Chapter 16: Saint of Predictions

"...Ehh... I... I think that’s good enough..." Stelaria murmurs, looking at Nio sitting in a chair. The outfit ended up looking excessively cute on her body, because even though the clothes fit Nio well.

The contrast of the white with the golden crosses fell in an adorable way on Nio’s smaller frame.

"I wasn’t cute like that when I wore these clothes... you’re so lucky..." You can feel the envy in Stelaria’s voice as she starts ignoring Nio and kneels on the floor, drawing magical circles.

’I wonder if I can predict this girl’s future...’ She cuts her hand deeply with a fruit dagger and pours the blood over the drawing until it forms a puddle. Several stars begin to shine in the magical circle as she stares into the deep red pool.

"..." In the blood, she sees very abstract things. Planets breaking, a sea of blood, a sun exploding, a leaf falling, a waterfall running upwards.

Every prediction is abstract and Stelaria is the one who must interpret it, but everything points to the opposite of order.

"Planets breaking... could mean the ruin of something large, like a group, a civilization, a kingdom, but it could also mean being at the epicenter of a chaotic event... considering the current wars, I deduce that Nio will have great interaction with the entire war scenario..." Stelaria interprets the first image.

"A sea of blood..." For a moment, Stelaria stares at Nio, but she won’t be partial in her interpretation and decides to be neutral, even if it’s something bad.

"Blood always means deaths, but I’ve never seen this much blood in a prediction... is this girl... really a saint?" This prediction would be enough for her to expel Nio from the kingdom, but she can’t bring herself to do it, even if it’s the logical course of action.

"An exploding sun... I don’t know, I’ve never seen anything like it... usually explosions are linked to the structural collapse of something, but what could Nio destroy, or what could be destroyed that belongs to her?" Stelaria runs headfirst into one of the problems with predictions.

They go both ways. There’s no way to know if Nio is the one who will cause the prediction or if she’s the one who will suffer from it. Besides, everything depends on Stelaria’s own interpretation, which can often be shaped by personal, religious, or symbolic biases, meaning she can get it wrong much more easily than it seems.

"Falling leaves... can only mean death, but again, I don’t know if Nio is the one who will die, if Nio will kill people, or if people important to her or around her will die."

"A waterfall flowing upwards would be... magic. Magic is a constant flow... but flowing backward? Why backward? I don’t know, I have no idea what this part could be..." Stelaria decides to skip what she doesn’t know, focusing on the last two images she sees.

"An ant being watched by a bear, a symbolism of prey and predator... is Nio being hunted by someone?... And the last image is flames. Flames burning a forest during a heavy rain."

"It’s as if a furious dragon had set everything ablaze... or, as if a natural event were fighting against the flames... I’ve never seen such abstract predictions about someone’s life..."

"...I should expel someone like her, so why is it so difficult?" Stelaria stares at the blood and for a moment sees a reflection, a small image hidden within the blood.

"..." She soon uses more of her magic as a saint of predictions to enlarge the image, and what she sees is her own reflection.

"...Is that me?... Wait, is that my reflection?" The vision is a mirror, but not a mirror that reflects the future, a mirror that reflects the present moment, to the point that the reflection in the mirror appearing in the blood follows Stelaria’s movements. She keeps staring for a few seconds.

Before the reflection changes completely and a murky eye appears. When the eye appears, Stelaria’s entire body fills with dread.

"[...]" The eye looks around as if searching for something, trying to see, and before it can find it, Stelaria slaps the puddle of blood, dispelling the magic as she drags herself backward, her whole body filled with fear.

Because something entered her prediction. Something in the "future" realized it was being watched and tried to observe back in search of something.

"...Haaa... Haaa... Haaa," Stelaria gasps, feeling her magic being drained for breaking the prediction so abruptly.

"W-What the hell was that? S-Something looked at me?" Never before had something in the predictions tried to see Stelaria, but for the first time, something tried to see her. And while Stelaria tries to recover from the panic, thousands of miles away, in a forest, a bloodbath is happening.

Or rather, a bloodbath happened. Thousands of mangled monster corpses forming a small river of blood that flows downwards while the trees are covered in blood.

"The monsters of this world don’t seem like much," Typhon murmurs, devouring the corpses of the monsters she killed.

"...I wonder who was trying to observe me. I couldn’t see because my eye was stabilizing... what a shame they canceled the magic, but it’s curious to know there is someone capable of detecting me." Typhon’s right eye bleeds, destroyed by the magic she used to invade the magic of the one who was observing her.

"It looks like I’ll need to eat a lot to regenerate this eye. How inconvenient. If it hadn’t been destroyed from so far away, I wouldn’t have to go through this trouble... but now I know there is intelligent life a few miles from here... I think I miscalculated my route." Typhon partially recalculates her route, changing her path so that at some point she gets closer to where she felt the magic.

"I should have gotten a map from those humans. How reckless I was. It’s truly lamentable... don’t you think?" She asks an ogre cowering on the ground in fear of her.

Contrary to how it seems, Typhon doesn’t care about killing low-level monsters. The return is minimal, so most monsters below level 20 were ignored by Typhon.

And the few low-level ones that were killed were just for testing, while the majority were monsters of level 30 or higher, and she only killed the level 30 ones because she wasn’t finding any level 70 monsters, which were her true targets.

"It seems the intelligence and level of the monsters in this world are also inferior to where I came from." She starts wandering through the forest looking for more high-level prey to eat and test the limits of her current power.

"I’m so sorry, Nio... I’m not ready to see you yet, if my eye was destroyed and I can’t regenerate it easily. In the past, even if this happened, I could have regenerated it instantly... my power has decayed so much." Typhon blushes with shame, feeling embarrassed to show herself so weak to her "wife."

It’s the first time since she arrived that she’s shown this kind of emotion that escapes her usual neutral and polite expression.

"It seems I’ll need a few months to get used to this new weakness and readjust my combat style, and there’s nothing better than nature itself to teach me." She decides to stay in this forest for some time, which for Nio is a true stroke of luck.

Just as it is a stroke of luck that Typhon didn’t have time to see Nio sitting in a chair right next to the magic she invaded.