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The wail of the castle’s warning system held me in a paralyzing spell, as did Mireia’s ashen face and wide eyes while she gripped me around the waist.
A strange phrase came into my thoughts. ‘Air raid siren.’ I experienced yet another of those placeless memories that plagued me recently. In this one, I’m watching some sort of theater performance, incredibly realistic, of a scene in the midst of a horrific war. Strange alien air boats hounded the hapless infantry with magic attacks. The enemy that must have sent an entire battalion of combat mages in their flying craft, given the degree and scale of the magic attacks.
“My Lady!” Mireia called, which might have been her trying to snap me out of it, or perhaps it was still Rhea speaking through her. She had suddenly become less terrified, after all.
This sound really is the same as those sirens.
Literally the same. This sound which I could say with certainty I had never once heard before in my life, I could also say for a fact was the same sound as in that memory of forgotten things.
And other memories intruded as well. Traveling in vehicles I had never ridden. Operating vehicles I had never operated. Because those, just like these alarms, convinced me that they, or at least their design, had somehow come from another world. A world that I knew.
It was possible, right? Rhea and the others claimed my soul came from other worlds, living as those other personas that somehow depended upon me to be in this world.
“My Lady!” she practically yelled this time. “Pull yourself together! You’re terrifying Lydia! You’re terrifying me!”
Lydia? I hadn’t heard from her in some time, right? I had almost forgotten about her.
“Right,” Mireia declared, growing impatient. “Up you come!”
She swung her legs out of bed while hauling on my arm to make me stand with her. The jolt finally broke me out of my fugue.
In the process, I finally awoke to the dozens of warnings my senses were screaming at me as loudly as the sirens.
Deep contrabass rumbles, like someone beating a two-pace-diameter taiko drum, were coming to us more through our feet and chests than our ears. I couldn’t imagine what made such a noise, but it clearly would not be unrelated to the massive shield that had appeared over my castle. And my [Fairy Sense] warned of a dire presence beyond.
I cast it beyond the shield, looking to see what enemy my people faced, and began encountering swarms of gidim. If they made it through the shield, they would surely fall upon the minds of the defenders to magnify fear and doubt, or perhaps they carried actual spells to inflict physical damage.
A swarm of gidim doesn’t appear by happenstance. They would not be here in such thick quantities without an appalling number of handlers. I pushed further, searching for the handlers, and instead encountered a miasmic horror.
“My Lady, let’s get you to a safe place,” Mireia begged. I wondered exactly where she planned to take me in our chemises, then realized that if it was the goddess speaking through her, she probably hadn’t thought that part through. What does a goddess care about mortal modesty?
“Not unarmed,” I told her, and hurried to the wardrobe where my panoply hung. “Help me.”
I wasn’t going anywhere unarmed with a battle literally happening over my head. Mireia looked like she wanted to protest, then shook her head and cooperated. My armor is simple, and in a pinch, and with enough time, I can do it myself. I didn’t have time for that. I need help with very few parts of it in order to do it in a hurry.
Frustrated with my muleheadedness but not arguing, she helped.
Nobody had come for us, yet, but we had given orders not to disturb us, and it occurred to me that I could sense the maids outside, fretting over what to do instead of getting to safety. Once the difficult parts were on and I only had to pull on my stocking-like greaves, my gauntlets and my sabatons and equip my sword-belt, I sent Mireia to get them to go to safety.
“Yourself, as well,” I told her.
She shook her head as she went to the door. “I refuse, My Lady.”
A particularly loud explosion resounded from somewhere else in the building, and I glared at her, but she just glared back, so I just rolled my eyes and drew out the sword-belt while she was speaking to the maids. I couldn’t get mad about insubordination when it was almost certainly the goddess replying rather than my pink-haired Servant.
Following an old habit, I rested my hand on the pommel when I finished buckling it on, and immediately heard, <My Lady, put me back in the wardrobe.>
“I need a sword right now, and you’re it,” I answered.
<This castle is under a powerful demonic attack!> the sword argued. <I am the last thing you should be holding in your hand right now!>
Ignoring him, I strode toward the french doors.
“My Lady, it’s dangerous out there!” Mireia protested, rushing across the room to catch me.
“I can’t tell what’s going on out there without my Sight,” I answered. “Too much interference.”
She clutched onto my arm, but of course, she’s mortal, and a relatively weak one at that so she wasn’t going to stop. She couldn’t overcome the strength of a fairy or a vampire, much less the combination. But I had to let her hold me back to avoid injuring her hand.
“I’ll use [Vampire Cloak] on both of us,” I told her, putting my hand behind her shoulder as I opened the doors and pressed forward while casting the skill. “Nobody will see us.”
As we stepped out onto the balcony with my stealth in force, the sword began talking to me again.
<My Lady, you still don’t remember how you found me, do you? I’ll tell you about it right now, so please listen carefully.>
The very same scene that appeared over the summit in the Highlands confronted me now above my own castle. I stared at the sky without replying to him. The roil of unworldly demonic clouds running to the horizons, the horde of demons, the demonic mana…
<My Lady, you found me deep under an abandoned temple of Eurybia. My previous wielder had brought me there while clutching the last of shreds of their sanity, to beg the goddess for release from the curse that the demons had wrought on me.>
Mireia pressed into my side and shivered. Few mortals have the ability to properly see mana, but her strange origins turned her into one of those few. She wasn’t seeing everything I saw, but she saw enough to terrify her.
But as I reinforced my [Fairy Sight], I perceived that this vision of hell was, in part, an illusion. Such a wide cloud of manifested demonic mana could never exist, even if one pulled every bit of it available in the whole world. I saw now that the part above the castle was indeed real, but the parts extending to the horizons were like the trick of placing two mirrors facing each other. The hall-of-mirrors illusion repeated itself across the sky to form this terrifying sight.
But as hard as I stared, I could not find the demons an illusion. They were real. How did they come here so easily? Another attack like the one from the harbor? But our inspections of river traffic were now done by the Army. Such a force could not possibly approach without warning.
Durandal never stopped his tale while I surveyed the enemy…
<Four thousand years ago, Demon King Orgoth crafted a terrible curse to turn spirit weapons into engines of chaos. It even worked on a holy weapon such as myself. And through me, the Hero Mizky became cursed, and when she died, other warriors encountered me and were cursed likewise. I do not know how many I destroyed. I only know that it lasted until one particularly strong warrior resisted me for long enough to reach an abandoned temple far from the living and pray for release, fortuitously leaving me stranded far from anyone I could curse next.>
… And every word brought with it a memory. This was not my first time hearing this story.
In the distance, from different directions, squadrons of hippalektryons and sea-wyverns approached, their embedded mages already firing ranged attacks. Demons angled to intercept them while others fired upon the castle defenses. Pendorian weapons firing from the castle burst midair, attempting to disrupt the flying beasts, with limited effect, while the demons rained attacks down on the castle’s immense magic fields.
<You saved me by pouring immense quantities of [Purification] into me, My Lady, but if you face a demon in possession of Orgoth’s curse again, you may not manage it! You must not do it!>
“I remember,” I answered, with a nod. “I remember purifying you.”
“My Lady?” Mireia wondered, confused.
<You actually called me a rusty old bludgeon. I’ll have you know I don’t rust. It was just four thousand years of grime encrusted upon my steel.>
The old man sounded a bit bitter about it. I nearly had to suppress a laugh. Then I had to push the thought aside. Above me, a demon slammed himself and his flying beast into the shield, detonating mana amid the collision. A second followed, striking the same spot with the same attack as the first rebounded away.
I had an idea what they planned and pulled Mireia back into my bedroom.
“Ti!” my husband hollered as I dropped the [Vampire Cloak]. I forced myself to stand and take it as his arms wrapped me up, trembling with anxiety as they squeezed me to his chest.
I mean, I had to let him do it. It was my fault he was alarmed, right? He’d come into the bedroom and neither I nor Mireia was anywhere to be seen, with the french doors standing wide open in the middle of a battle.
“I was just in stealth, Your Highness,” I told him firmly.
“You’re going to shelter, right now!” he declared.
But before I could refuse, a heavier thump than any prior noise rattled everything in the room. A baleful red-golden light blazed in through the windows. A moment later, a rakshasa landed in a horse-stance crouched, cocooned in a halo of lightning, while grinning ear-to-ear at me with his hideous face.
The tiger-stripped demon had ludicrously large fangs and massive claws gripping a spear, his face a hideous mockery of human features twisted into a beast-like visage, his upper body naked except for many heavy gold chain necklaces, his arms in gold rerebraces, his lower body in a kilt with a ridiculous amount of gold embroidery…
I immediately threw my husband off, toward the door into the next room. While drawing Durandal, I ordered him and Mireia, with a dose of Command, “Go to the shelter, now!”
The hole the demons had ripped in the castle’s shield would be healed up already, but I knew what they had done. Several demons had sacrificed themself, slamming into the shield to create a weak spot that this creature could blast his way through. I summoned several elements in the greatest quantities I dared, then dashed forth toward the creature.
A rakshasa has more than one definition in the Royal Knight’s bestiary. Demonologists claim he’s a male asura, while scholars insist he’s a humanoid demonic beast. It doesn’t matter which definition you choose, though. They both advise that a knight should not attempt to take one on, alone.
The manual doesn’t consider the possibility of the knight being a fairy knight though.
For some reason, the amount of Earth and Water I drew was many times what I intended. I couldn’t imagine where it was all coming from. But as I filled my pathways and the blade with it all, I felt completely natural controlling it.
Because I had done it before, right? I had fought with this blade, and battled at this level already. Recollections of working with Durandal while calling out his attacks spilled forth from my memory.
As the demon or demonic beast dashed forward while raising his spear to attack, I propelled myself with Wind across the room, stretching out a single step into a three pace leap, and sent a slash of Earth mana into him with a mighty swing.
The railing of the balcony had magical reinforcement on it. Either Mother or my father must have done it themselves, because it held up when the massive creature slammed into it. He instead flipped over the railing and out into mid-air, where he recovered and used mana below his feet to control his slide as he manifested wings.
“Fairborn deviant!” he yelled with a hoarse, rasping voice as he came to a stop. “I’ll be taking your head to my king!”
I planted my foot on it and leapt after him while growing my own wings. As I charged Durandal with more mana, I sorted out the names of his magic attacks, doing my best to ignore all the other things tumbling forth from my memory in a gushing torrent I had no time to deal with. I focused only on picking out the vital information of how to use the attacks.
<My Lady Tiana! Please stop!> I heard Lydia, who had been absent for so long, begging me. I understood, but I had no power to stop what she wanted me to stop. I could only slow it down as my mind insistently, greedily latched on to all the knowledge that was flooding back to me.
The rakshasa had recovered and was calling Aether into his spear in devastating quantities. I had no time to dwell on the past with the present threatening so dangerously. I pointed the blade at the recovering demon and chanted, “[Holy Smite!]”
