Chapter 71: Miracle

If previously the time would stop for just a short while, then now it seemed to stretch one instant endlessly. Ever since I gave my inner green light to the release of this magic, the entire world around me lagged out. But this almost completely stopped time didn't appear as I expected it in the slightest.

All at once, my vision filled with an endless sea of particles. What I couldn't see in my normal life, with the time stopped, finally revealed itself to me. The things that were simply too fine and too quick for my eyes to ever have a chance to notice them, now bared themselves before me, revealing the truth of the world right to my eyes.

This one single moment instantly harmonised all of my thoughts. Seeing how everything that I was seeing was confined to a small variety of elements, how perfectly everything around me was arranged I just couldn't fail to notice how much this structure influenced the world around me. 

Because amongst the stuff that I could expect to notice like atoms and particles, a flow of magic appeared right in front of my eyes.

Once I noticed this, something else drew my attention. 

The world around me was moving although at an incredibly slow pace. I could see the particles around me slowly gliding through the air, or rather, making up the air in the first place. But the magic wasn't as uniform in its behaviour.

Surely, the energy that so richly permeated the atmosphere was relatively stable, leisurely moving just like other, more physical particles. But the magic energy confined to the circuits within my bracelets was going mad.

Bit by bit, the chaotic mess that replaced the simple to understand the image that my eyes would usually provide would be replaced. With my magic spreading like an insanely thin blanket in the space around me, the sea of particles would be replaced with the true, macro-scale of the reality that surrounded me. 

But as this blanket continued to expand, a perfect map of the true form of the space surrounding me would at the same time register in my head. In what seemed like weeks to me but had to be shorter than even the shortest fraction of a second, the magic within the entire city resonated with my own flow, steadily feeding my tools with all the information to be processed.

With my mind free of the shackles of time in this strange situation I couldn't help but to notice one, terrifying thing. If something that I managed to find by chance was common in that apocalypse world before its collapse, then how would battles look like? How would it be like to be a soldier forced to learn about every nick and cranny of the place he would go to die? Force him to forcefully learn about the potential advantage of the enemy outnumbering him?

But as soon as everything started, it came out to an end just as rapidly. Given the simple fact that increasing diameter of area in the three-dimension meant that the amount of information grew incredibly quickly, before the suburbs of the entire city would enter my mind as a perfect map, everything snapped back to its normal pace.

The soldiers shoot a huge volley. Even though only a few of them could fire a direct shot at me due to the relatively good cover of my current place of being, that didn't stop the others from throwing all kinds of grenades and other explosives at me. Some kind of cultivator even went as far as to directly jump above me and drop a package of plastic right towards my head.

But before a single bullet could do me any harm, the black blob above my head exploded. 

Or rather, suddenly diffused in the air. 

As if the amount of energy that it consumed grew too big, it just collapsed on itself, sending a powerful wave of magic through the air. Even though I never could see the magic in its true form before, outside of the indicators on my main bracelet, the shockwave that instantly spread in the entire area around me remained somehow visible. 

At least, to my own eyes.

And then, the reality stopped making any sense.

The bullets stopped right in midair. The explosions didn't manage to break past the resistance of the air around them. Anything that would come close to me would cease to work. 

For a moment, the entire place sunk into a perfect silence, with both sides observing the insane show. Even with over a year worth of magic development on earth, I could tell that nobody ever saw a show that I was just giving. Sadly, it wasn't as if all of that was my own doing. In reality, I wasn't quite sure what was happening either.

But that didn't stop the power at play from keeping up the good work.

At first, all the bullets dropped from the air and created a gentle drum for the next events as they fell. Then, the explosives finally reached their limit before fading away in a small pile of ashes. And then, nearly all of the soldiers suddenly bloated their eyes up.

Staring at the mayhem surrounding me, at what remained now not only from my home but also its entire area… I didn't feel any rage anymore. It seemed as if all those negative feelings were released to the world around me. But that didn't mean they disappeared at all.

As if following some kind of artistic scheme, nearly half of the government forces brought their hands to their throats. Futile attempt. Even though I had no idea what would happen or even what was happening, for some reason I actually knew it. As if the trace of the program that my bracelets used to control the enormous magic wave remained hidden deep in my mind.

And then, as if by a touch of magical wand, several hundred men and women alike… Rose to the air. 

Not all of them wore military uniforms. In fact, nearly half of the people that were lifted in the air wore civilian clothes. Or rather, out of everyone that was lifted, only half of them, those who bore the military uniforms, were actually alive.

And then, the small blobs of magic that formed in the throat of the soldiers, melted down and spread through their entire bodies.

All at once, the soldiers suddenly bloated all up, as if something was expanding endlessly inside them. But instead of exploding in a bloody mess… A strange light started shining from all of their orifices… Before it defeated the confines of their flash, turning the soldiers into big candles on the evening sky.

Only to suddenly condense back to the size of a tennis ball, without leaving a trace of the humans that were gone in the light. 

Before the light suddenly rushed towards the lifeless bodies hung in the air, filling them with that strange light.

Then, my head exploded in pain, eradicating my consciousness.