Aqua's head was spinning.
The information just kept coming, wave after wave, each revelation more impossible than the last.
Her brilliant mind—the same mind that had mastered Archmage-level magic at nineteen, that could calculate complex spell arrays in seconds, that had absorbed entire libraries of knowledge—simply could not process what she had just learned.
She felt dizzy.
She needed to sit down. Needed a moment to let all of this settle, to rearrange her understanding of the world, to accept that her brother was apparently some kind of supernatural being capable of impossible things.
Maria, meanwhile, wore a smug smile of victory.
She had clearly won this round of gossip supremacy, and she was enjoying every moment of it.
But before either of them could speak—
"JOY!"
The voice cut through the evening air like a knife.
Panicked. Desperate. Completely unlike anything either of them had ever heard from that particular source.
