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As I witnessed the cascade of Demonic mana pouring into the hapless Shindzha, I have to confess that my first reaction wasn’t to snap instantly into battle mode. No, to be quite honest, I had a moment of other thoughts.
Ah.
Things are moving at high speed again.
I wish my rest could have been a bit longer.
I guess, after three months of Huade… has it really only been three months? Yes, it has. When I fell asleep and stayed down for three days, it was the wee hours of exactly three months to the day from when I woke up in this body.
After three months of Huade, I’m starting to get tired.
I only had the luxury of those idle thoughts for the short span of time while Shindzha was collapsing to her knees. Her lungs emptied after that one ear-splitting scream and she tumbled onto her side on the floor, felled by the horrendous onslaught. And even if my mind was momentarily distracted, my body was moving on automatic anyway, falling into a crouch with my battle fan already in my hand. Fans are appropriate accessories whether I’m in Atian or Dorian fashion, since the upper class women of both cultures use them. No wonder they are so popular as magic foci for the female mages of Orestania.
The mass of mana hanging like a storm cloud over Shindzha’s collapsed body had a painfully familiar aura, and it made me feel instant hatred, now that I knew the full story. After all, this wasn’t just the entity whose proxy detonated near Camp Langram while I was facing it. Before it found me there, it had found Mother and Uncle Owen. This was certainly their murderer.
Falerè’s lesser fairy warrior, who had been guarding the prisoner, sprang to her feet with her spear at ready. She had already formed a defensive bubble of Light mana, but her eyes were enormous.
The same stentorian non-voice as I encountered in Langram thundered from the cloud.
STREGA! I HAVE FOUND YOU!!
Just like in Langram, it was not spoken words nor any kind of sound at all, nor spiritual voice, nor anything else other than dark fury delivering a diatribe designed to intimidate and paralyze by sheer force alone.
The fairy went to a knee, as if she’d been physically struck by the invader. But my automatic reflexes had already circulated every form of mana, filling my pathways to near bursting while [Body Fortification] kept me on my two feet. I stood against the onslaught unmoved.
At the moment, I didn’t dare convert the Holy mana coursing through me into [Purification]. Even though I had worked out the ability to keep the circulation from touching my babies through Will, it was best not to push that for too long. By my estimate, I was only shielding them from ninety percent of it with that technique.
Fan Li’s automatic precaution already had my spiritual vessel expanded, but now I pushed it to the maximum I could manage.
Meanwhile, the Evil God continued his bluster.
YOU HAVE MY GRATITUDE FOR CARRYING MY TOY INTO YOUR CASTLE! NOW I SHALL TRAMPLE YOU LIKE A WEED BEFORE YOU CAN GROW!
More of the tendrils that had bound Shindzha sprang from the cloud, reaching out at me. It happened so fast that I wasn’t able to fully process what was happening, but fortunately, Fan Li was on the job. The scene quite suddenly froze, or rather, slowed down to an extreme degree. My body couldn’t move any faster than the tableau surrounding me, but my thoughts, from my perspective, moved as normal.
That is to say, they were accelerated far beyond the physical time-frame. It was as if my body were in the outside world while my brain was in Sky Ocean under a high multiple of time compression.
[Not a bad analogy,] Fan Li judged, as if we had all the time in the world. Well, at this speed, we had an awful lot of time to chat, surreal as it seemed.
I answered, [Thanks for the assist.]
[That wasn’t this small one, precisely,] she differed. [The Fan Li memories within you temporarily activated and provided this response. This Fan Li conversing with you is the one active within the old Spiritual Vessel outside the Mortal Realm, which the Great Senior stripped away from Fan Li in order to reincarnate our soul as you on Earth. The Fan Li within your vessel is currently inactive.]
I puzzled over her answer for a moment, then asked, [Those are different how?]
[In short, you did that, when it was necessary, by becoming me momentarily. You used my skills and my memories on your own. No doubt you have absorbed some of the automatic defensive techniques from my lifetime.]
Yeah, I didn’t understand how that was any different than her doing it, since she was just me with a different set of life memories, but she seemed confident that it was.
[Of course, his attack continues to advance, so we do not, in fact, have ‘all the time in the world’. This is a technique to give us time to evaluate and form strategies. It isn’t protecting us in the end.]
The tendrils were indeed gradually coming closer. Watching them was passing surreal and invading the realm of bizarre now.
[Right,] I agreed. [Any ideas?]
[This scholar is struck by the parallels between this situation and your old world’s story of the Trojan Horse.]
[Well, yes, but…]
I felt instant negation coming from her.
[Not that. Certainly, the story describes the method by which the enemy has penetrated your castle defenses, but let us, as they sometimes say in your old world, ‘take it and flip it around’.]
Stuck like a fly in amber, watching the Evil God’s tendrils slowly creeping closer, the last thing I wanted to hear was some pseudo-intellectual BS motivational catch phrase like I used to get from my regional manager. If I could have moved my eyes, I would have rolled them.
The most infuriating part was that, since I was conversing with a version of my previous self in the old spiritual vessel Fan Li had constructed in her lifetime, I wasn’t getting the memory of her side of the conversation, along with the thoughts behind her words. I had no idea what she meant with her analogy.
[Please be patient with this temporary disadvantage,] she noted. [The separation between the vessels will not last for long, with the speed at which you are advancing. When they merge, this dual existence will no longer be possible. In the meantime, allow this small one to operate through your mana pathways in order to defend the hellspawn child, while you generate pseudo-sword qi in order to create a [Qi Sword]. You will see why shortly. I shall work entirely from within the old vessel while you use the entirety of the new vessel. Make sure to use every ounce of Will it provides you!]
I could feel a sense of frustration from her as she quickly relayed these instructions, and perhaps worry that I wouldn’t follow them. Being able to see one another’s reasoning in the thoughts behind the words as we conversed was a great time-saver that we didn’t have at the moment, and she clearly didn’t think she had time to explain.
Yeah, those nasty tendrils were getting downright close to intimate now. No time to argue. The generation of mana and the creation of pseudo-qi were not decelerated by this technique, the way physical motion was, so I could do everything except actually form a grip with my hand and create the sword itself. I had to do those in the last split second after I dropped the slow time technique.
In the meantime, I could feel Fan Li working through my body from whatever mystery hyperspace wherein her old spiritual vessel dwells. I couldn’t tell what it was that she was doing, but it clearly involved a ton of Dark mana and, somehow, I could see that she had developed a method to reach Shindzha through the mana path between us.
As the tendrils reached their goal at last, touching my face and chest, Fan Li calmly instructed, [Use [Purification] on your skin only. As you do, release the [Heavenly Time Technique] and generate your sword. And remember to release the [Purification] spell as quickly as you can.]
I had no choice at this point. I could already feel the hideous pressure behind the Demonic mana trying to penetrate my skin. I silently chanted, [Purification] and let the now active Holy mana coat me in a blazing white garment of fire as I released Fan Li’s technique.
This was Astaroth. It wasn’t like a barrier at my level was going to repulse him. At best, it would bear up for a moment against him, but in that moment, as I swung my arm, my free hand formed around an unseen sword grip and the [Qi Sword] appeared in it, slashing an arc in front of me, through the tendrils.
With them detached from him, the pressure within those things disappeared and they sizzled away on the coat of [Purification] like droplets of water on a hot pan.
STREGA! Astaroth roared, his fury doubling.
Like a backhand swing in tennis, I slashed the sword back through the tendrils the other direction before they could fully retract. Mindful of the bars, I didn’t advance as the cloud pulled away from me. A shining figure of light holding a fiery sword, I had become the perfect image of his nemesis, the descendant heavenly maidens of old who had fought to pry this world from his hands.
But the heady feeling of exultation this created in me did not stop me from remembering to do something about the [Purification] flaming like a corona around my body. I snapped my fan closed, pointed it at the cloud, and used Will to dump every bit of it out of me, sending it between the bars and into the enemy.
Astaroth had no human form in this proxy, so I was technically the only one on my feet in the room. Falerè’s subordinate, as well as Ceria and Chiara, were all collapsed, unable to stand up against the awful presence. But I was not the only one on my side taking action.
While my attack distracted him, a massive blossom of Darkness became a cocoon wrapping Shindzha. I didn’t know exactly what Fan Li had done, but through some Darkness technique, she had expelled everything connected to Astaroth out of my hellspawn Servant. She did not stop there, however. The mana geysered up out of Shindzha’s body, stabbing into the Demonic proxy with great force.
I can’t spell the howling cry that issued from the Evil God’s cloud as it struck. It wasn’t a word, precisely, just bitter anger as dark red and deep as loathing can be.
[Durandal!] I heard Fan Li cry. [Now!]
While I was still being puzzled about Fan Li’s request to a sword who was eminently elsewhere, the [Fortress of Gaia] shield snapped into existence, but surrounding the cloud rather than me, just a millisecond before it exploded.
Astaroth had tried the detonating proxy trick again. Fortunately, it was a much smaller proxy this time. The [Fortress of Gaia] would never have contained that explosion in Langram that injured me so badly. The intruder exploded within the container, bothering nobody in the room.
“Durandal?” I asked the qi sword, puzzled.
[Haha, what is this?] he replied, and his spiritual voice was definitely coming from the blade in my hand. [It seems to be a bit different than my blade!]
A jian is indeed a different design than a bastard sword, although they do somewhat resemble one another. That wasn’t the real problem though.
[Fan Li?] I asked the likely culprit.
[The technique is still in early design,] she answered. [It’s only effective at short range at the moment. Once we’ve fully worked the method out, he should be able to remotely inhabit a blade many miles away.]
“Shindzha!” Chiara cried out, bringing my attention to the hellspawn girl. She was still sprawled on the floor like a discarded rag doll.
My senses read the situation that Chiara had already realized. The girl wasn’t breathing.
I ordered the lesser fairy, who was just now beginning to recover, “Let me into the cage!”
