Mahou Sensei Negima: Fabula ex Mundus Novus

A Surprise in the Midnight Air

H.J. hummed into the night breeze, hovering delicately on the wind, he was held up by the long wooden staff beneath his body, which layed lengthwise across the piece of ash. With a bit of magic and a quick incantation, he could set an ordinary walking stick into the fastest thing in the skies.

The term 'mage' had once called to mind the counsel of near skeletal men, who practiced occultism and worshipped esoteric gods; but several centuries and the arrival of technology had all but snuffed out the spirituality and wisdom of a once glorious age. According to the records in his history book, magicians were relegated to a secret society, living in far off hamlets and organizations far from the eyes of the mundane world. H. J. had even remembered one of his professors telling him that magic had nearly gone extinct at the turn of the 20th century; if not for the courageous efforts of one powerful Magister Magi, the greatest mage of his time, the very idea of magic itself would have crumbled like countless epochs before it.

H. J. was the product of this resurgence, coming from a mundane family, the Elliot's had moved to the Magical World when the secret was exposed, and had lived in the palisades of Bosporus for some decades before H. J. was born; with enough talent to be sent to a Magic School, he had spent the last three years studying the arts of the supernatural.

Graduating at the top of his class, H. J. had followed the long standing tradition of all mages, being assigned to the part of the world in order to act as counsel for those in need. At the young age of 16, the mage who had mastered all manner of spells and techniques put in front of him was ready to depart with unbridled passion and enthusiasm.

Very quickly though, he fell flat of his aspirations of becoming a hero, rather than send him to some war-torn country or into work as a Magic Operative for the Megalomemsebria Confederacy, he was relegated to work as the healer on staff for a school in Japan, a glorified nurse.

A week after he was sitting in a office, healing scrapes and everyday maladies with the flick of a wand and a utterance of a word. His job had quickly stagnated into reading everyday and sending kids in and out of his office with little contact in between, most of his free time was spent exploring the town by air, and on a night like this he found himself drawn to the wonderful Kyoto evening outside his room.

Several generations of time had separated Kyoto from the 21st century, and yet in much the same way it had retained its spiritual and cultural beauty, though most of it's populace had migrated towards the port-towns and the Capital. Kyoto had remained frozen in time and became a cultural landmark. H. J. had never seen such beautiful architecture, and from several kilometers up it seemed as though the temples and gates had led him through the rabbit hole and into a mystical land lost to history.

Passing over the temples one last time, the young mage had been preparing to head back to his apartment when he was alerted to the presence of magic, like a spark setting off an explosion hundreds of meters away, his sense had pointed him in the right direction; ordering his flying tool towards the blast, he planned on investigating the cause of the spell and the person that cast it.

Before he received his job he had been told their was not a single certified magician within the entire Kyoto area, much less one capable of conjure up a large enough spell that the magic could be felt from nearly a kilometer away. Darting across the sky with an acceleration spell, H. J. willed his 'broom' to move faster, and the broom did as he commanded.

The technique had gone off in the middle of a temple courtyard, and as he touched down in the middle of the yard he felt several presences some distance away. He conjectured that whoever launched the attack would still be within the vicinity.

Following the trail of the attacker, he spied from a distance another large technique, this one rending the air and crackling like lightning had struck meters away. He decided to keep his distance, raising his altitude a few more meters, he got closer to his target and watched the scene unfold below him.