86. Peripheral Survey
Early the next morning, while it was still pitch black before sunrise, Shiro and Mitoka were flying above the royal capital.
Shestia was riding on Shiro’s back—because she insisted she had to go.
Shiro had night vision, so darkness wasn’t a problem. He’d chosen nighttime travel to avoid the risk of being spotted from below during daylight.
If it were just Shiro and Mitoka, they could’ve used stealth or invisibility, but with Shestia along, that wasn’t an option. So they’d decided to move under cover of darkness.
After fighting the wyverns, Shiro had unlocked divine magic, finally allowing him to combine gravity nullification with inertia control to perform flight magic.
During the battle, he’d flown without thinking—now, with full awareness and at high altitude, he realized how terrifying it actually was.
He remembered the first time he’d flown through Earth’s surface in VR.
Back then, that level of realism had made his stomach clench. Now, in the real world, with real-world fidelity, it wasn’t going to be so easy.
360-degree vision, wind brushing his skin—barrier blocked it. The crushing pull of Earth’s gravity—partially dampened, but still felt. Just the visual input alone was enough to make his head spin, blood rushing from his face. He took a deep breath.
“Mitoka… this is impossible. I’m scared…” Shiro whined.
“You’ll be fine, Shiro,” Shestia said, cradled in his arms, though her reassurance lacked conviction. Still, the warmth of her body pressed against him gave him a quiet, hidden comfort.
“Shiro. Hold on. If you really must, I can suppress your fear with mental manipulation,” Mitoka said.
“Yeah, that’d probably be better. This kind of thing’s tough for a regular Earth-born human like me,” Shiro replied.
——『[Height Fear Resistance] Level 1 acquired』
——『[Flight Sensation Enhancement] Level 1 acquired』
“Whoa. Feels… a lot better. The fear’s gone. And my sense of up and down—something’s changed, like it’s… calibrated,” Shiro said, tension easing slightly.
“Shiro, keep the third eye’s third-person view active at all times. It’ll make flying easier,” Mitoka advised. Shiro realized he could now fly like he was in a game—calm settled over him.
Shestia, cradled in Shiro’s arms, seemed cheerful, but Shiro noticed a faint shadow in her expression.
Since the battle with the wyvern, Shestia had never left Shiro’s side for a moment. Shiro knew her feelings and wouldn’t dismiss them lightly.
At such a sensitive age, her parents had been sealed away. Thanks to the goddess’s protection, she’d fought alone, in secret, until now. Shiro had become her anchor. Shiro didn’t mind playing that role—just a little comfort, nothing more.
Mitoka often watched the two of them with a fond smile.
Though she was affectionate toward Shiro—always clinging, always wanting to stay close—she wasn’t just being friendly. She was deliberately staying with both Shiro and Mitoka, listening closely, experiencing everything firsthand, soaking up magical theory and practice as fast as she could. Both Shiro and Mitoka sensed that.
She had an absurdly high level of comprehension and absorption. That was why her core count was so high, and Shiro and Mitoka understood that. So they let her do as she pleased. Of course, their goodwill toward her was more than sufficient—but right now, they decided not to think about it.
Shestia’s soul link hadn’t activated since that incident. Probably, the extreme tension and focus during the Wyvern encounter had triggered it. Since then, Shestia had been training daily to activate divine magic, never missing a session.
Shiro and the others had come up here to check the miasma’s spread across a wide area.
They deployed a magical barrier in the air and stood atop it. Shiro brought up a display, making what he saw visible to Shestia as well.
Using miasma sight, he scanned the landscape. Band-like zones of high concentration stretched across the terrain.
Running from north to south, passing east of the capital, then extending southeast.
Two bands seemed to come from the north.
At the same time, a ribbon of miasma spread from the capital toward the west.
“This band stretching from north to southeast… it’s oddly clean. Like something passed through it…? No, the pattern—it feels familiar. Like I’ve seen it before… I’m being pulled toward it, somehow. Like iron filings drawn to a magnet?”
Incidentally, visual skills weren’t like detection skills. They didn’t extend magical energy. They worked like graphics rendering options in a computer—adjusting how the final image was generated. In short, they determined which wavelengths of light would be used to produce the final visual output.
In this world, visual rendering spans the electromagnetic spectrum—down to low frequencies, all the way up to gamma rays. Beyond that, it can visualize anything calculable in physics: photon dispersion, magical Odu, various subatomic particles, and more. A physicist would weep with joy upon hearing this.
When Shiro realized this, he thought, *Damn. This is a real world. This is divine engineering.*
In Shiro’s system, no matter how ideal the theoretical design, Earth’s technology still imposes limits. Earth-based VR systems are still trapped within RGB constraints. Even if color precision bits increased, there was no escaping it. Rebuilding every hardware component from scratch? Impossible—even for Shiro.
Shiro scanned the capital city’s surroundings from above, along with the problematic forest and labyrinth nearby.
What he found was grim. Monsters were already flooding the area.
He identified several, confirming some had gone feral. The mushroom overgrowth was visible even from above.
Shiro cut the survey short and headed back to the capital to file his report.
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