Skyl didn't often go on long trips. But whenever he did leave home, he went very, very far.
This time, since he'd come to Eastern Europe, he felt he ought to bring back a local specialty—such as this country's most famous Cold War export: a nuclear bomb.
He wasn't planning to haul the whole stockpile away; a single warhead would be more than enough. With a Duplication Charm, he could turn one into a whole pile.
Nuclear weapons were still the most powerful arms humanity had ever built. But Skyl wasn't eyeing them for their destructive power, nor did he intend to use one as his ace in the hole.
His view of the world was far broader than that. A thermonuclear explosion, fireball and shockwave enough to wipe out a metropolis of millions, was to him no more than a faint spark. Muggle technology looked glorious on the surface, but at the end of the day it was just boiling water and throwing rocks in fancier and fancier ways. Nuclear weapons ran on real, physical fissile material: an atomic bomb used explosives to compress it into fission, a hydrogen bomb used an atomic bomb to create the high temperature and pressure needed for fusion. It was like cooking in a kitchen—get the ingredients ready, then blast them with high heat. Compared to that, all those technological achievements didn't hold a candle to the simplest Transfiguration spell.
To counter Muggles' weapons, a wizard only needed a single Condensed Flame Charm and every heat-based weapon would instantly fail. In a world like that of Elden Ring, where the basic rules of physics themselves were different, a nuclear bomb might as well be scrap metal.
In truth, for Skyl this thing had more value as a collector's item than as an actual weapon.
He used a Flight spell to travel. Passing over the Ural Mountains, he made a side trip to the Gomel-30 Nuclear Weapons Base.
The bunker lay in a birch forest three kilometres west of a rural village. The radio and television were full of reports about the red flag falling in Moscow. The base commander, Mikhail Yelovich, sat slumped in his brown leather-backed chair, sunk in silence, swept up in a strange tidal wave of emotion. When the alarm finally sounded, he remained perfectly still in his chair, as if sleeping deeply.
The guards in the monitoring room called his office. They waited and waited. Outside, the winter night over the Urals shivered with cold as heavy snow fell, but no one picked up on the other end of the line, and the cameras picked up no sign of an intruder. Only the inventory logs showed that one nuclear warhead was indeed missing.
The sentries in the base clustered under the lights, crowded around a green-painted table scattered with pickled raw pork, playing cards, and spent bullet casings. The blare of the alarm didn't prompt a single one of them to stand up and return to his post. One of them saw the warehouse doors swing open by themselves, saw a warhead drift out, float up, and rise into the night sky. He rubbed his eyes, and they all gave the same tired, numb chuckle, pouring vodka from a grimy glass bottle into their cups.
Then snow began to fall—snow laced with Forgetfulness Potion. Every soldier and officer in the base forgot the strange theft that night. Four years later, the remaining warheads from this batch would be quietly smuggled out by sea and then vanish without a trace. No one would ever know what had really happened here.
Skyl felt no particular thrill of a great thief's success—more like the mood of a shut-in who had popped out to buy a tea egg and come home again.
He didn't go straight back to Hogwarts. Instead, he pitched camp on an uninhabited islet in the northern Mediterranean, in the Adriatic Sea. The next morning he was woken by the pounding waves in the cove. With two weeks of Christmas holidays ahead of him, he planned to use the break to explore the world of Elden Ring—the special plane known as the Lands Between.
He opened a portal and stepped into the Chapel of Anticipation.
He hadn't taken the time to properly explore this place on his last visit. The chapel was bleak and ancient. Near the wall by the entrance lay the corpse of a woman. Skyl knew who this woman was: one of the beings known as Finger Maidens, priestesses serving the Two Fingers, and the most important companions of every Tarnished.
Finger Maidens guided the Tarnished back to the Lands Between to stand before the Elden Ring. A Tarnished without their maiden was like a ship with torn sails or a kite with a snapped string—sure to meet an unhappy end.
Skyl didn't think he counted as a Tarnished at all. He had never been "stained" by the grace of the Erdtree. He was an utter outsider, not a native cast out of the Lands Between and stripped of grace.
If that was so, whose companion had this maiden been?
The corpse of the Finger Maiden slumped against the wall, the fatal wound through her chest and abdomen clearly visible. Her face was as peaceful as a white flower. When she died there was only calm there, and a hint of lingering reluctance. In her hand she clutched a desiccated finger, its yellowed skin shrivelled tight. That finger could leave messages that pierced through time and space.
Skyl bent his head and looked at the Finger Maiden's final words. They were written in an unfamiliar script—he'd never seen this language before and couldn't read a word.
As an old player, though, he remembered what the line said: Even if your guidance is long since broken, please, become Elden Lord.
He tried casting magic here. No good. All his a priori magic failed. His natural magic would need serious adjustment. The more complex the spell model and the deeper the theory it embodied, the more it was restricted. Conversely, the simpler the spell, the better it worked. For example, the novice-level Destruction spell Flame Tongue: all it did was convert magicka into fire and spew it out—nothing could be simpler—so it still worked just fine.
The Lands Between were a very special case. Their underlying rules had been amended by some higher-order law.
Skyl found this kind of coercive law—overriding every other rule—very intriguing. This was the prerogative of gods, and only gods had the right to wield it. For him, this was an entirely new field of study. If he could thoroughly understand divine law, he would not only be able to restore his full power, he could push his exploration of the roots of magic even further. He might even discover that eternal, universal solution lying between a priori and natural magic—and then his words would become law, the very rules of the world crawling at his feet.
Skyl made his camp in the Chapel of Anticipation. His daily routine was to design experiments in The Tower of Tomes, then return to the Lands Between to repeat them, recording every deviation in the data and analysing the causes. Over and over. It was extremely, mind-numbingly dull work. Even the most patient person would eventually be ground down by it, like standing at the entrance to a maze of infinite complexity where a change in just one digit past the decimal point might reflect tweaks to dozens of physical laws.
He had already made some progress, but he didn't dare act rashly. He still remembered Professor Quirrell's first lesson: when your strength is lacking, you can never be too careful. In the Lands Between, Skyl was no god on earth—he was just a small mage with endless magic power.
And so the days slipped by.
Ever since Skyl had chosen to use The Tower of Tomes to synchronise the flow of time between worlds, he'd finally developed a sense of time rushing past. In the past, when he hopped back and forth between World I and World II, events in both timelines unfolded independently. That had given him a very generous window for growth. Now that he was already a max-level character, he didn't need to steal time like that anymore. Let time flow as it pleased. Let the wind blow and the rain lash down. Skyl no longer cared.
Even the most indifferent of students still had to go to class eventually.
While Skyl was working himself half to death, the day to return to school crept up on him unnoticed. The night before term started, he glanced at the calendar Professor McGonagall had given him. It was already shouting about tomorrow's classes, so model student Skyl hurriedly flew back from the Adriatic to the British Isles, slipping in through the skies to his faithful Hogwarts Castle at three in the morning.
The next morning, after an entire holiday apart, the students were gathered once more in the Great Hall, chattering noisily and swapping stories.
Word that Harry and the other three had joined the secret club had already spread, and now they too had become minor celebrities. This put Ron in a very good mood. Hermione received an olive branch from the Third-Year Fever Dream Sisterhood; she just snorted. "You barely looked at me before. Now this girl is out of your league."
Neville and Harry, on the other hand, both found this new fame bothersome. One was shy by nature and uncomfortable with being the centre of attention. The other wished he could pour every spare minute into the study of Dark magic.
Skyl chatted idly with his roommates as well. He told them about his Christmas: how he'd gone to witness a historic event in the Muggle world, stolen a Muggle firecracker, then vacationed in the Adriatic Sea, and finally spent his time sitting beside a woman's corpse studying magic.
Even by the standards of wizards—who were famous for being odd—Skyl's holiday was exceptionally bizarre.
The Weasley twins were fascinated by this Muggle firecracker. Their dream was to open a shop specialising in joke products. Muggle fireworks might, they thought, prove a hit with wizards. So they pleaded with Skyl to take them along to steal a few more, in the hopes of modifying them into prank toys.
"…That particular toy isn't really suitable for pranks," Skyl said after thinking it over carefully, and he still refused the twins' request. "The effect isn't very funny. It's more… hell on earth."
He had no desire to see the wizarding world turned into a nuclear wasteland just yet.
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