Utopian System

They watched as Memory-Nala ignored more of Dionz's increasingly exasperated attempts to get her to socialize.

"You know," Zara mused, "for someone who hates humans so much, you sure put a lot of effort into avoiding actually getting to know any of them."

"I knew enough," Nala insisted, but something in her tone suggested uncertainty.

"Did you though? Because from what I'm seeing, your grand experience of human life consisted of... what? Staring out windows and telling Dionz to go away?"

The memory showed exactly that happening, Memory-Nala shooing away a concerned Dionz while peering through barely-opened curtains at the bustling life outside.

"At least tell me you eventually left the house," Zara pleaded. "Please don't tell me you spent a hundred years as the neighborhood cryptid."

Nala's silence was telling.

"Oh my god, you did. The great and powerful Nala, future scourge of humanity, spent her human experience as the weird neighbor everyone made up stories about."

"I don't know yet you idiot, I'm watching the same as you… maybe I was gathering data!"

"You were gathering dust!"

As they bickered, both noticed something odd about the memory, despite Nala's isolation, her house was always well-maintained, food appeared regularly, and someone seemed to be taking care of basic necessities.

"Wait," Zara paused their argument. "Who was helping you if you never left the house?"

For once, Nala had no answer. Another mystery in a growing collection of them.

Life in the developing city continued, and while boredom took longer to catch up with Nala than it might have with others, it arrived inevitably. Her avatar's unchanging nature, neither aging nor evolving like the humans around her, made her self-imposed isolation somewhat practical, if not particularly enlightening.

"So let me get this straight," Zara's consciousness prodded with evident amusement. "You spent ninety-eight years basically being the neighborhood ghost?"

"I was probably processing complex thoughts about existence," Nala defended.

"Oh yes, very complex. 'Should I peek through the left curtain or the right curtain today?'"

"I may have had memories of the divine war to contemplate…"

"Had memories? More memories you can't actually remember now?" Zara's mental eye-roll was practically audible. "Face it, you were a hundred-year-old shut-in who never learned to human properly just because."

"The term 'human' is not a verb…"

"Says the person who spent a century failing at it!"

The memory continued to unfold, showing Nala finally venturing out of her house after nearly ninety-eight years of seclusion.

"Oh! Character development!" Zara exclaimed with mock excitement. "Did you finally run out of things to stare at from there?"

"I was likely perfectly content with my observational approach."

"You were perfectly bored is what you were. No wonder these memories got stored away… watching clothes dry would have been more exciting."

But then the memory showed something that silenced both of them. There, standing in the street that Nala had finally decided to walk down, was a sixteen-year-old boy who was unmistakably a 16 years old Elio.

"That's..." Zara's tone lost its mocking edge.

"Impossible," Nala finished. "I tried to approach…? He couldn't have been..."

The young Elio looked exactly like the one they knew, down to the determined set of his jaw and the intelligent gleam in his eyes. The only difference was his age and the lightness that came with youth, unmarred by the battles and hardships they knew awaited him one day.

"Maybe if you'd left your house before year ninety-eight, you'd understand more of what was going on," Zara couldn't resist adding.

They watched as Memory-Nala and young Elio's paths converged. Two years remained in her hundred-year sentence of human existence, and here was Elio, appearing like a ghost from a future that didn't exist yet.

♢♢♢♢

The landscape shifted as Elio and his invocations advanced toward the scandium mountain.

Where before he'd seen twenty elements interacting, now a twenty-first was weaving its way into the fabric of reality, creating new patterns and possibilities.

As they neared the mountain, the concentration of scandium increased.

Their enhanced magical power resonated with the environment, creating small disturbances with every movement.

The mountain loomed before them, its surface glittering with scandium deposits. This would be where they'd face the 64,000 monsters, in an arena where every spell could trigger an exponential chain of effects.

At the peak, a familiar sight awaited them, the central shaft leading down through the mountain's core. But unlike previous challenges, this one glowed with layered barriers of combined scandium.

"Time to put theory into practice," Elio muttered, examining the first barrier.

Instead of trying to break through with brute force, he reached out with his enhanced magical control. The scandium responded eagerly, almost too eagerly. Each barrier was like a complex lock waiting to be picked, or in this case, drained.

The first barrier shattered as Elio pulled its scandium content into his own magical control.

The second followed quickly, though this time he pushed the previous scandium into it to weaken the resistance.

Their descent became a dance of elemental manipulation. Elio would change each barrier they encountered and extracted scandium he could use later.

When they reached the chamber at the mountain's base, Elio almost laughed. Sixty-four thousand creatures awaited them, bizarre hybrids that looked like someone had tried to create platypuses out of pure energy. Their beaks crackled with scandium power, their fur rippled with elemental potential.

But where once such numbers would have been daunting, now they were just targets.

Elio unleashed their collected scandium in a devastating opening salvo. Then element's chain-reaction attacks turned each spell into a cascade of barrier destruction.

The creatures tried to build back, but Elio had learned too well how to control this element.

The chamber became a lightshow of devastating proportions. Scandium-enhanced magic filled the air with crackling energy, each spell triggering multiple secondary explosions. The strange platypus-creatures fell by the hundreds, then thousands, their own elemental nature making them vulnerable to the very chain reactions they helped to create.

Elio stood in the center of the chaos, directing the symphony of destruction with casual confidence. His enhanced magical power and the effects of the curse giving him a new satisfied face.

As the chamber cleared of smoke and residual energy, Elio couldn't help but appreciate the irony. He'd spent so much time months earlier worrying about facing such numbers, only to find that now, they were barely a challenge.