Marilou's black hair hung down her back. She reached out to feel at herself and only then discovered how bare she was.
"Wait a moment."
Marilou hurriedly wrapped herself in the sheet and pushed at the door, hustling Viya out.
Slow on the uptake, Viya only then registered that Marilou hadn't been wearing anything.
You couldn't really blame her for being slow. What difference was there between Marilou's front and her back?
A few minutes later Marilou came out again, dressed, and asked in a sly little voice as they walked.
"What exactly did you see just now?"
Viya thought about it and answered honestly. "Your back."
"Oh, only my back."
Marilou let out a long breath of relief, and then very quickly noticed something wasn't right. What she'd had turned toward her was plainly her...
Good grief. Good grief. Was she really that barren?
Marilou looked down at herself. There was a curve to it, at least. It just wasn't very obvious first thing after waking.
They came to the dining room, and Viya gestured at the meal that had long been laid out.
"That's your breakfast for today. We leave when you've finished."
Marilou drew out a chair and set to eating. In the course of it she observed Viya and found her simply sitting there without touching her cutlery.
"Aren't you hungry?"
"I've eaten. Take your time; I'm studying the map."
Viya held the drawing in her hands. The Silent Ridge lay squarely on the road back, and going around it would be difficult, though not entirely impossible: she could make the carriage fly, which was no great problem for her.
It would simply add a great deal of unnecessary drain.
Or else she could walk into the forest right now, the disadvantage being that she might startle the grass and alarm the snake, unless she used the saturation strike the academy faction was so fond of.
That counted as a decent method.
Viya drank a mouthful of coffee and decided to take Marilou out to be tempered a little after all.
"Marilou, today we're passing through a stretch of badlands. Remember not to get down from the carriage at any point."
"Is it dangerous?"
Viya nodded. "We'll be going through the Silent Ridge. There have been incidents of magic beasts attacking people there recently, and by rights going around would be the safe choice.
"But looking at the attack reports that have come in lately, the danger in the other several routes is nothing to overlook either. The Silent Ridge is at least a place we've surveyed, so it's marginally safer."
Marilou bit into her cheese bread. She'd more or less understood what Viya said: the carriage had to pass through somewhere badly policed, where magic beasts attacked.
Shut up in the Temple all day, Marilou's grasp of the dangers outside stopped at the level of rational analysis.
Which is to say she had been very well protected and had never once left the Temple.
It took her a long while to construct any picture of what danger ought to look like, and she chose her words. "Could we not go?"
"I'll prepare you several more ways of staying alive. It's only a Tier 5 Moonlight Wolf; that should be defensible. Besides, when the contract really does end, you'll have to take the same road when you leave. Treat it as getting used to being outside."
Seeing that there was truly no pushing it away, Marilou simply nodded.
After the meal she went back to her room, packed a few changes of clothes, followed Viya downstairs and boarded the carriage, which rolled slowly out toward the outside world.
Compared with previous outings, this one had not a single binding measure on it. In other words, Marilou could have made a clean escape while Viya went to wash her hands.
But she had no desire whatsoever to leave, and simply lay in the carriage with her eyes shut, resting. The road ahead was long, and sitting up the whole way only made your backside sore.
She turned over and found Viya calmly drinking tea. Pulling the curtain aside, she could see the scenery running backward in the distance.
Viya was studying the many matters awaiting her at home and had no attention at all to spare for Marilou.
Better if she ran. If she didn't, that was normal enough too; the carriage was traveling through open wilderness, and no ordinary person would go wandering off out here.
There was a good deal of food aboard. For the first several days the carriage rolled steadily along, entering the rubble country a few times.
The attendant carriages around them would send people out to keep the main carriage safe. Ordinarily there would have been no problem at all with Viya bringing attendants when she traveled, but this was private business, and she couldn't use the state's soldiers on it.
Those who came with her were formation mages and a number of archers, there to detect whether monsters were nearby.
Marilou yawned. Looking out of the window at the sweep of fiery red, she thought Viya's initial worry had been entirely unnecessary. The firepower they had brought along was far too heavy; what magic beast with no eyes in its head would come and attack this?
Back to sleep.
And just as Marilou was about to roll over and sleep, a huge rumbling came from outside the window.
Away in the distance, a bolt of thunder came down in front of the carriage. The crown of a huge tree was struck, laying its blackened trunk bare.
"Careful. We're under attack."
Several formation mages in plain clothes raised their staves and closed around the horses to keep them safe.
Viya pulled the curtain aside and looked toward the lightning strike in the distance. She glanced back at Marilou. "Stay here. I'm going to take a look."
Marilou nodded her head off. She wanted to go and gawk too, but considering she would in all likelihood be cannon fodder, she shrank back again and only watched Viya's retreating figure blur bit by bit.
"Your Holiness, we noticed lightning striking continuously out there, and force of that order is highly unusual. It's as though a monster is breaking through nearby, or else the cultists from the earlier reports are active here."
Viya looked at the black cloud in the distance, her brows drawn together.
"Cloud that dense looks about to form fresh lightning."
"Guard the carriage. I'm going to take a quick look. Don't act unless you must; we don't want complications."
Viya reached the center of the strikes. The further in she went, the stranger the shapes of the trees became, and the more bones lay on the ground. It was worse than she'd imagined.
"How can there be this many bones here..."
Viya looked up at a rocky outcrop in the distance, and only on drawing closer did she find it covered with monster corpses giving off the stench of death.
The further in she went, the more corpses there were, nearly piled into hills.
Following the traces of the thundercloud, Viya moved swiftly among the mounds of bodies until her eye fixed on a corner giving off points of light. She held her breath and closed on it slowly, and then saw, on the blackened ground, two withered treants like dry firewood pounding a magic core apart with all their strength.
Every time those deadwood palms came down on the core, thunder rang out once across the sky.
At their feet was a magic beast whose fur had not entirely sloughed away. Viya's stomach twisted, and the reek grew stronger.
A shattered magic core affects the mind and spirit of anyone near it, and draws the surrounding monsters in as well.
"They can't be allowed to go on harming the mortal world."
Light flashed in Viya's hand and she blasted it at their foreheads. In the space of a spark, the monsters' bodies burst apart.
"Dealt with?"
Viya was about to step forward when, in the next second, everything changed.
The ground shook again. The monsters that had just gone down stood back up, their necks giving off the crack of splitting wood, and turned their heads, crimson eyes fixing as one on Viya.