Acceleration x4

Time, I thought, power rising in me. It was a vague idea, more instinct than actual thought, but it came together like the shift in gravity before it and I poured every ounce of power I could spare into it. In a flickering moment, the face of a giant clock appeared beneath my feet, written in pure white light. With a musical sounding chime, its hands began to turn quickly, faster and faster and faster, until even my eyes couldn’t follow them.

And time slowed to wait for me.

A skill has been created through a special action! By combining many elemental affinities, the skill 'Acceleration’ has been created.

In an instant, everything around me began to slow, dragging to a relative crawl before my eyes. The bullets, illuminated by spinning trails of Aura in the sky above me seemed to put on the brakes, pulling down to speed I could actually keep up with—Ren and Nora, meanwhile, just seemed to stop.

Even without seeing the name of my new ability, it wasn’t hard to grasp what was going on, at least not for me. I knew logically that I couldn’t be slowing the world down; the sheer amount of energy that would be required to do something like that on an area that large was far, far beyond me—and, more than that, it was completely unnecessary when I could accomplish almost the same thing for far less power.

I wasn’t slowing the world down; I was speeding myself up. Warping time in my immediate vicinity to change how it progressed for me as opposed to changing the world around me. It was all in the name, even—Acceleration was the change of something’s velocity over time. I was just tampering with the denominator of that equation instead of the numerator.

And it gave me exactly what I needed. My eyes swept up to the bullets still speeding towards us, but from my perspective they’d been cut down to less than half their original speed—no, perhaps closer to a quarter of their speed, which meant I was moving nearly four times faster now. That carried with it more than its fair share of implications but first thing’s first.

I spun back towards Ren, snatching a blue Dust crystal from my Inventory. Reaching out to him as gently as I could with my free hand, I saw the fabric of his shirt ripple out from where I touched his chest as even that soft contact was magnified by my speed. I healed him quickly and restored a healthy chunk of his Aura as his eyes slowly began to widen—and then pushed on his chest a bit harder, lifting his feet from the ground and leaving him moving slowly through the air. A quick pair of steps drew me close to Nora and I did the same thing to her, directing her back towards the demolished building.

Then I turned, my eyes landing on my Ice Elemental who stood, still as a statue. It didn’t seem like my speed boost carried over to her, unfortunately, but that was okay, I supposed. I considered commanding her to create a layered wall of ice around the area, but no; I reached out mentally and unraveled the merged pattern that composed her new form. After a moment, I felt her presence in my mind separate back in Xihai and one of Levant’s manifestations, though her body seemed to be a lot slower to come apart—it didn’t matter. I touched her mind and told her what I intended.