As immovable Theora pushed hard against the crystal, she got catapulted away.

Like a cannonball, she shot through hoards of Afterthoughts, destroying them all, shockwave blasting. Then, she plummeted into the side of the hall in an explosion of rock and dirt and brick, leaving a crater the size of a house. Debris shot off into the area, dispatching hundreds of additional creatures. The hall erupted into chaos, wild screeches resembling the echoes of voices and growls and whimpers broke out as the creatures scrambled out of the way and into the corners. The guards yelled and shouted unintelligible words.

Theora felt masses of stone tumble down on her, exerting a gentle pressure on her entire body.

She frowned.

This was, honestly, really discouraging. Hadn’t she put in her best efforts to become stationary? Why had she still been blown away?

That said, something didn’t feel right. Because, regardless of the reality of her having been launched off, she didn’t feel like she had moved at all. In fact, she was still immobile, feeling drowsy and heavy. She had made herself immovable, and now she couldn’t get up. She felt way too tired to rise from the rock.

But if she hadn’t moved, then why was she in the wall now, and not the crystal?

It felt suspicious.

Theora started racking her brain about this. How could she have moved if she was immovable?

She couldn’t have. It must have been the crystal that had moved. Except, the crystal was still floating where it was before.

Did this have to do with some weird magical effect? Some kind of Skill?

It seemed unlikely. What kind of Skill could launch Theora against her will? That was even less likely. She had specifically willed herself to be stationary, and it was rather disheartening that she seemed to have moved anyway.

Except, she still really didn’t feel like she had moved.

She thought it over in her head again and again, and couldn’t come to a satisfying conclusion. Out of frustration more than anything, she activated [Head in the Clouds]. She wasn’t outside right now, so she closed her eyes and imagined a wide sky as accurately as she could.

What in the world just happened?

 

[Head in the Clouds].

Answer: Darling, you rotated the planet.

 

Theora stared at the response. That made absolutely no sense to her. She rotated the planet? What? As per usual, her Class was completely—

Before she could end her thought, Theora blinked.

Ah. Of course.

Yes, she had rotated the planet. Oh no.

If the crystals were truly stationary, they would cut through the earth as it rotated. But, they didn’t. They stayed in-place in relation to the planet, because they were anchored to the planet. That’s what made them immovable. They were stuck to the planet. 

So when she’d successfully shoved the crystal, she’d also successfully shoved the planet. But since Theora herself hadn’t changed location, she’d crashed into the planet that was rotating around her. 

In a way, she was lucky she wasn’t currently cutting through the planet due to her own inertia. To some extent, her movement was also tied to it — just to a lesser extent than the crystals because she didn’t see herself as part of it.

She sighed. “I’m sorry,” she shouted out to the guards. “I will fix it.”

The two were still frantically yelling, but Theora hadn’t listened to them so far.

“Oh thank god, you are alive?” an oily voice yelped.

“What do you mean, ‘fix it’? The wall?”

Ah, right. Theora had ruined the wall. She would need to repair that too. That would take weeks.

Thankfully, putting the planet back was only going to take a moment. All she needed to do was break her self-imposed immovability and repeat the pushing process on the other side of the hall.

… But how would she do that?

Right now, she felt really, really tired. Tired and heavy, and close to dozing off. She had messed up again, big time. Just like back when she’d destroyed part of the System. She really needed to get a grip. Spinning the planet because she was too lazy to clear the Afterthoughts by hand a few times? She truly was beyond help.

And despite really wanting to, she couldn’t just fall asleep for a hundred years right on the spot, either, because she needed to undo her mess and help these people.

Ah, this was all so sad. She was so sad. So sad and empty and heavy and sleepy. Her eyelids felt like they had the gravitational pull of the sun. They just wanted to go down, down, down.

But then, right before closing, her lids jumped back up.

That’s right, she wasn’t done for today.

After a hard day’s work, she would get to come home, and eat a homemade meal, and see Dema again. But for that to happen, she needed to make up for her mistake first, and then clear away all these Afterthoughts that were left in the hall. This hall, and all other halls she’d be able to reach today, to relieve some of the pressure off the people in town.

Theora sighed. She took a deep, steadying breath. 

She was immovable, and that made moving really hard.

She could still control her limbs and face, just not get up and walk around. She had no idea how to undo this. It was a self-imposition, so getting out of it required her to be stronger than herself. This was going to be tiring. Especially because she’d put herself in a position of gentle comfort, of not having to get up, of not having to move, and the idea of having to undo that was heartbreaking. 

After agonising about it for a while, and after reluctantly agreeing that she needed to get back up, and after banishing all the bad thoughts from her mind, she managed to come up with a plan. First, she extended her self-imposition to her limbs.

Now, she was truly unmoving; petrified, lying there without being able to move a single muscle. That was a good start.

Because now that she couldn’t budge, she could focus on moving just a tiny part of herself. If she succeeded in moving, say, a finger, then she wasn’t truly immovable anymore, and maybe that would break her self-imposition.

And so, Theora chose her right index-finger, and tried very hard to bend it.

It was just a finger, right? So, bending it shouldn’t be too hard. She simply needed to exert all her power, and twitch it just the slightest bit.

And so, she tried. She arched all the muscles in her body, pulling them tense like she couldn’t remember having done in an eternity.

Nothing ever required her full power. Nothing ever necessitated her to go all out. And now, every single fibre in her body lamented from the exertion, every tendon stretched as far as it could. 

She would have screamed or groaned or let out a frustrated yelp, but she didn’t want the guards to worry. And so, she just yelled out in her mind, writhed and squirmed against impossible shackles she’d placed on herself, trying to move the heaviest and most slumberous and sluggish object she had ever perceived — herself.

This was taking a lot of strength. She would probably be sore tomorrow.

And, finally, after tensing up to the brink for way too long, a slow lightning arc came free from her finger, dissipating into the air with a shockwave, and her finger moved ever so slightly. With that, the self-imposition broke apart.

Slowly and feeling rather rattled, Theora peeled herself out of layers of rock and soil and dust, rumbled out of the crater, and stumbled back into the hall. She peeked to see if the guards were alright. Magda looked like she was gazing at ghosts, and Rogue was simply shocked.

Theora bowed down. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I’ll fix it now.”

With that, she went back to the same crystal, and put her hand on it, although this time, pointing in the exact opposite direction.

Magda started shaking her head in disbelief, rasping Rogue’s arm as if to steady herself. “What’s she doing?” she muttered, but didn’t receive an answer, because in the meantime, Theora had made herself immovable again, and repeated the process.

In an earth-shattering explosion, the opposite side of the hall crashed into her. Again, the impact left a wake of utter destruction. However, she was fairly certain she’d exerted about the same amount of strength in her push, and really hoped the planet was back in its correct rotational axis.

Theora still felt weak from her first attempt, so breaking free from being immobile was much harder the second time around. It took her almost half an hour of lying around in rubble until she could finally bend a finger and get herself back up.

The worst part of it all was that the crystal was still happily producing Afterthoughts without a care in the world. Seeing that, Theora felt her heart sink. She blinked and tried to focus on the task at hand instead. Yes, having accidentally rotated the planet and then forced herself to get up from such a cosy stony bed twice was dejecting, but she’d fixed it now, and there were other things left to do.

So, she started dispatching the remaining Afterthoughts. She didn’t bother too much with the weak ones pouring out from the crystals, and instead focussed on using [Obliterate] on all the others. Her goal was to get to a point where no strong Afterthoughts were left. Still, they replicated quickly, so it took almost two hours to get to a point where she could deem the area safe for at least a while.

In the meantime, the guards had made themselves comfortable — they hadn’t entered the hall, but they were sitting on the stairs, making comments on Theora’s every action. Magda’s way to deal with the surreal display was apparently to make sarcastic jokes in the manner of, “Of course, she just kills the level 600 Type A in a single hit. Sure, whatever. Not like that would have been a full raid party fight for us, yeah,” every five minutes.

When Theora was done, she came back to the guards, nodded a goodbye, and went past them up the stairs.

“Wait!” Magda yelled out, and grabbed Theora’s ankle, causing her to stop and look down at her questioningly. Magda simply gave a meaningful and exaggerated shrug. “Haven’t you forgotten something?”

Theora felt another shudder go down her back. “Yes, of course. Again, I apologise for the mess I’ve made. I’m sorry, I will fix the walls once I have time, and I will be more careful from now on.”

Magda just shook her head, totally bewildered. “No, I mean those,” she said, and pointed back into the hall, at heaps of compacted stray Afterthought goop. “Not gonna pick those up?”

Ah. She meant their residue. One needed to touch and absorb that goop to be rewarded with experience.

Theora shook her head. “No, I don’t need that. I don’t even have—”

She halted. Actually, she was a Level 1 [Stargazer]. And judging from all those things she’d just dispatched, that was likely enough to get her Class up hundreds of Levels. If she absorbed it, maybe she would gain another Skill?

After all, Theora’s Class had been useful today. It had given her the solution to the riddle she couldn’t solve herself, because she wasn’t all that good at physics. Maybe she’d gain another pretty Skill.

And so, she made off to absorb all the gunk. But first, she collected it all and placed it on a large heap, so she could take it all in at once. Oh, that was going to be so rewarding.

Finally, she proudly looked at the gigantic mass she’d put into a corner of the hall, and consumed it all in one go.

 

You have received 3,924,824 Points of Experience.

 

For a moment, Theora just looked at the now empty corner in front of her, waiting for something else to pop up.

But, nothing did.

No, that was definitely wrong. She opened a few HUD screens of the System, trying to find her experience bar. She’d not looked at it in ages, so it took her a moment to find it. On the way, she noticed that, indeed, [Stargazer] was still Level one.

When she finally found the bar, she almost choked.

 

Experience collected until next Level-up: 0.3 %

 

What an utterly, irredeemably useless Class.

Theora took a deep breath. She couldn’t wait to get home. Even though the day felt like it had only just begun. The others were probably having a nice day… On that note, she wondered, what might Dema have been up to, in the meantime?