“Where—Where am I?” A young lady was walking dazed within a dark area, her emerald hooded eyes blinking wildly as she took stock of her situation—one minute, she was with everyone at the training grounds, the next, she was all alone in an eerie forest of dead trees.
‘I need to light a torch,’ she thought.
The luminous blue glow emanating from the surroundings wasn't enough to see far. Ariene picked up a branch and naturally tried to manifest a flame, but when she mustered up her mana, a powerful feeling of lethargy caused her to drop to her knees.
“I—What’s going on!? Why can't I use my magic!? Why!?”
Her stomach churned, cold sweat passed over her and she shuddered after repeated attempts to spark a flame, but not so much as a flicker appeared. Her slender limbs that were always saturated with mana, they had never felt so dry and enfeebled.
‘No! This can’t be! Work! Why won’t it work!? Without my magic, then–!? …Mother…’ Ariene’s fingers dug into the ground; her breath staggered as she felt it difficult to get air into her lungs. Why was this happening to her? Even her burning vines weren’t responding to her call.
For the first time in a while, Ariene Diadora recalled a fear from when she was a frail young girl. She grabbed at her chest, hit by a sudden pain and tightness–a knot tied taut within her insides. Only after a couple of minutes had passed did she finally free herself from panic’s grip.
‘Ariene, get a hold of yourself!’ she scolded. ‘Your magic’s not gone. It must have something to do with where you are!’
Ariene could still feel a hint of mana’s connection with her spirit. Only, from observing the dead trees surrounding her, as well as the barren soil, it was obvious that there was something draining her strength and preventing her from casting magic.
Mana, a sustenance that every living thing depended on. Seeing as there were no signs of life, then this area should be a dead zone, she deduced. There were very few of these places in the continent of Waylurne, each considered very dangerous.
The question was: how did she end up at this place?
It was when she asked herself this that her long ears twitched and her heavy expression lightened. From a distance away, she managed to pick up the sound of someone humming a gentle tune. She breathed a small sigh of relief.
‘Is someone there?’ Ariene thought.
The combination of fog and darkness made it hard to see past a certain point. But by use of a fae’s heightened sense of hearing, Ariene had a direction to follow. However, she was still in a panicked state—much so that if she was calm and collected, then she would have found the tune she was following quite familiar.
The humming grew closer and closer—just a few more steps and it would have been right behind the next tree. When Ariene was about to take a step past it, that was when the humming abruptly stopped and someone spoke.
“—The silence was good while it lasted. I was wondering when….”
The latter half of what was said, Ariene could not understand properly, but she immediately recognized the voice. She stopped in her tracks and quickly hid herself.
‘Roa Fariche?’ she furrowed her brow. ‘Was he expecting me? Are we under the same predicament? Or is… is he the one behind all this?’
There were still a lot of suspicious points circling Roa, and Ariene could not help but be wary of him. She perked her ears while he continued to mumble, and could tell that he wasn’t directing any of his words in her direction.
‘No. He must not have noticed me, he couldn’t have,’ Ariene thought.
Upon forest soil—only a sensitive beast or a skilled fae could detect her light footsteps. Although a beast in some sense—as far as she knew, Roa was purely human.
Leaning upon gray bark, Ariene dared a peek past the tree—dark hair and eyes; a laid back demeanor; chewing the cap of a glowing mushroom in his mouth—there was no mistake that the dumb-looking boy was Roa. There, he was curiously slapping his own left hand with his right.
“—No!—Are you playing dumb!? Or do you really…” he grumbled.
‘What’s he doing? Eating mushrooms? Is he that hungry?’ Ariene could not make out what he was saying. She picked up a blue mushroom that was at her feet, similar to what Roa was chewing, and brought it close to her nose.
‘Gehk! It isn’t poisonous but it smells funny enough. It’s like one of those plants that make you see things. Is he really eating this? —No. He might look like one sometimes, but he… he isn’t an idiot. Right?’
Against her better judgment, Ariene took a small bite off of the blue mushroom, curious to find out if it was edible; but as she did, she reflexively spat it out as she saw Roa abruptly breaking into a series of weird movements.
“Pfft!” Ariene stifled a laugh. A pinch on her cheek assured her she was awake and with alternating glances towards the dancing boy and the sprout in her hand—she unhesitantly discarded the mushroom in her hand.
The following thought crossed her mind: though her connection with fauna wasn’t as strong as how a proper fae’s should be, appraising poisonous plants shouldn’t be a problem for her.
Ariene let out a chuckle, ‘I guess being able to distinguish plants would be useful for his party.’ She found one reason that Roa would have, inviting her to be his companion—but was it only because she was a woodland fae?
“Gah!” A scream of agony raised her attention as Roa suddenly dropped to the ground—his eyes rolled back, unconscious.
‘It wasn’t the mushroom,’ Ariene observed. ’He isn’t foaming at the mouth, so it’s unlikely to be poisonous. Did he trip over his feet and hit his head?‘
She took no time to ponder, Ariene tried to get close to the fainted Roa but was stopped by a sudden explosion at the front of her feet—a long wooden shaft had flown in from an unknown direction and stabbed into the ground.
Visible from the quickly clearing dust—it was too thick to be an arrow. The object resembled a rough wooden spear, fashioned from one of the dead trees in the surroundings. Ariene shuddered. One more step and it wouldn’t have been just the ground that had been skewered.
‘An enemy!?’ Ariene’s immediate reaction would’ve been to retaliate, but she currently had no strength in her limbs. She wouldn’t even be able to run away, let alone swing the dummy sword strapped to her waist.
’Over there! The attack came from that direction!’ Ariene instinctively shifted her body to the left as another wooden spear came from beyond the surrounding white fog and just barely scratched her right shoulder.
‘If I only had my magic!’ She clenched her fists, inciting her own rage to stimulate her spirit. Soon, another wooden spear drove into the ground behind her, along with a torn cloth from her sleeve. ‘Burn! Whoever this bastard is, I’m gonna burn him to ashes!!!’
Ariene’s eyes shone with anger, and her hair glowed with a tinge of fire. These things flying towards her could be taken care of by her burning vines, but unfortunately, like earlier, strength left her body before she could take any action and forced her knees on the ground.
Ariene felt like she was submerged within a thick mire and couldn’t breathe. What little mana she had mustered abandoned her and paralyzed her body. To make matters worse, a wooden spear whistled through the air and fell almost close enough to take off her left ear.
“Mother…” The feeling of death had never come so close as this—once when she was young, but not since she learned to manifest her flames.
‘Freedom… Death should be one way to grasp it.’ Ariene breathed a sad sigh and accepted her fate. However, just as she had shut her eyes, a shuffle by her side had her inadvertently turn her head.
“Huh?!” Ariene gasped. Her mouth stayed agape as a pair of eyes a shade of crimson locked with hers. Stood there with its two small hooves was an adorable looking goat-like creature, two heads smaller than her shoulders if she knelt down.
It had a pair of black knobs on its disproportionately large head, snow-white fluffy fur, and a tail similar to a rabbit’s. The shuffling seemed to have originated from it trying to pull something heavier than it was with its small arms.
–Snap!!! One of its arms yanked back as whatever it was pulling gave way.
Ariene blinked at the dark strands of hair falling from its loosened grip. When the creature ignored her and shrugged, going for another handful of hair, Ariene finally saw what it was that it was so hurriedly busy with.
“Roa?” she muttered in surprise. The creature was slowly dragging the unconscious Roa away from the scene. At least, however suspicious its actions seemed to be, it seemed it was trying to bring Roa out of immediate harm.
A moment of reprieve arrived as there was the loud sound of a tree splintering over the distance. Whatever was attacking them with wooden spears was restocking its supply.
“I’m sorry,” Ariene bowed her head, not towards Roa but to the small creature.
Unfortunately, she had unintentionally brought them both into the crosshairs of the attacks. “It could be that soon, another set of spears would be flying towards us. Leave that guy behind and save yourself, little friend.”
Even as she cautioned, the creature still continued to pull on Roa’s hair; it did not seem to understand her words.
Ariene could only sigh. It was not long before her ears twitched at a faint whistle in the air; another wooden spear was flying towards them.
She couldn’t move, and the small creature wasn’t budging.
It was then that the unconscious Roa suddenly came to life with a high-pitched raucous laugh. “Savior is here! Haha!” Roa jumped up into a stance with his chest puffed proudly—the dumb smile usually worn on his face replaced with a wide pompous grin.
Ariene widened her eyes with surprise, not at Roa’s sudden revival, nor his suspicious demeanor, but at the fiery glow of mana emanating fiercely about his left arm.
“How could this be!? That’s—That’s mine?!”
Roa stood in front of Ariene with the goat-like creature hanging on his head. A wooden spear pierced through the mist. Burning vines appeared around Roa with a timely fashion and intercepted the spear before ripping it apart.
Helplessly sat on the ground, Ariene stared dumbfounded at the figure of Roa—embers slowly descending around him. A different person reproducing a signature spell would come as an utter shock to anyone. The magic unique to Ariene Diadora, which she could only manifest in a fit of anger—Roa had managed to do so without a single hint of rage.
“Huh?” Ariene inferred another baffling change in his demeanor—from the earlier frivolousness to a sudden abrupt silence.
Roa turned around and approached her. “We should get out of here,” he said, switching to a serious tone of voice.
Without warning, he grabbed onto her waist unceremoniously, and picked her up from the ground and heaved her onto his right shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
“H-Hey!?” Ariene tried to voice a complaint, but before she could say anything further, a small hand with white fur chucked an object, blue and glowing, into her mouth.
—End of Chapter 11
