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I didn’t have a specific objective in mind when I put the [Blood Sigil] on Trisiagga’s back. Generally, I wanted to have a means to track her down no matter where she went and I wanted to eavesdrop when she met with fellow demons, revealing her real plans, rather than whatever nonsense she was handing the Hamagaarans who believed her to be a fairy knight.
Kwelabi realized that it was providing another very important function when he noticed Trisiagga’s sigil rapidly converging on Aenëe’s. That could only mean one thing.
I poured on as much speed as I could, attempting to intercept them, but Trisiagga would reach her target before I reached the demoness. I focused on Aenëe’s mind and called out a warning.
My Lady, incoming attack!
By this time, I could see the two directly, using my fairy sight, although I was still very distant. Lady Aenëe wheeled, looking for her attacker, who was still in stealth, but nearly on top of her. Aenëe’s bracelet should have been telling her something by this point, but I didn’t know how detailed that information would be.
Just dodge! I nearly screamed in my mind. I was still too far away to help her in any other way.
She juked to one side, forcing Trisiagga to veer, then dodged the other way, attempting to keep her flight too erratic to strike. But the demoness had closed by this time and fired her first shots, sending out magic bolts identical to the ones she had struck my guards with, back when she attacked my carriage on the way home from Copen.
At that time, I had been unable to see the mana she was using. I thought it had been somehow disguised, because it looked sometimes like Wind and sometimes like Earth. Now I understood that it was demonic mana, an eerie mixture of elemental mana and miasma, with something else not quite definable binding it all together.
In rare cases, elements of mana are alloyed, like the lava bolts thrown by certain volcano-dwelling magic beasts, which are perfect blends of Earth and Fire. Demonic mana is like that too, except it is a twisting, grotesque mishmash of different manas rather than a smoothly blended amalgamation. All logic tells my eyes that it comes flying apart from the repulsion of opposing mana types, like what happens if one attempts to create ‘Steam mana’ by blending Fire and Water, but with Demonic mana things somehow remain together.
My instant fear was that Aenëe, who could not sense demons, couldn’t sense the magic bolts either, but my fear was unfounded. She not only dodged, but immediately slashed in the direction of their source, blindly firing [Wind Scythe]s at the enemy she couldn’t see. She fired them in a wide spray pattern, creating six or seven of them with each slash of her sword. But the stealthed demoness evaded, passing through a gap in the volley before shooting again.
Throughout all of this, I had been accelerating, to the point that I actually had to start braking as hard as possible if I had any hope of actually doing anything when I arrived. I’m sure I was over two hundred miles per hour by this time, and was in danger of zooming right past them.
I began setting up my defenses, filling my body with Healing and setting up [Fortification], while talking to Durandal.
Hold off on the defenses until you think an attack is too much for me to handle.
There was no way of knowing if Trisiagga knew about him. She had only seen me carrying Oberon’s mithril sword previously. But just in case she didn’t know about him, I would keep him a secret at first.
Trisiagga’s second attack on Aenëe was a single, heavy mana bullet, and it struck home… Except that a shell of Earth formed around the fairy as it hit. It wasn’t a shield, but instead something akin to [Fortification].
Aenëe let out a string of Dorian invective as she fired back, but Trisiagga had confirmed that her foe was unable to see her. She dodged upon firing this time. All of Aenëe’s shots went wide as Trisiagga circled and closed in on her enemy from a new direction.
Her spear grew intensely heavy with Demonic mana just before she struck. The mysterious shield of Earth formed again, but it wasn’t enough to protect Aenëe. The point drove into the side of her ribcage, in territory dangerously near to her heart.
A sudden corona of Aether burst out from the half-fairy, like an outburst of a Van Der Graaf generator gone mad. After the initial burst, it then all focused into a heavy flow traveling through the spear into Trisiagga. The demoness screamed and pulled away, backpedaling to escape as the attack continued flowing, arcing through the air as it followed her. Aether isn’t specifically lightning or electricity, but they are of the Aether aspect, so it often materializes as such.
Aenëe could have been using the arc to target her, assuming whatever was powering it did not run out of mana, but she was folding up instead, her wings becoming lax and her sword dropping out of her hand. Sword and fairy plummeted together.
Fearing that it had been a fatal blow, I stopped braking and instead aimed to intercept her. I could do nothing about the sword, so I ignored it and grabbed the fairy, immediately covering her in my vampire cloak.
The Aether switched from attacking Trisiagga to attacking me instead. I poured extra mana into my [Fortification] and held on, choosing to believe the attack would run out of juice quickly. Aenëe’s eyes weren’t focusing, and it looked to my fairy sense that this was the output of a defensive fairy treasure tucked inside her brassiere cuirass. The item did not contain a large enough magic stone to last long.
Meanwhile, I poured a massive extra quantity of Holy mana out of my core into the Healing in my body and let it flow into her. Even if the spearhead had pierced her heart, the magic would sustain her.
I accelerated away, gritting my teeth as the electricity kept attacking. Meanwhile, the information on Aenëe’s condition flowed into my mind…
With Senhion’s knowledge having returned to me, I now understood that my mind was just a conduit when I used this Holy magic. It was a specialized variant of Divination, tapping into the Sea of Knowledge and letting that knowledge directly manipulate the Holy mana to achieve the desired miracle. The better I understood anatomy, the more efficiently the spell worked, because that education paved the way through my brain for the magic, but ultimately it was wisdom from the Immortal realm that supplied the cure.
The damage to her heart was severe. It was in fibrillation, and had a long gash torn in it, opening two chambers. Fortunately, she couldn’t die as long as I sustained strong enough Healing. While continuing to draw mana and pour it into her, I kept accelerating until the mana in Aenëe’s defensive treasure ran out. Once the Aether dissipated, I turned left, heading into the hills, rather than right, back toward friendly territory.
Why? Because, at that moment, Trisiagga was still following me. She had been able to see me, or at least the Aether pouring out of the tool, up until it ran out. I was betting she would guess that I would head away from her ground, and deliberately went the other way.
I scanned the territory ahead, looking for a sheltered spot. Seeing nothing, I finally decided to just stop and stay in cloak. I was using magic at an intense rate, and I frankly no longer had any feeling for how long I could without pneuma exhaustion. If I at least landed, I could eliminate one source of drain.
On the ground, I kept Aenëe in my arms and finally put all my concentration on her. She was half-conscious, staring up at me but without comprehension. It was the eyes of a groggy person, just roused from sleep.
Contrary to my expectations, Trisiagga stopped dead in the air roughly where the Aether had run out. She began some sort of incantation, but it was in a language I didn’t recognize. If it had been Regaritan, I could at least identify it as such, but it was probably one of the other languages from the other side of the Great Wall.
Meanwhile, in my arms, the Healing flow was continuing across her body, with an extra dose for her heart. I couldn’t just concentrate the spell there, because the Holy mana was supplying oxygen to this body that currently had no circulation.
…while the young princess tended to the wounded, this old shaman was listening to the demoness delivering an angry monologue.
“That’s my prey you stole, whatever you are! My pets will find her, no matter where she is!”
The wind was rushing too fast past the princess’s ears to hear those word, but I could hear them through the [Blood Sigil]. As she spoke them, I could feel, through the spiritual sense that my younger self calls ‘fairy sense’, that her spell was creating a swarm of tiny specks of the same condensed blood that our ‘blood core’ is made of. They buzzed around her like hornets, then flew outward in various directions.
The demoness continued, “She’s marked. I will find her, and I will take her, just you wait! Your stealth is good, anyway, so why don’t you come closer? I’ll have an answer for you if you do!”
I considered the possibilities, and concluded she had something like the [Blood Mist] that my younger self was using earlier. Perhaps she was filling her immediate surroundings with it. The ‘fairy sense’ wouldn’t pick it up from this far away unless I concentrated additional energy on it. I suspected that might be a mistake and didn’t try it. In any case, if I flew into that [Blood Mist], it would surely detect me.
My younger self was having success with her healing. I couldn’t directly follow the stream of wisdom that came with this miracle, but I could see the progress second-hand through the link that was our mutual mind. Her technique had already rebuilt the heart and recovered what blood she could from the body cavity. Naturally, what had flowed out of the girl’s body into the open air was lost, but what remained inside her had flowed backwards, returning to the vessels of her circulatory system.
Trisiagga’s blood insects flew overhead, then began circling. Alarmed, I pressed that knowledge into my younger self’s awareness. Forewarned, she took off before they homed in.
– I’ll fly, but you tell me where to go! I have to concentrate on Aenëe!
I felt it was a bizarre proposition, for her to simply fly blind and let me steer, but I had a solution, dividing my awareness in two and causing one to become Sirth…
… it was a hell of a gamble that the old man took, throwing matters to me on the fly, and I barely had time to think before I had to choose the best course for our current incarnation to take. That princess keeps a small flock of Wind spirits in the area with the help of her little friend Lucy, so I called on them now, so I could do as I did when I sailed at night. With Her Highness keeping her eyes on the little ladyship in her arms, preventing me from borrowing them, I had to sail like in a fog on a moonless night. My friends shifted into my intended path to feed me knowledge of what they saw, and that’s where I steered Her Highness. She dodged around the blood bugs as she fought for altitude, as I showed her the course for the camp.
But it turned out that the witch, as wily as any witch of my home world, had sent swarms to block the way. Her Highness couldn’t fight, and I couldn’t say whether they could attack us or just sense us, so I turned us southward, to stay in the hills…
… At last, Aenëe was breathing again, and her heart was beating properly. She needed a lot more healing before she was well, but she was out of danger. Relieved, I stopped the Healing spell so I could put my mind back on the outside world.
