As soon as Grisella felt the fell Breath, she rushed ahead. There was a real fear that the worst may come to happen to her somewhat-friendly ticket to eternity and power.

Yet, what awaited her at the end of her race defied all of her expectations.

There was no time-old monster, masquerading as a toddler, captured or -Luminous Source forbid!- killed by a group of dark mages. Nor was it the bizarre scene of the same child, somehow stalling or even pushing said mages back.

No. Instead, what greeted her eyes was perhaps even weirder. Two fell Practitioners were being confronted, all right, but no child was facing them. Instead, it was a large group of men. Even from afar, it was quite evident that they were soldiers of some kind.

An entire company?

Of course, finding a military company close to the village was strange, but it wasn’t really that shocking. What was rather bewildering, however, was that their outfit didn’t belong to any Imperial troops that she knew of. Nor any of the Empire’s neighbors, for that matter. There was even a standard-bearer carrying the depiction of some bird of prey; either a hawk or an eagle, perhaps.

Suffice it to say, she couldn’t think of any nation, present or past, to which the symbol may belong to. And, among many other things, Grisella had once been a lecturer in the Imperial Academy of War, so she knew her heraldries rather well.

Leaving the soldiers’ obscure origin aside, though, even more shocking was that, despite being obviously well-trained, neither the men nor their weapons or armor seemed to have a single trace of Breath to themselves. Yet, they appeared completely fearless of the mages and -of all things!- were all forming in closed lines, with their flimsy, perfectly mundane shields for all protection. Even half-assed officers whose only merit was being born noble knew not to pit mundane troops against Practitioners! Not without both absolutely overwhelming numbers advantage and at least middling arcane support of their own, anyway. Even then, the standard practice was to have them disperse, as much as possible. Attacking in waves, from multiple angles, had the best chance of overwhelming a Practitioner. Or, more realistically, making them spend more Breath by widening the area their spells ought to blanket.

To have all of the mundane soldiers group together, in the same spot, was just...

Sitting ducks waiting to get blasted away by any Practitioner worth his or her salt...

From experience, she knew that the soldiers’ unenchanted shields would prove about as useful as sheets of paper, for all that they would help them. Even the most basic of spells available to a fell mage would go through thin wood or metal as if they weren’t even there...

Actually, the only explanation that she could find for the entire situation was that the soldiers’ commander had been assigned on the basis of nepotism alone. Or that they were an element so useless that they had deliberately been sent to die.

Grisella could only internally sigh. She wouldn’t make it in time.

The troops were confronting a small group of obvious Diabolists, who -judging by their almost-finished Weaves- were about to cast a handful of decently powerful spells against them... Well, ‘confronting’ might have been too strong of a word, for it implied there would be some sort of fight. What the dark mages were about to commit would be closer to one-sided extermination-

Only, it wasn’t.

Even as Grisella madly dashed ahead, in hopes that getting there even an instant earlier might allow her to save at least a few lives, her eyes widened in surprise. The mages unleashed their spells, for sure, but nothing happened. Instead of the hellish scene of severed limbs, rotting flesh, and falling corpses that she had expected, whenever any part of a Weave met shield, the latter endured and prevailed.

The sight was so surreal that she stopped dead in her tracks, her mind pretty much refusing to properly process what she was seeing with her own two eyes.

That is, at least until, having come closer to the elements at conflict, another small, little detail was revealed to her. It turned out that neither was quite as mundane as she had initially thought.

From afar, the men had occasionally seemed a bit odd, rough around the edges even. As she grew closer those oddities only increased, until her mind seemed to suddenly catch onto the ruse, so to speak. Suddenly, the illusion was over. Those were not men, at all. Phantoms, perhaps, Shadows. The kind of entities that usually only fell mages dealt with...

But then, why was she unable to feel even an iota of Breath coming out of them? It didn’t make any sense!

But, even ignoring the matter of fell Breath, revenants of any kind could only be enslaved by Necromancers, there was always a baleful aura coming out from them. ‘Resentment Against the Living’, the scholars called it. Just like ‘Dragon Fear’, it was ineludible and couldn’t be masked by any known means... Which, it was often speculated, was part of the reason Necromancers and their ilk had always been easy enough to rout. They couldn’t really infiltrate any important organizations and remain unnoticed.

Yet, the ghosts in front of her still felt as mundane to her mystical senses as they did before she had caught on to the ruse. Their expressions weren’t of forced, hate-filled subservience either. Instead, they still shared the same look she had seen multiple times among long-time comrades in arms.

And then there was the no small fact that the one ancient thing she had been looking for was floating inside one of the translucent creatures.

Darkness below...

What in the world was-

“Pila!”

The word was completely foreign to her, yet it was obviously a spell of some sort. Even if she couldn’t tell what it was aligned to, the resonance with Breath was unmistakable. Yet, what came after the brief incantation was not a careful Weave, nor the perfected harmony of a Gift. Instead, about half of the soldiers lowered their towering shields, only to unceremoniously throw a multitude of javelins at the mages.

The weapons zipped through the air at speeds that would only be achievable by an average Practitioner of the fifth or sixth circle, though. Or around the third, if it was one of those simpletons that forewent spells in favor of pure bodily enhancement, the so-called ‘Aryava Orthodox Arts’ practiced by most of the Landknights. Which was beyond strange, of course.

Grisella immediately attributed the spears’ swiftness to the unknown spell. She had seen things of the like. Perhaps some eclectic aspect of Wind used to accelerate the projectiles. Maybe, even blessing them with a truer aim.

Even if she assumed the boy had started working on them since his birth -and had some method to obfuscate it from her-, there was no way he could have gotten more than 2 or 3 Nodes, tops, in such a short time. And pure bodily enhancement was pretty much a non-factor, for obvious reasons.

Yet, just an instant later, her theory came to a swift end.

One of the mages conjured what seemed to be a pretty decent enchantment-mediated shield. It was the kind of solid defensive works that would demand even her quite a bit of effort to breach. At least as long as she wasn’t willing to spend a Gift on it. The spears didn’t seem to care, though. They went straight through the arcane barrier, as if it’d been naught but flimsy paper.

Well, most of the spears, anyway. A few had just vanished, somehow taking entire chunks of the conjured protection along with them into oblivion.

How in the Ten Names-

Before she even had time to wonder, the other conjurer took to the skies. Then, he revealed his hand. Judging by the large cloud of fell Breath he summoned, the Diabolist, was a fairly skilled one.

It was time for her to stop dawdling around and take the kiddie gloves off.

I’m dying~

Dying on the inside~

Ah! Nothing beats down on a newly rekindled ego quite like getting bested and kiddie-carried away by a frail old lady! A veteran lady who’s even aware you’re an old goat, nonetheless!

Despite her devastating exhibition of power, Grisella had proven pretty understanding, as far as my newly discovered ghost-summoning Skill was concerned. ‘It’s a Gift from a Node I just opened’ had sufficed. Well, at least temporarily. The face she had made had given me the impression I wasn’t completely off the hook yet. There were just more pressing matters at hand. Like a group of Necromancers and Diabolists gunning for our village.

Incidentally, those same circumstances meant we had to rush back home. Hence the need for the witch to carry me. She couldn’t well come back without me, and my stubby legs were simply incapable of keeping up with her.

“So...” I started, trying to distract my mind from the unavoidable ignominy. ”You said these ‘necromancers’ don’t take after the Source?”

Grisella didn’t even look down as she answered, for which I soon became thankful. “Yeah, fell mages in general don’t. Instead, they follow the Husk of Darkness, the impurities shed by the Source as it transcended across the physical Realms. Corrupt things that completely antagonize the benevolence of the Nodes...” Finally, she shot me a glance. “But, thanks to that, it’s pretty easy to tell the Fell apart. Any Breath around them just feels foul, stagnant.”

Fuck my life...

I’d been wondering a bit. But, it didn’t take a genius to guess that edgelord ‘Zekhron, the Threatening Depth’ probably didn’t belong to the same goodie-two-shoes group of ‘Xerbal, the Fair’ or ’Lahnav, the Lover’.