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The fighting was on hold for the moment. Almost all of us had retreated to catch our breath. But up in the air, the three-way standoff continued a staring contest of sorts, reduced to the three principal combatants as their subordinates regrouped and recovered. For our side, the representative was Lady Serera, and of course, Lady Domerà represented our assailants.
Command of the third side was held by the mysterious interloper who had waded into the contest, the woman mounted on the back of a firebird commanding a force of local fairies and forest denizens. Somehow, her beast was successfully hovering in place like a fairy, its flaming wings calmly sculling the air, an act that I felt a bird ought not be able to do.
Rather than joining either side, she seemed determined to drive all of us away. And because neither she nor anyone behind her pretended to be a fairy knight, she had neither named herself, nor spoken at all, except to demand that everyone else immediately leave.
<It’s really troubling,> Sen groused. < The whole purpose of fairy knight banter and verbal sparring is to delay the actual fight long enough to warn innocent bystanders to get back and give a moment for all parties to avoid fighting if it can be found. Battles between fairies become too destructive if they just start willy-nilly like that.>
But Sen’s thoughts had already come to me, that this being seated upon a flaming firebird, who had disrupted the conflict while leading a ragtag band of magic and monstrous creatures was no fairy anyhow. We couldn’t expect fairy etiquette from her.
Speaking of destruction, I looked around at the devastated forest around us and remembered all the members of the First SAS Mountain Troop that had melted into the forest. Sen’s military knowledge informed me that they had intended to find sniping positions away from the main force.
<Mm,> Sen agreed. <SOF doctrine is to never group up the way standard troops do. Some of them had to form a wall to protect the civilians and the horses, but they definitely had offensive measures in mind as well. In their world, thinking that way comes as automatically as breathing.>
Speaking of the SAS, my own fallback position had been right there with the ones who protected the civilians and the animals. In areas where the combat mages cast magic barriers to protect the pack beasts and riding animals, the forest was still in good condition, and the soldiers had taken cover in the shaded areas. They were currently bandaging wounds and getting water.
“Little Miss?” one of the corporals asked as I knelt down next to the big lunk he was bandaging. The man’s wound, a burn on the outside surface of his well-muscled upper arm, probably hurt a lot more than he was letting me see. At least, the jar-headed brute was stoically bearing it without complaint. But I wasn’t here to admire it or his tolerance of pain.
Frankly, it wasn’t really me doing so. After wordlessly warning me what she was about to do, Sen began moving me for a bit.
“Remove the bandage, Corporal,” Sen told him. “I’ll take care of this.”
Mystified, the man unwound the bandage he had been halfway through winding. I’m sure he didn’t expect what happened next.
Mages and Healers are two different kinds of magic users. This is common knowledge. Outliers like Tiana or Mireia, who can do both, are so rare that many people think they don’t exist. So, because they knew I was a ‘mage’, they would not think I could use [Healing].
Well, Sen didn’t use it. Instead, she held my hand close to the wound, drew Darkness out of the deeper shade in the underbrush, and used my mouth to intone, “[Regeneration]!”
Although the process feels different when we cast magic in the [Blood Effigy], the pouring forth of the mana is the same. The circulation of it happens in a space separate both from our image and Tiana’s body though. And it isn’t clear how much our magic relates to Tiana’s pathways.
But the effect of the spell is amazing, when you can see the motion of mana. From the environment, and especially the air around us, Wind and Water mana whispered forth, taking the atomic shapes of the very air itself to become the components to rebuild the flesh. It flowed into place, manifesting and then materializing where needed to replace what a bolt of magic had destroyed.
The new flesh could have been made from the damaged tissue being sloughed off the man’s upper arm as the new tissue grew underneath. I wondered why the spell used the air and created new matter instead.
<Too complicated,> Sen explained. <The components in the air have a simpler structure that’s easier for the magic to work with.>
As the muscles finished growing and the new skin spread to cover them, I felt the spell come to its conclusion. I was pretty sure now that I could cast it myself.
<Technically, you couldn’t,> Sen said. <Nor could I. The spellcasting elements of the mortal mind that form the spell don’t exist in your alien physique. I was borrowing Shindzha’s physique just now. But you should be able to do what I just did.>
As the two big SAS men stared at me in awe, she continued, <If only one of our incarnations had been a mortal of this world, we could probably pull it off without a local Servant. But we never returned here until Robert became Tiana.>
“Little Miss, you’re a healer?” the corporal wondered.
I shook my head. We didn’t want to use Healing, since we weren’t sure how the mana draw would work out for Tiana’s body. Our connection to her was different than a Servant’s, and the way we drew mana was actually unknown. We might accidentally harm her babies if it turned out that her pathways were involved. For safety’s sake, I would leave any demand for healing magic to Melione.
“That was Dark magic,” I told them. “I have several affinities.”
They would have at least heard that Light mages could do some medical magic, and Water mages had some treatment spells as well. They had no panaceas like the [Healing] spell, but they could perform various medical treatments. It shouldn’t be too weird to hear that the rare Dark mages had some medical means as well.
“And you were just battling a fairy knight one-on-one,” the big lump of muscle that I had just treated said, sounding a little overawed. “Someone with your strength could have been a royal mage, or one of the real bigshots in the Duchy. Why are you wandering around the Highlands as a wilderness guide?”
I laughed self-consciously. “I was mostly dodging, you know?”
That was a lie, of course. I had somehow evenly matched Lilte, sword to sword. But I found their worship very embarrassing. I escaped right away, before they said more.
“Miss Hiléa,” Captain Macla acknowledged, holding his chin up as I approached him.
“You have people missing,” I told him. “I assume they spread out when the fighting began?”
He pressed his lips together, then nodded sharply.
“Do you need me to check on them?” I wondered. “If they were out there on their own in all that…”
“Please don’t, Miss Hiléa,” he answered gravely. “Your offer is appreciated, but you might reveal their positions.”
“I have a means to avoid that, Captain,” I told him. I know it’s a sneaky trick to play on a man, but I gave him my best upturned, worried eyes, taking full advantage of my tiny stature. “With your permission, I would at least like to try detecting them from here.”
He scowled, but it was in thought, not irritation. He asked, “You aren’t actually going to their locations?”
“Only if I discover someone in immediate danger of their life, Captain. I’ll be casting magic from here. Or rather…”
I looked around, then spotted a well-shadowed hollow, between two boulders where a tree had hung a thick limb heavy with foliage perfectly above it.
“From over there in the shade,” I stated. I looked back over to him. “Is it alright?”
I trained the puppy-dog eyes on him again. He cleared his throat and gave a gruff nod.
I knew, from all my time in my previous life going into the mountains with the wood-harvesting gang, to be wary of such spots, and from Sen’s knowledge I had a good idea what sort of things to expect there. Sure enough, my [Spirit Sense] revealed the owner of that particular spot.
Peering into the darkness, I told the creature hiding there, “I’m sure you’re frightened by all the fighting. I’m not here to hurt you, I’m simply borrowing your spot for a bit.”
Then I summoned up the spiritual voice I had picked up from Sen, adding a touch of threat to my thoughts, and added, <You might get hurt if you say no, so please agree without a fight.>
Eyes peered back at me, from a creature about the right size to be a gnome, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t a gnome.
<A dwende,> Sen mused in the back of my mind. <They like hidey holes like this. And they’re Darkness types, so they love the shade.>
The information about the rare species filtered into my mind with her thoughts. A gnome is a kind of mostly harmless monster, but a dwende is a magical species that is otherwise practically identical to a gnome. They have different behavior though. They’re solitary nature types, not known for farming or for forming villages.
Both fairies and mortal scientists believe that dwende may actually be the male of the pixie species, despite being about twice Kiki’s size and lacking wings. This theory is mostly based upon the total lack of either male pixies or female dwende and on the fact that both are small magic species known for being pranksters.
The eyes withdrew, which I took to mean agreement. I slipped into the shadowy hollow, then summoned up [Vampire Sense].
The day was far too bright for a vampiric skill to work through the air, but I could cast it through the soil. Thanks to the heavy vegetation in this forested area, the herbaceous layer of the soil had lots of air pockets and voids to provide a rich source of Darkness mana. My mana spread out, filtering through the forest, first counting all the soldiers here with us (ten) to determine how many I was seeking (six).
I quickly found the first pair, and confirmed they were safe and uninjured. But I discovered the mission’s first fatalities when I found the second pair.
Two young soldiers lay lifeless where they were slain. One had been wielding one of the gun-like wands, similar to what I had seen in the warehouse in Narses, while the other still clutched the stock of a bolt-throwing device. I had seen it in operation a few days before. It wasn’t a crossbow, per se, but it propelled crossbow bolts that fed from a gun-like magazine. Perhaps he’d been out of ammunition; it looked like he had used it to parry a few blows before losing the fight.
That was Sen’s thoughts leaking into my head again. She was using Tiana’s military training to analyze the fight.
It looked like they’d been stabbed multiple times. Sen guessed the attacker would be one of the fairy warriors following Domerà, but we had no way to be sure.
The discovery shook me a lot, but with Sen’s calming thoughts steadying my nerves, I moved on. I began encountering the enemy and withdrew, then cast my sense in a new direction, to the other flank of the fight, to track down the third pair.
There, I found a soldier bandaging his badly injured comrade. And I also found, to my immediate distress, a group of the interloper’s fighters creeping through the underbrush toward their location.
