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Pixies are terrifying.
I really had no idea.
I wasn’t ungrateful for their help, though. I was just very, very thankful they were on our side! And completely mystified as to why we were receiving it. And as to how they could be so impossibly powerful.
According to the pixies in question, all three of which used the name ‘Nana’ and none of which could agree upon which were assigned which number, one, two or three, it was because I was ‘Auntie’.
That news, for me, carried an absolute lack of information, because I was also completely mystified as to how or why I was their aunt.
During battle lulls, they behaved like normal pixies, zipping around our vicinity, sometimes interested in us and curious about our captive fairies, sometimes distracted by bugs or flowers or even drifting fluff. But every time the opposing warriors threatened, they would quite abruptly shift into attack mode, assailing our enemy with frighteningly powerful attacks, often using the environment to play hell with their movements. It was a combination of play and overwhelming power, like a cat having fun with a captured prey.
After the enemy faded into the leaves again, a forest ravaged with pockets of destruction surrounded us in all directions. In the wake of the battle, now faded into silence, the mages drank [Recovery] potions and waited. They grew more exhausted with every battle, despite the potions, and traces of miasma had begun to darken their mana.
<It’s an effect of the dense free mana,> Fan Li judged. <They’re using magic to counteract it, but they can’t go forever. This is not a sustainable environment for humans.>
They didn’t dare finish the ‘delousing’ job while the enemy lurked beyond visual range, because they needed to conserve their energy and recover their pneuma for any resumption of battle that might be coming.
I was glad to have a rest as well. This had repeated throughout the night and until now, and even the fairies were showing fatigue.
<I’m not even a physical being. How is it I’m fatigued?>
<While you operate the [Blood Effigy], you possess a physique,> Fan Li lectured. <It’s simply fashioned from Blood and Will rather than Flesh and Bone. Quite naturally, your physique will tire. Do you wish to rest in the Spirit Core? This small one can maintain the immaterial effigy for you while you recuperate.>
I let out a tired breath as I sat, leaned back on my hands, and declined. <It’s just a lull. I can’t just vanish on these people in the middle of a battle.>
<Mm,> she mused. <Considering how important you have been for them, your disappearance would likely be quite a cause for alarm.>
<Why is it you instead of Sen?> I wondered.
<We switched out during the last skirmish. This small one wanted to observe the [Blood Effigy] in action. In its current form, it ranks at best in the Spiritual Refinement realm. To raise it to the Soul Refinement realm, several bottlenecks must be resolved.>
<Wait!> I yelped silently. <You can’t make it more powerful! Lady Tiana can only support so much!>
<Don’t forget, she has acquired a blood core worthy of a senior Elder. The instruction she receives from Lydia every night is raising her Blood magic level rapidly. When she reaches the equivalent of the Golden Core realm, the [Blood Effigy] as it now ranks will be unable to endure her power.>
Through Fan Li’s memories, I more or less understood the meaning of the realms. Her world formalized the stages of development for mortals pursuing immortality in her world. In numeric terms, the terms she used meant that my [Blood Effigy] was stage three, and Fan Li wanted to raise it to at least stage four because she figured Lady Tiana’s blood core was of sufficient strength to make her equal stage five once she could fully employ it.
Something about the captives had caught the interest of the Nanas. After orbiting them them for a long time, they would stop occasionally to chatter rapidfire to each other, using words from a language unknown to me. Through very multilingual Tiana, I knew every language spoken on this side of the Dragonsbacks, with the exception of a few minor tongues used beyond the fringes of Orestania, so the fact that their words weren’t intelligible to me seemed odd.
<The world is wide. We have no way to tell how much of it these creatures have seen,> Fan Li commented. <Lady Tiana’s knowledge is largely limited to Orestania and the countries on its border. And to the present day. These creatures could well be speaking in a tongue dead for thousands of years or spoken on the far side of the globe.>
Every once in a while, one of them would dash up close to a captive and say, “Sniff sniff!” in Dorian, while pretending to smell the fairy in question. The captives were gagged and tied, so they couldn’t retort. They could only glare back at the pixies, offended at the suggestion that they had an odor.
Then, all at once, they stopped circling and hovered side-by-side in one place, staring at one of the captives and propping their chins up with a fist while pondering, “””Mmmmmmmmm…”””
They shifted to another and did the same. I suspected it was no coincidence that it was the two fairies identified as carrying progenitors.
Without warning, the three abruptly abandoned the captives and zipped across to my position, spinning around me like I had become their maypole. Or perhaps their tetherball pole.
“Why demon?”
“Why demon?”
“Why demon?”
“Inside fairy strange!”
“Inside fairy new thing?”
“Inside fairy why?”
“New play?”
“New game?”
“New toy?”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Why?”
They kept watching me expectantly as they whirled around me, and I realized they would continue until I answered.
“The demons did it,” I told them, while forcing myself to just hold still and answer, so as not wear my neck out trying to follow them. “We want to remove them, but these fairies don’t like us, so they won’t let us.”
The mages wanted to cure the blindness first before removing the progenitors in the two infected fairies, so all of them would see the extracted gidim, but they had only removed the Dark spirits from two, neither being the fairies carrying progenitors.
On top of that, they actually wanted to wait for Melione’s return to cast the Healing form of [Purification], which was much more effective than the Light form that these mages could cast. It was still an open question whether the Light form could actually purge a gidim deeply rooted within a fairy.
“Demon trick?”
“Bad game?”
“Bad play?”
“Bad trick?”
“It’s… well, yes, that’s right. We don’t like what the demons did to them, so our mages will remove the parasites after they recover from the fighting. Right now they’re too tired.”
“””Mmmmmm,””” the three pondered once again. Then the one with bee wings stopped in front of my face and asked, “Auntie want chase away?”
The dragonfly-winged one dropped onto my right shoulder. “Auntie want demon gone?”
The butterfly-winged one sat on my left. “Auntie want no more trick?”
“No more bad?”
“No more smell?”
“””Nana help Auntie?”””
They watched me expectantly.
“Why are you calling me Auntie?” I finally demanded. Really I was getting tired of it.
“””Huh?”””
The sisters looked confused.
“Auntie Grandma Big Sis!”
“Grandma Big Sis Little Sis!”
“Right?”
“Right?’
“””Right?””” the three chorused.
Checking if I understood, I asked, “Is Kiki your grandmother?”
“””Grandma!””” they proclaimed together, happily confirming it.
That bizarre creature actually reproduced at some point. Knowing she had progeny made her seem just a bit more preposterous to me, somehow.
<Well, she’s from the ancient era, so it was bound to happen at some point,> Fan Li noted, sounding like she was chuckling.
“Grandma fun fun!”
“Grandma play play!”
“Grandma send Nana!”
“Teach Nana Auntie smell! “
“Nana follow!”
“Auntie here!”
“I… see.”
She taught them my smell, to find me? On reflection, they might be talking about my mana signature or my aura. That’s certainly what they actually sensed when they pretended to smell the captives. There’s no way they tracked me down according to my actual scent. According to Brigitte, I had none.
They hovered once again and asked, “Nana help Auntie?”
“Nana help Auntie?”
“No more bad bad demon?”
During the battle, I watched these three devastate the forest, so I figured they might just be able to do it, but I worried about whether the mages could capture the expelled creatures once they did. We still had to capture four Dark spirits and two gidim. The mages were tired and I wasn’t even sure if I could explain any of this to the pixies.
Urrit, who was listening this whole time, had the same thoughts. He wondered, “Do you think they would understand if we spent our energy on exorcising and capturing one Dark spirit?”
“I’m confident that they would understand what they saw, Mr. Fairling,” I answered. “But how do I explain that we want them to watch a demo first?”
I discussed it with Ladies Dilorè and Elhàn. Elhàn didn’t want to rely on them, but Dilorè insisted, “As long as these pixies keep causing the enemy grief, we can risk letting the mages deplete their mana. The faster we clean them, the better, after all.”
Elhàn wasn’t pleased with that suggestion, which seemed a little foolhardy on the face of it, and Elhàn outranked Dilorè, being an official fairy knight. But I had a feeling it would work, and I could add weight to Dilorè’s side, as the mysterious representative of the fairy princess Tiana. Apparently, my effectiveness in combat solidified my credibility.
“The main force should be rejoining us soon,” I noted. “That means that Arken, Lady Ceria, Melione, Princess Amana and Lady Chiara will all be here to relieve these guys of their combat responsibilities.”
“How soon?” Elhàn demanded.
I sighed. “Lady Dilorè, you can contact them, right?”
Soon, she established that the rest of the expedition had a little over a mile to go, although through thick brush, so Elhàn agreed to the plan.
Maybe I should mention here that during this entire conversation, the Nanas were zipping around our position, looking with curiosity at each person present, investigating any bugs they found, and finally piling into the hair of the captives and frolicking, perfectly aware that the bound fairies whose hair they were messing up could do nothing about it, and were steaming mad. The women were shooting them some amazingly deadly glares.
I called, “Nanas, can you come here?”
The trio came criss-crossing across the grass to where we had been holding our discussion.
“Auntie!”
“Auntie!”
“Auntie!”
The fairies gave me some amused glances, no doubt wondering how I picked up that name from the pixies.
“Can you call me Hiléa?” I begged them.
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Auntie Grandma Big Sis!”
“Auntie Auntie!”
I sighed and shook my head, wondering why I bothered. I had never heard a pixie use a name for anyone except themselves, after all. They seemed to choose a descriptive title for anyone else they wanted to name.
“We are going to remove a Dark spirit who is possessing one of our captives. We want you to watch us take it out and capture it. Then you can tell us whether or not you can do the same thing.”
The three propped their chins on their fists as they pondered, “””Mmmmmmmmmm…”””
“No kill demon?” Dragonfly Nana wondered.
“”Why?”” wondered her sisters.
“We want to take it out and show it to them. But first they have to have the Dark spirit removed so they can see it. Do you understand?”
They suddenly zipped away, circling all around and between the captives, before returning and buzzing around me again.
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Demon bad!”
“Spirit good!”
“Fun play!”
“Fun game!”
“Fun toy!”
I really didn’t want to know what Dragonfly Nana meant by that last statement. I held up my hands and pleaded, “Please hold on and let me tell you, okay?”
Strangely, this prompted them to line up in a neatly-formed echelon, facing me like dutiful little school children while they hovered with their hands folded. I guess this well-behaved act was just another game to them, though.
I cleared my throat and explained, “The Dark spirits are keeping the fairies from seeing demonic mana, so they can’t tell when demons are disguised as humans. And they can’t see the demons inside those two.”
“Oooooo….” Butterfly Nana replied.
“No see?” Dragonfly Nana asked.
“No smell?” Bee Nana asked.
“Right. In fact, the demons can’t even be seen by normal [Fairy Sight] because of stealth, although I bet you can see them.”
“Hide hide?”
“Demon secret?”
“Demon sneak sneak?”
“Exactly,” I confirmed. “So we want to take out the Dark spirits first, and free them from the spell they’re under.”
“””Ooooooh….”””
I waved Urrit Fairling over. “We’ll have Urrit do one, then you can say whether you can do it.”
He looked hesitant, so I asked him, “Have you recovered enough?”
“I’ll take another potion…” he muttered, digging into his bag.
“Wait,” I stopped him. The man looked deathly tired, after all. “Someone just needs to channel Light mana into one of those talismans, right? It’s the capturing part that gets complicated.”
Paused with the potion in hand, he nodded, “That’s right.”
The Nanas, by this time, had broken their formation to fly over and peek into his bag. He watched them nervously, but they didn’t touch anything.
“Does it have to be a human?” I wondered. “Can a fairborn’s mana power it?”
“Fairborn?” he wondered.
I pointed at myself. Honestly, I’m not a real fairborn. My actual mana signature is Elder. But there’s usually overlap in these things, and I possessed memories of Tiana using amulets that were made for human knights. I was guessing it should work.
He pondered, then nodded. “Fairborns are usually similar enough. It will probably work.”
“Give,” I said, holding out my hand.
“You’ll need one of the involuntary exorcism ones,” he muttered to himself as he put the potion back and dug for a talisman.
I won’t give a minute by minute description. Exorcising the spirit from the first fairy went the same as when Urrit exorcised Alwain’s follower, except the fairy I used it on was visibly distressed as it hit her, thanks to being the ‘involuntary’ type. The Nanas watched as two of the mages caught the spirit and showed it to the fairy and the pixies. They buzzed around it, asking the poor mages many difficult to decipher questions, rarely more than four words long.
Then the pixies each promptly exorcised and caught one of the three remaining Dark spirits, done easily and in about as much time as it took me to say this sentence, they came back with a spirit each to show the baffled mages.
Step one was already complete.
