.
Ryuu was sweating and exhausted when the sand ran out, but he actually pulled it off. He had held that maximal charge of wind for a full three hours, in addition to the fighting he had done before that. Orho dismissed the hourglass, gave him a grudging recognition and agreed to ‘assist’ him. Then she languidly swam away, entering a haze and disappearing.
Ka didn’t follow her. Instead, she asked me what we would like for dinner. Once she had my answer on what and when, she turned into a streak of light and disappeared into the distance. I doubted there was a kitchen in that direction, so I decided that had just been a little bit of theater.
I looked at Ryuu once he had unwound all that mana and then caused a futon to appear and told him, Lie down and rest, Mr. Kowa. You’ve overtaxed your pneuma a little.
He flipped his sword over his shoulder and hung it from the hooks on his harness, but folded his arms instead of complying.
“So that fish lady is going to train me, now?” he demanded. He sounded a little disgusted.
I had transferred back to the cube somewhere in the middle of the three hour ordeal. I stretched my arms, then took wing.
Not train. Assist. Those two will be your team, while I advise.
“To destroy that ball.”
Right.
He didn’t look impressed. “And this is going to be different, how?”
You’ll see. Rest now. We will discuss the details later, but right now you need to recover. You overextended your pneuma.
With that promise, I finally got him to lie down. Once he was on his back with his eyes closed and his arms folded under his head, I cloaked to sneak behind him and give him a light dose of [Sleep].
I’m sure he would have been angry at me for doing it, if he knew, but pneuma depletion, to the degree that he was experiencing it, is a lot like the condition where you are too tired to sleep. It can be difficult to get the rest that you need in that state. I would let him recover naturally a little, then complete his recovery while waking him for dinner.
I settled down on the floating cube again, then contacted Curator.
Are the rest of the arrangements in place yet?
We have it all ready, Commander. When you are ready for them to join in, their call symbol is ‘Ball Defense Team’.
Ka appeared, perhaps an hour later, in her serving girl form, carrying a satchel containing two thermoses, cups and plates, and using spiritual energy to float a stacked box lunch set alongside her. I landed behind Ryuu’s quietly snoring head and cast, “[Restoration]”.
I flew over to where Ka was laying out a meal and took a seat on the blanket she had spread. As she worked, she proved that my cloaking magic didn’t work on Spirit Beasts by wondering, “Was that magic from the world outside?”
“Yup, yup!” I answered, then giggled a bit at the accidental Kiki impression and reminded myself to answer in spiritual voice. Have you not versed yourself in mortal-style magic at all?
“I would have very little use for it, Commander,” she answered stiffly. “I can use my Spirit Beast magic if necessary.”
I felt a weird sense of disappointment in that, then realized it was for a stupid reason. I had developed a bad habit of evaluating people as potential Servants, just in case the opportunity arose. If the only way she utilized mana was for instinct-based racial magic, then it was something I couldn’t learn. It was a somewhat predatory way of looking at people, and I hated myself for doing it, but I tended to do it before thinking. It was probably a habit inherited from Senhion, who had a slightly different set of morals than I had developed since.
And it was a useless habit in this case. Ka was a spirit beast, not a mortal. I could form a contract with her if she agreed, but she couldn’t be my Servant. And couldn’t survive in Huade’s poor thin spiritual environment in the first place. The only reason a spirit beast like her could go into scenarios simulating Huade’s spiritual densities was because the simulation made adjustments to her avatar to allow it.
Ryuu had finally sat up and was looking in our direction. I waved for him to come over while Ka was pouring a cup of soup. I would only be able to tip the bowl slightly and sip a little off the top, so it had to be for him.
As I expected, she produced a doll-sized bowl and deftly poured barely a quarter-teaspoon into it somehow. The maid powers were strong in this one.
I went ahead and put my hands together when Ryuu said his “Itadakimasu.” Probably, it was the convergence of his habit and the vestigial remnant of Catholic boy in me, but it seemed the right thing to do. We had our soup in silence, because I could sense that Ryuu was thinking pretty hard about something.
Actually, we were just about finished with our appetizer course, Dorian renditions of tamagoyaki, and gyoza, both of which I was only taking little bits of, before he finally gave a voice to his thoughts.
“That fish woman…” he started, then pooched out his lips to consider his next words.
Her name is Orho, I supplied in the gap.
“Orho,” he echoed. “She wouldn’t fight me, but she acted like she’s a lot stronger than me. I’m supposed to accept her help for this?”
I nodded to myself. I had expected him to come up with this objection.
Orho is extremely proud, I explained. And she has no desire to prove herself to you or me. Her original form, before she evolved, was a solitary hunting animal. If she hadn’t developed a curiosity about human art and sexuality, she would never have bothered evolving a humanoid form.
She wasn’t part of my original team of Spirit Beasts. After we had been in existence for a few centuries, a parade of creatures from the Fundamental Realm and Spiritual Realm who became curious about my small world began treating it as a tourist spot. They came, played a bit, chased other beasts for sex and companionship, and often wiggled their way into the competitions between mortals held in the big arena and in various simulated venues. Only the strong Spirit Beasts could make the transition across the barrier into the Mortal Realm, so this was dangerous for the Servants and Servant Candidates. We eventually organized them into their own tournaments instead, and it was for these tournaments that Orho made the journey.
To make the long story short, she still treats Sky Ocean as her second home, some twelve or thirteen thousand years later, spending more than half her time here competing in the tournaments and chasing (and at times catching) interesting visitors for erotic flings. And, it seems she has contributed a large number of descendants to my spirit beast population.
She found ways to help out here, such as looking after the little cloud coral colony in Sky Ocean’s upper altitudes, so she wouldn’t wear out her welcome, and it was for this reason that she was willing to help me now.
“But is she actually as strong as she acts?” he asked. “She talked like I could never beat her.”
“Hmm,” I vocalized, then noticed I was doing the fist under the chin thing again. I had reviewed records of Orho and Ka’s various combats in the arena while selecting Ryuu’s team, so I could give him an actual assessment.
I shrugged. She is weak offensively, but you would have a hard time beating her.
“She’s weak, but I can’t beat her?” Ryuu echoed, scowling in confusion.
“Mistress Orho has very powerful defenses, Master Kowa,” Ka stated quietly while serving our main course. “Very few competitors can cause her difficulty.”
The main course was the old Tiana’s favorite, the critter whose Ostish name roughly means ‘Horse Squid’. It was cubed up and grilled this time, unlike the baked monster that had stared at me in Uncle Owens’ dining room. I received a single cube of it, along with a little dollop of rice, a single slice of yellow squash, and a single slice of carrot. It was more than I could eat.
Her basic technique is to let the opponent wear themselves out on her impenetrable shields, I told him. Somewhat like the way Graham fights.
“Let her be in charge of defense, Master Kowa,” Ka advised him.
He looked at the meek, polite serving girl and a perplexed wrinkle grew in his brow. “Are you really that moose that I faced a while ago?”
She tipped her head, “Moose?”
It took me a moment to realize no equivalent Huadean beast exists, and he had fallen back on the English word, or maybe the Japanese have imported the English word into their own language. Either way, she had no idea what he had said.
You resemble a beast from his homeworld, and that is its name. Yes Mr. Kowa, she is the same being. But, ‘moose’ doesn’t seem quite like the right name for her kind. Give me a moment.
I put down my knife and chopsticks and sat up in meditation position, putting myself into a trance. I was pretty sure, in this thick spiritual environment, that I could manage to do this for very simple things. The Sea of Knowledge is accessible without Divination for immortals. At my realm, it is very difficult and only very simple things can be deduced through it, but I could, with a little effort and perhaps a little luck, do this much in the current environment.
Seeking within myself, into that sea which is my own soul, I fell into a sort of waking dream, connecting to the greater realm of knowledge, then began my deduction, starting from my observation of Ka herself. Clearly, she was somehow a relative to the great family of deer and its many relatives, or at least she was loosely related, like gazelles and caribou and such. But her specific interuniversal clade had somehow become predators or omnivores. Those vicious fangs had no place on an herbivore.
Soon, images came to me of a Ka-like creature, one of a trio of females, accompanying an even more massive male, chasing down an animal somewhat like a llama. An additional female sprang from ambush, forcing the surprised beast into the path of the male, who caught it with an antler and threw it sideways toward the three females following him. They pounced, one forcing it off its feet, allowing another to grab its throat with her mouth, hopelessly snaring it with her fangs, while the other two latched onto leg to hold it captive. Once the llama-like animal perished, suffocated from the crushed throat, the male dragged it back to his little herd. There, other females guarded the young, who played games typical of young predators with each other, even though the female adults were contenting their stomachs with grass as they stood watch.
I knew omnivorous grazing creatures were a biological twist not seen on Earth, although some might occasionally eat birds or rodents, but I was able to deduce what the local humans called these creatures. The name was a simple portmanteau of two other beasts, because they imagined it came from a cross-breed between them.
Elklion, I stated, coming out of my deductive trance. It’s a translation of what the humans of your species’ homeworld call your kind.
All that effort, and I got back something I could have come up with, myself.
“What about fish lady?”
Orho, I corrected, then admitted, There will be no human name for her kind. She’s a unique spirit beast evolution of a lifeform type only found in aerial biomes of the Immortal Realms. Even her name ‘Orho’ is a tag we assigned her when she came to Sky Ocean. In my small world, we call the category of creatures to which she belongs, ‘skyfish’. Obviously, these creatures are reflections of mortal aquatic species, but lacking mortal prototypes, they have evolved their own species. Let’s call Orho a ‘skymaid’.
I had cleverly merged ‘sky’ with ‘mermaid’. Well, it beats ‘elklion’.
Ryuu shrugged. “That works, I guess.”
He chewed for a bit, then looked back to Ka. “So the ‘skymaid’ is defense, then what are you?”
“I run fast, and I’m difficult to stop,” she said. “I can defend myself if I’m ambushed. Depending on the contest, I normally scout, harry or carry messages.”
“And I’m the damage dealer,” Ryuu said. “I can understand the team you’ve put together, Tiana. But what is the point of it all? I’m getting tired of all these challenges. What is it you think I need to learn from all this?”
I again put down my utensils, crossed my arms and tipped my head, considering the question. It took me a bit to realize I was doing a Kiki pose again.
You’ve achieved my original goal, I confessed. While fighting Ka, you didn’t fall back on your [Spirit Shot] once. And you rise immediately to challenges again, like when I first met you. I feel like the hero Ryuu Kowa is finally returning.
“So why am I still here?”
Because I have a stretch goal now, to give you an unmatchable advantage, I told him. One nobody on Huade is able to teach you.
