Mike Followed Crosse back across the bridge that leads to Ina’s home. The inert hunter’s bow still clutched in one hand, though he didn’t need it as he had before, his leg no longer feeling numb, had Ina cleansed the medicine that was numbing him as well?

As they reached the other end of the bridge Mike looked back at the tree as he saw a flash of light from the corner of his eye. Light Magic was pouring from the tree at the point where the bridge protruded, running across it.

Mike took a few steps back in surprise, afraid that the Magic was coming for him, but as the wave of Light Magic reached the meeting point of the bridge and the walkway it stopped. Mike watched as the Light sunk into the bridge and the walkway they began to glow with a different kind of Mana, the brown of wood mana.

The wood of the bridge began to change in the same way that Mike had seen Ina do on a smaller scale. It looked almost to be growing in reverse, separating from the walkway a railing rising to fill the gap. Mike watched as the whole bridge retracted into Ina’s tree, leaving only a smooth patch of wood where it had been.

Mike just stood and stared for a second. He hadn’t been able to sense the spell, but that had to have been an absolutely insane amount of mana. How much did Ina have? Or was she storing it somehow? Mike shook his head, he had no way of knowing besides asking her.

“Quite the sight isn’t it?” Crosse asked, breaking Mike from his thoughts.

“Yeah, you weren’t kidding when you said she was strong enough to defend this place on her own,” he answered. She was apparently strong enough to resist the direct influence of a god. Mike wondered what level the AI would give her if he understood what the AI wanted him to do, he needed to kill at least three beasts to be able to get that information just for them. He hoped he didn’t have to do the same for Humans and Elves.

“It is interesting how you always seem to react to Magic before it happens, though,” Crosse said, raising an eyebrow and smirking at Mike.

Mike’s eye twitched, yeah, he had been doing that a lot. He might need to do some explaining soon, if not to Ina then to Crosse.

Crosse continued along the walkway, heading towards a different bridge than they had crossed previously. He leads Mike through the Village of Inasholme, not stopping as they crossed between trees and went upstairs to higher levels to reach another bridge that connected to a different tree.

They eventually came to a tree that Mike saw had several people dressed very similarly to Crosse, in leather padded fabric clothing and carrying bows, most of them the now distinctive hunter’s bows, made of wood that seemed to be still alive.

Before they entered they stopped on the bridge, Crosse turning to speak to Mike, “this is the hunter’s tree or hunter’s barracks, all the hunters live in this tree with their families, making it by far the best-defended part of the city. Be on your best behaviour, depending on what Gonal said or did on his way back they may be… mourning, in their ways,” Crosse explained.

Mike nodded and they continued, as they walked up the tree, across walkways and upstairs. Mike looked at the hunters. They were not the majority of people, even here, but they were certainly more common here, as he hadn’t seen them anywhere else in the village. There were both men and women, Mike found as he saw a pair of women in the hunter’s garb leaning against a railing and talking, their bows in hand.

They went up five sets of stairs before Crosse walked toward one of the doorways in the side of the tree, parting the curtain of metal leaves as he entered. Mike followed him through and looked around the new room.

It wasn’t overly large, and it appeared to be triangular, a bed large enough for one sunk into an alcove in the left wall. The right wall had shelves indented into it, much like Ina’s study had had, they were filled with books, though there were much fewer here and they appeared to be of lower quality than the metal-bound books of Ina’s.

Mike leaned the inert bow against the wall by the door then made his way towards the shelves, wanting to get a closer look. He had yet to try and read anything in this world, and he had a hunch that worried him.

As he was close enough and looked to the text on the spines of the books his worries were confirmed, it was written in a language that he didn’t understand. He was processing this when he felt a notification from the tattoo, He was sincerely hoping that was a Reading Skill, cause not being able to read would suck.

Mike really wanted to open the notification but before he could Crosse spoke up, “Welcome to My humble abode, you can stay here as long as you need,” he said, and Mike turned to look at the man. He had placed his bow in the corner a corner of the room, leaning up against what seemed to be a hand-carved rocking chair, one of the first pieces of furniture Mike had seen that wasn’t part of the tree.

As he watched Crosse grab a short wooden object off a spot on the wall. Mike took a step closer and saw that it was a wooden key, about handspan long and with the appearance of an old tumbler key, with two teeth of different lengths on one end and a ring on the other, which had been used to hang it.

Crosse walked to the wall which had his bed in it and ran the key-like over the wall in a rectangle shape very similar to the size of the alcove that housed his bed, then he used the key to write something in the rectangle. The key left no marks in the wood of the tree, but Mike saw a trail of brown mana wherever the two touched. Another casual piece of Magic.

“In the morning, when Lady Ina reconnects her tree to the others, any alterations we request be made to our rooms with the room keys are made,” Crosse explained and Mike nodded in interest.

After replacing the key Crosse moved to to the chair. “Now let’s get that bandage off you,” Crosse said, taking off his pack, and kneeling by the chair to rummage through it.

Mike nodded and made his way over, taking a seat in the rocking chair, something he hadn’t done in years. Crosse took out a pair of shears from his pack. He started to cut away the bandage on Mikes's leg, then spoke.

“So, why is the god of the High Elves so interested in you?” Crosse asked, more bluntly than Mike had been expecting

Mike sighed, he had to make a choice. Trust Crosse with everything or keep hiding as much as he could. The hunter seemed to be a good man, he had helped Mike without asking for any real compensation and had brought him to his home to stay.

He had expressed intentions to train Mike in the manner of these hunters, as he likely had Connor before him. Mike looked to the bow he had leaned against the wall by the door. Crosse had seemed sincere in his confession of guilt for Connor’s death. Mike didn’t know if Crosse was to blame, the whole situation was a mess.

He did know that if Crosse had stayed with Connor that He would be almost certainly have died, bleeding out from the head wound after having killed the peryton. He felt like he could trust the man that owned up to that though, despite not needing to explain anything, hiding it behind Mike’s lack of understanding for the language.

So he started to speak.

***

Ina sat in her chair, the feeling of the tree comforting around her as she wrote notes on her meeting with the strange boy that Crosse had brought. Her quill making dark lines of ink into letters as she ran it over the page. The boy had been very interesting, he spoke GIldaic better than Crosse did, as if he was raised in the capital, which for a human was absurd.

His story of being held by Ailish herself was also very interesting. A frown touched her lips as she thought of Ailish. The girl had been an acolyte of Light when she had left the empire, though Ailish hadn’t even been born when she left the Searers. She had risen quickly in the ranks and had been praised for her, ‘divine disposition.’

A fancy way of saying that she was almost as greedy for knowledge as Light himself, and likely had even fewer compunctions on how it was obtained than he did. She had certainly lost a rather great prize for him this time though. This Mike seemed to have some kind of Spirit bonded to him, one that could protect itself and him from the full force of her examination, and that she had no experience with or knowledge of.

She only knew that it seemed to be linked to that tattoo that had been revealed by her examination spell. A Dark Magic Illusion, it had hidden in the manner of the Dark Elves, was it a spirit of Dark mana then? That would explain why the Dark Elf had helped the boy escape.

Pain tried to protect Dark mana Spirits as best he could, though that usually meant just keeping them away from other spirits, who very much disliked the Spirits of fear, pain, and obscurity that they usually were.

Ina suddenly felt a presence from within her soul and then her Magic escaped her, not under her control, coalescing behind her into a complex illusion. She clenched her jaw in annoyance, knowing that her eyes were currently slitted, like that bastards. She took a deep breath and didn’t try to take control back immediately.

Instead, she stood and faced the illusion. It was of a High Elf Like man, who was very obviously not a High Elf. Oh, he had the golden skin and pointed ears, his hair even brighter, yellow-golden, long and loose. But he also had horns. Long curved horns that rose swept back over his head and fine scales that covered his cheeks and ran down the side of his face to be concealed by his robes.

Lastly were his eyes, they were beacons of light that illuminated the room in front of him, Ina looked into them. No High Elf feared the glare of the even the sun, and these were not it's match.

“What do you want, Light?” she asked.