"Do you know her? Xenia Torrell... sounds like a woman's name. Did you have a 'thing' with her?" Alistair's inner gossip-monger was suddenly very active.
"A 'thing'? Don't be ridiculous," Takai sighed. "She was one of the top archmages at Leibnitz. Her students were famous across the continent—though mostly for the wrong reasons."
"Wait, if this is Xenia's book, does that mean Aoi is her descendant?" Alistair asked.
"Impossible," Takai said firmly. "Xenia was captured and sealed. Her soul is a mystery, but her body was entombed in Gremlin. She left no heirs."
"What about her students?" Chitose asked.
"One of her students was one of the Fourteen Fallen Demi-Gods," Takai said darkly. "After the war, she was sealed, too. Rumor has it her soul was bound into her own magical diary, though I can't confirm it."
One of the sisters? Alistair rubbed his chin. Georgia (his companion) was one of the fourteen. If one was sealed in a diary, she might be in this world.
"Fallen Demi-God? Sounds terrifying," Aoi whispered.
Alistair looked at Takai, a realization hitting him. The War of the Demi-Gods was ancient history. If time flowed at the same rate in both worlds, how could Takai have studied at Leibnitz?
"Uncle... are you even human?" Alistair blurted out.
WHACK!
"Ow!" Alistair clutched his shoulder as Takai's heavy hand landed on him.
"You brat! You're doubting your teacher's humanity now? Do you need more 'training'?" Takai looked genuinely offended.
"But that war was hundreds, maybe thousands of years ago! Even as a Transcendent, you shouldn't be that old!"
"Use your brain, boy. I'm only in my eighties," Takai explained, crossing his arms. "In my realm of power, I have at least five hundred years of life. By this world's standards, I'm practically a young man in his twenties."
"Then how did you study at an academy that was destroyed centuries ago?"
Takai smirked. "How do you think I broke your 'Time Acceleration' earlier?"
"The accident... you were sent to the past?" Alistair realized.
"Exactly. A magical anomaly threw me into a time-field. I ended up in the period roughly fifteen years before the Great War. The magical disaster at Leibnitz is what actually kicked me back into the time-stream and returned me to the 'present.'"
Takai added, "By the way, your acceleration depends on your physical durability. The stronger you get, the faster you can go. Eventually, you really will be 'stopping' time for everyone else."
Alistair nodded, then asked, "What was the name of Xenia's student? The Fallen one?"
"Her name was Holliace," Takai replied.
Alistair committed the name to memory. He'd have to ask Georgia about her later. Meanwhile, Aoi and Chitose were reeling. Finding out their "Uncle/Dad" was an eighty-year-old time-traveling mercenary was a lot to process.