The Girl Who Hacked The Magic System

PoV: Aurea

No no no no no!

This can't be happening.

"YACI!!!"

She is lying on the ground, with a leg twisted in an impossible way.

I waste no time, putting myself between the girl in Roman attire and Yaci.

"Oh? Another little rat? Did you come to save your beastly friend?"

I have no time. I need to bring Yaci to safety asap. But this girl is really bad news. Ingela was right.

A person able to hurt Yaci that badly is trouble.

I quickly cast the lightning bolt aria, unleashing hellish electricity onto her.

She flies backwards, but I can feel from the flow of mana that she is not dead yet.

"There aren't many people capable of surviving a hit of this spell, you know."

"I am a special one, after all. I'm quite conscious about it, so you don't have to flatter me."

"That wasn't meant as flattery. But It doesn't matter, as you will die anyway."

I bombard her with more lightning, which she deflects by conjuring an earthly shield.

She then starts chanting an aria. Not in Esperansy or Draconic, but in good and proper Latin.

So she is Roman, after all.

I don't know much Latin myself, but I am able to get the general gist of the chant. It seems to call forth something from the heavens.

But, before she can finish, I have an idea and shout in the best Latin I can speak.

"Alea jacta est!"

It's Latin for 'the dice has been cast' or something like that. It has no actual meaning in this situation besides the fact that it is a famous Latin quote.

And it seems to have hit home, as her eyes widen in surprise and she gasps, interrupting the aria.

That was all the opening I needed to cast a gravitational aria, increasing her weight a hundredfold.

"Ugh! You filthy rat... How do you know that expression?"

"Julius Caesar said it before crossing the Rubicon. It's just basic knowledge you learn at school."

"You're lying. That knowledge is not taught in this world."

"Oh, I'm sorry. Did I say anything about it being a school in this world?"

"Aurea. Stop playing around.

"Oh. Hi Ingela. And Yaci?"

"We already rescued her and the whole squad. Thank you for buying us time, but we need to finish this."

The Roman girl is looking at me, bewildered, as she slowly gets back to her feet. The gravity spell is still weighing her down, so the fact that she's able to stand up with the weight on her body says a lot about her strength.

"Are you a Roman like me?"

She spoke in Latin again. It was a bit hard to get the meaning, but the context helps a lot here.

I answer in Esperansy.

"No. I'm from a time after the Roman empire collapsed. Though my mother language is one of the Neo-Latin ones."

"YOU LIE! Rome is a never-ending empire. It will never collapse!"

Damn. Meeting an SPQR chauvinist wasn't in my bingo card this morning.

A lot of mana condenses in front of the girl as she screams, then the mana comes at me in the form of a light spear, but it's blocked by Ingela's shield.

A never-ending cascade of those spears comes bombarding us, while I keep increasing the weight on her body.

This doesn't seem to be an aria, but it's more similar to the spell-like abilities of some monsters.

I use an illusion spell to make it seem that I am running to the left, outside the protection of the spatial barrier. She falls for it for a split second.

But a split second is all we need.

My coordination with Ingela is honed by years of training. As soon as the enemy switches her attack patterns to hit the illusion, she drops the shield, and I unleash the most powerful of my lightning bolts.

Before the girl is even able to process what hit her, the shield is up again.

But that precaution wasn't necessary, as the attacks didn't resume. Instead, the girl is running away back to the camp. Actually, the most accurate would be to say that she is floating back to the camp.

If she tried to run, the added gravity would hinder her. But, by using a levitation spell, she is able to circumvent it, having to deal only with the pain.

But she doesn't seem too badly hurt. It looks more like a tactical retreat than anything else.

"Aurea, let's fall back as well."

"Yes. Yaci..."

"Exactly."

:::

PoV: Urraca

The three angels are having tea with the commander of the army inside the command tent.

One of them is visibly injured, but neither she nor her colleagues seem to mind it. Actually, to Urraca's astonishment, the injuries are slowly healing themselves.

"A girl with flame-red hair, you say?"

"Yes. And the other girl called her Aurea."

"Then there's no doubt about it. She's the person I hate the most in this world. Aurea Annes, daughter of the so-called Saint, and a princess of Wesgoth."

"A princess and daughter of the Saint? Hm. She is quite the interesting character indeed."

"And for someone to make you run like that, sister Claudia, she must be quite the opponent."

"Oh. I won't deny that she is strong, sister Flavia. But I simply decided to gather some intel with you both first. After all, she spoke Latin."

The other two angels, who were giggling until now, suddenly stopped, with the blood running off from their faces.

Urraca just looks from one to the other, confused.

"She spoke what?"

She obviously has no idea about what Latin is and what speaking it means.

But the angels pay her no mind.

"Are you sure about it, Claudia?"

"Do you really think that I would get confused about a thing like that, Lívia?"

The three of them looked very uncomfortable, which made Urraca bite her lips and just listen, deciding that the best course of action would be to gather as much information as possible and then put it together later.

"What did she say?"

"Nothing special, Flavia. It was just 'alea jacta est.' What threw me off wasn't the contents by themselves, but the simple fact of hearing it in this world."

"Caesar's declaration? No, those words actually matter. They are a declaration directed at us."

"Huh? What do you mean, Lívia?"

"Isn't it obvious, my dear sister Flavia? Do you remember what happened to our world after those words were said?"

"Well. The Republic ended and... Oh."

"And the empire began, and the Caesars became gods."

Livia was smiling a wry smile that didn't reach her eyes. Even her practiced giggles became dry.

"But how does she know about that phrase? Did she say anything else, Claudia?"

"I asked her that it's just basic knowledge taught in schools in an age after the empire crumbled."

"Impossible!"

The two angels shouted in unison, protesting the mere idea of the empire having an end.

As the three of them went on to a whole debate about how Rome is eternal and about the divinity of the Caesars, Urraca, forgotten by the others, listened with enraptured attention.

She grew up in a world where the goddess was silent and the Church was doing its best to cover it up.

She had been suspicious of the Church for some time. Even suspecting that the goddess never existed to begin with.

But as her goals and the Church's goals were aligned, she didn't give a damn about it. The Church was a great tool to keep the rabble in place, after all.

One day was what it took for her world to turn upside down.

First, the blessing confirmed both the existence of the goddess and that the Church was hiding something crucial and deceiving everything.

Then the angels came.

Then her nemesis, Aurea, managed to injure one of those angels an leave without a single scratch.

Then this conversation that unveiled a whole new reality for her. A truly disturbing one.