Jasper casually threw a lightning bolt at Jasmine. The woman with the fiery red hair had caused him no end of trouble. Not only did she have a pretty thick accent, something that Jasper was still fairly certain was some bug, but her physical proportions had also been investigated. She was significantly more curvy than any other NPC that had been seen, to the point where Celeste had made a bug-ticket on it.

  The lead programmer had to agree that the body of his chosen one's disciple looked like a parody of the overly sexualised silhouettes one would see in anime. It would probably end up breaking immersion for quite a few people, so he had investigated it to determine if it really was a bug.

  After an afternoon studying the code the AI had produced for creating NPCs, Jasper found the cause of Jasmine's unnatural proportions. It wasn't really a bug in the traditional sense. After all, the AI they were using had been repurposed from other projects that Weird World Computing had taken on. It made sense not to train new AI models for specific projects every time you needed them, but thanks to what Jasper assumed were budget cuts, everything hadn't been cleaned as well as it should have, especially not custom code made by other developers.

  There were clear differences between human code and AI code, and the code block that had spawned Jasmine was definitely human-made. Not only that, but it was designed to start out affecting only 1 in 1.000.000 NPCs, but would slowly be used more and more, to the point where it would end up being used for 1 in 10 NPCs when it was fully up and running. Jasper nuked that code and sent Cathrine some information about what he had found.

  As with any mystery code, it turned out that the function was loadbearing, meaning that the entire application couldn't spin up again once the code had been nuked. In the end, Jasper had to reimplement the code and then add a function that reversed the NPC code. It was needlessly complicated and overengineered, but that was just one of the many gifts that resulted from inherited systems.

  As such, Jasper felt that the lightning bolt was the least he could do to return the favour of all the headaches that Jasmine had caused him. She didn't appear amused, but instead of a barrier, she used counterspell to destabilise the magic, which Jasper had to admit was impressive. There weren't a lot of people who could counterspell his attacks. Not that he had met any that could actually counterspell properly, but his magic was still divine, meaning that it should be almost impossible to do.

  "Ay should be angree with ya." Jasmine said, giving Jasper the stink eye. "Ye do'n talk to me for three hundred years, and ye make more trouble than any of da other gods. Necromancer, inquisition, dragons... Ye are a menace. And when ye finally show up, ye cast ur-magic out in da open? For da god of knowledge, ye are a fool."

  Jasper smiled. "I missed you too... and I am sorry to hear about Erik." Jasmine nodded in thanks, but it seemed like all the time spent alone had allowed her to process her grief in her own way. That seemed healthy. For Jasper, it was still less than two months ago that an NPC he had ended up caring for had decided to pass on. Maybe Jasper should make an afterlife for all his favourite NPCs, just so he could visit them when he wanted to.

  The next thing he knew, he was pulled from his thoughts as Jasmine greeted him with a hug. His eyes were watering ever so slightly as he looked around. "So what is with the dragon?" He asked.

  Looking over, they saw the giant beast try to strike at Riez, who was using her divine powers to dodge the attack, then pretend that she was dying and was in the middle of giving a deathbed confession to a very confused dragon. She had even used her powers to pluck a small flower she was holding over her chest already, while making exaggerated coughs from time to time. The dragon would then swipe at her again, only for Riez to repeat the process and even play her own grieving family, using her bursts of speed to quickly switch places.

  "She is one of you lot, ain't she?" Jasmine clearly saw the level of shenanigans for what it was and avoided answering the question that her patron god had asked, at least temporarily.

  Jasper smiled. "Yup, she is the goddess of trickery." The resulting groan from Jasmine made Jasper's face light up to a degree that could be construed as a radiant attack of some kind.

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  "Any way. Da drake have been helpful through mah journeys. They are fast and ay get to fix ye problems from afar." She said with quite a bit of pride, as if taming a dragon was some kind of accomplishment. Jasper realised that for mortals, that probably was an accomplishment. Though it honestly was less impressive to him, since he had created the dragons.

  They continued to talk a bit back and forth, though Jasper didn't really need Jasmine to tell him what she had been up to, since he already knew everything that had been written down. Both she and the rest of the world had been very good at keeping notes compared to the last couple of times Jasper had logged in.

  He told her about the way he had reworked his powers and that he would have Contracts as his Domain from now on, which, to his surprise, made Jasmine very excited. It turns out a lot of people wanted her to officiate or witness various contracts, but with no way to enforce them other than the words "If ya break it, i'll batter ya", it was hard to really be the scribe of the gods.

  As they talked, they continued on their journey to the place of frozen time, which was a lot harder than he had expected. As they moved closer to the area, it was like the world itself was trying to resist their movement, as if their speed was being slowed down.

  Jasper ended up casting a couple of haste spells on the orks, goblins and his companions. Riez seemed to be the only one completely unaffected by it, and she was consistently using this slowed time to annoy the people she was travelling with.

  She would talk to people at normal speed, then impatiently wait for answers, which they couldn't give quickly thanks to the slowed time. When they were annoyed enough that they tried to strike her, she would pretend to be hit, and somehow fly through the air in slow-motion. The fact that she had so much control over her Alacrity Domain, that she could slow down her own speed, was impressive, but it was still very distracting.

  It would be another day of travel before Jasper finally saw the root cause of the problem. Over the last few kilometres, birds had slowed to a crawl in mid-flight, and the wind was barely moving.

  Jasper sighed. The time bubble wasn't a time bubble. In the centre was Dranos, the headmaster of the Forgotten Academy in the Empire, locked in battle with what Jasper assumed to be a lich of some kind.

  It wasn't hard to assume that the other person was a lich, after all, not many people were made completely from bones, with a long dark robe, accented with golden trim, burning blue flames in their hands and the same unnatural blue fire burning in their eyesockets. That had to be a lich. Though he too was stuck.

  How long they had been stuck, frozen completely, was unknown, but they didn't even blink. Even though that was less impressive for the lich. The god of magic could easily see the problem, as both of them had cast a spell known as "Eye for an Eye" on each other. It would effectively transfer whatever damage they took to the other person. It was an incredibly useful necromantic spell, but also extremely high-level.

  It made sense that a lich would know it, and as the son of Ewen, the other god of magic, Dranos would probably have tried to learn this type of magic on his own, to try and one-up his dad.

  Unfortunately, they had cast this spell on each other, and one of them had taken some damage. This meant that the damage was now infinitely looping, which meant that it was creating an infinite number of gamestates every gametick. The time bubble wasn't really slowed time. It was just that every other gamestate had to get queued up with this infinite loop, making them slower and slower the closer you came to the source, as there weren't other worldcells to offload the processing to.

  Haste worked primarily by moving their actions up in priority of when to handle gamestates, meaning that of all the spells Jasper could have cast, this was probably the most effective one. Furthermore, Jasper and Riez were still able to think normally since their thoughts weren't processed by the game, but their character models were moving more slowly since those were being processed by the game engine.

  Riez was apparently only able to move as fast as she did thanks to consistently speeding up, an effect that Jasper assumed either worked on the same principle as his haste spell, or more likely by her headgear processing at an increased time dilation, effectively running the game faster, but at the same percieved speed, and offloading some of the processing onto Riez's gear.

  Whatever the case, this was unsustainable, and Jasper needed to stop it before he had to make a forced reboot. The frozen worldcell was trying to offload some of the processing to worldcells around the one they were currently in, but since there was an infinite number of tasks, it just meant infinite work, and offloading the process to other worldcells meant that the zone of frozen time was spreading.

  Luckily, there was an easy solution to this. Jasper raised his hand and cast two counterspells, removing the "Eye for an eye" spells at the same time. And as he did, the world seemed to explode into a vicious battle.