“How’s it going, Feil? Can you see?”
As I heard Cyril’s voice come from above, I checked on the image of the scenery projected on the wall.
“Crystal clear! Keep it ’round that height, could ya? I want a view of the whole body!” I shouted back at where his voice had come from.
Looking up, I saw the sunlight streaming in from a large crack in the ceiling. The person moving up above was Cyril, who was projecting the state outside using magic after he’d summoned a large bird.
The previous day, once we’d returned from the floating cemetery, everything had been chaos. Since we were the first in decades to get through the barrage of destructive beams into the cemetery, we’d been greeted with celebration and applause from the dropouts. The students from our year who’d heard about our success started interrogating us during mealtimes, asking whether we’d brought home any artifacts or seen the necrospecter Tory.
And after Sasha saw our reckless charge, she called us into a classroom to scold us, just like I’d expected. “Do any of you value your lives even a little bit?! If anything happened, I wouldn’t have been able to save you in that situation. There is a point where an endeavor becomes unreasonable.” I probably haven’t been scolded like that since back when my mom would sit me down on the ground and chew me out for being up to no good.
After sleeping like a log, the next day—in other words, today—I’d been restless since morning.
We didn’t have lectures, either, since it was a Sunday, so all three of us got together right after the morning meal and got to talking.
“Have you recovered your magical reserves?”
“Enough,” I’d said. “Finally got a decent night’s sleep for once.” Then we flew off to the Agona mountain again to summon Pandora in the deserted, sprawling wasteland.
And here we were now…
“Feil, are you done yet? Go faster. I wanna see it.”
“Don’t rush me. This looks like a good spot. The membrane looks broken, so I’d be able to get my arm in.”
Myfila and I were inside Pandora’s head—and that was no metaphor. We’d actually slipped into a crack in his skull and were walking along his gray matter. Normally, it would’ve been chock-full of stuff, and we shouldn’t have been able to get in there, but when Pandora was hit with the Supreme God Zen’s thunderous hammer, it seemed a ton of his brain matter had evaporated. The space inside his head was about half the size of a classroom and ten mejals in height.
In addition to the light streaming in through the crack, Myfila had also conjured up two light orbs to make the projection, so it was pretty bright inside, all things considered.
“Still, just figures with Pandora. He’s pretty different from any other creature I’ve seen. I think if a normal person cracked their skull, this whole space would’ve been flooded with blood by now.”
“It feels like soft cement. It’s not very brainy,” Myfila commented.
The first issue at hand when it came to manipulating Pandora was visualization.
If I was inside Pandora’s head, I couldn’t see outside, and that’d pose an issue when trying to control him. But we figured that out quick.
We just needed to project the eyesight of a bird that Cyril summoned. We were using the same method as the Academy’s match broadcasts. All of us could use projection magic, and Pandora’s skull made for the perfect wide screen.
“Feil! Are you already moving him?! I just saw a finger twitch!”
“Not yet! I think you’re so worked up that you’re seein’ things!”
We were projecting Pandora as viewed from above on the matte white wall—the same image of an immobile Pandora that I’d gotten fed up with the last few months.
“I’ll count down to three! I’m goin’ to really focus, so give me some time!”
“Got it! Once we’re done, we’re celebrating with tea! And you have to drink it!”
“Only if it works!”
Then as Myfila watched over me, I got on both knees on top of Pandora’s brain.
“Sorry, partner. This might tickle a little,” I murmured as I thrust my arms straight into the gray matter through a tear in the thick membrane.
Sure is chilly…
I only went down elbow deep. I exhaled a long breath, clearing all the air out of my lungs. Then I breathed in the smell of Pandora through my nose. He had a slight iron scent to him.
Electromagic was probably the one and only way to get Pandora to move in his state right now.
Doctors and scholars had known for a long while that living creatures moved using electrical impulses. I’m not sure if I read it in an electromagic enchantment tome or what, but I knew I’d learned that from some book somewhere as a kid.
Then again, there were still many mysteries about the brain, and nobody had established through research where or how the electricity traveled from the brain to move the body, so that was a blind spot.
“You can do it, Feil,” Myfila said.
“Yeah, yeah. I know I’m the only one who can do this.”
There was no way Pandora would react to either Cyril’s or Myfila’s electromagic. But as for me—the one deeply connected to Pandora’s corpse as his Counterpart—I might be able to intuitively figure out how to zap Pandora so he’d come to life.
………
“Three!”
If Pandora had no soul, then I could take up the job.
“Two!”
Even if I couldn’t make him move like he had when he’d been alive, just getting him to do anything with his mountain of a body would make him plenty strong enough.
“One!”
In the next moment, I concentrated everything I had into a Thunderbolt. I could tell that the electricity was charging in through his cranial nerves, traveling through his neurons one after another.
This just proved how deeply we were connected. It felt like a tiny centipede was crawling around inside my own brain—and I was the one controlling it. I was also the one who felt just how nasty the sensation was.
But that also meant I could direct the centipede into the muscles of my arm. And somehow, I even knew how to direct it through the labyrinthine maze of nerves to get there.
“Okay, that’s it—how’s that?!” I shouted, before I even realized I was talking out loud. I stared at the projection illuminating the brain wall.
Pandora’s right hand had moved.
First, I made him form all five fingers into a firm fist, then I gingerly raised his clenched hand into the air.
“Feil! His arm! Pandora’s arm is moving!” I heard Cyril’s worked up voice.
Myfila was also staring at the wall in a daze. And as for me—well, I’d just realized that continually discharging electromagic was freaking exhausting.