The night at the boy's home was the first time Jessica had slept in a real bed since Earth. The smell of fresh hay and baked bread was a stark contrast to the damp cave in the wilderness. But as the sun rose over Eldaline, Jessica knew she couldn't stay. The "system" of this world was calling to her—a pull toward the horizon she couldn't ignore.
She left a small bag of coins she’d recovered from the kidnappers' stash on the kitchen table and slipped out before the family woke.
The Encounter in the Woods
By midday, Jessica was deep in the forest trail leading toward the border of Felinesa. The peace of the morning was shattered by a sound she had grown to recognize: the heavy, rhythmic thud of an Ogre’s footsteps, followed by the desperate clash of steel against bone.
She rounded a bend and saw them. A small company of mercenaries was backed against a rock wall. An Ogre, standing twelve feet tall with skin like mottled granite, had just swatted a man aside like a fly.
The man—a rugged mercenary with graying hair—hit a tree with a sickening crack. His chest was crushed, his breathing shallow and rattling.
"Fall back!" the mercenary captain screamed, but the Ogre raised its massive club for a final blow.
Jessica didn't hesitate. She didn't use a blast this time. She channeled her mana into her feet, accelerating her body to a speed that blurred reality. She appeared directly under the Ogre’s arm, her palm pressed against its stomach.
“Vibrate,” she commanded.
She sent a high-frequency magical pulse through the creature’s internal organs. The Ogre didn't explode; it simply collapsed, its nervous system shut down instantly by her precise application of energy.
The Healing
The mercenaries stood frozen, weapons trembling. But Jessica wasn't looking at the beast. She rushed to the fallen man.
"He’s gone, lass," the captain said, his voice thick with grief. "No one survives a rib-crush like that."
Jessica ignored him. She closed her eyes, her genius mind visualizing the man’s anatomy as if it were a complex circuit board. She saw the ruptured lungs, the shattered sternum, the internal hemorrhaging.
"I can fix this," she whispered.
She placed her hands over his chest. A soft, warm violet glow emanated from her palms. On Earth, she had studied cellular biology for fun; here, she could actually manipulate it. She forced the cells to undergo rapid mitosis, knitting bone back to bone and sealing the torn vessels.
The mercenary gasped, his eyes flying open as his lungs inflated fully for the first time in minutes. The color returned to his face.
The captain dropped his sword in shock. "You... you’re a High Healer? No, that’s impossible. You’re just a girl."
"I'm an adventurer," Jessica said, standing up and wiping the sweat from her brow. "Or at least, I’m trying to be."
The Road to Felinesa
The mercenaries were part of a guard detail for a wealthy merchant named Erfl. Out of pure gratitude for saving their comrade, they insisted on escorting Jessica.
"We're heading to the capital of Felinesa, then onto the Kingdom of Heltery," Erfl said, offering Jessica a seat on his finest carriage. "The roads are crawling with bandits, but with someone like you... I think we’ll sleep quite soundly."
For the next week, Jessica traveled in relative luxury. She spent the time talking to the mages in the caravan, trying to gauge if anyone else had power like hers. But the more she listened, the more she realized she was an anomaly. Most mages needed staves, long incantations, and years of study just to produce a fireball.
She was doing it all with raw thought and high-school physics.
When bandits finally did attack—a group of fifty men blocking the pass—Jessica didn't even step off the carriage. She simply raised a hand and altered the atmospheric pressure around the bandits. A localized gravity well pinned them to the ground, their weapons feeling like they weighed a thousand pounds.
The caravan rolled past the groaning bandits without a single arrow being fired.
The Kingdom of Heltery
After passing through the marble-white capital of Felinesa, Jessica finally arrived at the Kingdom of Heltery. It was a land of mist and ancient stone, where the magic felt older and more volatile.
"This is as far as we go," the mercenary captain said, clasping Jessica’s hand. "If you ever need a blade at your back, find the Company of the Iron Rose."
Jessica watched them leave, then turned toward the Heltery Adventurer’s Guild. She needed a way to move through this world legally, and a copper rank plate was the easiest disguise for a god-tier mage.
Inside the guild, the air was thick with the smell of ale and old parchment. She took a seat at a corner table, her silver hair drawing eyes, but her cold expression kept the drunkards at bay.
"You look like you're searching for something," a voice said.
Jessica looked up. A woman in dark robes sat across from her. She had sharp features and eyes that seemed to have seen too much.
"I'm Elsa," the woman said. "I'm a mage, like you. And I have a job that requires someone... unconventional. It involves a friend named Selia, a tragedy that shouldn't have happened, and a spell that defies the laws of time."
Jessica leaned in. The word time struck a chord. If she could move through time, could she go back to that intersection on Earth? Could she save her sister?
"Tell me more," Jessica said.
She didn't know it yet, but Elsa was about to lead her into a darkness that even her magic couldn't light up.
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