.
I used the same gentle, mostly muscle-power flight I used before. Whether an archfiend was coming or not, I believed it would be best to keep my Wind mana signature as low as I could. The boost to my wing lift from mana is almost invisible to fairy sight, because I’m merely transferring air pressure from the top surface of my wing to the bottom, but the boost to my airspeed can be seen with sufficient spiritual strength, since it involves streaming the ambient mana surrounding me.
As I neared the end of the cavern, where the western north-south main tunnel met the curving east-west connector that formed the southern end, I felt distant surges of mana, at levels of violence that reminded me of the fight between Oberon and Lâsin. Immediately, I knew that the Jurmat I fought in Carael had been a pint-sized weakling in comparison to this Diurhimath now.
I had doubted, if it really were a class S demon leading a squad of class Bs and Cs, that guy really take them on, but the energies I was feeling suggested he just might be capable of it.
I turned west, and spotted one of those strips of land against the north wall of the cross tunnel, bearing a small grove. I ignored it as too obvious and flew to the next one, against the south wall.
It was a piece of land about twenty paces wide and perhaps twice as long, with a shoreline covered in rushes and grasses. Beneath the surface beyond the rushes, dense aquatic plants, the kind Robert’s mother would have called ‘grass’ and cussed at when her line snagged them, grew for a pace further from shore, until the water grew too deep to see the bottom.
Probably, the wave action was never enough to wash away the seedlings growing up to the shore, so a beach couldn’t form. Tall grasses filled the space between the rushes and the trees, so the spot I chose was a wide spot between two of the tallest trees on the tiny forest’s edge.
Landing there, I deposited Brigitte, then dropped my wings and cloak.
After she spent a few moments observing the surroundings, she noted, “We flew south, right? But you went west instead of east.”
I nodded. “I know.”
My main motivation for going right instead of left at the end of the western tunnel was probably simple-minded, but I wanted to mix it up at least a little, in case a trap of some sort had been awaiting us. My basic idea was, I would find a spot near the theoretical ambush point and then see what I could see from there.
Brigitte looked at me oddly for a bit, then shrugged and took a seat next to one of the trees, slipping off one shoulder strap of her pack and keeping her arm hooked through the other. She was letting the weight rest on the ground without losing hold of it, so she could bug out in a second.
“What is it with that guy?” she immediately groused. “Acting like he’s our ally.”
“I can sense him fighting, still,” I told her. “He’s throwing around lots of mana. A massive amount, for me to be able to feel it from this far away.”
She looked at me, a slight frown on her face. “My Lady, he was talking like you two are part of some species. And you called it the same thing as an Elder, the thing you called yourself before. He was talking about the same species you were in your old life, right?”
“In my first life,” I nodded.
“I still don’t get that. Your mom in this life somehow gave birth to an extinct species?”
“Not entirely. Fairies and vampires are both descended from the Elders. Somehow my father’s and mother’s blood mixed just right to recreate the old species.”
I didn’t mention the probable strong dose of Oranos’ manipulation in that mixture.
She twitched an ear, then nodded. “Well, my mom’s a halfling, so I get how the child can be different than the mom, but… what you’re saying is that these ancient celestial beings or whatever they were called were fairy vampires like you.”
That revelation threw me for a loop. Her mom was a halfling? I mean, Brigitte’s pretty short, but how did a halfling even give birth to a beastkin?
The poor woman…
“W… Well, they had the nature of both monster and magical races, so I guess that’s right.”
“And this Jurmat is one, too.”
I nodded. “He really does seem to be. His mana and miasma look almost exactly the same as mine. Well, except his body mana seems to be overloaded with Wind, while mine is overloaded with Water.”
“He looks a lot different now than when he attacked us. He was all gray and stuff before.”
I nodded again. “I thought he was a demon when I first saw him. Some form of demonic mana was covering him. When I hit him with [Purification], some of it came off. When I did it the second time, I must have cleaned off the rest.”
She asked the sixty four thousand dollar question next.
“Do we trust him?”
I thought about it. “Thinking back, he was like a berserker before I hit him, but afterward, his behavior changed completely. And I don’t see anything demonic about him now. It’s possible he isn’t on their side anymore.”
“You’re going to trust him because of that?”
Shaking my head, I said, “That’s not enough to trust him. But maybe… we have a reason to trust him long enough to hear what he has to say?”
Her ears cocked sideways slightly. “Why?”
“Like he said, I’m the first female of his kind he’s seen in ten thousand years. At the very least, he won’t be eager to harm me.”
She gave me a really strange look, a combination of a raised eyebrow and a smirk.
I scowled at her and asked, “What?”
“Even though you look like a succubus, a honey trap seems really out of character for you.”
My face blazed instantly. “I have no intention to take it that direction!”
She grinned at her successful tease. “Yeah, I know.”
Then she shifted her pack so that she could curl up. I guess she still considered it her turn to sleep, because she shut her eyes.
Honestly, I still wanted to discuss our new frenemy, for want of a better term, a little longer. I’m not sure why Brigitte thought that was enough. Although, I had to keep in mind she was a mortal. She was probably still very short on sleep.
But, with her asleep, I could do what I planned to do. I moved another pace away from the water and sat by a shrub with no luminescence and thick Dark mana. I needed to soak some up to replace the mana I had drawn from the blood core while using Cloak, but I turned on my vampire sense, instead.
I couldn’t run it out very far, but I could confirm a lack of land monsters on the strip of land we were on. I found only small mortal creatures. They were few enough to suggest predators visited this place and kept the numbers down, but those predators were coming out of the water or flying in. They didn’t make their home here.
The other thing I could do was push my sense down into the water, in order to answer a very important question: exactly how deep was this water?
Until this moment, I had no idea if the depth was measured in inches or paces. The light was too low for me to see more than a couple dozen inches into the water, at most. But the reality stunned me. The water was more than fifteen paces deep, deeper than a lot of reservoirs I had fished in on Earth!
I had thought that the entrances I was looking for might be just barely submerged. That was no longer likely. If it were this deep, they were far under water.
I found a couple of slumbering predators in the depths to be wary of, but none that would cause us real trouble. Then I realized that the water was a much richer source of Dark mana than this shrub. It begged me to go for a swim to the bottom and load up on both Water mana and Dark mana, until I remembered I couldn’t sense Diur’s presence when he cloaked.
Like hell I was going to give him a free show. I compromised, pulling off my shoes and socks and stuffing them into my pack, then wriggling into a gap in the reeds, keeping my senses wary of unwelcome guests, to slip my legs into the water.
Experimenting with my vampire sense again, now that I had a richer source of Dark mana to work with, I discovered I could spread the sense a great distance under the water, then concentrate on the volume above the water at specific spots much farther away then the furthest I could reach directly. I began probing the region Diur had wanted us to go.
I’ve described it already, but the cavern as a whole is three main tunnels, forty miles long and around fifteen hundred paces wide. I was west of what I’m calling the West Tunnel, in a side tunnel extending the southern end. I began investigating the bits of land to be found to the east, between the West and Central Tunnels. One after another, I let my sense crawl up onto land and into the air above it.
I found two basking amphibious predators of significant size, and other lands with only small denizens. Eventually, I also found a little village of Troglodytes, about a dozen residents in total. They appeared to be farming their land in a crude fashion. At least, it was overloaded with fruit-bearing magic plants that wouldn’t normally all grow together. They also had what was either a primitive fish farm or an elaborate fish trap set up in the shallows beside their land.
I found nothing to suggest an ambush, but, then again, I couldn’t seem to detect Diur when he was cloaked, either.
I gave up that search, and probed the water to my west. As I mentioned before, this curving tunnel forming the south end of the complicated cavern ended about a mile west of us, and I expected to find our passage to Amelia at that spot. I probed the dark depths of the lake bottom, seeking some sign of the entrances that Senhion remembered. Unfortunately, I did not have a precise location to go on, with the continent itself having moved.
Extending the sense into the distance requires concentration. I forced my mind clear of frustration and began exploring the tunnel wall pace by pace. I tried looking both below the mud and above. Eventually, I found an entrance, but it lay beneath the bottom of the lake, buried in two paces of muck. I extended my senses inward, following the mud into the passage, but my hopes fell right into that muck, as I found it filling that passage as far as I looked.
