriends, my family, plus Jaakobah and the Praetorian Guards on standby.
That was an eclectic group, but I was sure there was a method to this madness. Josh and Angie were a no-brainer; future-me was out to heckle them and set up the final stretch of the scenario. Judy was there to coordinate things on our end, while Elly's job was to break out of the Purple Zone and inform Lord Grandpa, who was the only person with the authority to forcefully enter and bring reinforcements, thus setting up the excuse for future-me to retreat without accomplishing much more than being a nuisance.
As for the rest… I had a feeling they were taken in just so that they would serve as opponents to the so-called 'Axis of Evil' future-me was making, and in that light, the choices made sense. Out of the whole group, Snowy was the most powerful by far, but she was also a conservative combatant who preferred to fight defensively, so she was the least likely to nuke the Purple Zone, while my knightly family members had no access to their weapons, limiting their damage potential. As for the Praetorian Guards… they were probably chosen to invoke the 'Worf Effect'.
It's a trope named after a character from a big sci-fi franchise; a big guy who was meant to be the strongest and toughest of the crew, but he got beaten up disproportionately more than anyone else to establish the threat level of the antagonist of the week. While the Celestials seemed fine on the surface, from what I could gather from Jaakobah's laconic debriefing, they had a lot of trouble keeping up with the 'Axis of Evil', and while I didn't realize it at the time, bot hammer-lad and wetsuit-chap were taken out of commission by them.
So, while the battle-slash-performance was happening, the more dangerous and unpredictable combatants present at the athletics festival were locked out of the Purple Zone, and so they focused on other things. Naoren and Rinne guarded Xiao, the arch-mages ensured that nobody remembered seeing people disappear in front of them, while Duncan and the other armed Ordo Draconis personnel secured the perimeter.
They were still doing that even now, hence why only Mrs Applebottom was on stage. As for the aftermath, Lord Grandpa wanted to keep things under wraps for the moment, so he stayed behind to wrestle back full control over the anchor of the School's Purple Zone, while the rest of us pretended that nothing out of the ordinary happened over the last half an hour. Except for Josh and Angie, who were both exhausted and so they were now resting in the nurse's tent with Jaakobah, but that was it.
So, in conclusion…
"Chief?"
"Hm?" My train of thought was interrupted by Judy tugging on my sleeve. "What is it, Dormouse?"
"Is everything okay?"
"… Can you be more specific?"
"You zoned out," Elly chimed in from my other side. "You just stared ahead without blinking."
"I just… I was just thinking. Hard."
"Pfff!" John Stevenson, standing in the row in front of us, stifled a chortle. "Yeah, I'm sure you were 'hard' at something, amirite?"
"Cut it out, you moron!" another of our classmates, a tall girl with pale blue hair, whacked the guy in the back of the head. "It's their business, not ours. Stop being a nuisance."
"Bleh!" the guy grimaced but fell silent all the same.
Meanwhile, Judy rose to her tiptoes (even though she didn't really need to) and put a hand on my forehead.
"Hm. It's as I thought. You're feverish."
"Really? Let me check!" Elly followed, and she also put a hand on my forehead and cheeks. "Yes, a little."
"Did you over-exert yourself?" my dear assistant inquired, and my other girlfriend let out a slightly strained chuckle.
"Hehe. Do you remember when Leo used to be like this after every time something major happened?"
"I do, and I also remember telling him—"
"To be careful, yes, yes," I interjected and gently pushed their hands away. "I'll tell you the details later. By the by, do you think I showed my face enough already?"
My girlfriends glanced around and checked their phone, respectively, and Judy responded with a flat, "It's still a bit early."
"I need to go to the toilet first, so I think I should get going anyway."
"If you say so," Elly whispered and showed a reluctant smile. "Let's meet up back home after this and continue where we left off."
"Another round?" the guy in front of us blurted out, followed by a string of stifled curses. "Goddamit. Why is life so unfair? I want to have a frisky girlfriend too!"
"I told you to pipe down!" the tall girl whacked Steven Stevenson… or John Johnson… whatever. The point is, she hit him in the back of the head. They had quite the slapstick relationship, didn't they?
Anyhow, once I got permission from my girlfriends, I slipped out of the crowd and headed to the usual ground-floor restroom for the third time today. My destination?
"Here you are!"
The moment I appeared inside the out-of-the-way storage room of the underground base, I was greeted by a chipper voice from future-me, as well as an enthusiastic 'Nyu-nyu-nyuuu!' from Pudding-kun. The latter was sitting on top of the magitech Roomba I got from Mensah as a party gift, and he was riding it around like a tiny chariot.
However, before I could even take a second look, I was suddenly grabbed by the shoulder and pushed down onto a chair prepared in advance.
"Here, drink this," future-me told me on no uncertain terms as he dangled a bottle of mineral water in front of my nose. "All of it. You need it."
"I'm not particularly thirsty, but…"
"No, you literally need it. Your body is out of whack now, you just can't feel it, so rest up and hydrate yourself."
It was around this time that my eyes fully adapted to the dim lighting condition of the storage room, and I was surprised to see that future-me was not only still wearing his Bel costume, sans the mask, but his injured right arm was completely wrapped up in white gauze up to the fingertips, making him look like he just got a transplant from a mummy.
"Shouldn't you be resting after taking a hit like that?"
While saying that, I didn't forget to open up the bottle and take a sip. To my surprise, I found myself feeling violently thirsty as soon as the first gulp reached my stomach and I downed the rest in pretty much one go.
"That's one," he said nonchalantly as he snatched the small empty bottle out of my grasp. "I brought a few more, but let's space them out a bit." He handed it over to Pudding-kun, then turned back to me. "As for the arm, it's nothing major."
For emphasis, he flexed his biceps and wiggled his fingers.
"It looked pretty major to me," I grumbled, and I had a feeling I was forgetting something.
"Nah, it was mostly for show. Josh and Angie needed a morale boost and I needed a handicap. This way, we hit two birds with one stone." He circled his bandaged shoulder before continuing in a detached tone. "Invincible villains are cool and all, but if we want Bel's defeat to make internal sense, he needs to have at least a few vulnerabilities."
"Yeah, that makes sense, but…"
"All right, second bottle!" future-me cut me off and handed another water bottle to me. "Here you go. Now, listen. Before anything else, let's discuss the state of your body."
"… As in?"
"You're a bit disoriented and tired, right? Mild headache and nausea?"
"Yeah. The usual symptoms of…" I began, then frowned.
I wanted to say 'the usual symptoms of using my abilities too much', but once I gave it a second thought, I realized that I didn't have those for a while now. On the other hand, as soon as started Phasing around in Ottawa, they hit me like a truckload of bricks. Could it be that the reason why I no longer experienced these side effects wasn't because I got more used to my powers, but because the world around me got more solid and defined?
But I didn't remember Critias being particularly floompy, ever. Not the same way as Ottawa was, at the very least… but then again, I had no reference until now, so maybe it was, and I just couldn't see it because it was my 'normal'? But if that's the case, then…
"Focus!" future-me snapped at me by literally snapping his fingers in front of my face. "That's another thing you have a hard time doing at the moment, right?"
"Yes, but the Simulacrum—"
"Yes, yes, you're entirely correct about that," he cut me off without hearing me out. But then again, he was me, so he ought to know what I was thinking. "Listen, that isn't why you're feeling off right now."
"It isn't?"
"Nope." Future-me stood upright, grabbed a third bottle from the top of a crate, and tossed it to me. Wait, when did I finish the second one? There was no time to ask, as he barrelled on without giving me the opportunity to interject. "You were hit by restoration magic. It sounds all nice and dandy, but it's nasty stuff. Do you remember when we got that mana-burn from handling Onikiri?"
"Of course I do."
"Then you remember the thing about astral bodies as well," he stated, and I nodded along.
I mean, it would've been weird if I didn't. Astral bodies were like the metaphysical shadows of physical objects in a lower stratum of the Simulacrum. In colloquial use (as much as the term applied to a word like this) it was almost exclusively used to refer to living creatures, but enchantments were acting on the astral bodies of inanimate objects, so I was familiar with them both in the Doylist and the Watsonian sense. In fact, technically speaking the Oaths and enhancements of the Knights were effectively enchantment arrays engraved on their astral bodies, and… Searᴄh the NovelZone.fun website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.
"Our mana-burn was healed by Jaakobah by forcefully morphing the 'injured' parts of our astral body to match our corporeal one, effectively 'healing' it," future-me spoke firmly, jolting me out of my stray train of thought. "Normal healing magic works the other way around; physical injuries are matched to a 'healthy' astral body to reverse them, and it has to be done ASAP, because the astral body adapts to reflect the state of the physical body over time. Restoration magic doesn't just 'restore' things, but directly modifies astral bodies to cause corresponding effects in the corporeal ones. You were hit by one of those spells while you were in Ottawa."
"I thought I blocked all of those. Or resisted. Or… you know what I'm talking about."
"I do, and you're wrong," future-me told me cheekily and pointed at my forehead. "The Magi wanted to restrain you and Ambrose. That's why he was hit by contact spells that disabled his limbs. In your case, you were a higher priority target, so what you got was an instant knock-out spell, right in the astral body."
"But… I'm awake."
"Yep. You are," he said, and this time he outright poked my forehead. "But your body isn’t. It's literally asleep right now, but because we don't sleep, you just keep moving it without realizing it. That's why your brain isn't working quite right at the moment."
"Oh. I see." I didn't, but I didn't want to get bogged into an argument with myself. "Should I be worried?"
"Nah. It's not that serious. Once we're done here, have Jaakobah diagnose you, just to be safe, but he'll tell you the same thing: rest, drink plenty of fluids, don't do anything strenuous, and try to avoid using the stairs. You'll be back to normal in a day or two."
I glanced down.
"I'm sitting, not straining myself, I'm hydrated, and there's no stairs in sight. Now what?"
"Now, you take a break here for a bit, and then once you have more of your faculties under control…" Future-me paused and gave me a sly grin. "All the pieces are finally in place on the board, so it's time we discuss the capital-P Plan."
"Better late than never," I grumbled before taking a sip from my bottle and preparing myself for everything. Or at least as much as a sleepwalker could do so under the circumstances.