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The moment after I told Ged that I would go reconnoiter rather than follow his request to join him in his tent, I noticed that I had just overruled the First Prince of the Realm.
Now that I had said it, my only choice was to stick to my guns and be the domineering fairy knight who does as she wills, only loyal to her contractor. Who, in my case, was King Owen, not Prince Gerald. I wasn’t wrong, telling Ged that I had other plans. I still grew a slight blush.
I saw his lip quirk slightly, but he nodded gracefully.
Of course, the little sister in me still felt a secret pang of guilt that I wasn’t doing what my big brother asked. The diverging impulses in my head were a very weird dichotomy.
As I cloaked and flew away, I added in spiritual voice, Lady Aenëe is currently guarding your camp. If she comes to you, don’t be alarmed. We arrived here together.
I had at least a dozen other things I wanted to say to him, but I was in a hurry. I needed to catch up while I could still sense Trisiagga. And I definitely needed to find that gargantuan creature that she had just shown us.
That image in the fog had seriously alarmed me, because it didn’t correspond to any creature I knew.
Yes, I know I said it was a five-story-tall wolf. Huade is not Earth, but wolves don’t get that tall on Huade either. After hellhounds, which are mastiffs the size of small elephants, dire wolves and thunder wolves are the largest monsters of the canine persuasion. They’re both the size of large buffaloes. Neither Tiana’s education nor my fragmented memories of Senhion’s knowledge included such a gargantuan creature.
I hadn’t put aside the possibility that the wolf was an illusion, although I found it difficult to believe Trisiagga could pull off an illusion that could fool my spiritual sense when her stealth no longer did.
The first time I encountered her, when I managed to stab her in the heart, she completely disappeared on me. All I could tell about that trick was that it operated using the bracelet on her wrist. It might have been stealth, but my mother’s head maid Benedetta, who helped the Knights investigate the incident, detected traces of Dark mana that convinced her that Trisiagga had used a magic item that casts [Shadow Walk], a variation on [Wall Pass] that allowed a Dark magic user to move through the darkness from one place in shadow (such as underground) to another.
I had not been able to follow her at that time, but my fairy sight and spiritual sense had become far stronger since, and I was following her just fine right now. With that in mind, I had high confidence that this titanic wolf was a real creature, even though it was easily bigger than a dragon. At this time, both in terms of morale and as a tactical threat, it more than doubled the threat that Trisiagga posed on her own.
I flew into the fog bank, keeping my stealth amped as high as I could. I had no information on the asura’s abilities to penetrate stealth or sense oncoming threats. My fights with her before had been as a clueless beginner, so I hadn’t garnered much information on her.
Flying over the heads of the orc regiment, I detected a large number of demons, which I took at first to be the mages I had suspected before. They were in disguise, but I spotted many at the Class E level, the level of wraiths and hags, and a handful of stronger ones, up to Class C strength, the level of imps and skeletal knights. After a bit, I realized the numbers were high enough that the leadership also must be disguised demons. Only the rank and file were real orcs.
As my targets emerged from the other side of the artificial fog bank, the wolf suddenly broke into a trot, increasing his speed to well over fifty miles per hour, and headed into the hills. Trisiagga turned and flew toward the Hamagaaran camp.
Honestly, I was torn. I wanted to follow the wolf.
I could judge a lot from its appearance. Its body had to be mostly mana. If it were even half mana, like me, it couldn’t possibly stand on those canine-style legs. There’s a reason elephant legs are like tree trunks, and the great titanosaurs of the past had even thicker ones. This creature that stood taller at the shoulder than the largest dinosaur couldn’t support that kind of weight on such slender limbs. The great majority of his body had to be weightless mana.
That meant it was probably a shape-shifter that could take on a gigantified form. It could keep that mana compressed to shrink to its normal size, or expand it to achieve this impossible scale.
Shape-shifters are almost always magical or monstrous. Demons are known to change their form slowly as they evolve through the classes, but only a very few rare demonic beasts fall into the shape-shifter category which can easily change their form. And as I have mentioned, this was not any of the ones I knew.
Being mostly weightless mana did not mean the creature wasn’t dangerous, though. The biggest mistake one can make when confronting a magical body is to assume it is like an inflated balloon. I’m a good example of that, frankly. I weigh less than a human eight-year-old girl, but I hit harder than any eight-year-old.
It took a huge amount of mana to create a solid body the size of that creature, and it presented a danger equal to it. I wanted to follow it, but… My first order of business was Trisiagga.
Hey, Old Man, I asked. Have you ever seen a creature like this?
I could feel Durandal mulling it over. The bond between us occasionally seems to include a bit of emotional communication and I thought I could feel a bit of hesitation.
Is it a demon? he finally wondered. It doesn’t seem possible though.
I see demonic mana, I told him. But mostly I see elemental mana. Wind, Fire and Darkness.
The same combination as a dragon, Durandal noticed. It certainly has the size of one.
That’s not a dragon, I rebutted.
It certainly is not, he agreed.
It seemed Durandal had nothing more to say. I gave up and followed the ‘fairy knight’, cautiously shortening the distance as she landed and approached a Hamagaaran general. I also landed, and drew close enough to her to strike.
So to speak. I could not attack yet. Not as long as I didn’t know the relationship between her and that gigantified beast. With a strong possibility that such a huge beast would become a runaway catastrophe upon the entire land without her control, I couldn’t kill her.
Her conversation, as she did her fairy knight act with the general, had predictable content. She was hearing the report on the battle losses during contact with the enemy, giving instructions to maintain skirmisher patrols and otherwise hold the lines, and all the other things I could more or less predict. None of it contained anything we didn’t already know. They were waiting for more Orestanian troops to mass before executing the next stage, which they did not conveniently describe for me to overhear.
In a demonology lecture during knight training, Tiana learned that the scholars were still unsure whether demons could change form without going up in class. The majority of scholars believed that their forms remained fixed between evolutions. I was now seeing proof that this school of thought was wrong.
Trisiagga’s illusion of white sylph wings was actually hiding a real pair of leathery demon wings that she did not have, the last time I saw her. She was also not hiding her second pair of arms with illusion; they had physically vanished.
Asuras do come in more than one body plan. They, and the demons of the classes above them, can have anywhere from one to four pairs of arms. They can have horns or not. They can have wings or not. The females can have the usual two breasts or additional pairs. Trisiagga still had the normal bosom that she had before, but she had previously possessed two pairs of arms. It seemed that she had re-engineered one of them into wings, leaving herself with two arms, legs and wings, just like me.
I had used my ‘rest and recreation’ with Durandal and with Little Jia in the simulations to unearth a lot of old skills from Senhion’s memory. I still couldn’t manage the advanced spiritual techniques that Diurhimath employed, like the creation of outriders and proxies, but I had revived several of Senhion’s blood magic techniques.
Trisiagga continued to show no awareness that I was approaching her from behind. The blood magic I needed to execute was horribly tricky, and I feared she would sense it, even though I covered it in vampire cloak, so I stayed primed to jump away and fly out of there even as I reached out.
I didn’t touch her, but I came close. I held my breath as my fingertips approached her back, then I sent out an invisible form.
It had a similar nature to my blood tendrils, but it could separate from my fingers. In that moment, as it left my hand and landed on her back, every cell of my body became a taut spring, ready to jump.
But it settled between her shoulders without Trisiagga showing any sign that she had noticed.
While my luck held, I retreated rapidly. The sooner I got away from her the better. I didn’t fear fighting her, even here in the middle of the enemy camp, but I didn’t want to alert her. If she knew I had been here, it would invalidate my reason for coming.
My main mission was done. I didn’t know yet what I would learn from it, but through the mark that I had just placed on her, [Blood Sigil], I could track her and eavesdrop on her conversations as well.
But the wolf still needed investigation. I took off after it, thinking that heavy mana signature would be easy to spot. Instead, to my astonishment, it had entirely vanished. I flew along the path that it had taken, spotting a couple points where trees had been destroyed in its passing, but then all trace of it was gone.
It couldn’t just be stealth. A body that size, even in stealth, would stand out to my senses. But if the wolf had shrunk himself, he might be able to do it. Even better, if he had shrunk himself and found a tunnel to hide in.
For a bit, I was tempted to execute another of my blood magic techniques, [Blood Mist], to disperse a nearly undetectable net across a wide area to try to catch the hidden creature. But it was just nearly undetectable.
Trisiagga had harnessed blood magic in the past, using it to survive after I stabbed her through the heart. When she told me about it, angrily blaming me for the great loss of collected mortal blood she had suffered, I had not known what she was talking about at the time. I understood it later though, using Senhion’s knowledge. Blood magic can reproduce major organs, creating a temporary substitute while simultaneously growing a permanent replacement, but the method requires a huge expenditure, gradually consuming one’s supply.
Because she could use blood magic, she might detect [Blood Mist]. I couldn’t hide a wide area of effect spell under my vampire cloak the way I could hide the [Blood Sigil]. For now, I just had to give up on the wolf. I had to settle for finishing half of what I set out to do.
Frustrated, I flew back to the Orestanian camp and extended my senses to seek out either Ged or Aenëe. I found both in the same location and headed there.
