“Asaren! Why did you leave like that? Someone left the village! You weren’t here! They escaped now!”

Nymph started yelling at me the moment I came back and got out of Ms Duloki’s sight. I immediately allowed my cold anger to take over as I turned to her.

“Well, at least you have enough sense in your head to not say stuff like that in front of others. Thank you for that at least.” I said and then placed my hand on the wall to create some stairs to get up to where everyone else was. Of course, it was Nymph’s body. She had the power to resist it, but it was pretty clear from her face that she was struggling.

“Asa! Didn’t you hear me!?” She yelled again, this time far less forceful and more panicked. “They got out! What are we going to do about the plan?”

“That was your plan, I made it pretty clear from the beginning that I didn’t like it. And besides, you stopped Eirlathion from talking about mine and Tia’s options for survival. You endangered us again. I made it pretty clear what would happen if you did that. Now, are you going to let me go upstairs?”

“WHAT?” Nymph shouted loud enough I actually cringed in pain. “Asa! What are you talking about? I… I… you said it yourself! If the queen finds out about you, they’re going to send someone to kill you!”

“According to what I’ve heard.” I gave Nymph a glair with all the hostility I could muster. “The reason why they kill grey elves like me is because the dark elves are afraid of us. We are a threat to them. That means convincing the queen we are more valuable to her than the people of this village is our best path to survival. Tell me. What makes me sound more valuable? Having the ability to fully tame an unruly [nymph] who hates the people of the village, or bending to the will of that [nymph] and giving it the mana to terrorize the people?”

Nymph’s face somehow became pale, an interesting trick considering the fact her projection was made of nothing but light. “Did… Asa, did you just call me a [nymph](sakitii)?” She looked absolutely devastated by the fact I had used the elven word for her species instead of calling her by name, even though her name was really just the English translation of the same word.

It seemed like this was quite a bit more effective than I thought it would be. While this was good in the moment, in the long term this was actually extremely bad. I had no idea she would be this sensitive to something like this.

Great. But I couldn’t back out of this now. I would have to try and fix whatever fallout may come of this later. For now, I simply maintained my brooding anger.

“I believe I told you last night.” I said with an icy chill in my voice. “If you endanger mine or Tia’s life again, I am going to really be angry and I am not going to forgive you so easily. Endangering our lives is exactly what you did when you made a scene in front of Eirlathion. This is what I look like when I am angry. Now, let me go up stairs.”

I heard Nymph’s tree body groaning for a while, and then there was suddenly a very loud crack. A large part of the ceiling exploded into splinters. Large wooden shards rained down all over the floor. I had to jump and flee across the room in order to avoid anything dangerous falling on top of me.

“WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?” I heard Rolwen’s voice shouting from above.

“THE FLOOR EXPLODED!” Levin answered.

As the dust cleared, I saw a small silhouette drop down from the upper level. I quickly identified it as Tia as she was looking around. Meanwhile, Levin and Rolwen were peering down from above.

Nymph’s projection suddenly materialized right in front of Tia. I hadn’t even noticed she had dismissed it. It approached her immediately.

“Tiiiaaaa…” She said in a voice that was half crying. “Tiiiaaa… heeeep! Mana, pleeeeaaas!”

Tia was clearly confused, but she immediately acceded to Nymph’s desperate tearful request. She dropped to her knees and put her hand on the wood-splinter covered floor. The hole that had just been created in the ceiling rounded off all of the rough splintered edges and made them all smooth.

“What happened?” Tia demanded.

“I… I’m soooowreee!” Nymph said. “I was mad and… *hic*”

I stepped forward to finish the explanation.

“Nymph and I got into an argument. It looks like she deliberately hurt herself in order to try and scare me.” I told her.

“Aaaa-saaaa!” Nymph whined and flew back over to me. She stopped up short and made a pouting face. I took a deep breath and did my best to school my face.

“Well, it looks like you really screwed things up here, didn’t you?” I scolded. “Yes, you did scare me, but it wasn’t because of the loud noise or the falling wood.” Actually, I had no idea what had happened. The noise and wood were the first things on my mind, it didn’t even register until later that she had resorted to self-harm in order to do that until I saw her begging for help in front of Tia. But, I wasn’t about to say that out loud.

“Nymph, I care about you. I do not want to see you hurting yourself like that.” I told her.

“Asaaa…!” She tried to hug me with her light projection, but it simply passed right through my body. A second later, some vines dropped down from the ceiling and hooked themselves under my arms and wrapped around my body. A second later, her light projection awkwardly tried to overlap the locations where the vines were as she continued to sob. I saw a wooden humanoid doll rise up from the floor, roughly taking the shape of a badly carved version of Nymph’s projection. It was clear she was asking me to hug her back.

I sighed. The wooden doll was kneeling. Due to the fact Nymph’s body looked like an 8 year old and I was still a 2 year old, this doll was still taller than me even while kneeling.

I reached up and placed a hand on the doll’s shoulder, and then closed my eyes.

“Nymph, I am sorry.” I said. “I did not realize just how much my using that word would upset you.” I let my words hang in the air, letting that apology stand on it’s own.

Nymph just continued to cry.

“I am still angry at you.” I said. “I have no intention to reward you for hurting yourself. I care about you too much for that. It is not a behavior I plan to encourage. So, I am even more angry at you right now than I was before.”

I reached down to the vines wrapped around me and pulled them off, then threw them to the side as I walked right through the body of Nymph’s light projection as though it wasn’t there.

I sighed. “I know I would be setting a bad example if I went outside right now. That would be me doing exactly the same thing I am telling you not to do right now. I would be putting myself at risk of harm, and it would scare you the same way you just scared me.” I told her. “I will stay inside for a while, and I will not be using my void energy to hide from you. But I want you to know, I am still very angry.”

Nymph made a small miserable sounding noise of acknowledgement. I did not look back at her projection, but I could imagine she must be pouting a bit. I wondered after all I’ve seen from her if she might be mature enough to recognize the small partial victory I had given her. She might even have a weak smile on her face right now for all I know.

I stepped carefully over the wood splinters with my bare feet and then sighed as I looked up at the hole that was left in the ceiling. Levin and Rolwen were still staring down at us from above.

Tia had taught us how to strengthen our bodies with our spirits over a year ago, and since then I had confirmed that all of us are a whole lot stronger than a toddler has any right to be. That said, my jumping height is only about 8 to 10 feet. That’s five times my body height, but nowhere near enough to get all the way up there. These sharp wood fragments creating a hazard all over the floor meant I would not be so willing to experiment with something that might have me landing back down here as well.

Of course, there was the option of having Nymph create some stairs, but taking that option after saying all that would damage the impact of my words a little. It would not be good to do that right now.

Tia seemed to sense my dilemma. She had been looking at me for a little while, and her face just suddenly broke into a smile of realization. She walked over to my side and then tapped me on the shoulder.

“Hey, I’ll help you up.” She said. To be honest, I was a little nervous about what she might be about to try, but I decided to keep my stony expression for Nymph’s sake and silently allowed Tia to bend down and put me on her shoulder despite being identical to me in height.

There was a problem with my position though. I was not on Tia’s shoulder in the riding position. She was leaning backward with me partially on her chest, and she had a hand on my butt in the hammer-throw position.

I only had enough time to mentally say the word ‘crap’ in my head as my thoughts were going into overdrive and trying to calculate for most likely possibilities. Either she throws me with a lot of power and I go flying up over the lip of the carved-out section of floor. If this happens, I might have to use my legs to bounce off the wall of the room above.

The next possibility is I manage to catch the lip that had been freshly smoothed out with Tia’s donated mana. If that happened, I would need to hold on and pull myself the rest of the way up.

Third possibility, I miss and come crashing to the floor down here. This is the worst case scenario due to all the wood splinters down here. Chances of having some of those things dig into my skin are probably high.

Before I can say anything to stop her, I feel Tia’s weight shift and the tension rise in her arm, and the next thing I know is I am sailing through the air. I pull up my knees and perfectly clear the lip of the hole in the ceiling, and then the arch of my momentum tops out a mere 3 feet above the floor.

I am able to land smoothly on the upper floor. My skirt hardly even rose up due to the bit of forward momentum I still had. The only thing that kept me from landing with perfect dignity was my own face that probably wasn’t quite as schooled as I hoped it would be after that momentary panic about what Tia was going to do.

A moment later, Tia jumped up here herself every bit as smoothly as she had just thrown me. Seeing her face allowed me to shake my head and laugh off how flustered I was there. “Tia, how the Sam Hill did you get so good at throwing?” I asked her.

She didn’t seem to know quite how to answer that. So, I just waved her off to say she didn’t need to.

“Alright then boys.” I said to Levin and Rolwen. “That was a pretty crazy incident just there, but let’s not let it control us. I say we get down to some training.” I wasn’t in the habit of unproductive brooding after all. Being mad at someone only governed my personal interactions with that one person. Outside of that, I was going to live my life as I normally would.