"First things first," I said, stepping away from the window. "That safety asure you planned for . We are tossing it... If you cut off my magic for thirty seconds, Garek is going to knock out cold. And if he actually turns out to be a cultist, I’m dead."
Mitsuki rubbed her forehead, clearly exhausted by my persistent paranoia.
She still firmly believed her people were clean, but the tactical reality of the situation forced her to compromise. She looked up, eting my eyes with a heavy, deadpan stare.
"If I do not sever your mana... can Garek survive against you for more than ten seconds?"
I tapped the stock of the shotgun resting on my shoulder and ran a quick ntal simulation of exactly what I could do to him if I lost control.
"If I don’t use my Soul Armant?" I replied, keeping my voice completely casual. "Then yeah, he’d live. But he wouldn’t co out of it as pretty as you last saw him... If I get influenced, and my brain goes on autopilot, I definitely won’t be holding back. But he’d survive..."
Mitsuki gave a slow, tired nod. "Then I will place a blessing on you instead. If an outsider infiltrates your mind, the blessing will forcefully purge the influence. But it will take about 10 seconds to do it."
I did the math in my head. Ten seconds of being a hostile puppet.
[That works... barely.]
Outsiders operated on a strict, twisted set of folklore rules. They could only mind-control a target once. The second that blessing scrubbed my brain clean, I’d be completely immune to their domain for the rest of the night.
"Good enough..." I agreed.
I looked back out the window. The bright orange sunlight was rapidly bleeding out, leaving a bruised, dark purple sky hanging over the basin. The shadows stretching across the living quarters were growing longer by the minute.
My gaze shifted back to Mitsuki. She stood by the altar, quietly organizing a small stack of paper talismans with trembling fingers.
[It would take a special kind of badass to be her without breaking down crying right now...]
She knew exactly what was coming. She knew she would be the primary target out there.
And she was doing all this while pregnant, carrying a kid right into the middle of a literal horror show.
I let out a long breath. I walked over to the small wooden desk and planted my hands flat on the grain, staring at the wood.
[If I do this, I’m half-burning my best trump card.]
But I eventually just shook my head, [Who am I kidding? I don’t exactly have a choice here.]
"Mitsuki," I said, standing up straight. "Turn around and face the wall. I need to prep sothing for you."
She blinked, looking at in total confusion. She opened her mouth to ask a question, but she quickly closed it.
She simply turned her back to , facing the empty wooden planks of the shrine wall.
While I imdiately opened a direct line to the tech support in my head.
[System. I need sothing like a capsule. Sothing I can fill with a liquid and keep safely tucked inside a cheek. It needs to burst when I bite down on it, and it needs a capacity of exactly zero-point-five milliliters.]
-Ding!
{Sublingual Capsule (Rare Consumable)
Description: A soft, biocompatible capsule designed for intraoral storage. Holds up to 0.5 mL of liquid. Stable under normal conditions, ruptures instantly under bite force to release contents.
Price: 20 Credits }
[Buy five of those.]
Five tiny, transparent capsules materialized in my Inventory.
Pulling them out, I lined them up carefully on the table, along with a small glass dropper, right alongside the intricately carved glass vial containing my last Grade 2 Healing Potion.
I gently popped the glass cork, and the very next second, a suffocatingly dense wave of raw mana instantly rolled out of the bottle, along with an aggressively potent herbal scent that saturated the small shrine within seconds.
Mitsuki gasped, her shoulders jerked up, and her entire body tensed.
She clearly recognized the sheer density of the magic hitting the air, fighting the urge to look, but she kept her back turned just like I asked.
I ignored her reaction, focusing entirely on the tiny bottle.
The master vial held a little less than 5 mL of liquid.
Back in that dungeon, I had diluted a asly 0.02 mL into a hot bath just to knit my completely ruined body back together after the Mage’s Folly hit .
Pinching the dropper, I extracted exactly 0.5 mL of the red glowing liquid before carefully injecting the dose into the first tiny capsule, sealing it shut.
That dosage wasn’t random. Back in the forest, around 0.5 mL had splashed across my face, basically turning immortal for the next 30 seconds.
That brief window of biological invincibility was the only reason I managed to kill him.
And now, I was basically bottling that chanic.
I ticulously filled all five capsules without spilling a single drop.
[It is what it is...] I sighed, seeing a little less than 2.5 ML resting at the bottom of the master vial before shoving the bottle and the dropper straight back into my inventory.
"Alright..." I said, picking up the capsules. "You can turn back."
Mitsuki spun around. Her dark eyes imdiately zeroed in on the tiny pills resting on my palm.
I picked out three of them and held them out to her before sending the remaining two in my inventory. No point hiding the supposed ’Spatial Storage’ from her.
"Take these..." I instructed. "Keep them tucked in your cheek during the entire ritual. If anything happens... you bite down hard."
She carefully reached out and took the three capsules, holding them in the center of her palm, staring at them like they were live explosives. "What are they?"
"A fail-safe..." I said flatly. "Biting one makes you functionally immortal for thirty seconds..."
Mitsuki’s jaw dropped as she stared at , completely stunned.
"Immortality?" she whispered. The word stumbled out of her mouth, completely breaking her composed deanor. "Nico... what exactly is inside these?"
"Look, just... for your own sake, don’t ask," I replied, shutting down the interrogation before it even started. "Be a doll and keep it in your cheek, and make sure to bite down on one before you get ripped apart. Got it?"
After all, I told her I just gave her three capsules full of the 2nd-highest graded healing potion in the world, she might actually faint.
Mitsuki slowly closed her mouth, looking from the capsules back up to my face before giving a stiff, chanical nod.
My math for the night was brutally simple now. If the outsiders hijacked my brain, the blessing would knock out for exactly ten seconds.
With the three capsules I gave her, I now had exactly eighty seconds of a workable window, excluding that 10-second possession.
Eighty seconds to pop a pill and carve my way through an army of invisible monsters, and reach the center of the basin to save her.
I watched her stare at the tiny pills in sheer disbelief, and a soft chuckle escaped my throat.
Wanted to say sothing sassy, but I just looked her dead in the eye and confessed.
"Look, I know I dragged you into this ss... But you can rest assured. I won’t let anything happen to you... And I won’t let anything happen to the others, too, provided they don’t try to stab first."
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