§ When I departed Cara Ita, I left trouble in the form of an asura in the hands of a young fairy knight who might have been even less qualified than I believed at the time. Poor Aenëe turned out to be merely a half-fairy who had somehow received enough of Oberon’s favor to get permission to call herself a …

§ I slowed my craft as I approached the Fairy King’s Castle and turned to enter a circular path around it. Naturally, I had already attracted an additional patrol, but I left it to Tamerà to sort matters out with them. Instead, I called up my memory of Oberon’s spiritual aura and sent a message to his mind. Your Majesty, …

§ It was my good fortune that Orestanian engineers prefer brass for handles, fittings and controls on machinery. If, for some reason, I wasn’t wearing my fairy mail gauntlets when an emergency came up, I could still grab the controls. This was a passing thought I had as I coaxed Reia into the air above the great paved combat ground …

§ 1-29-2022 Greetings, Readers. This is again your author, Eric Fretheim, online as Fushigi on this site and Discord, and as /u/ericthefred on reddit. With the preceding chapter, Volume Seven is complete. This afterword is being inserted after the fact (after completing Volume Eight!) so it will be short. Why didn’t I close volume seven properly back at the time …

. Goals and progress are important, but so is downtime. My plan for the afternoon for those three had been to let them decompress. Since we had held our fight in the time compression of the simulation system, and had used up essentially none of the afternoon, that plan was still on. Ryuu and Chiara returned to the pavilion by …

. True to his nature, Mr. Kowa did not hesitate. He charged while pulling his blade back to prepare for a strike. Meeting that enormous blade with a pair of cutlasses would normally be an act of suicide, and I wasn’t feeling particularly suicidal. Pouring additional Earth into my blades, I directed my friends to support my arms rather than …

. I kicked the ground in order to meet him with a parry while moving forward. The trick to fighting an opponent with great weight is physics. Momentum equals mass times velocity.  Force A times distance A equals force B times distance B. Power equals energy divided by time. In other words, you can match greater mass with greater speed. …

. Before Ryuu arrived, I had already made a few arrangements. Such as picking a different spot for our entry. Nothing required us to appear on the simulated North Island at the exact location of the simulation facility, so I had set the appearance point to the North Shore, which had a wide expanse of grassland ending in ten-pace-high cliffs …

. Lunch was Dorian cuisine again. The main dish was ginger pork and rice. The sides were a croquette and a mix pickled daikon, burdock root and carrot. Ryuu was genuinely surprised to find an umeboshi tucked into the rice, although I noticed a slight tinge of disappointment when he ate it. Something must have been different. Ryuu had been …

. Gugrenar rose into the air, finally fleeing the torture, and the trumpeters blasted out a loud chord, followed by a series of mini fanfares. I flew up to rejoin them and then the announcer declared their victory. The roaring of the stands had decidedly dimmed. The home team had just lost, after all. They wanted retribution, but this land was …