Ball of Nothing

Once the flash of light died down, there was a tiny voice.

"Um... Hello Zero... I-I'm Lily, glad to be of service again!"

Bob and Mii blinked. All that mana to summon a tiny flower fairy?

Zero blinked. "Oh, you've changed a little since the last time we met. It's good to see you again. I was hoping you would help me to find someone again."

Lily smiled shyly. It wasn't often that people noticed how the number of flower petals on her skirt had increased. Not even Gaia noticed it so the fact that Zero did, made her very happy.

"Don't mention it, I was glad to help. Who are you looking for? Is it a lost soul in the void again?"

Zero shook his head, his eyes became sad. "I'm looking for a very important friend to me. He was lost in some dimension because of this strange place. His name is Baal and although he might be the laziest Demon Lord in existence, he is still a very important person to me. Could you please help me find him?"

Lily was slightly surprised when she heard the name Baal. There was only one Baal who was a Demon Lord. Lily didn't think Zero would end up becoming friends with someone of such terrible rumoured personality but it was not her place to judge.

"I understand. Please give me some time to determine his location."

Lily might be a very ordinary flower fairy but she was created by Gaia with the sole purpose of being able to sense and locate souls. While she behaved like all other flower fairies, Lily always knew that her existence was created out of Gaia's desperation to aid Zero that day. Although her birth was not planned, it was a much-desired one. The small flower fairy was happy to put her gift to use. Although she hadn't known Zero for very long, she liked the aspiring doctor very much. Zero's soul was rather unique. It felt like the sun and the moon at the same time. It twinkled like stars and was calm like water. If anything, Lily was in love with Zero's soul for it was a very comforting feeling.

On the other hand, Baal's soul reeked of bitterness and smelled like rotting wood. Lily didn't like it very much but she noted that the Demon Lord's soul had recently changed. Although it still smelled stale, there was now a hint of ocean. The smell of souls usually does not change easily unless something life-changing happens to them. Someone had rewritten Baal's fate and Lily had her suspicions that Zero was somehow involved.

"I think I found it. However, I do not know how we can reach him. It's not a pretty place and the dimension is very unstable..."

Zero's heart sped up when he heard the good news. Lily knew where Baal was which means that Baal was alive! The more dreary part of Lily's report was simply filtered out of Zero's brain. It didn't matter what kind of trials he had to overcome, his friend was alive!

Lily was troubled. The dimension wasn't one that was created by Gods or a split off from any plane. It was artificially created using magic and was highly unstable. How Baal chanced across it or why he was trapped there was beyond the flower fairy's understanding. However, she understood the severity of the situation. For any dimension not supported by the creator or any God, it will eventually be returned to the void. Baal's soul was in a very compromising situation. There was no telling what would happen and when the tragedy would occur. She only prayed to Gaia for strength to be able to be that beacon that Zero needed. Not to mention, the density of souls per space in that dimension was unusually high. Some sort of sacrifice must have been done in exchange for the ability to sustain the artificial dimension and Lily didn't have a good feeling about it.

"Could you let Mii know where Baal's soul is? Maybe we can add a marker to it on the map and calculate a direct path to teleport," Zero suggested.

The two fairies talked it over and Bob took that opportunity to interrogate Zero. "Young master, what is going on? Also, why did I detect bloodlust coming from you not too long ago? I hate to say this but the way you were treating Mii earlier by cutting connections wasn't very nice. While it isn't my place to say it, I do hope that you can apologise to her after this. What happened isn't her fault."

Zero looked at Bob silently for long enough that made the dragon start squirming a little. Bob didn't know what was going through Zero's head and was beginning to feel uncomfortable with the piercing stare devoid of emotions. Zero suddenly seemed older than how he usually appeared and behaved. There was a flash of aged wisdom in those hazel eyes but it quickly disappeared when Mii announced that preparations were ready.

"We will talk about this later, Bobbinskrier," Zero promised.

Bob gulped and watched as his contracted master prepared a huge teleportation spell that would take them to a different dimension.

Lily watched as Zero weaved a multi-layered spell using Mii's calculated coordinates. She still kept an eye on Baal's soul just to ensure that it wouldn't change locations. It was dejà vu when Zero tucked her into the pocket of his shirt again.

"Hold tight," he told the flower fairy. "We're going to make several jumps to get there. Mii, I'll be counting on you to get us all there. Also, I'm sorry for what I did earlier."

Mii was pleasantly surprised by Zero's apology and accepted it numbly. There were many questions but retrieving Baal took priority. Bob was pleasantly surprised by the sudden apology and smiled secretly in the background of Zero's mindscape. He was proud of Zero's ability to right the wrongs despite the inappropriate timing.

Without further delay, they zipped past the timeline and hopped into a different dimension before quickly warping four more times.

When they landed in the dimension that Baal's soul was in, everyone had to hold their breaths because of the strong stench of death in the air. Low moans greeted them and Bob was quick to throw up a weak magic barrier before the projectile hit Zero.

Lily screamed in fear as an icicle disintegrated two inches away from her after making contact with Bob's flimsy barrier. Her tiny heart was beating so rapidly that the flower fairy feared it might rupture.

Zero scanned the room quickly and wanted to rush over to Baal who was collapsed on the grimy ground when he heard Lily's scream. It wasn't until he saw the icicle heading this way that he understood why she did so. The brunet didn't think that they would be under attack so quickly and clicked his tongue in annoyance. Checking on Baal was more important than dealing with the unknown attacker.

"Is there no way to do two things at once?" Zero yelled as he was attacked by magical projectiles once more. This time, it was a muddy gust of air bullet and Zero nimbly evaded it.

Bob looked around the room to find the assailant to no avail. Wherever the attacks were coming from did not point to anyone in particular. Could it be that the entire room was a death trap from the beginning? They might have made a terrible mistake by coming to this suspicious dimension. Baal's soul was clearly a trap. What was their motive? After chatting with Olaf, Bob knew a few things going on in the Academy. However, he was still missing many pieces to complete the puzzle.

Mii was going crazy from fear. The entire room gave her the chills and the strawcherry fairy shuddered once again. Although she did not have a physical body, the chill still affected her. It was a very odd phenomenon but Mii couldn't stop the chattering of her teeth or the shivers wracking her body.

"Z-Zero... something is wrong... with-with the room!"

Zero didn't answer her. It was obvious without his assistant's input. The premonition senses were firing off in every direction. It was annoying when Zero couldn't place a finger on what exactly was wrong. Like Bob's suspicion, Zero thought that this room was a death trap as well. According to Lucifer, the rebels were looking for anyone with powerful mana as a battery to open a certain gate. It was the reason why Beelzebub and he were chosen to become the baits. Baal's presence here would only mean that the rebels have gotten hold of Baal as a battery when their plan to capture Beelzebub or himself had gone awry.

Annoyed at the continuous attacks, Zero decided to stop running and evading. So what if the opponent was good at sneak attacks? Zero had a unique gift too!

The next time a wave of soul magic came at Zero, the young doctor stood firmly on his ground and glared at it.

Whoosh!

The soul magic vanished completely into the vortex at Zero's palm. There was a small shudder from the artificial dimension and Lily cowered. She could feel the number of souls decrease with the magic that Zero just deployed.

"It's working!" she quivered in Zero's pocket. "Whatever you just did is working... the number of souls in this dimension just reduced drastically... the dimension would soon fall if you keep it up, we might be able to retrieve Baal and escape."

Zero nodded. He didn't know what kind of magic that was because none of that attack converted into mana or energy for him. However, he knew that Lily wouldn't lie to him. The tricky part was getting to his friend lying on the ground covered in filth. From his quick assessment, Baal didn't seem to be injured in any way, he was merely unconscious.

"Bob, would you be able to retrieve Baal while I keep the assailant occupied?"

The Eternal Dragon nodded. While he wasn't better than Mii in terms of maintaining his physical projection, he was better at stealth.

"I will help to open the portal to the void," Mii told Bob and turned to Lily. "We will be counting on you to guard Baal in the void. You can still contact us, just accept the invitation to the temporary party call," she told the flower fairy.

Lily blinked at the window that materialised before her in fae language. She had no reason to distrust Mii or Zero so she accepted and waited for Bob to spring into action.

"Ready?" Zero mentally counted down in their party call.

The room groaned in agony as Zero started absorbing the pile of flesh trying to encase his feet. "Now!" the young doctor shouted in the call and Bob shot off like a rocket.

Baal's body floated for a split second in mid-air which caught the room's attention. Before the room could do anything to retrieve its host's body, the Demon Lord's body vanished into nothingness. Bob sneakily dematerialised and returned to Zero's mindscape, heaving a sigh of relief at being able to pull the mission off without a hitch.

Lily found herself sitting on the Demon Lord's unbreathing body in the void. This void space felt fairly different from the one she had to search for Egui's soul. What was even stranger was how she sensed no soul in the space. That was odd... the flower fairy looked at the Demon Lord's body and flew a few circles around it. She circled it frantically lengthwise and breadthwise when she sensed something off about the body.

"Where is Lord Baal's soul?" she asked in the party call. There was no smell of rotting wood or ocean. The smell had been so strong in the room earlier so Lily could not have mistaken the location of Baal's soul.

That question made Zero pause. That momentary shock allowed the room to gain the upper hand and land a hit of dark fire magic on Zero. The young doctor howled in pain as the dark fire burned the skin of his arm and refused to be put out by regular water magic. Bob had enough sense to realise what was happening and told Mii to pour holy water onto it. Thanks to his quick thinking, Zero got away with minor burns that he quickly healed with healing magic.

"Lily, what are you talking about?" Zero asked.

"Soul... Lord Baal's soul is not in his body!"

Zero felt a chill go down his spine and swallowed. "Lily... can you tell me where Baal's soul is?"

The flower fairy concentrated again. She smelled it in the same room that Zero was in but couldn't pinpoint its exact location.

"I'm sorry, Zero. I don't know where they are hiding Lord Baal's soul but it is still somewhere in the room that you are in..."

Mii trembled and glanced at her toes. There was frost growing on her feet so she quickly hid them away from sight. There was no point in worrying anyone else now when things weren't looking good. The only thing she could do to save Baal and herself was to quickly find out who was attacking them. Great One might have set limiters on what Zero could and could not use with Mind's Eye but that was not the case for her.

While everyone else was preoccupied with searching for Baal's soul, Mii took the chance to disappear for a while after replacing herself with a clone.

"System Administrator requesting for an override, code red emergency alert. I repeat, code red emergency alert."

[Request received. Please verify the password and pay the toll fees.]

Mii placed her tiny hand over the system window and felt some of her earlier memories with Zero disappear.

[Toll fees received, granting temporary override access. Welcome back, Agent Mii 005.]

Mii felt her body reconstruct itself as she became one with the system again. It was part of Mind Eye's system to reabsorb herself and reconstruct a newer and better version of Mii each time she returned to the system so that she could better assist Zero according to Great One's will. This would make the sixth time she was being rebuilt and while it wasn't a process the strawcherry fairy enjoyed, she would do it as many times as it would take for her to remain by Zero's side.

"Mii requesting for full level access to the Map ability. Feature requested: Soul tracking. Target: Demon lord Baal, fragment of Divine Entity - Duu's soul."

[System access granted. Processing... please wait.]

Mii felt herself being torn apart by the system at her request. It was excruciating to feel the system pry into her memory to implant new knowledge and remove some parts of the memories it felt wouldn't benefit her. Her affection for Zero was being deleted once again and Mii wanted to cry. Luckily for her, she was able to retain the sibling-like concern over the young doctor. Mii was secretly afraid that the Great One might one day deem it to be unnecessary to Zero's growth and delete that too.

Once Mii was rebuilt, the strawcherry was returned to the mindscape. She quickly dismissed the clone and used her new ability. From the merged memories of the clone, Zero discovered a huge mirror with a grotesque frame made out of fused flesh and decaying souls. That seemed to be the heart of the room and she left the battling to the more experienced Eternal Dragon.

"Baal's soul... come on, system!" Mii thought to herself. The small room was completely full of red dots and Mii swore. The map was almost useless if it didn't have the upgraded system to do identity tagging. The one thing good about Mind's Eye was the information hacking ability it had. Normally, King Yama's soul records were impossible to know to anyone else apart from the Lord of the Purgatory himself. However, things were different if you were a system created by the creator of the multiverse. With that information available to the system, Mii could now zoom in to sort through the massive list of souls present in that dimension.

As a system administrator, Mii was adept in the art of data analysis. Using Steve Job's art of technology, Mii simplified her search by pulling out that data into a virtual csv format and used the filter function to remove lower levelled souls.

"Lily, what's the strength and unique identifying features of Lord Baal's soul?" Mii privately whispered into the flower fairy's mind in fae tongue, not wanting anyone else to catch on.

The flower fairy was initially startled to have someone speak directly into her head but did her best to supply Mii with the information she required. Quite honestly, the flower fairy had never had to describe a soul for anyone so it was rather difficult to rank the soul's colour or history. Nobody has tried to understand the characteristics of souls as much as Mii did so Lily had a hard time explaining how her ability worked.

"It's not green. Baal belongs more to the onyx category..."

Mii retyped the search filter and groaned in frustration. Onyx wasn't in the search definition. "Do you have something else? I don't have onyx here. There is only lapis, maroon, gold and toxycon. What's the closest?"

Lily didn't know how to answer that. She wasn't aware of what Toxycon was and felt utterly useless. "I-I don't know... I'm very sorry!" she apologised, close to tears. She wanted to help Mii find Baal's soul but it wasn't easy explaining how Baal's soul looked or felt like!

Mii bit her tongue in frustration. She couldn't blame the flower fairy, she really couldn't. Nobody understood King Yama's categorisation and it wasn't as if the strawcherry assistant could send a private message and interview the King of the Purgatory about his ranking standards. He would not be pleased to know about the information leak and that would put Zero in a tough spot.

"Is there any other way you can describe Lord Baal's soul to me? What's the size like?"

Lily thought for a while. "It's wispy..."

Mii checked the filters again. "No wispy, only cloudy, moony, starry, halo-like and descriptions like that."

Lily blinked. "I'm sorry, I don't know how to describe the size..."

"Texture? Is it sandy, gooey, muddy or fluffy?"

Lily squinted in concentration. "It's muddy! Definitely muddy!"

Finally, they were making progress. Of the thousands of souls in the list, Mii managed to narrow that down to about three hundred.

"On the scale of -80 to 5000, what is Lord Baal's soul age?"

Lily apologised again. She wasn't able to see the soul's age. Mii skipped that category and continued to ask questions for the next ten minutes.

Back to Zero and Bob, the two made a great team by chipping away and the room's defences. After a few tests and trials, the Eternal Dragon was finally able to pinpoint the location of their attacker.

"It's not the room, it's the consciousness of the mage in the room. Lord Baal's soul may be the battery for it. It wasn't very obvious at the start but this room reacts to mana... Left!"

Zero jumped just in time and kicked hard to his left. His feet made contact with something semi-solid and he felt proud of his ability to read the room's intentions with Bob's aid.

"How do we take down the mage's consciousness?" he asked. The Eternal Dragon thought hard. usually, the only way to do so would be to fulfil the desires of the one who cast the spell or resolve the grudge of the castor. However, Bob didn't want to satisfy the mage's wish. Surely opening the portal to the human world and destroying the abyss wasn't something that should be supported. It wasn't something like finding your grandmother's lost ring or telling your unrequited love that you had feelings for them while you were alive. Those were things that could be accomplished, not the destruction of an entire plane and eradication of an entire race...

"Nevermind," Zero brushed it aside. Knowing Bob, the dragon would only withhold information that he was better off not knowing for his benefit.

The elusive attacker slunk away once more and Zero sharpened his intuition. Meanwhile, Lily and Mii were on to the final question.

"How does the soul smell like? Smoky, Earthy, Oceany..."

"Earthy! It smells strongly of rotting wood!"

Mii added it to the filter and looked through the remaining five results. One of the souls stood out to her with its unusually high number of sins so Mii clicked on it. The soul showed up on the map to be hiding in the mirror, away from the rest.

"Zero I found it! Lord Baal's soul is hidden in the mirror!"

Zero looked at the mirror and frowned. "How do we get it out?"

Lily's eyes sparkled. "The soul is sealed in it... if there is a way to break that mirror, there is a chance I can connect Lord Baal's soul back into his body. Someone has done a ritual to forcefully separate the soul from the body and sealed it there..."

Bob and Zero grinned. Finally, they had an answer.

The evil-looking smile sent chills down the room's mind. Zero swung his arm twice and encased his fist with a magic barrier. For some reason, the souls in the room felt a sense of doom awaiting them. Without hesitating, they launched an all-out attack on Zero who vanished too quickly for them.

Crash!

The sound was soul-shattering quite literally. The dimension shook with the broken mirror and Zero could only be surprised at how easy it was to break the mirror. If he knew that this was the way to defeat the attacker, he would have done it ages ago. Oh well, they now had Baal back so all was good and well.

Lily wasted no time and caught hold of Baal's escaping soul with Mii's help. She quickly stitched the soul back into Baal's body and added some of his shadow for stronger adhesive.

"I don't think they are very happy," Bob told Zero. "Let's return to the Academy..."

Zero agreed readily and they made their hasty escape while the room roared in rage. Rhinestone may have died and sold his soul for the ritual but the curse was strong. After Zero's escape, a five-layered blood curse appeared on the ceiling of the small room. With the power source stolen, the dimension craved another to sustain its existence.

It scanned its proximity for the closest soul with the greatest mana and found its target. With a rumble, the broken mirror pieced itself back together and the dimension teleported, ready to ensnare its next soul.