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My only complaint about the [Blood Effigy] technique is that we can’t properly see while in immaterial form. That’s why Sen had me materialize once again, positioned near Lady Serera as she confronted the Pooka.
Hidden in the limbs of a blackened, gnarled tree that would surely have been long dead if not for its ability to tap the mana stream flowing through its roots, suspicious mana traces revealed our quarry. After several seconds, the outline of the creature finally appeared, twisting and writhing within the whirlwind that wrapped it like bindings. The hurricane howl filling the forest should have blotted out any sounds from the creature within, but somehow his voice came across, as an angry howl that sounded more like a threat than a protest.
I was scared, but somehow not terrified. I moved my hand back to rest on the sword hilt, ready to draw. I was using the same horizontal scabbard across the back as Tiana used as ‘Tia Mona’, and I had practiced the move many times in the Spirit Core, but I wouldn’t describe the move as ‘comfortable’ yet. But I was ready.
After a moment, I realized we could hear him because he was using both aural and spiritual voice, and in the emotional layer of the spiritual side, he was making it clear that he was angry, not scared. Defiance and aggression have different tone qualities. This being was belligerent, without any doubt.
Flying at ground level, Lady Elhàn dashed forward diagonally to one side of the tree with an arrow already nocked, drawing and aiming her bow when she arrived and planted herself in a shooter’s stance. A blaze of Aether enveloped her weapon like St. Elmo’s Fire as she let fly at the creature.
Her arrow exploded inside the whirlwind, while my shock at these two hit me almost like a palpable blow, but Sen’s thoughts said they weren’t guilty of overkill in the slightest. Not against this creature. She pushed that thought at me without taking time to put it into words, but I think I was already recognizing it myself. I had simply been caught off-guard. Realizing that the situation warranted it, I drew my blade.
I suppose our minds began overlapping at this time, with a dose of Tiana Full Battle Mode mixed in for good measure, because our thoughts were identical during the next moments. Every emotion coming from the pooka screamed of an imminent attack, and yet his first move was to burst out of Serera’s attack heading in the opposite direction. The wily creature had faked his emotional content in order to prime the fairies to defend, giving himself a head start to flee, and again Sen didn’t need to communicate that to me. I had already un-manifested and dashed ahead of the pooka as an immaterial [Blood Effigy].
By moving at an impossible speed for a fairy or a pooka, I had time to manifest in a sword-fighting stance, facing the creature. And as our thoughts diverged again and I grew shocked at myself over what I had just done, Sen concluded that I had just put Tiana FBM into action. I had never flown the effigy of my own volition before, and I had certainly never tried to put myself in the path of an oncoming enemy. But I didn’t have time to think about it, with the creature rushing straight at me, so I just let her continue.
A pooka, like a vampire, is mostly Darkness mana in its magic part, and that mana manifested as a sort of haze clinging to its skin as it arrived, all long teeth and sickle-like claws. My battle alter-ego filled the effigy bastard sword with Earth [Fortification] and my body with [Body Fortification] as I parried the creature’s attack.
The creature’s momentum, far heavier than I expected, knocked me backward. I managed somehow to flip and create a [Water Step] to land against as he rushed after me. I raised my blade point-first, thinking to make myself too dangerous for him to charge directly, when his arm stretched out, his claws morphing into a scythe, which he planned to sweep across me at neck level.
Converting my lunge into a sideward slash, I met his arm/scythe with the sword, generating a huge blast with the mana-on-mana collision, and then kicked his chest with my [Body Fortification] enhanced boot as he arrived.
Again, my tiny frame was blown back, but the creature was howling in pain now, and no longer rushing at me.
Another shot from Elhàn arrived, blasting the creature in the back, followed by the two fairy knights themselves. I managed to get to my feet facing him as they took up the other two points of the equilateral triangle surrounding him. Suddenly, the forest fell silent, except for distant echoes of our fight.
Then, after those echoes came the sound of the camp now on alert, having heard the commotion.
“No fight! No fight! Give up!” the creature began squawking. I could feel Sen’s doubt that he was surrendering rather than buying time.
“Ohohohohoho,” Serera chuckled softly. “Perhaps I’ll allow you to live if you tell us who you were spying for, Little Boy,”
“Tuck no spy!” he protested. “Tuck no want trouble!”
In the sudden calm, I finally a chance to take a good look at the strange creature.
He wasn’t in any way a pleasant thing to see. He looked a lot like the goblins that Tiana had met regularly while traveling with the Hero’s Party, with warty, greasy skin, except it wasn’t green. Instead, it seemed dark, but it wasn’t anything like dark human skin. It was more like light gray pottery. He was bigger than a goblin, and had the ears and tail of a donkey, instead of a goblin’s bat-like He wore a ragged kilt and tunic and a collar. The collar seemed to be a magic item of some sort.
I knew that Sen had half-expected the creature to have black skin, and I wondered why. But Sen answered the thought right away.
<In old folk tales on Robert’s world, this creature is often described as ‘black’. But black in old Celtic tales can mean actually black or it can just mean black-haired. It’s often unclear which was intended by the original story tellers. Black hair was a foreign trait in the British Isles before Roman times, and most of the old stories have roots that go back well before the Romans, when most of the population had light brown or blond hair.>
This being did have black hair, I noticed. Although the Darkness mana floated like smoke around and within it, so thick that I couldn’t be sure if it was his real hair color or just the mana creating the illusion.
<So you just didn’t know which it would be?>
<Later artists took the ‘black’ to mean black skin and portrayed them as ink-black beings like shadows. I wasn’t sure which would be the real version from before it crossed the Sea of Knowledge to end up in British mythos.>
“So your name is Tuck?” Serera noted, her voice archly playful. “Little Boy, aren’t you lying to me?”
She let the mana filling her sword flare just a little.
“Tuck no lie!” the creature protested, waving his talon-like hands in a panic. “Tuck good boy!”
“This many human soldiers would look terribly delicious to a creature like you,” she noted.
He shook his head, clearly anxious. “Tuck no eat! No touch!”
She nodded. “I suppose a pooka would be smarter than to go after well-armed humans traveling in a large group with fairies. Miss Hiléa, tell me again what he was doing before we camped?”
“Just moving through the forest, parallel to us,” I answered. “And reporting to someone about our movements.”
“Oh, really?” she replied, turning her accusing eyes back on the creature.
“No, no, no, just telling!” Tuck insisted anxiously.
“That’s called ‘spying’, Tuck,” Serera noted with a wry smirk.
Tuck shook his head desperately, waving his hands again. “Not spying! Tuck just doing job!”
“A pooka with a job?” Elhàn wondered, her voice dripping with doubt.
He nodded vigorously. “Tuck watches the forest and tells the Lady what’s happening! Any big monsters, any humans, any visitors at all! Just Tuck’s job!”
“Why do you do it? A pooka has no need to work in a forest filled with goodies, does he?”
“Lady give fat chickens, maybe a goat sometimes! Delicious and tasty!”
I pointed out, “That collar isn’t something a pooka would usually be wearing, right? Is he a slave, maybe?”
It looked quite fancy, putting me in mind of the collar on a rich woman’s pet … or the pretty collar the master gave me when I moved into the big house after I got pregnant.
“Not slave! Lady nice!”
“Who is this lady you keep mentioning, Tuck?”
“Lady is…” he stopped and scratched his head. “Lady is Lady, right? Maybe I take you to her?”
I thought he might be growing cagey. Serera frowned, glancing at Elhàn and then at me, then noted, “Actually tying this thing down and interrogating him is going to be difficult, and if a powerful local fairy actually cares about what happens to him, it might be counterproductive to anger her.”
Lady Dilorè and two of Elhàn’s warriors arrived while she spoke.
Although she had given up on her fairy knight apprenticeship for the duration of the war and reverted to her old job as a mage scholar, Dilorè was carrying the giant’s bone spear that she got from the asura Tiana fought in Ilim Below. It seemed she was using it as her magic focus now, but she looked a lot like a third warrior flying next to the real ones. She landed and walked toward Serera as the other two fanned out flanking me, perhaps judging me as the one most in need of protection.
Well, my two companions were fairy knights, so I guess that makes sense.
“A pooka,” Dilorè observed. “First time I saw one in real life.”
Elhàn wondered, “Aren’t they fairly common in the Eastern Continent?”
“Common isn’t the right word. There are just a few more of them than on this continent. And they prefer to stay hidden.”
The creature had continued to scan around, looking nervous. He was facing an awful lot of fairies, so I actually felt a little sympathetic for him.
“Should we take him up on the invitation?” I wondered.
“The odds are high that he’s got a trick ready,” Serera pointed out.
“Would he really be ready to deal with all six of us?” Elhàn countered.
Serera nodded, then told the pooka, “Fine. You can lead us to your boss, Tuck.”
He looked around, then began gingerly walking back in the direction from which we had come, his head constantly swiveling around, checking the two fairies he was walking between to get there. He kept glancing over his shoulders at them as he moved through the forest.
Then, all of a sudden, a black plume of dust blew up from the ground around his feet and he took off, dashing as fast as he could back toward the ancient, gnarled tree. His wild, almost hysterical laughter filled the woods as he ran, each stride of his long, frog-like legs covering two paces.
We dashed after him, but I didn’t have the presence of mind to go immaterial again. I guess Tiana FBM had gone back where she came from once the fighting ended. Since I was just running with the others, we didn’t catch him before he reached his destination. He dove into a black recess between two massive roots of the ancient tree and disappeared as if diving into water, leaving his laugh of madness disappearing into the distance.
The rest of us surrounded the tree while Serera dashed straight up to it, going down to her hands and knees to jam her hand into the dirt where he had disappeared. Her brow bunching up in anger, she threw herself back onto her rump and let her shoulders slump as she tossed aside a handful of soil and forest debris.
“Gone,” she declared as the rest of us relaxed and caught our breath. “Some sort of [Shadow Walk] skill.”
“That creature could use an advanced magic like that, Master?” Dilorè retorted, sounding shocked.
She glanced at her apprentice. “Just because it fights with tooth and claw doesn’t make it a beast, My Lady. Those things usually have a well-stocked bag of tricks.”
Elhàn gave a frustrated sigh. “So now we have no idea who this ‘Lady’ is or whether she’s an enemy.”
Serera nodded, then noted, “Well, that makes us no worse or better off than before we knew she existed. Let’s head back to camp, ladies.”
