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Although I was once more paying attention to my surroundings, I let Kwelabi and Sirth continue to handle things for the moment, as I caught up on the situation. We were actually flying away from the camp, although on a dogleg. Once I became aware of that, I fully understood why.
The flow of information is weird between mental manifestations, but we are, in the end, all the same mind. I joked before about being like a certain spider, but the personalities are just parallel thoughts, not detachable separate minds. I wouldn’t be able to send one to handle a task in a different body. Diurhimath’s proxies and Kanon work that way, but it’s a different technique, which I haven’t recovered from Senhion yet. Probably, when I do master it, I will also feel comfortable with being Tiana in more than one manifestation.
So, although it wasn’t instant, I could catch up quickly on what “I” had been doing in my manifestations as the other two incarnations. It was a matter of digging through my near-term memories.
Sirth had chosen this course specifically to avoid discovering what the mysterious blood insects actually were, since at the time I would have been at a disadvantage if they turned out to be Something Very Bad.
Now, I was done with healing, for the moment. I needed to give Aenëe more treatment, but all her vitals were good and the blood loss had stopped. I could deal with nasty surprises now. I pushed my thoughts at the other two.
– Sirth, stay awake and keep in touch with the spirits, but have them spread out and stop giving away our path. The demoness may notice their movements. Kwelabi, help me keep an eye on all my senses. I’ll take the wheel now, but I’ll be getting a little tunnel-visioned.
It might sound like it isn’t clear who is in charge, but the correct answer is, it’s all me, anyway. If one manifestation thinks of an objection, it would quickly be understood by all, as the reasoning becomes part of our jointly held memory. In this case, nobody hesitated.
Now back in charge of piloting and navigation, I put on ‘Tiana Full Battle Mode’ once more, letting her knight training temper all my thoughts. Those thoughts drilled down, eliminating all factors other than situational awareness and solutions for the tactical problem at hand. Executing that training by the numbers, I cataloged my issues.
The primary threat (asura) was not the proximate threat (blood bugs), but the former was clearly in control of the latter. The primary threat also controlled a massive unknown (literally, in the person of the titanic wolf) which restricted me from simply overrunning and destroying her as I was fairly confident I was capable of doing. The bundle of wounded fairy in my arms hampered my ability to fight this asura whom I needed to neutralize without killing (a far more difficult task than simply obliterating her). I needed to get that fairy to a safe place and treat her, absolutely ASAP. Trisiagga had clearly spoken as if her blood insects could find Aenëe, and the evidence from Kwelabi’s memory was that she could do so, despite my vampire cloak.
That last item settled my immediate plans. I had to eliminate the blood insects.
Durandal wasn’t the right tool for this job. I would prefer to have him, to fight two-handed with a magic tool in one and Durandal in the other, but even after shifting to a single arm to carry Aenëe, I was out of hands. I left him in the scabbard and drew my combat fan, then executed a trick which I taught myself while traveling with Durandal in simulation. It was something I learned in order to deal with cases where I didn’t have my other hand free to secure the fan’s safety tether cord around my wrist.
A single blood tendril snaked out of the hand holding the fan, taking hold of the cord and merging with it. Guided by my thoughts, the cord now moved as if alive, snaking itself around my wrist, tying itself into a nicely formed bowline knot.
Couldn’t I use blood tendrils to carry Aenëe so I could just have both my hands free? Setting aside the problem that she was now conscious, although still too weak to fly on her own, and being carried that way would probably be very disconcerting, the real reason I didn’t do it was my concern about my pneuma.
When I first came to Huade, my pneuma had been roughly equivalent to a normal juvenile fairy. My blood core now contained a massive extra supply. The blood is the organ of the body which contains the pneuma and anchors the soul. Having a huge additional reservoir of it gave me a level of magical stamina that I could only dream of.
Pneuma is not consumed like mana. It isn’t a fuel, but rather the non-physical element of life itself. It doesn’t get used up, but, as with anything living, it becomes fatigued with overwork. A horse becomes tired from running too long, and an oak tree in a hurricane eventually loses its fight and breaks. All the magic I was doing, from vampire cloak to flying to healing to manipulating spiritual energy to allow multiple manifestations of my mind, was pushing my pneuma hard, and I had absolutely no gauge for how much was too much. I had to do anything extra, even using blood magic, as sparingly as possible.
But I had a situation in which not using it was not an option. I turned and flew directly toward the swarm of blood insects, mentally flipping through one strategy after another for how to deal with them.
As I grew closer, the swarm shifted toward me as well, becoming denser as all the individual members separately targeted me. It was as if they had only had a vague idea where we were when I had some distance, but my position became clearer as I drew closer.
I reversed course, but didn’t fly as quickly away as before. The swarm gradually condensed into a smaller and smaller globe.
“Hahahaha! They’ve got her scent now!” Trisiagga’s voice came through the [Blood Sigil], as both I and Kwelabi heard it. With things clarifying for me, I could pay attention to it directly now.
The blood insects were drawing closer, as I was purposefully lagging, letting them catch up to me. It seemed that the individuals didn’t have much intelligence. They were beginning to line up neatly for me. I increased my speed just before the leading edge caught up.
– I’m watching behind, so look out ahead for me.
As soon as I relayed that thought, Durandal’s voice came to me.
I’m keeping watch for the sailor lady, he told me.
In the same moment, I became aware that Sirth had already contacted Durandal directly, after I worried about Trisiagga spotting the movements of the Wind spirits. She’d handled him a number of times in sim, so this interaction wasn’t a huge surprise. Just a small one, since I hadn’t considered that the other manifestations who shared my bond with him could use it while acting as parallel minds.
The air ahead taken care of, I concentrated on the air behind, and found a partial answer to a question I had been struggling with.
I couldn’t deal with them if I didn’t know what they were, but now I knew at least something about them. Up until this point, I had assumed I was looking at a blood magic spell at work.
Now, at closer range, I could see demonic mana attached to the little specks of blood that I had called insects. Each and every dot was carrying a demonic presence, and I had a suspicion it wasn’t just mana. The specks had an aura to them like that of a living being. If they were just pure compressed blood under Trisiagga’s control, each one would be like a tiny droplet of her presence.
Each of these was different. Not that it was possible to verify that they were all literally unique, but they varied enough that it seemed to be a whole crowd of demons operating them.
Or, like they were all independent little demons on their own.
Although I really didn’t want that second choice to be possible, because a millionfold swarm of demonic insects was just a tad too creepy to contemplate. And how could she have created such a thing with a spell?
Still, after seeing this, I had a strategy. It modified the tactic I had originally imagined, of using my fan to batter them with Wind. If it was demons, then Wind wasn’t what I wanted.
I had already drawn a lot of Holy mana from my blood core, and I had time, so I began drawing it from its original source. That ‘Healing’ mana that appears, to fairy eyes and mortal scholars, to come from nowhere actually has a source. As it turns out, ‘Healing’ mana, Holy mana, is quite literally a blessing from above. Just like the wisdom required to effect the healing, the mana springs directly from the Sea of Knowledge in the Immortal Realms.
The divine substance flowed into my pathways and I circulated it, letting it build more and more.
The pain, the penalty that Oranos and the others created for we Elders in order to prevent us from abusing the power, rolled over me. Yes, I had the control to avoid this pain now, for normal amounts required for healing mortals, but this was a different situation. Even if the swarm chasing me had tightened, it still filled a huge volume of sky. I couldn’t say how much I needed, so, just to be on the safe side, I assumed that I needed everything.
I split the stream of mana into two, letting a small thread of it fill my body before chanting in spiritual voice, [Healing].
My Elder body, thanks to its magical half, could stand being flooded with [Purification] despite its monstrous half, but the [Healing] would cut a bit of the edge off the pain.
With that prepared, as I reached the limit I could do with raw Holy mana, I converted it to [Purification] and the real fire began. This was just step one. I let the circulation flow into my spiritual vessel to make room for more in my pathways. Rinse and repeat. Fill up my vessel to the absolute maximum, all while continuing to lead these insects at exactly their top speed, further and further away. I had purposefully avoided heading toward Thuriben, but I had long since passed Cara Ita and I was now near the little village where I first arrived in this world.
At last I felt as if I was approaching my limit. The final step was to fill my pathways to overflowing. I saw Aenëe’s eyes grow wide as my wings, then my hair, then my skin began glowing white.
It was time. I flipped backwards, pushing hard on the surrounding Wind mana and on the Earth and Water within mine and Aenëe’s bodies with my Will. Call it what you want, drogue chute, reverse thrusters, retrorockets, ABS. I dragged us to a halt in the face of the oncoming swarm and dropped my cloak, becoming an incandescent angel fully visible to the asura and the swarm. I let the purification flow from repeated waves of my fan as I swept it back and forth, painting in every direction.
The effect was as if I had taken a flamethrower to a swarm of gnats. The demonic mana component burned away, dissolving into its component elements as the miasma and the demonic aura vanished under the torrent of [Purification]. Using the fan, I painted it as wide as I could. I had bunched them up nicely. The great majority had been in a crowded line following me, and therefore, now directly ahead of me. The outer demonic specks were harder to target, but Sirth had been hard at work out of my sight. Her spirits had been readying an ambush, and were now blowing those outliers into the line of fire.
My ‘braking’ had become hard thrust in the opposite direction, and as the swarm vanished, I was accelerating toward the demoness who had been following it. She raised some sort of shield as the last of the [Purification] hit her. Her screen partially protected her, but I could tell from her shriek as I hurtled past her that she had taken a heavy dose of it.
