Chapter 176: Freefall (1)

Out of all the things that travelling through the different worlds have taught me, there was one thing that annoyed me the most. Maybe because I was comparing my own adventures to what I expected an adventure would otherwise look like. Maybe it was because I read too many young-adult novels in my life, changing the expectations from realistic to idealistic. But this one single thing, constantly reminded me how reality didn't confront my own wishes.

And it was time.

It took a long time to travel to our current destination. It was easy to read in a novel that after leaving the city, the cast of the story spent over a week moving towards their next destined place. But when it came to reality, one week that sounded like a little on a paper, turned out to be quite a boring period of my life.

Waking up with the sunrise, the two of us would snack on some leftovers from the last day's soup, before packing our stuff up and jumping into the air. After about two hours of flying, we would descend for a quick rest, during which the girl would attempt to teach me her techniques, only to give up roughly ten minutes later and force me to resume our journey.

Between the two of us, it was the girl that was in a much greater hurry. Even though contrary to me, she didn't appear to have any time limit to her mission outside of the one I set myself, she still constantly poked my sides whenever I wanted to take some rest, quickly turning to the greatest annoyance I would have to suffer with ever since I left the school when the apocalypse originally started.

"Come on, just how bad your sense can be?!" Startled by how ineffective her own lessons were, the white-winged girl reached the point where even she was annoyed by the results. "Don't try to figure it out logically, as a man. Follow your feeling!"

Putting her fists on her sides, the girl looked at me with clear scorn in her eyes. "Listen, there is a reason why magic was discovered and developed by women. If you keep trying to wrestle control over it, then no matter how hard you will try, you will fail."

With the power leaving the girl's body, she weakly sat down on a nearby fallen tree, not even daring to look at me anymore.

'Eh, could this get any worse?' It was my very first time to know a girl for a few days like this winged one besides me, without even learning about her name. But given how I have yet to introduce myself to her directly as well, it was nothing but my fault. But ultimately, given how I didn't have any plans on sticking to this girl for any longer than necessary, knowing her credentials wasn't of much importance.

What was my point of focus though, was learning this strange shifting ability of hers. Because over the last few times we travelled together, it always put me on the spot to try to catch up with her speed. And what was even worse, was that the girl was actually gaining momentum while shifting, while apparently, she didn't suffer all the drawbacks that effectively limited how quickly one could accelerate or slow down.

"It's not like I don't want to learn it. Do you think I enjoy hearing your nagging over and over again?" In the end, there was no way I wouldn't respond to the girl's provocation. While I was initially immune to her baits given how we stood on the opposite ends of the barricade, there was one major change that happened to our relationship after just a single full day of travelling together.

We no longer consider ourselves to be enemies.

Sure, I didn't trust the girl at all and I was quite certain that she had no trust for me whatsoever either. But that didn't mean we kept our hostility born from the clash the day before. And while we were both cautious when interacting with the other, some early sparks of mutual sympathy continued to sprout.

"It would be far easier if you just had wings… Even the men from my tribe learn to shift from the feeling of passing through the air at quick speeds." Shaking her head in defeat, the girl raised her eyes to look at me for a moment, before hanging her head low again. "There is no way. Right now, you are nowhere near as fast as you would need to be to use that method."

Muttering the second part of her reasoning to herself, the girl most likely didn't expect me to actually pry my ears to her self-whisper. But while she clearly didn't intend for those words to make a difference, it actually did for me.

"Wait, so you believe that all I need to do is to reach a sufficient speed midair, right?" Moving my eyes on the girl, I watched how little changes appeared on her face when I posed my question. It appeared that she didn't really amount this question to much in her head. "How much faster would I have to go?"

Standing up from the random spot I chose to sat down before, I started to warm my body up. While reaching higher speeds midair was definitely possible, doing so would still require me to use the initial acceleration from the jump enhances with repulsion against the ground. And that means I was once again in for quite a lot of pain caused by the changing momentum.

But if it was just the pain to deal with, I was more than willing to suffer through it if only I could obtain this shifting ability!

"How much faster, huh? It's not easy to quantify it… But I would say at least half the time faster than you can travel right now." Finally forcing herself to acknowledge that I was actually serious, the white wings of the girl twitched slightly before she stood up as well. "But keep in mind, that this kind of enlightenment… It comes to everyone at its own pace." Turning her head to the side, the girl hid her expression from me.

"Comes at its own pace? In crude,  male words then, how many times do you think I will reach that speed to obtain this skill?" Approaching the girl far closer than I ever was to her before, I moved my hand on her chin before forcefully bringing her face up to my eyes.

"…ty times." Wrestling the control of her chin from my hands, the girl took a step back. "No, this is the wrong way to think about it. If you can keep your speed above a certain level, then you might do it in just a few attempts. On the other hand, if you will be able to reach such speed only momentarily, even hundreds of attempts might not suffice." Lowering her head and resting it on her raised hand, the girl bit on the nail of her thumb, sinking deep into her thoughts.

And given how I often would lose myself in the wonderland of my own thoughts myself, the option of waiting for her to figure out what she wanted didn't even appear in my mind.

Moving to the side, I scanned the wide-area around us. While most of my vision was blocked by the ever-present, lush forest, I could still see quite a lot. From the mountains far in the north, through some kind of body of water to my current left, this location seemed to be a perfect place to settle down… if not for the trees domineeringly taking over the entire, huge plain and stopping any attempts at colonising this land.

But that didn't matter to me at all. Not until a quest to turn this barren land into a kingdom would appear in my system interface. For now, what was important, was that there was more than enough space for me to try this new idea that this girl gave me!

"Prepare to launch. I will try something… disturbing. Don't fly too close to me." Informing the girl without any regard for her opinion or problems with my plan, I did everything… exactly the same way I would do it whenever attempting to fly. Starting with balancing repulsion and attraction, I would let those two opposing forces grow to the absolute limit of what I could hold, before springing up on my knees and completely releasing my attraction.

POOF!

The small noise of my launch didn't even make the leaves on the ever-present trees rustle a bit. But on my end, a head-splitting pain tore through my mind as my body squeezed under the influence of inertia. Yet, after the initial torture of g-force that a human was not built to sustain, the pain eased. Soon, my body shot through a random cloud, appearing above the heavenly dome.

But for now, I only got a lot of height. While falling down would allow me to obtain more speed, this was something that I already tried before. From just falling alone, it was impossible for me to obtain the ability that I wanted. But I wasn't some kind of madman to repeat one action and expect a different result.

Once I reached the apoapsis of my trajectory, once I could feel that I stopped climbing up the sky ladder and started to fall down instead, my head once again focused on manipulating the witchcraft of mine.

The one problem was, as for now, I was surrounded by air and air alone! And just like one wouldn't propel a sailing ship by blowing air into its sails, the air around me was just too thin for my repulsion to return a proper amount of energy to my body.

Yet, nothing was stopping me from raising both the repulsion and the attraction at once. Just like before, the two opposing forces cancelled each other, not affecting my freefall at all. And then, I reached the distance at which my witchcraft could affect the ground.