As much as I would’ve loved to remain in bed for the entire morning alongside Daniella and Maya, I had things that needed to get done. So I disentangled my limbs from their embraces, gave each a kiss on the forehead, and then made myself clean with a stray thought. I’d take a proper bath later.
Once I was dressed in my cosplay outfit again, I made my way out of the tower bedroom and descended to the dining hall. I found Riko already there, sitting beside the older gentleman who’d been talking about radio frequencies the other day.
“You’re up early.”
“I’ve got reconstruction efforts to assist with. Seemed a little indulgent to sleep in multiple days in a row without an excuse. What about you two?” I cast a sidelong glance at the otherwise empty dining hall.
The older gentleman responded first, with a rueful smile on his face. “The beds here aren’t… kind.”
Fair enough. It made sense that someone in his age range had worries like those.
Riko just shrugged. “I’m an early riser.”
Sheesh, I mentally sighed, Riko is studious, thoughtful, and all-around responsible. Definitely wife material. I’ll have to try harder to keep her close before someone steals her away.
“And you two are the only ones awake this early?” I tried to make simple conversation while glancing into their bowls of breakfast. Unflavored wheat porridge, maybe? I’d be skipping breakfast for sure.
“The young’uns are all wiped out from their training. Or just the types who sleep in a lot.”
“What Yamanaka-san says is, unfortunately, true. The instructors for combat drills should be waking up the first group soon, though. I doubt today will be as well received as yesterday was. Especially with the four missing people.”
Distractions plus magic and combat training? Yikes.
I grimaced, sitting beside Riko and gathering my thoughts. “I’ll be away most of today. And since we don’t have long-distance communication, I won’t be easy to reach. If there’s trouble, find some way to get my attention? Flares? Even smoke signals. Just know that I’ll keep my eyes and ears open.”
“I can manage that, actually.” The older man, Yamanaka, said. “Got some basic Fire magic down. I can throw sparks into the air pretty high. They’re not quite fireworks, but you’ll hear and see them from a good way off.”
I nodded to him with a smile, then took Riko’s hand and gave it a brief kiss across the knuckles. “Stay safe.”
“You too.”
I reminded myself that I’d need to find her a pair of prescription lenses eventually. Her eyes looked a bit more irritated than they’d been the day before. Part of me couldn’t wait to see her activate her true nerdy mode. It was a guarantee to be quite cute.
I departed with a wave, slipping out of the dining hall, then out of the castle not long after. I wreathed myself in wind, then lifted off the ground and soared over the walls. I noted an ostentatious carriage below, sitting outside the front gates, and lowered myself to listen in on what was happening.
A middle-aged brunette was standing in front of the guards, airing all her grievances with a polite volume, but the words cut like glass to the ear. She didn’t shout or scream, but she was definitely angry.
Beside her was a younger woman, though she stood expressionless and dead-eyed. Her stare was vacant, and her neatly folded hands and squared shoulders spoke of decades of etiquette lessons, otherwise known as the ‘polite’ repression of her personality.
I drifted lower, and caught the gist of the tirade more clearly. They wanted to speak to me. Something about her daughter being forced to grow up without a father? Interesting, when the woman’s daughter appeared to be in her mid-twenties.
The least I could do was cut the poor guards a break, so I interrupted. “I’m not setting that fool of a duke free.”
All eyes turned to me, and I saw momentary shock spread on the younger woman’s face, though it vanished within moments.
“Excuse me? Do you know who you’re speaking to, common-born sludge?”
I glanced at the mother briefly, shaking my head. “You should watch your tone, Duchess. Even your king could not command me with his authority, which means I am higher born than even him. Your husband lives within an illusory prison he has the power to break, if only he could give up his own greed. For so long as he cannot free himself, he does not deserve to rejoin society.”
There was a flicker of something in the young woman’s dead eyes, but again, it vanished too fast to take in. Curiosity hit me as I wondered what she was like beneath the mask she wore.
Before the older woman could reply, I cut in over her. “I have business to attend to. Urgently. I’ll be taking my leave now. But first…” I flew in close, reaching out my right hand, and rubbing a thumb beneath the young woman’s eye, as if wiping away a tear that wasn’t there. “Just how long have you been crying for your cheeks to have long become dry? You’ve felt this way all your life, haven’t you? Think your life over, then come find me, and I’ll free you.”
It wasn’t the clearest message, but the words weren’t mine. I had felt something in her eyes tugging at me, similar to the feeling of my Liberation Aspect, but entirely different at the same time. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but when I’d gotten close enough, it was like everything happened without my input.
She looked at me properly for the first time. Her amber eyes locked on mine with a startling depth and clarity. She didn’t speak, but something within her moved, and she regained a bit of life from it.
I turned from the indignant mother and her stifled daughter, then rose into the air, shooting off like a comet towards the construction crews that had gathered to clear debris and continue patching damaged buildings. I couldn’t do much for broken windows, but bricks and quarried stone? I could pull that from the planes.
Deliverywoman Li’erz, on the scene! Or something like that. It was boring, so I had to entertain myself somehow.
There wasn’t time for me to sit down and chat with every crew, but I’d already gone through the reports the day before, and I knew roughly what materials most areas needed.
In a loosely outlined order of importance, I flew by, made a show of pulling materials from the planes, then stopped to wave at the adoring crowds before moving on.
It was nice in many ways. Having people cheer at me, their flying Mage Heroine, while I did something simple like dropping off construction supplies. It gave me a lot of cover, given that I was so publicly making my display. Word had spread fast about the hero summoning, and not even two days later, I was there, helping them.
It wasn’t without downsides. I was being followed, though the ones doing the following didn’t know I could sense them. It was easy to tell, though. Most people just didn’t move as fast as they did. If I had to guess, they were specialists of some form, and they managed to keep up with my flying decently well.
For the most part, they had my hackles up and eyes on the skies over the castle. Anyone keeping tabs on me had a reason, and I could only think of two. One was to target me, and the other was to keep an eye on me while someone did something to the conventioners. That would become quite obvious once I went for my last stop.
I’d been flying around and dropping off supplies for hours. Noon had come and gone, and I finally found my way out to the damaged roadways. They were the biggest project for me, as I’d be doing the entire repair job myself, rather than leaving materials for someone else to use.
It meant leaving the city, and venturing into the woods. Which was when the pursuers made their move.
I felt a vague discomfort in my chest as an unnatural heat settled into my body, and I purged the foreign influence with a grimace. I was apparently too slow to react, because my mortal shell decided a coughing fit was the next course of action I would take.
Eight mages stepped from the trees with mocking grins and leering eyes. One of them had conjured fire inside my lungs, choking my oxygen supply and giving me a direct dose of smoke inhalation. The rest assumed that the fight was already over.
They were wrong.
I forced all the smoke out of my lungs and pulled fresh air into them from the plane of wind. I only offered a brief warning of “too little, too late,” before returning violence with extreme violence. The words barely left my mouth before my body flared with raw lightning, detonating the tree I was standing beside and instantly riddling three of the mages with shrapnel that punctured their bodies.
Only one of the mages reacted quickly, chanting a swift spell. “[Wind Blade]!”
I curled my fingers, thoughts traveling faster than the oncoming blade, hauling a raw chunk of stone from the planes to block. The fire mage tried his trick again, but I retaliated the moment reality started to bend, and he lost his spell as he was encased in a conflagration that caused horrific screams to escape him.
All the while, I was preparing my true spell. As before, the best mages could multitask. Throwing raw elements while they composed their real spellwork in the background.
A large ritual circle knit itself into existence beneath the small battlefield, and all the attempts to work magic ended abruptly. All except for mine.
I sighed, despite the lingering pain it caused. “You don’t get it, do you? I’m not really the merciful type. It’s just not part of the playbook I learned. Why did I let the duke live? Why didn’t I kill anyone before now? It was because… I just don’t want my cherished ones to have that kind of opinion of me. I’m sure they’d accept me just fine if they knew, but that isn’t the way I wanted to make my first impressions.”
I encased their feet in stone before they could run.
“But now, they’re in the city. And I’m out here.” My voice dropped low, turning predatory. “With no witnesses.”
I snapped my fingers, and all of them turned to ash as [Disintegrate] hit them.
Then I looked up into the sky, where reality was being warped on a larger scale. There were five more mages there, two wind mages that worked to hold the whole group in the sky, and three earth mages that were trying to draw a huge mass of stone from the planes to drop on my head. I could see the sweat beading their brows despite the vast height they were at.
I could handle them now, but what’s the most poetic way to handle this? Ah, that’s the perfect idea!
After a full minute, the stone began to fall, and I watched it come, slowly growing larger in my view. Then the world slowed as I turned up my perception properly, and to an observer, I blinked into the air near the mages. The moment after that, they all vanished as I leveraged my enhanced speed to relocate them to where I had just been standing. Where my ritual circle was still nullifying the magic.
There was a distant thunderous boom as the rock hit the ground, and I sighed.
When I turned my gaze back toward the city, I saw a lone figure perched in a tree nearby, facing me. She wore royal guard armor, had a curved blade on her hip, and her eyes shone with silver and gold.
“No witnesses?” Fukushi asked as I descended to meet her.
“I can make an exception if you promise not to tell anyone. Otherwise, you might have to disappear.” Not that I meant it. Mostly. I couldn’t decide if I liked Fukushi enough to let her live at the expense of Riko’s opinion of me. It was a very close contest.
“Very scary, Eileen Singer. And after I came all this way to warn you.”