Since time immemorial, the cycle had repeated itself. As any [Spell Forger] would attest, mana had a life of its own. It responded to conscious thought, picking up ideas and images, bringing imagination into reality. What, then, of the unconscious thoughts? The nightmares conjured by a sleeping mind? The overactive imagination of a child? The fractured ideas of the insane? What was it that mana did to them?

What was a 'thought' in the first place? An electrical signal in the brain? But Mystery had made her first spell perfectly well without possessing any such squishy bits of biology. Mana was obviously linked to her soul.

Thankfully, mana required order. It wouldn't act on a passing whim, but required meditation on a subject. Consistency of image, solidified over time. It required rules.

Miasma was what happened when those rules broke down, twisted and corrupted. When the nightmares leaked out. When order turned to chaos. Strange and unphysical beasts dragged themselves from nothingness into reality. And then there were those who interacted with the miasma directly. There was a reason demons tended not to think long term, and to act only according to their whims. To do so was the very nature of that which birthed them.

Order fought back; the ensouled races of the world did not appreciate their nightmares leaking into the waking world. The embodiment of the chaos—the demon lord—didn't care. Its existence was eternal. An indisputable fact. People slept. People died, and as they did, so too did the small amount of order their souls imposed upon the world. It could be fought, it could be pushed back, but any such efforts were meaningless in the face of its inevitability. Maybe next year, or maybe in a billion years, all order would eventually decay and chaos would be all that was left. Not in the least did it matter to the demon lord how many times a [Hero] plunged a sword through its blackened heart. As such, it knew no fear.

Until now.

Something was very wrong. A monster tide that should have flooded half the continent had been annihilated. Its demons were destroyed. But that much was comprehensible. Powerful heroes of the past had managed similar feats. It mattered little. They would return with time.

But now something had purged the miasma from the forest's dead heart. Something had taken the chaos and turned it to order. Something had reversed entropy. That wasn't possible. And yet it had happened. There was something out there capable of taking everything that the demon lord was, every last strand of its existence, and undoing it.

Inside the black egg, buried a very short distance from the girls, a half-formed heart raced with terror, the nascent demon lord unable to comprehend what was happening. Lacking intelligence, all it had was instincts, and those instincts screamed to flee, to surrender this cycle and wait for the anomaly to pass. Alas, eggs weren't known for their mobility, and so the demon lord could do nothing but wait. To brace itself to defend against the incomprehensible threat that approached it.

---

"So, what should we do with him?" asked Rose, picking the unconscious demon up by his remaining wing. Oddly enough, she was able to do so, despite the way the sheet of darkness didn't appear physically attached to anything.

"Kill him, obviously," answered Rrillandral. "Preferably before he wakes up."

"But he wanted to surrender..."

"Demons don't..." started Rrillandral before catching herself and rephrasing. "Historically, demons have never surrendered. They have faked surrender on multiple occasions, in an attempt to get their targets to lower their guard."

"... Didn't try... to attack..." pointed out Mystery, who didn't count the final suicidal charge, during which he'd obviously had no control.

"Yes, he did. It may not have been his intent, but when he wakes up, he'll still be under the control of the demon lord. He will simply attack again."

"Then we just need to slay the demon lord before he wakes up," pointed out Rose.

"Normally, I would accuse you of misusing the word 'just', but in this case..." sighed Rrillandral. "Nevertheless, it would be wise to recover our mana before facing the demon lord."

"Hayedalf, can you cage him securely?" asked Grace. "Or Rrillandral's vines and Kellela's barriers?"

"I don't exactly have much in the way of materials with me."

"And my barriers require concentration to maintain."

"I would not trust my vines alone to hold him, and they decay rapidly when my transformation expires. You are seriously planning on letting this demon live? All of you? Do not forget that he is the one responsible for our former imprisonment."

The rest of the group looked conflicted. None of them were the sort of people who would kill an opponent that had given up and stopped fighting, nor had they had the prior experience with demons that Rrillandral had. Yet they'd heard plenty. Logically, sparing the demon seemed a terrible idea, but emotionally, lacking any first-hand experience of betrayal, none of them could bring themselves to kill the unconscious, tiny demon.

"Would it help if I were to point out that this is likely the very last demon alive? Completely eradicating every demon in the world would assuredly be an act worthy of a legendary achievement. Furthermore, given the nature of the achievement, its benefits would almost certainly aid in our imminent conflict with the demon lord."

The looks of confliction didn't change upon the mention of a legendary achievement. Just as the party were not the sort to employ violence as a first resort, they also weren't tempted by personal gains.

The thought of winning another advantage against the demon lord did a little more to sway them, though.

"No..." said Rose after some thought. "If we took that route to power, how would we be different from the demon lord itself?"

"Uh... In quite a few ways..." pointed out Grace.

"You know what I mean. Where does it end? Hunting down criminals and slaying them to get the benefits that come from [Murderer]? Why not? Bandits would be executed anyway, if they were caught. Stealing supplies that would improve our chances but that we can't afford? We could easily justify that by pointing out how many lives would be lost if we failed."

"I'll do the best I can with these trees," sighed Hayedalf. "And maybe I can slap together a durability enchantment with these burnt bones, and something to encourage him not to wake up... Rose, I have no tools. I'll need a sword."

Rose conjured one, and Hayedalf started slicing off twigs and branches, weaving them into a cage. A bone crushed to powder fuelled a protective enchantment, and Rrillandral wrapped the construct in thin vines, reinforcing it further, and tightly binding the demon inside.

"... We should at least remove his other wing, to prevent him from flight," she grumbled.

Rose shot her an offended glare.

Their work complete, they waited around for mana to recover. Although, as usual, Mystery took a more active route to recovery, albeit now feeding Kellela instead of draining her.

ding
For replacing your spent mana in a hurry, [Mana Absorption] advances to level 14.
For supplying another, [Recharge] advances to level 4.

Having finished working on Kellela, Mystery peered at Hayedalf appraisingly. After all, he should be just as compatible with her as Kellela was. Yes, the pair weren't literally plumbed together, unlike Kellela, but she should still try. Then Hayedalf could use his new recharge ability to bring Grace back up to full.

What was the difference between recharge and [Recharge]? Why couldn't Mystery just [Recharge] Grace directly? Questions that she hoped the royal academy—or any kind of schooling, really—would one day answer. Just what did 'compatibility' entail? If mana only worked for one person, how could everyone draw it in from the air? Was mana in the air universal, but it was personalised somehow when drawn into a particular person?

"... Dad... Going to... try [Recharge]..." she warned, before perching on his shoulder and invoking the skill, pulling mana from the Vale's Finger. There was some resistance, unlike Kellela, but nevertheless, the mana began to slowly flow.

"I'm glad to see that Artefact is proving so useful," commented Rrillandral, glad to have an excuse to change the topic from the risk they were taking sparing Dreobeth.

"I'm just dejected at how trivially your father made an Artefact," complained Hayedalf. "Before all this [Hero] business, I was planning in another five years or so to take a few years out to try to build one of my own, and maybe I'd have succeeded, and then someone else just forges one on the spur of the moment. A bonded Artefact, even."

"It was hardly the spur of the moment. He gathered the greatest craftsmen in the Vale, and they spent weeks on it. And linking it directly to the Vale's Heart is not a solution that can be repeated. Not to mention the symbolism that went into it; following the exact same steps a second time, without Mystery as the intended recipient, would be unlikely to result in an Artefact."

"I suppose, but it still grates. Why don't I get to be the one giving special gifts to my daughter?"

"You know, that sounds really weird when you say it out loud," pointed out Rose.

"Huh? What does?"

"Calling Mystery your daughter."

Hayedalf looked down, remembering his current appearance. He made a half-hearted effort to push down the petals of his skirt, trying to make himself a little less puffy, but as soon as he let go, they bounced back up. "Yes, well... It wasn't as if she had much choice at the time. I'm not going to complain."

"That's not what I'm talking about. That's just a consequence of her weird spell image, and now that we know it isn't as impractical as it looks, it's fine," declared Rose, shamelessly giving a twirl. Her spin caused her own petals to float up, displaying everything beneath. "I mean the way you haven't raised her, or even seen her."

"Please don't do that..." chided Grace, despite not looking away.

"Do what?" asked Rose innocently.

"... Cute..." opined Mystery.

"Mystery!" gasped Grace, scandalised. "I mean, yes, but..."

"... I was... talking about... your reaction..."

Grace coughed and spluttered, glowing as red as a tomato.

"Seriously, what's going on?" asked a confused Rose, who earlier on the very same trip had claimed that her naivety was exaggerated.

"No," said Kellela, interrupting the accidental flirting session with uncharacteristic anger. "Please don't ever say that again, Rose. The circumstances may be unusual, but Mystery is our daughter, and that's the end of the discussion."

Rose looked somewhat taken aback, not ever having been scolded by Kellela before. "Sorry... I didn't mean..."

Rrillandral looked very much like she wanted to say something, but held it back. "Don't worry; you'll have plenty of time to shower your daughter with affection once this is over," she said instead.

"Too damn right," agreed Hayedalf. "Now, thanks to that overachieving daughter of ours, it seems that everyone is back to full mana far ahead of schedule. Let's end this."

"Yes, let's," agreed Grace. "Mystery, which way?"

Mystery summoned a glowing light and led the group between the trees and out into a patch of obviously disturbed ground.

"... Below..."

"Well, how should we go about this? I assume someone has a better idea than [Meteor Storm] followed by a desperate sprint for our lives?"

"We lack the tools for digging, and the egg is large. Burying it like this in the first place must have taken extensive effort."

"They did have lots of giant worms."

"True. In any case, I suggest our first move should be Grace's purification wave. If that fails, let's dig in the centre and attempt to break the shell."

"Fine," said Grace, taking a deep breath of the purified air and bracing herself to spout an unbearable amount of cringe. The pink tinged her cheeks before she even started speaking. "Evil being of chaos and death, no more shall we let you spread your terror over the lands of light. Your corruption ends here, purified by the bonds of our friendship. Purification wave!"

White light blasted from Grace in the usual sphere. That which was aimed upward receded harmlessly into the distance, but that which was aimed downwards tore into the soil, and bore into the egg beyond.

Where, for the first time, it was countered.

The stronger demons had taken little damage from her purification, able to simply tank the attacks, but never had they reversed it. The ground shuddered, the soil over the egg blasted into the air as a pulse of black was launched from it, enveloping the girls. The last desperate attack of the demon lord, refusing to allow itself to be purified.

And, once the wave had passed, the girls were nowhere to be seen.