.
After I finished the exchange with Dilorè, I asked Lucy, who still seemed to be worried about demons, “Can you protect yourself if you have enough Healing mana, Lucy?”
She seemed to be struggling a little to understand, so I handed it off to Durandal. “Old man, can you explain what I’m asking to her?”
Absolutely, My Lady, he stated, and once more, a conversation I couldn’t hear transpired. While I waited on it, I noticed that Brigitte seemed to be hunting now. I dug a hand spade out of my pack and went to work preparing a hearth. If Brigitte was hunting, I had no doubt there would be something to cook.
Eventually, Durandal came back with the understanding that she would feel safer with a lot more Healing, and she had the capacity to accept it. I went ahead and coated him with Healing once again, and they both fueled up on it. I might be risking spoiling Lucy with too much free stuff, but it was better than risking her being unable to prevent a demon from hurting her, or worse, somehow possessing her.
“Would having Healing mana have saved you from becoming a Cursed Blade back then, Old Man?” I wondered after that.
It might have, he admitted. I didn’t have any, at the time. Mizky did not possess Healing magic.
“That was your partner at the time?” I remembered Durandal and Grandmother discussing the name before. Not a name I knew, but they had mentioned Orgoth, who had been a big player on the demon side during an ancient rising.
She was, yes. I fear that, when I was possessed, it was the end of her. I don’t remember her death, so I don’t know.
Brigitte returned, carrying a horned rabbit. She reported on the alraune and the lack of other threats nearby as she unlimbered her pack and sat.
I had the hearth ready for her. I still needed to round up wood to keep a fire alive long enough to cook anything, but I had gathered the starter fuel.
“Those things cause enough damage that most people consider them threats,” I commented as she laid the animal out.
She rolled her eyes as she began skinning it. She’d already bled it somewhere away from the camp. After shaking her head, she stated, “They can’t sneak up on either one of us, and they’re probably smart enough judges of their enemies to avoid trying it.”
She sounded a little annoyed that I would even suggest the little thing was a threat. It’s technically a monster, and a dangerous one to unarmed civilians, but, to a pro like Brigitte, a horned rabbit is just small game.
Okay, she was right. But I was just making conversation. I decided to switch topics.
“I reported to Dilorè. Looks like they might be getting involved in the war upstairs, because of the demons.”
She paused her work and frowned. “How are the war and the demons connected?”
I felt it was obvious, but kept that feeling off my face. “It’s pretty clear that the Berado are working with the demons. Upstairs, they were guarding the entrance for them. And if the mine that the Berado are enslaving people to work in actually exists, it’s somewhere inside this cavern, under demonic control. Although I suspect they’re actually doing something else with those people.”
Brigitte’s face twisted with disgust. “Like eating them, right?”
I hesitated, then nodded. “Well, that’s a possibility. From what we know, demons don’t see any difference between non-demons and animals.”
She nodded. “That was pretty obvious, back at that camp.”
Unsure of what she meant, I answered with a tip of the head.
“You didn’t see what they had been eating?” she asked.
A ugly feeling hit my stomach. “From context, I’m going to guess it wasn’t the medium large animal I thought it was.”
She shook her head. “Based upon the tail and the skull, he was either my tribe or a wolf-kin. I thought he was a buffalo-kin at first, because he was a big guy, but no horns, so not a bull-man.”
After a pause, she said, “I’m assuming he was a guy. Not enough left to tell.”
In retrospect, the arms and legs of the carcass had been laying wrong for a quadruped. Perhaps I hadn’t wanted to notice that, and blinded myself to it. Hunter Brigitte, with her deep understanding of animal carcasses, hadn’t been able to overlook it.
It was a revolting thought, but not exactly news. In addition to meat, demons need both pneuma and mana. Monsters can provide the pneuma they consume, but monster mana is just as useless for demons as it is for monsters. No matter what they eat for physical nutrients, they have to have the stable mana of mortals. And just like for monsters like me, they can’t get their mana from creatures of little awareness and intelligence, which have very little stabilized mana. To get enough mana from cow’s blood, I would have to drink it 24/7 to get enough. I could never physically consume that much, so it isn’t even possible.
Herbivorous monsters can get their stable mana from magic plants. Carnivorous monsters can get their stable mana from plant-eating monsters and intelligent mortals. Highly specialized monsters like me are limited to just intelligent mortals, unless we want to kill intelligent monsters. And it seems, demons are the same in that respect.
Demons are known to steal pneuma and mana from mortals until they’ve been bled dry, but they rarely do it individually. A group will pass a mortal captive around, each drinking their fill, until the victim is dead. And once they have a dead carcass on their hands, they will go ahead and consume the flesh as well. Actually, records of past demon risings suggest that they actually prefer mortal flesh to animal flesh. If those records are correct, then the mortals in the Regaritan Empire suffering under the current demonic wave aren’t being annihilated. They’re being kept in farms. Demons like the way mortals can raise their own feed, making them a less expensive meat source than cattle or pigs, as well as a useful mana and pneuma source.
Sickened by the topic, I declared, “I need to get fuel for the cooking fire,” and escaped.
I don’t have Talene’s handy magic camping tools, but I have a Durandal. Not that the small tree I targeted for harvest needed [Holy Strike] to take down. I coated him with Wind and took one strike on the south side and one on the north, and that was enough.
Greenwood doesn’t burn easily, but when Matthias was teaching me how to coat with Water and Wind mana and strengthen with Earth, he also tried to teach me how to use Fire to kiln greenwood into firewood. I had a feeling I could do it, now that my control had improved. It was worth a try. There were few suitable fallen branches larger than kindling in the area. Pressure imbalances big enough to create windstorms are rare in Ilim Below. Trees don’t suffer wind damage often, underground.
I reduced a fair portion of the trunk to forearm-length logs and carried them to the hearth. Brigitte already had scrounged enough branches to get a starter fire going.
She shook her head at the bundle in my arms and said, “That green stuff…”
“Is going to have to work, unless you can point me to a fallen tree that I didn’t see,” I answered. There were a few very rotten examples that I had found, but none in that valuable intermediate state between living wood and rotted wood that made for good fuel.
Brigitte scowled at me, but as I deposited the stuff, I said, “I’m going to try a mana trick that Matthias tried to teach me. I think I might be able to do it now. If not, I’ll just hold a [Fireball] on it until it catches.”
“You’ll have to keep doing that as we add firewood,” she noted.
“I’m aware. Fortunately, down here, we don’t need the fire for warmth or light. It’s just a cookfire.”
We didn’t speak much while teaming up to cook the rabbit (actually, she cooked, I forced the greenwood logs to burn by steaming them dry with repeated applications of fire mana. A cookfire isn’t hot enough to insta-kiln fresh wood the way a forest fire does.) But once we were enjoying freshly barbecued horned rabbit (which, since Earth element monsters lose their mana element very slowly, was very nourishing for the non-naiad portion of my fairy half), she finally broke the silence.
“Why aren’t you telling me?” she asked.
I was puzzled. “Telling you what?”
She frowned at me. “It’s a little hard for me to say, since you haven’t really said a word, right? When we reached this area, you ran into a problem, and you still haven’t said a word about what it was!”
I floundered for a moment, then laughed and put my head in my hand. “I totally forgot, sorry. I told Dilorè, so I was thinking I’ve already talked about it.”
“Mm,” she said, slightly sour faced.
“The problem is that,” I said, pointing toward the lake that was just visible from our dining spot. Camping spot, rather, since we needed rest and would be doing it there. “That lake is a huge problem.”
She had her mouth full of rabbit at that moment, so she just chewed while staring at me and tilting one ear.
“Do you remember that we turned right just after we reached this lake and flew down a side tunnel?”
She nodded.
“At the end of that tunnel, at the corner where we made a tight turn and headed east, there is a path, or actually about a dozen paths, from this cavern to the next one, where Amelia should be.”
“All I saw was water and walls there.”
“Exactly,” I nodded. “Because ten thousand years ago, there was no lake there. Those paths are now somewhere under water.”
“This whole lake just appeared out of nowhere?” she asked, doubtful.
“Ten thousand years is a very, very long time, Brigitte.”
I mean, on Earth, Lake Superior only appeared ten thousand years ago, and some people say that a lake of that size is legitimately a sea. This little puddle was nothing.
“Some sort of flood happened, and the water never receded,” I explained, not prepared to talk about tectonic plate theory with this girl. “That’s my guess.”
She shrugged and finally accepted it. Then pointed out, “There must still be a way across, if Her Highness got over there.”
“Yeah, if I could just figure out what it was,” I agreed. “After we rest, I’ll fly back there and dive in. If I can find the entrances, I might be able to figure something out.”
Following the meal, we doused the fire that we didn’t need for warmth and then took turns resting. It had been a really long walk down, and we needed it. I wanted to go take a soak as well, but decided to do a mana coat and stay close to Brigitte as she slept.
Brigitte has a weird sleeping behavior. She curls up in a fashion reminiscent of her animal relatives, and she hides her face with her tail. I would never say it, because I’m sure she would be offended, but it is a ridiculously adorable habit. I was enjoying watching her experiencing a dream that was causing her ears to twitch when my fairy sense rang with dire warning.
I immediately jumped close to my companion and gave her a hard nudge, then grabbed my pack. First rule for adventurers camping in the wild is, always be ready to bug out. Always.
Fortunately, she’s good at coming awake fast, and was instantly alert.
“What?!” she whispered, looking around as she grabbed her own pack, but the threat wasn’t yet in sight when I gave my one-word answer.
“Demons.”
