.
Being underwater, and having no technique to project my voice, I wasn’t able to respond immediately. I was ten paces deep, surrounded by near-total darkness, but to my right, one of the ‘islands’ rose against the southern wall. It had a dense stand of cattails for ramparts, but a small breech at one point made a good place for me to poke my head out of the water while still being mostly covered.
My teeth were still grinding as I surfaced there. I forcefully reminded myself that he saw a very young child in me. Even so, it was time to put an end to it.
I asked the air, “Are you still there?”
“I am. You haven’t learned [Silent Voice] yet, I take it.”
One of his proxies was hiding in the trees nearby. I’m not sure, but proxies are spiritual bodies either remotely controlled by his mind or copies of his consciousness that reunite with him later. Either way, I was more-or-less talking with Diur.
I answered, “If [Silent Voice] is a technique that would have allowed me to respond underwater, then no, I have not.”
“I’m sure the portal passed my message on to you.”
“I received it,” I admitted. “But I have a mission and comrades on the surface who are reliant upon me. I couldn’t grant your wish. My apologies.”
Another sigh inside my head. Which is a very disturbing effect, by the way.
“Maintaining your cloak and using that swimming technique is eroding your stable mana. Are you on good enough terms with any of the mortals in the subspace to draw their blood?”
“No… well, I bet Amelia would do it, but generally speaking, I don’t want to feed on any of them. But I won’t need to, any time soon. I can draw from my blood core, if necessary.”
“You have a blood core, at your age?” came the surprised response.
“Is that strange?” I wondered, even though I knew the answer.
“You should know how to form temporary cores and hold them for a day or two at your age, but most children would have low odds of success at creating a permanent core. You would normally reach adulthood before succeeding. I’m quite impressed.”
Elders considered adulthood to kick in at one hundred forty four years, I recalled. Although they became physically capable of pregnancy around my age, a number of ability more important to Elders, such as the capacity to form their spiritual body, normally took nearly a hundred fifty years to appear.
“You don’t need to be,” I told him. “I cheated.”
After a long pause, he insisted, “This is not something that can be cheated, My Lady.”
“What if this is not my first lifetime as a Ha-ne?” I asked.
“You remember a prior lifetime in this form?” he asked, sounding a little surprised.
“Didn’t your outrider overhear me explaining it to my companion earlier?”
“If it did, I haven’t heard it yet. I instructed it to proceed to a safe place where I will pick it up later.”
“I am literally my own great-grandmother,” I told him. “My grandfather in this life is the fairy son I gave birth to, shortly before my death. I reincarnated into this body with the help of the supervisors.”
After another even longer pause, he asked, “May I ask who your previous identity was?”
“Commander Senhion of the Third Legion,” I told him. “Although it’s fine if you want to verify that before trusting me.”
Instead of agreeing, he simply replied, “If it were a lie, it would be easily found out.”
“Because you only need to ask the portal system,” I deduced.
“Exactly.”
“So, my former identity is probably the answer to your question.”
“What question?”
“‘Why am I so willful?’,” I paraphrased with a wry smile. “As a commander, I’m not accustomed to taking orders from a specialist.”
Another pause. He came back with a less superior tone. “So, if you have a blood core, you should have blood magic techniques.”
I confessed, “I lost my original spiritual body to the Affliction, and I went through a large number of reincarnations before returning. My memories are dim and full of holes, my spell seals are all gone, and my skills are a mess. I’ve been trying, but I don’t remember any blood magic beyond forming my core. Furthermore, my Servants are children of the modern era, so I have only a small magic repertoire which includes none of the spells I dimly recall my Servants of the past granting me.”
He didn’t reply. I had the sense he was mulling over the ramifications of what I had said.
Since he wasn’t speaking, I conceded. “You aren’t entirely wrong in seeing me as a vulnerable child. I am currently far less than I was. But I am a royal knight in this life and I have comrades depending upon me, so I cannot afford to be a child right now. I apologize, but I must continue being willful.”
He was silent for a time again, but finally, he responded, “I apologize for my arrogant attitude, Commander.”
I decided it was time to let it rest and move on to the next subject. “The leader of my comrades up on the surface will need my first-hand reconnaissance of the archdemon and archfiend you have described. Kings and chieftains also need my personal observations. How much do I risk if I attempt to observe them by vampire sense?”
“Vampire sense… is that [Dark Observation] or [Dark Perception]?”
“Eh… If [Dark Observation] enhances eyesight, then it’s probably [Dark Perception].”
“It would be far safer to use [Dark Perception], but a demon lord would have a moderate chance of noticing it. I would recommend immediately dropping it and leaving the area after using it. They wouldn’t be able to see through your cloak at this distance, but they can trace your position while the Dark field is active.”
He wasn’t trying to talk me out of it, I noticed.
“Alright. Then that’s what I will do.”
“What are your colleagues’ plans, once you have this information?”
“If things go as I foresee, they will summon the armies you hoped for,” I told him. “I’m going to submerge now. I want as much Darkness around me as possible, to increase my range. Stay out of trouble.”
His answer sounded amused. “You do likewise, please. Although you seem intent on ignoring me when I request this.”
I slipped back under and pushed my way to the bottom, where the Darkness was as thick as blood. I swam along for a long distance, almost a half mile along the curving tunnel, until reaching the Central Tunnel. I swam up that tunnel a few hundred paces.
There, I began to send out my sense.
Rock isn’t an obstacle to Dark mana. It isn’t ‘dark’ inside, per se, except in voids and cracks where such a thing as Darkness can be defined, but it isn’t bright either, so on the Light/Dark spectrum it’s the equivalent of a vacuum. Thus, the fact that I was in a different tunnel than the demon camp wasn’t an obstacle. Since I very much wanted to know what was happening in the other tunnels, I had chosen an optimal place to work from.
In various places, I spotted small communities of troglodytes and gnomes, and a variety of solitary monster species, most of them small. I was pretty surprised to discover an occasional cave bear, and a few other medium large species, like stone lizards and hawk lions. No surprises like the several large monster species that Trisiagga had mustered in Carael, chimeras and humanoids that couldn’t survive long without the support of Elder zookeepers in small environments like these caverns.
Then I found the farm we had seen when we first arrived. As expected, the barracks were full of mortals. The food in the fields was largely to feed those mortals; it would be the mortals themselves that were the food for the demons.
I avoided pushing my perception forward into the demon camp at first. I concentrated on the other tunnels. There, I found several more farms with mortals sleeping in barracks. Only a handful of lesser and middle-rank demons guarded each farm, but for unarmed non-combatant mortals, that would be enough. Especially if they had been cowed into obeying the demons and pinning their hopes on salvation later, unaware that their time was short.
By the time I had pressed my senses out as far as I could on the Central and East Caverns, I had estimated more than a thousand mortals in captivity.
Based upon the rule of thumb that Tiana learned in demonology classes, that was fifty thousand demon meals. Since demons only need to consume mortals occasionally, the same way I only need mortal blood occasionally, that meant they were planning on bringing in thousands of demons.
I withdrew from those caverns and concentrated on the West Cavern now. I sent my sense toward the demon camp.
When I saw it previously, it had been largely empty. A much greater number of demons were present now. All of the crude shelters now had gear in them. But the demons were gathered near fires, getting ready for their meal. The cook fires were burning, but the roasts were still being prepared; various mid rank demons were simultaneously raping and bleeding two women and a man.
The mortals were already too far gone to live. Even if I flew at top speed, and somehow rescued them, they would never survive. All I could do was witness in horror. This wasn’t anything like the gentle care of a vampire. This was just violation and consumption.
I pulled my attention away from the revolting scene and moved onward. That’s when I encountered the first asura, a four-armed male. A hag who had dematerialized nearly all her raiment was in his lap, rubbing her body on him.
Nearby, a equally bare fiendess was drinking from a goblet while snuggled up to a demon with six arms and wings.
A chill ran through me as I sensed him. Archfiends have various forms, but this matched the description of a well-known one, last seen operating in Regaritan territory. This was Diur’s ‘Demon General’, and he would be a being greater than Trisiagga in power. If this was the one from the report, he had decimated an entire Regaritan Imperial column before they merely succeeded in injuring him and forcing him to retreat.
He didn’t seem to be reacting, so I kept my nerve and continued scanning.
That’s when I encountered a strange being. He had the standard one pair of arms, but two pairs of enormous bat wings. His head had three faces, one in the middle and one each facing left and right. Left face was currently kissing a female asura while right face suckled upon the naked breast of a fiendess. Middle face was drinking from a goblet.
He showed no apparent reaction, but Diur’s voice warned, “The demon lord is scanning, My Lady!”
The alarm in his voice came through like a hammer. Shaken, I dropped the mana field and turned to swim back the way I came.
“Swim without using mana for a while, My Lady,” he advised. “If you know how, grow your flukes so you can move naturally. He has taken to the air to come investigate. I will distract him while you get away.”
Grow my flukes?
My vague sense of what he meant telescoped into a clear memory. It wasn’t some instinct from my naiad blood, it was Senhion’s millennium spent underwater in the East Sea, rebuilding the biome. By habit, I placed my legs firmly together and began dolphin kicking, something neither Robert nor Tiana knew how to do.
As I suspected it would, my body carried the semi-involuntary reflex forward. A feeling similar to growing my wings overcame the lower half of my body.
When I grow my wings, physical changes transform my skeleton and muscles. Additional sockets form to accommodate an additional pair of ball joints, and additional muscles form to drive the wings. Obviously, existing skin, muscle and bone must change form to allow room for these.
The same thing was happening now to the entirety of my thighs, legs and feet instead. In astonishment I looked back using Vampire Sight to see my thirty or so inches of legs fully superseded by over fifty inches of… well, to be frank, the aft end of a dolphin.
It might seem stupid as the first thing I asked, but the foremost question on my mind was a fortuitous one.
What happened to my panties?
I sent out my fairy sense to discover them drifting in the distance behind me. I dashed back to grab them, trying not to focus too hard on the absurdity of the situation.
