Chapter 2: Prologue 2

Chapter 2: Prologue 2

Thomas Prest, a nineteen-year-old young man of average height with messy brown hair and brown eyes, reasonably handsome depending on who you asked.

He was just a human and as far as he was concerned, that race didn't come with natural charm or devilishly tempting looks which was a damn shame.

Not that he really cared about his appearance that much. He was a magician and researcher, which meant he spent most of his time in his lab where he was alone so nobody cared about his looks either. Then again, he could clean up nicely if he tried... which he had to do while his father was alive but since the man met his unfortunate end two weeks ago, Tom was enjoying his newfound freedom a bit too much.

Nevertheless, Tom was researching like crazy.

He found out his family's savings were quite abysmal and that didn't sit well with him nor with his plans. He had to earn money but...

He wasn't extremely strong. In fact, he was barely comparable to a mid-class devil if their magic reserves were compared. And his body? That doesn't even need to be mentioned.

That was the unfortunate result of being a human and his family being merely an upstart in the magician community. Prests didn't have many magical tomes. They had quite a bit of beginner-level spells in their library and some rudimentary magical theory but compared to a properly established family of magicians, The Prests were dirt poor and had barely a minimal knowledge of magic.

With such a small amount of resources and incomplete study materials, it was frankly a miracle Tom could reach enough magic reserves to rival a mid-class devil. And yet, it wasn't anything grand. In more wealthy magician families, someone with his talents and advantages would long ago have high-class reserves if he had enough resources.

But Tom wasn't disheartened. This miracle was possible only thanks to his Sacred Gear and now that he had his freedom, he could finally get... creative with it.

...

Tom's Sacred gear, Vision, was quite obscure and weak compared to other gears. In fact, it could only allow him to look into the past when he started to use it, and even then it took a lot of magic from him.

But Tom had to play with the cards he was dealt with, knowing well nobody would give him anything for free. That's why he experimented with his Sacred Gear, trying to find out what he could do with it and where its limits lay.

It wasn't instantaneous and for some of them, it took years but Tom noticed some quite nifty features of his Sacred Gear.

While it was utterly useless in combat, he retained the knowledge of everything he saw in the past when he used it. A quite helpful learning tool, if he said so himself.

And around the time he was twelve, he tried something that sounded extremely stupid. nove(l)bi(n.)com

He used Vision... on Vision.

He tried to see the past of his own Sacred Gear.

Much to his shock, it actually worked.

Tom saw short glimpses of some of its previous owners, some of which never unlocked the gear, some who did unlock it, and when Tom saw how they were using it, he realized why his Sacred Gear was not known.

Don't call him stupid...

He was just a child and some things aren't obvious unless someone points them out or you learn them by accident.

In hindsight, Tom should have known this could possibly work but he was still not thinking enough outside of the box. It was a valuable lesson for him that propelled his future progress forward and while he learned it later than he probably should, he was glad he learned it at all.

In short, it worked. Vision was able to reveal many things about the spells. From individual cases where it was used... which Tom quickly discarded as useless, to the information on how the book itself was written.

And that's when Tom realized just how shitty his household really is and how vicious the magician community can get.

The reason why he was having trouble with the spell was simple. After some more specialized screening with Vision... and God it was hard since Vision didn't have any sort of sentience and like a machine, it only revealed to him what he 'wished to see', rather than what he needed to see... he came to a very simple solution.

The bastard who sold his father the spell scammed him horribly. The book was faulty. It still contained most of the spell but it was slightly tweaked in a way it would never have worked.

It was a simple case of sabotaging the upstarts by a different magician household.

To be honest, Tom couldn't blame them. If his family was stupid enough to fall for this, they deserved to be sabotaged. While he didn't know about the spell, his father should have checked what he was buying before he paid for it.

Nevertheless, Tom decided to shrug it off. He did the same thing he did with Vision and tried to see how the spell was created and how it worked.

Sure, not every spell was better at the time of its creation than in modern ages but if Tom had to start somewhere, it was at the very beginning, no?

Unsurprisingly, Tom learned the spell in under twenty minutes after that.

But the important part was that he also memorized the principles on which the spell worked. He wasn't like these 'monkey see, monkey do' magicians who only learn spells but have no idea how they really work.

These principles were not some incredibly hard-to-understand magical mumbo-jumbo. This was a basic spell so it worked on basic principles. Basics Rei could easily understand and build upon in the future.

His Sacred Gear was actually a much more amazing learning tool than he first imagined!

Needless to say, his magic studies picked up an abnormal pace after that revelation.

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Author Note:

The Gear might seem overpowered but there are proper limitations I will be introducing later on. :D Don't get your hopes too high. It is still one of the 'trash-tier' Sacred Gears that nobody cared to even note down throughout history.