§
This time, Mireia handled the connection herself, although Rhea would still watch closely. During the previous day, after the crisis with Alwain passed and the battle forced Domerà’s retreat, I had simply monitored the situation from Narses through the regular reports, but it was still early morning and I didn’t want to wait.
Dilorè had switched groups to supplement the force chasing the Rebel group out of the mountains, and I needed news from the group that had stayed with the captive Rebel fairies. But I had no Servant with the captive group, Rhea forbade me to contact Lhan using this method. So the next best choice was the Servant who was maintaining communications with the group that stayed behind.
<Chiara, wake up,> I urged gently.
The knight roused from her sleep, which allowed me to grasp her current location. To my discomfort, her position proved to be cuddled up to the chest of a certain overly-muscled Japanese Isekai hero.
Ugh…
“Mistress?” she whispered.
I could feel in her thoughts her supernatural awe as she recognized the touch of my mind. It seems she’s been contacted by my pre-amnesia self through some similar method, so contacting her this way had just ramped her confidence in my current self back up to the high levels she’d had in my old self.
<You may speak in your mind to me. I’m contacting you from Narses. I’m not nearby.>
She quickly separated herself from Mr. Kowa and sat up.
<Yes, Mistress.>
Again, that worshipful aura in her voice.
<It seems it’s peaceful now. How were things last night?>
<We’ve made the decision to return up-river during the meeting last night. The Lady of the Red Tower insisted that we leave the Rebel force to her people and go back with her escort.>
From stray thoughts coming across from her, I understood Alwain’s plan was for her army to continue driving Domerà’s company back to Fiorene without the help of Serera and the mortal forces.
<Isn’t that a bit foolhardy? Can her army handle them without your support?>
<It seems that more rebels stayed behind than we realized, so not only are we facing a smaller force than we planned, the number of enemies that the purification group must deal with is greater. The leaders agreed that we need to reinforce them. Ladies Dilorè and Elhàn have headed back ahead of us, and we will follow once we break camp.>
I had just begun worrying, but the news that Dilorè and Elhàn should have already relieved Elhàn’s warriors, the force holding the captured fairies together with Lhan and several of Alwain’s people, put a stop to my fears.
But they’d held them captive since the evening before yesterday…
<Have they not finished purifying them?>
<Only two have been rid of their parasites so far. After that, our mages have had their hands full, dealing with the additional warriors.> Chiara explained. <The mages and Alwain’s group are tied up casting defensive magic and stopping attacks while our fairies maintain the bonds keeping the prisoners captive.>
<How could we have left so many behind?> I worried, now that I understood the group harassing the “delousing crew” was larger than what I first imagined.
It wasn’t a question for Chiara, but she answered it anyway. <We didn’t. It appears that members of Domerà’s group slipped through the lines to find their missing numbers while we were driving their force down-river.>
That made sense. Of course, they would realize they had missing warriors.
<Which group is Lady Domerà with?> I wondered.
<We don’t know, Mistress,> Chiara admitted. <They are using magic to obscure their presence, so we don’t know which members of the enemy force are still present.>
I felt a chill inside, as my worry fully rekindled. But Chiara was not the one who would have any answers that would douse that flame.
<I see. I’ll check in with you later, Chiara.>
<Yes, Mistress.>
I pulled away from Chiara’s mind, which broke the spell. Now, I was on my back, with Mireia’s nude form snuggled up to mine.
It would have been nice to concentrate on that, but I had to focus on my worries. Once the expedition broke camp and the forces divided, I would have nobody with whom I could check to make sure Alwain’s force pursuing the rebels were okay. Perhaps I didn’t need to worry about them though. With several warriors gone, whoever was left was more of a decoy group than a ‘main force’ at this point.
But I also had nobody in the ‘delousing crew’ I could connect with until the main force joined up with them. The main force had pursued Domerà’s group all day, so it would take all day for them to return to their starting position.
I remembered again that Mireia’s divine power would work between me and anyone spiritually related to me to a sufficient degree, and that included Lhan. But of course, Rhea had told her I would risk destruction if I tried it with Lhan, so she would never help.
Mireia squeezed me in a two-armed hug and asked, “Have you seen enough?”
“No,” I fretted. “Maybe I should try that [Blood Presence] spell again.
“No!” she ordered, bluntly. “Do not do that, My Lady.”
Rhea would only allow limited use of that spell, when she could monitor my thoughts directly. She didn’t want me using it at all, if possible, but if I needed to use it, she wanted to be the one monitoring me.
“It can trigger memories, remember?” Mireia added, looking genuinely worried.
“This is so unfair,” I griped.
“You can’t just stay in bed watching the expedition members anyway, My Lady. You have work to do here.”
I knew that. But all day the previous day, as I went through my day as the acting duchess, I had continually demanded progress reports because I couldn’t keep my mind off them and the danger they faced. I was such a wreck that, at bedtime, after cleverly seducing me into another night of play with her and Husband, Mireia used a divine blessing to send me off to some proper sleep.
I had woken up well before dawn and began this effort to get updated news, and she had cooperated, but it looked like she now expected me to get up and spend another day properly working as the acting duchess. And I knew she wasn’t wrong.
“I really wish I could have gone with them,” I griped.
She kissed me on the cheek and told me, “It’s not wrong to worry about them, My Lady, but it’s wrong to distrust their ability to protect themselves. The expedition has some amazingly strong people.”
With that, she slipped out of bed, found her discarded yukata to cover herself, then went out to get our maids.
§
“Miss Hiléa! To your left!”
The enemy approaching out of the woods was using some form of low-grade stealth like [Sneak], but my mortal partner was Urrit Fairling, a Reladorian mage. Rather than his bag of anti-parasite equipment, he was equipping a heavy staff of carefully twisted ironwood and crystal. It was a classic, right out of RPGs, but he used it as a weapon in addition to using it as a magic focus. On one surprise attack, he had caught a fairy warrior right in the head with it. Urrit had some legitimate combat skills.
<Heh. You’re talking about RPGs now,> Sen chuckled.
Urrit had indeed detected a fairy warrior surreptitiously sneaking toward our position. These guys had fully given up on the fairy stand-and-fight mentality at this point. They were trying infiltration tactics now, for hit-and-run attacks.
I filled my [Qi Sword] with Wind and sent a [Wind Scythe] her direction. Ceria had not taught it to me directly, but Rhea had taught me a few of Ceria’s second level spells in my training sessions in the Spirit Core. As long as it was a magic one of my Servants knew, Rhea could teach it to me. I was still dependent on the link to my Servant’s mind to cast it though.
And, also thanks to training in the Spirit Core, I was able to cast second level magic with merely the thought of the invocation word and my magic focus (Qi Sword). It was practically fairy magic at this point.
<What worries me is how you so easily acquire Elder magic skills beyond the blood magic that the [Blood Effigy] gives you. You’re gradually merging with me, aren’t you?> Sen mused.
<Is that really a problem?> I wondered. I had been coming to terms lately with the fact that my life was actually over and Lhan was just an echo of the lifetime memories we shared.
<You are the one in front because I put more burden on Tiana than you do. But as you grow, you become more like me, and we lose that advantage.>
I nodded to myself. I had been concerned about this problem as well, ever since the lines began blurring between all of us. Although, I suppose that’s just all part of the process of us merging to become Senhion again. We’ll be one person in the end, after all.
<Our evolved form,> Sen added, with a bit of humor. <Unfortunately, if our hair turns yellow, Ryuu will be the only one in this world who gets the joke.>
One part of this process, I suppose, was the fact that we sometimes had these conversations in the space of a single breath. My attack was still on its way within the space of that dialog. The fairy warrior sprang up as the scythe arrived, her shielding magic taking the blow.
She vanished into the woods without attempting to engage. Apparently I had a reputation among the enemy fairies now. Nobody stood and fought me anymore.
Urrit hunched down with his hands on his knees, his staff across them, and labored to catch his breath. He noticed me looking with concern at him and grinned.
“Rest Day my ass,” he grated.
I just nodded ruefully. That was the name of the day on the calendar, but…
“How many enemies do you think are still out there?” Urrit wondered as we settled back into our crouches.
“I tried to sense them a while ago,” I said. “But they keep moving around. At a guess, there’s at least five of them. Maybe six.”
“Between that and the six we captured, that would be nearly their whole force!” he protested. “Who is the main group chasing?”
We caught more than we were aiming for. Originally we aimed for four, preferably including at least one progenitor. We caught two progenitors and four others, which ought to have been nearly half their force.
“It could very well be just Domerà by herself, using illusions and magic decoys,” I answered. “She’s a skillful fairy knight, after all.”
I closed my eyes and tried sending out [Vampire Sense] again. You might wonder why I don’t try [Fairy Sense], but the reason is pretty simple. Tiana’s [Blood Effigy] can never be as strong as Tiana herself, and spiritual sense in particular has less range and resolution. Tiana, especially before her amnesia, could probably cover the entire battlefield, but I had far less range and what I sensed through it came through with less clarity.
At least [Fairy Sight] seemed to work fairly well. But [Fairy Sight] augments one’s natural vision, so its range is limited to whatever my eyes can see.
The bottom line was, I needed [Vampire Sense], which I could send through the shadows of the forest undergrowth, to detect at the distances I wanted.
“She’s still pulling back,” I reported. “And she’s joined with a couple friends. So they’re regrouping. I guess we can depend upon a follow-up attack soon.”
“You can’t keep that up, right?” Urrit wondered.
“I can’t,” I admitted. “It’s an active skill, and I have to stop and cast it. I do have a passive skill that I’m also using, but it doesn’t have the same range. I would have spotted her with it, if she’d made it a pace or two closer.”
Then I sucked my breath in sharply. “Get ready, something’s incoming!”
He and I both got into stances, crouched low, as I dropped [Vampire Sense] and prepared for a fight. I didn’t need it any more, because the bright streaks of mana became sharply visible in my [Fairy Sight], like little sparks of energy flying erratic courses through the underbrush. They were coming far too fast.
“They’re almost here!” I warned and then…
“Auntie!”
“Auntie!”
“Auntie!”
“It’s Auntie!”
The three perplexing creatures each made that puzzling declaration individually, following it with that unison shout for a chorus. My mind struggled to catch up with the bizarre turn of events as three pixies spun like electrons around the baffled nucleus that was trying to understand what was happening.
