Agnisotra: Origin Tails

I was holding another book. It had images of 2 men on the cover, one was a nine-tailed fox and another one was a three-tailed shadowcat. I showed it to Gregory. Shit, I’m curious but it will probably do the same as the last book. Yeah, but aren't you curious? Noob god mentioned our races already being thin, I don't know what that date was he gave us but as far as I know, it isn't a system we use nowadays.

Yeah, we use Kaledonian years, and our months aren’t named after Sarian gods… Ugh, I will regret this but… Gregory grabbed the book out of my hands and opened the book. The area was filled with light and we appeared to be in a house made out of ice. Hmm, frost magic.

“How did you two get in here?” Uhh, we got lost, we will see ourselves out!

“Wait, aren't you two too young to be on the battlefield?” We saw 2 men in front of us, and we recognized them from the cover of the book, one was inspecting us with Elgards eyes and I countered it to make sure he couldn't see much.

“Oh, this young one has quite the powerful eyes, I could only see their age and race.”

“Oh, do tell”

“They are a nine-tail spirit fox and a three-tailed shadow cat just like us, it's just… They are only 1 year old…” We can hold our own I’ll have you know!

“Nonsense! I’m about to become a father soon and you will be hardly any older than my daughter!”

“Didn't you guys decide to delay when she will get born? At least until all this mess is over, you didn't even get a name for her!”

"Well, I’m sorry but not everyone can come up with cool names like you 2! I was thinking about Ennea, Ennea Oures, sounds good right?”

“I thought you wanted to make sure that the gods couldn't find out that your daughter was related to a nine-tail spirit fox…” Hey, those guys kind of remind me of us, they completely forgot about us. Yeah, I was thinking the same.

“So what? I completely change her name?”

“That’s what we did, I hid my wife in a safe spot, she will delay the birth of our daughter and call her Nadila Sheru.” !

“Hmm, I like Ennea Oures, though maybe I should change it a bit, Elea Oura? Emea Houra? Oh! How about Edea Hourai? Yes, that’s what her name is going to be!” !

“That sounds like a wonderful name. Oh, sorry, forgot about you two there, anyways we need you kids to stay alive to play with our daughters.”

“Yeah, who are your parents by the way?” Uhh... I have a question. Agnis?

What are your names? The two looked at each other.

“I’m Alep Oures”

“I’m Giovanni Nyx, now where are your parents' young ones?” I looked at Alep. You can find out if we’re lying or not with those eyes, right? Agnis??

“I can if you let me, I have never met anyone with Elgards eyes as strong as you though.” Go ahead go and find out, So I’m Agnis Hourai, son of Edea Hourai and this here is Gregory Sheru, son of Nadila Sheru! Have you lost your mind?

“Haha, Giovanni this guy sounds like you! Let me see… Oh my…”

“What is it?”

“I don’t see any trace of deception… he is speaking the truth… they are our grandsons…”

“If you are pranking me, I swear I’ll kick your ass! This is not funny!”

“Here see for yourself!”

“....” Hey what do you think you're doing? Look we probably need to do something here but if they are in the middle of a war, we have no chance! So, to make sure to get out of this we need their help but as they said we are just brats do you think they would help us if I didn't do this?

There surely must have been another way, what if this affects the future? We don't know how all this works! Maybe we are never born now! But if we never got born, we could have never set this in motion because we needed to be born to do this in the first place!

That is not a reason to be so reckless! What if they use this as an excuse to keep us extra safe and prevent us from reaching our objective? Safer than what? We’re brats! They could easily take us away and put us I don't know where! And then we are certainly never going to reach our objective!

“Hey, Alep, I think these 2 really are our grandsons…”

“But what are they doing here and how?”

“Your race can mess with time, right?”

“Well yes but it is not easy, it’s probably harder at that age…”

“So, what do we do? I want to talk to them but I don’t know how or what?”

“Maybe we can train them!”

“What? Alep, are you out of your mind?! They are just kids!”

“They are our grandkids and they’re here for an objective, we can’t just send them away, might as well teach them some tricks!”

“You want to babysit while we’re in the middle of a war?! I don’t mind talking a bit with them but we can’t train them! What if it messes up their future?!”

“It can't be that bad, they came here by themselves my grandson could even block my eyes I’m sure they will be fine!”

“You don’t know that! Maybe they’re here because of things not being fine!” Hey, Greg, I think these guys really are our grandparents… Yeah, I was thinking the same… Our gramps kept arguing so we left the room in this icy building. We walked through some corridors and got outside. It seemed we were in a budget village, more houses made of frost could be seen everywhere and there were tails everywhere.

“Oh hello, what are you two doing here? Aren’t you too young to be in a camp on the frontlines?” I worked hard on this illusion to make us appear young and trick our enemies! Wha?

“Ohh, this is indeed very convincing I can’t even find out much about you two only your age and race, some very potent illusions. I’m Astrea Mikazuki what are your names?” This place is a paradise of information, way more useful than this shitty library.

“Oh, Astrea you found our grandsons!” Shit!

“Grandsons? I thought your firstborn daughters would be born far away timewise and location-wise from this war!”

“Uhh, it is complicated! Hear us out!” Our grandfathers explained the situation. It seems that Giovanni’s brother is Astrea’s husband.

“So, these troublemakers somehow managed to go back in time, very impressive, his eyes are better than ours…" But I’m not even that good at using them…

“Right, so what do you guys need?” Right, this is going to sound weird so hear us out. Gregory explained our situation.

“So, you’re stuck in a book that brought you here and you need to follow the objective of the situation to get out?” Yes.

“I have the feeling that all you need is to learn some cool skills.” Same!

“As long as you 2 don't send your grandsons into battle, I’m fine with it, so uhm do you by any chance know my grandson?” Uhh you probably mean Hisui Mikazuki, I guess?

"Ohh, so Neia has a daughter called Hisui." Uhh. Uhh, no Hisui is Viridian’s daughter.

“Oh… That was what I wanted to call my next child if he was a boy….” Awkward…

“Anyways let's teach you some cool skills!" Ooh, gramps! Do you have some cool frost skills to teach me?

“Frost skills?” Yeah, like that! I point at the houses made out of frost magic.

“Oh, Pagos, so they call it frost in your time I see.” Yeah, that! Let's go! Can I learn some abyss magic gramps?

“Going for the big hitters, eh? Sure.”

“I wish my grandkid was here too… Wait for me!” Gramps tried to teach me complicated skills called [Pneuma Boreas] and [Kryokym], and Gregory was trying to learn [Erebea] and [Telos]. Our gramps didn't go easy on us, these skills were extremely difficult.

“Hey Agnis, my grandkid is a nine-tailed spirit fox too, right?” Yeh “Can you teach her these skills?” On top of that, I also got two more skills stomped in my head to teach Hisui. Which were [Pneuma Nefriti] and [Thalia]. I’m going to be real here we didn't get close to mastering these skills at all. We did get a good foundation though. It gave us a better understanding of how frost and abyss magic worked. I also got blasted with how nature energy works. The skills I have to pass on to Hisui were based on nature energy, I guess I can use these for myself too. [Thalia] seems like a problem though… it is a super stacked skill it combines nature energy with illusions and charm attacks…

“I knew these skills were hard but you guys surely learn fast…”

“Ha! It is because they have our genes!” My head… so much stuff… I think I will let my tails sit on these for a while… After 4 hours which felt like forever, we got the basics of the basics down.

These skills, seem very potent. They have to be if you want to slap gods. We rested while our gramps went to do their stuff.

Do you think this here is a form of time travel and is affecting our present or is it just the magic that traps us here? I have no clue, maybe it just makes our gramps and Althea act like how they would if they were still alive.

That sounds plausible. We stayed the night and had some fun with gramps and their friends. A lively bunch, hard to tell that they are about to go to war with that bitch. I hope they win…

The next day arrives and more training. After 2 hours it clicks for Gregory and me and it seems we reached our objective. We haven't mastered it yet but we will without guidance from here on. We said our goodbyes before a bright flash appeared and brought us back to the library. Phew… that was rough but I’m glad we did that. Ugh, that was so tiring, and we still had to walk out of this library. I took the book and several others and stashed them in my dimensional pocket.

I saw that! I’m not handing gramps over to Mr. Fungus!

Understandable… Let's go. I might already know the answer but do you think they escape alive?

Sadly, I think only Althea escapes… Thought as much… We climbed the stairs and we heard the ticking sound again.

I forgot how this place creeps me out. How long do you think it will take for us to master these new skills?

A year? Maybe 2? I didn't know that magic could get so complicated… Me neither… it already took us so long to understand these magic circles, what madman made these?

Probably our gramps themselves or maybe our great gramps. It still feels close to what we regularly use although way more complicated. Yeah, crazy how much magic and well everything deteriorated I wonder what happened that caused the Great Eraser. We’ve seen glimpses of what happened before it.

So many factions were involved and I'm sure we only saw a small portion. Maybe all the books in that secret area were clues about it but to do this trapped in a book things over and over… too much! Well, yeah, this kind of magic only traps you for about 2 to 4 pages worth of content, you either get rid of the magic to read everything or you keep jumping in, which I wouldn't recommend… Do you hear me?! Don't do it!

Yes, yes, I won’t jeez you're starting to sound like your gramps! Why you? Another bright flash.

Ah, shit here we go again! The Scytedog goes after me again. I try to stay in the lit area because it keeps disappearing when I get out. It is hard to evade this with this limited space. Gregory is assaulting it with shadow magic. This creature seems light-based so it is taking a lot of damage. I take out Potato Peeler 3.0 and parry the scythes while I evade the paws. Parrying the scythes is hard because there is a lot of force behind them. Gregory anchors my shadow to make sure that I don't fly off from the force behind those scythes. This is actually the first opponent in a while that is giving me trouble. My eyes are still affected by hypersensitivity. Inside the books, it was like I never got hit by that fungus attack but now I’m back outside I’m back to being nerfed.

This sucks. Can’t you do anything about this Scythedog? I don't want to end up as a doggie snack! Working on it! Gregory was using his [Shadow whirlpool] and the light cloud slowly got sucked in and got smaller. It started thrashing, broke loose, and dashed at me to which Gregory responded with a [Shadow wall]. I moved to its cloud body and slashed it but it did no damage.

Great so only dark and shadow magic works? Hmm, that reminds me, you don't know any real offensive shadow skills, right?

Not really no only utility, but I can try something with the skill I got from Azu. It took me a lot of concentration but I managed to make a small dagger out of shadows. I tried to close in but this thing was fast and wouldn't let me get close to its cloud body again. I just had to distract it while Gregory was slowly defeating it. It screeched and fled again.

Pain in the ass monster. Can I drop some fire in your shadow wall so you can one-shot it with [Liberation]?

Uh, sure. Gregory made a shadow wall and I shot some fireballs at it till he told me that that was enough. I chugged an anti-nausea potion. We almost reached the main floor when the ticking sound started to become really loud.

This is giving me a bad vibe, shall we run? Yeh! I grabbed Gregory with my tail and dashed. Gregory told me from memory where to go because I couldn't see as far with my eyes as I wanted to. We made some small detours because Gregory seemed to have trouble with placing us in the correct spot but from where he thought we were in the library he seemed to know where to go I made sure to swipe and stash some random books that I came across. Kind of weird that he has a good memory but has difficulty with directions. I recognize a part and know the route from here.

Another bright flash. There are more of these things? Maybe, we fought a different one each time. 2 Scythedogs were blocking our path. I ran at them and evaded their swipes while Gregory one-shot one with [Liberation] and the other fled.

Good riddance. The ticking sound was loud and ominous. It felt like a clock was being held close to our ears. Both our intuitions started to send us alarms and we decided to not stick around to find out what it was about. We saw the front door of the Library which Gregory tried to open but couldn't.

How much energy do you have left? Enough to feed to you for a nuke or 2, I don't care what you do I want to get out of here, [Vaporize] that door! Gregory fed me energy and I touched the door. My finger briefly turned into millions of degrees and I transferred it to one of the stone doors. The door didn't [Vaporize] but turned into magma and created a small pool on the ground, through which I dashed. Gregory protected himself with a [Shadow cloak]. The moment we got outside a big slam could be heard as out of nowhere another door appeared where I just melted a hole and the Library was shut again.

Never am I going back there again… Same here, that place is spirit-unfriendly. We went back to the palace tired but we decided to suck it up and take Ted and Raishin and head back to the surface with Gregory's [Shadow meld]