Day 5
It was the fifth day of the subjugation. Team B stood deep in the toxic mud.
The three Mages attacked the Miasma-Titan with fire and ice magic.
FWOOSH. KRR-CRASH. SHHH-HISS.
During the first few days of the raid, the Mages actually experimented with other spells. They cast brilliant arcs of chain lightning that danced across the rotting timber. They threw razor-sharp wind blades that sliced cleanly through the dense gray fog.
The magic looked incredible, but the damage was terrible. The lightning simply grounded out into the wet swamp mud, and the wind blades only left shallow scratches on the petrified bark. So they stopped.
They went back to the boring, repetitive cycle of extreme heat and extreme cold. It was an ugly tactic, but it caused massive thermal shock that reliably shattered the outer shell. Practicality always beats flashy magic in a death trap.
The Thieves automatically climbed up the Miasma-Titan's body. They aimed their weapons at the exact same spot the Mages had just blasted.
SHLICK-SHLICK.
They drove their daggers deep into the soft, exposed wood. The Titan groaned. Its huge body moved violently, throwing large debris from its hard shells high toward the sky. The Thieves immediately retreated and dropped safely back down to the swamp floor.
A new wave of Mud Crawlers swarmed through the muck. The beasts were very near to the Mages, who were currently chanting their next heavy spell. The two Thieves rushed back to intercept the threat and kill the crawlers.
SCHWAK-SPLAT.
Their steel easily tore through the soft mud bodies of the monsters.
The Mages released another heavy fire and ice combo. As the explosions rocked the swamp, Chris the Thief noticed something moving in his peripheral vision. A single Mud Crawler had managed to sneak completely around the frontline, creeping right behind the Healers.
In the current battle formation, the Healers stood at the very rear. Chris rushed toward the beast to protect the backline. He swung his arm and cut it using his dagger.
SWISH-THUD.
Chris turned around to face the Miasma-Titan again. In his current position, he could see the backs of the Healers and the Mages. He was now standing at the very rear of the formation.
He watched the three Healers raise their staves. They prepared to cast healing magic toward the three Tankers and two Swordsmen fighting at the very front of the line. The Healers were not glowing yet. They were still raising their staves at this point.
Then Chris saw it. The small debris from the Titan's hardened shells, which had been thrown into the sky earlier, was falling downward. He estimated the sharp rocks would hit the Healers in about 2.5 seconds.
The moment he thought of this, the Healers started casting their magic toward the vanguard.
In 2.1 seconds, Celia completely healed the two Swordsmen. At roughly 2.5 seconds, the small shell debris hit the Healers' arms.
In 3.5 seconds, the second Healer finished healing the other two Swordsmen, entirely ignoring the wound she just got from the debris. And in 3.6 seconds, the third Healer finished healing the two Tankers, ignoring the falling rocks as well.
Chris easily stepped aside and dodged a separate piece of falling debris that went toward him.
Up at the front, the other Thief sustained a minor cut from a Mud Crawler, so Celia started to cast another healing spell to mend his wound. Chris watched her from the rear.
Chris's eyes tracked the entire battlefield in extreme slow motion. Thieves were born biologically fast and agile. Because of that natural speed, their eyes had to biologically adapt to match their fast bodies.
It would not make any sense if a person could run like the wind but their eyes could not catch up to their own momentum. They would simply crash into a wall. That is why a Thief's eyes evolve differently from a normal human.
In everyday life, a Thief sees everything in normal motion. But the perspective changes entirely when they enter a state of hyper-focus. In a battle, their senses open wide, forcing everything around them into a sluggish crawl. This phenomenon is called Tachypsychia.
It is not that a Thief's brain actually thinks faster than anyone else. A common misconception among rookie Thieves is assuming their mental speed increases simply because the world looks slow to them. They are wrong.
What makes their eyes see the world in slow motion is the incredible amount of raw visual data they take in at once. A Thief's eyes are comparable to the eyes of a dragonfly, absorbing thousands of tiny details in a fraction of a second.
To a Thief like Chris, his eyes could see the density of the atmosphere. He saw the wind movements through the flying dirt in the air, tracking the shifts of the people and monsters around him. He used this visual data as a reference to calculate time without ever looking at a clock.
If an ordinary person watches a carriage run down a road, they have no way to measure its exact speed without a tape measure for the distance and a clock for the time.
But for Thieves, it is a piece of cake without any tools. Their biological eyes are accustomed to making highly accurate visual estimates of distance.
It works just like a siege engineer calibrating a catapult from a high wall. An engineer knows a standard broadsword is about 1.5 meters long, so he holds his arm straight out and closes one eye to align his thumb with the distant weapon. He then switches eyes to watch how far his thumb visually shifts across the battlefield.
By comparing that visual jump to the sword's known length, The siege engineer consciously pieces the math together to find the estimated range. Once the distance is firmly set in his mind, he tightens the thick ropes so the flying boulder drops right on top of the enemy camp.
Thieves use the exact same principle of triangulation, but they skip the manual tricks entirely.
Because a Thief possesses incredibly rapid vision, their eyes capture thousands of individual moments in a single second. Even the tiny, natural sway of their neck as they breathe gives them dozens of different viewing angles instantly. Their mind subconsciously overlaps those rapid visual frames to build a flawless perception of depth, so they can calculate massive gaps without ever raising a finger.
In measuring time, Thieves rely on the movements in the atmosphere as a point of reference. The most reliable anchor they use is gravity. The speed of gravity in this world is a constant 9.8 meters per second squared (9.8 m/s²).
Chris remembered the first time his eyes unlocked this absolute law. He was just a young boy standing on a crowded street, and he was watching a heavy carriage gallop past him at full speed. At that exact moment, a loose stone slipped from the roof of a nearby building.
To the ordinary adults around him, the speeding carriage was just a fast blur of wood and horses but Chris saw it perfectly. In his young eyes, the world slowed to a freezing crawl. He watched the carriage roll one meter forward, while the falling stone only dropped about five centimeters toward the road. He did not know any complex math back then, and he did not consciously calculate the distance.
His child brain simply absorbed the natural rhythm of the falling stone compared to the moving wooden carriage, so the exact speed instantly clicked in his head. He instinctively understood the carriage was running at ten meters per second.
A Thief's mind subconsciously uses the strict law of falling objects as a flawless ticking clock to gauge how fast everything else moves around them. It is not as perfect as a real clock, but a Thief's estimate is extremely close.
A high-level Thief's internal clock is deeply respected throughout the world. Royal scholars and magical researchers eventually proved that their raw visual instinct mirrors the kinematic equation for falling bodies, where distance equals half of gravity multiplied by the time squared: d = (1/2)gt².
If a Thief saw a stone fall from the air, and when it fell 490 centimeters toward the ground, that means 1 second had passed. If the stone fell for another 1470 centimeters, a sum of 1960 centimeters since it started falling, that means 2 seconds had already passed. If the stone fell for another 2450 centimeters, a sum of 4410 centimeters, that means it was already 3 seconds. And so on. This is how a Thief subconsciously measures the time.
In Chris's vision, he saw the wet soil that was kicked upward by a Swordsman's boots as he ran. The dirt created an arc, reached its peak, and was now being pushed down by gravity. It hung in the air in Chris's eyes.
A Tanker's heavy coin pouch snapped loose and fell down, moving slowly, currently hovering near the man's knee line.
Celia was currently casting a healing spell on the Thief in the front, and a second wave of debris from the sky was about to hit the Healers in about 1.2 seconds.
In a Thief's eyes like Chris, everything moved in slow motion, but it did not mean his brain could react as fast as his eyes. A Thief's eyes capture the image clearly, but their brain does not immediately know what is happening in that frozen moment. This physical limitation is called Perception Latency.
This latency applies to everyone universally, especially civilians without Mana. If a normal person suddenly looks up to the sky, they might see something falling toward their face just one centimeter away.
A leaf lands on the forehead of the ordinary human. At that exact moment, when the leaf is one centimeter from his face, his eyes clearly see the leaf, but his brain does not process it yet. When the leaf physically lands on his forehead, the man blinks, his brain processes what he saw, and he finally figures out it was a leaf.
The moment he realizes what happened, the event is already over. That delayed realization is called Postdiction. There is a strict delay between the moment a person sees something and the moment the brain analyzes it.
That exact same delay happened to the Thieves. But in a Thief's case, it was an extreme situation elevated to a superhuman level. A Thief's eyes can see everything in highly detailed slow motion, but their brain only processes what their eyes saw a few seconds later.
Chris's eyes recorded the sequence. The wet soil from the Swordsman's boots fell and hit the ground after 0.06 seconds. The Tanker's coin pouch landed in the mud at 0.08 seconds. Up ahead, Celia finished casting her spell to the Thief in the front. Chris's eyes saw her casting time take roughly 2.1 seconds.
Then, after 0.4 seconds passed, the tiny debris finally struck the three Healers.
Small droplets of blood from the Healers' injured arms started to fall toward the ground at the exact same time. Simultaneously, the three women cast self-healing spells to mend their own wounds. Self-healing actively bypasses the Law of Aura Delay for Healers because their internal Mana does not need to exit their bodies or travel through the open air.
Chris's eyes tracked the very slow fall of the blood droplets. The Thieves' senses used the speed of gravity as a reliable visual metronome for measuring time down to the millisecond, easily accounting for the very tiny influence of wind resistance.
Thieves are not actually seeing floating numbers in their heads, and they are not calculating complex math. Their sharp senses simply convert the visual data they gather into numerical estimates. Their brains do it subconsciously. It was an ingrained instinct, completely removing the need to calculate anything. Their minds subconsciously used the speed of free-falling objects as the absolute baseline for computing time.
Then Chris's eyes saw the very slow motion of the three Healers casting their spells while the droplets of their blood free-fell toward the ground. There was no wind at that moment to alter the trajectory.
Then it happened.
Celia finished casting and completely healed herself before the blood droplet even reached the ground. The other two Healers finished healing themselves after their blood droplets had already splattered into the mud.
At that exact moment, Chris's brain had not caught up to what his eyes had just seen.
After three seconds of reviewing the footage his eyes recorded, his eyes suddenly widened.
The Postdiction finally hit him. He realized Celia's self-healing speed was 4 milliseconds, while the second Healer did it in 700 milliseconds, and the third Healer finished healing herself at 800 milliseconds.
Chris frowned.
What was that? he thought. Achieving 800 milliseconds is actually an elite-tier benchmark. Most low-level Healers require around three full seconds to finish self-healing. But this elf's speed was incredible.
While Chris thought about this impossible gap, a new batch of Mud Crawlers surged.
Chris shook his head, quickly pushing the impossible numbers aside.
It doesn't matter, he told himself as he rushed toward the nearest Mud Crawler. Four milliseconds or eight hundred. What is the real difference? Thehuman body won't even notice a time gap that small, right? Fast is just fast.
Spinning on his heel, he swung his dagger to decapitate the leaping beast, catching a brief glimpse of the blonde elf lowering her wooden staff in the distance.
As long as they close the wound quickly, the end result of 4 milliseconds and 800 milliseconds is exactly the same. Her casting speed is an amazing feat, sure.
Two more Mud Crawlers lunged for his legs. With a sharp pivot, Chris effortlessly sidestepped their snapping jaws and drove his blades deep into their soft, muddy skulls.
Healers are obviously vital to keeping an entire raid team breathing, Chris thought as he cut down three more Mud Crawlers. But it's still just a healing spell. You cannot use a 'heal' to cut a monster's throat. It's completely useless in a direct clash of blades.
Team B kept up their rhythmic battle strategy, and they did not stop until the six-hour shift finally ended.