.
“No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.”
That’s a famous quote, but it’s actually just a paraphrase. Just like “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead,” it’s not quite what the man actually said.
The real quote is “No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.” Which doesn’t exactly role off the tongue as nicely as the paraphrase does.
The guy wasn’t saying there’s no point in planning. What he meant was, no matter how much you plan, you will need to skillfully make continuous adjustments once the fur starts flying.
I had relayed my plans to Dilorè, as well as my position, and we felt like we had a pretty solid plan of operations. But shortly after she relayed the news that Rufin’s Brigade had surrounded the fort at the edge of the plateau, and his cavalry units were sweeping up the last of the Berado troops outside that fort, effectively taking control of the plateau, my hackles rose as I felt something nasty enter the edge of my fairy sense.
I had sensed a similar creature in the past. This was definitely an asura approaching, leading a group of fiends and imps.
Chiara was napping, a symptom of the pneuma loss she had suffered. I had given her a dose of [Restoration] early, which had eliminated her fatigue, but not the pneuma depletion. Only sleep and time could fix that.
I immediately gathered her into my arms and Cloaked. She looked both startled and foggy as I jostled her awake. I circulated Healing mana and chanted “[Restoration]” again, imparting it to her with my hand on her head to help her get alert.
Suddenly, the outrider nearby morphed into a proxy, which quietly told me, “You need to feed her.”
“What the heck!” I hissed back, startled.
It wasn’t really possible for the proxy to look apologetic, but it came across in the tone. “Sorry to alarm you. You have seen the approaching demons by now. Waiting for her to recover naturally is no longer an option. You need to restore her so she isn’t a liability. Cut your palm and feed her your blood.”
“Huh?” I blinked.
“Hold out your hand. Please trust me and don’t resist,” he said.
Mystified, I held out my hand. The proxy drew a line across my palm, scoring a shallow cut, making me gasp.
“Feed her,” it directed. “Hurry.”
The demons were closer now. I didn’t need to extend my sense anymore, so I retracted it to the normal radius. But they stopped outside the tunnel mouth rather than enter.
I was a little baffled, but I held my bleeding palm up near her face. To my surprise, she immediately grabbed it, pressing it to her open mouth, and began to greedily suck the blood.
At the same time, the now familiar feeling of spells happening in the background, as Ceria worked her magic, started up again as mana started flowing. As I had come to do, I ignored it and focused on the mystery in front of me.
“Help me out, Diur,” I requested, truly perplexed. “This isn’t something from my memories.”
“Probably because it is rarely done,” it declared in Diur’s voice. “Servants feel quite ashamed to have fed from their mistress, afterward when the blood hunger fades, so they usually refuse. But in an emergency, their mistress’s blood can restore their lost pneuma. If she was suffering truly severe blood loss from a serious wound, she would need several feedings across a day or two, but this time one feeding should do.”
“But, it’s monster blood she’s getting?”
“There is no harm to a mortal in ingesting monster blood. A mortal body can stabilize the mana and metabolize the miasma. The important issue is, she can absorb the pneuma as long as it is her mistress’s blood.”
The proxy looked past me, then commented, “Looks like they stopped because they detected my sudden appearance. I have summoned another outrider to replace the one that I converted into this proxy. I will go out there to deal with them.”
“Any idea why they came?”
“They were headed to Berado in order to fly from there back to here above the surface. They have lost two patrols using their normal route, so they were using this alternate route in order to learn the situation above.”
It looked back to Chiara. “She should stop shortly. Retrieve condensed blood from your core and use whole-body healing on yourself to replenish yourself when she finishes. I need to leave now; our guests are discussing using a fire attack to clear the tunnel.”
The proxy suddenly vanished, or rather, it departed faster than my eyes could track. I felt it in my fairy sense, barreling through the tunnel at jet airliner speeds. It exited with attack spells blazing.
The air around us began reverberating from the explosive attacks just outside the entrance. The cacophony brought Chiara to her senses. She let go of my hand and jerked away, then tried to get out of my grasp.
“Don’t struggle,” I warned her as I circulated Healing mana. “I need to keep hold of you, or I can’t cloak you.”
“I am deeply sorry, My Lady,” she stammered. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“It’s called blood hunger, and it was because your blood was depleted,” I explained. I pulled some blood from my core, then chanted, “[Healing].”
My improved control meant it only felt like a hyperactive sauna now. The wound on my hand closed up and the pneuma and mortal mana entered my bloodstream. I ended the casting, then licked up the remaining blood on my palm.
“I’m… a thrall now, aren’t I?” Chiara whispered with dismay.
Immediately annoyed, I answered, “No. There is no such thing as a vampire thrall. You are a Servant. You drank your mistress’s Elder blood in order to recover. Drinking mortal blood would have done you no good.”
She must not have been paying attention to Diur while she fed. I looked closely at her with fairy sight, and saw that she had indeed restored most of her lost pneuma by absorbing mine. I wondered if it would make her bond different in some way from Ceria’s or Melione’s, but no answer came to me out of Senhion’s memories.
“Dee call,” Lucy suddenly declared from within her pouch at that moment. She had abandoned ‘Dilorè’ for ‘Dee’ somewhere in the last couple days.
I already had my Cloak turned up to be strong enough to block sound, so I nodded. “Alright, go ahead.”
My cousin’s voice came from the pouch. “Be on alert, Your Highness! They’ve attacked us! A squad of demons came up the tunnel to meet us before we reached the cavern!”
“They’re here, too,” I responded. “But I’m not in the fight. Diur is fighting a group just outside the entrance.”
I had long since filled her in on the name and nature of the person I originally just called ‘a powerful mage’, although I left her with the impression he was a vampire. I hadn’t yet explained that it was somebody we had encountered before. The full story could wait for a more appropriate time.
“Have they discovered you?” she asked. Her worry came across strong.
“No, I don’t believe so. Diur said they were simply on their way to Berado when he intercepted them. But there’s an asura leading the group, so it’s pretty dangerous out there.”
“We’re facing several fiends. We’re pushing them back, though. Alternating Ryuu and Allia seems to be effective. Do your best not to face that asura directly, is that clear?”
“Dilorè,” I started, then cut off. It wasn’t worth arguing. Instead, I told her, “I’ll be careful.”
Just after we ended the conversation, a new outrider came out of the wall nearby and took up the same position as the previous one. I bent close to Chiara and asked, “What sort of stealth skill do you have?”
She looked rueful. “My affinities are Wind, Water and Earth, my lady. I have movement camouflage for Wind and Water, but my true stealth is weak.”
I frowned. A half-merrow should have inherited some racial skills. “Is there no Merrow innate stealth skill?”
“There is, but as I said, I’m very weak in it. I lack sufficient Darkness mana to use it well. I had a magic item that gave me Darkness so I could do it properly, but they took all my gear away.”
“I’ll just have to keep holding onto you, I guess.”
The battle outside felt like it was going well for Diur’s proxy– at least, it was doing damage to the enemy– but that took a sudden turn as I felt a massive blow landed on it.
As the tunnel echoed with the explosion, the new outrider came up close and transmitted Diur’s voice in low tones. “The demon general caught my proxy by surprise and destroyed it. It will take time to recover the spiritual energy to build another, so I’m moving in to take over.”
“Wait, with your own body?” I yelped. “Send in another proxy!”
“My other two are currently battling the demons that are attacking your friends,” he stated. “You can do things to slow him down, but please don’t face him directly. You are more valuable than me.”
I felt the archfiend enter my perimeter. As he approached, the asura again headed toward the tunnel entrance, a vanguard of imps quickly forming ahead of him. It looked like two fiends had survived but they were grouping up with the archfiend.
While I grabbed Durandal’s handle to warn him, I told the outrider, “There’s a lesser cavern along the highway, about ten miles south. If anything happens to me, lead this woman there and hide her where the demons won’t find her.”
And to Chiara, I ordered, “When I let go, use your stealth and movement camo and head farther down the tunnel. Don’t try to stay and protect me.”
In retrospect, I should have used Command when I said that. I didn’t think of it at the time. After fishing the Starfire Jade Brush out of my belt-wallet, I let go of her, dropping Cloak as I did it. I felt her stealth appear as she moved away. Hopefully the archfiend only saw one person in this spot.
He wouldn’t be focusing on us at the moment, though. A new attack on him advertised Diur’s arrival. Drawing Durandal, I began moving toward the demons now entering the tunnel.
I muttered, “Standard rules, Old Man.”
As I was rounding the bend, the asura appeared in my sight. I already had Durandal held up crosswise and horizontal.
“[Holy Strike!]” I ordered.
The Aether magic circle instantly blossomed. I was ignoring the three imps in the lead and targeting the asura. I hadn’t been able to tell in my fairy sense, but it turned out to be the male. He projected a shield as the electric bolt shot forward. The shield shattered as the bolt struck it, the resulting blast knocking over the imps. The asura held a spear up with his right arms, pointing it at me, and I saw a terrifying quantity of Fire mana filling it.
I dumped Aether out of my core into Durandal’s blade and he converted it immediately to the [Shield of Oranos] as a torrential flood of flame saturated the tunnel.
