Fellow Sufferers (3)
One second. That was how long it took for the water that had reached my waist to climb over my head.
Opening my eyes underwater was not something I was used to. Even so, I had to. The thought that staying still might kill me forced my eyelids up.
Something cut through the blur of my vision.
Smoke?
Whether it was smoke or mist, a pale, formless mass was coiled around my ankle. The water made its outline hard to pin down, but it looked like a monster — a ghost-type, at that.
What is this?
Seriously, what? As of yesterday I couldn't even see ghosts.
What is it saying?
I kicked at the smoke. My foot passed straight through it, limp and useless.
So that was why the detection stone hadn't picked it up. How was anything supposed to sense something without a physical form?
Physical force didn't work, so it wasn't human. It used Whieon, which tilted the odds heavily toward it being a monster.
But hang on — did things this formless even count as monsters?
My breath was clawing up into my throat. It wasn't just from being underwater.
This pressure. This cold.
And the way it kept threatening me for mana.
Damn it.
This thing was a demon.
I squeezed my eyes shut and covered my ears. I emptied out every complicated thought until only instinct remained, then thrashed desperately toward the surface.
It was pointless.
The force dragging me down was far stronger than anything I could swim against. I was clearly trying to go up, yet my body kept sinking farther from the surface.
I couldn't breathe. My lungs felt ready to tear.
A sweet whisper.
I thought of the Mage's Oath.
No matter what happens, never bargain with a demon.
There were lines a mage was meant to hold. I couldn't sell myself to temptation just to buy a few more seconds of air.
It was showing its true colors. Soft persuasion hadn't worked, so now it was holding my life hostage.
A hellish binary choice. With every second that passed, the need to breathe grew more desperate, and the urge to pick the first option exploded inside me.
Even so, I couldn't.
Only yesterday I had urged the lingering spirits of the Magic Kingdom to honor the Oath. What would it mean if the man who said those words turned around and contracted with a demon? Even if I survived, it wouldn't be living.
Of course I wanted to live. How many people truly wanted to die?
But anyone who sold their soul to a demon had only horrors waiting for them on the other side of survival.
The pull grew faster. Everything below was murky gloom; I couldn't see the bottom. It was a lake, and yet it felt like the middle of the open ocean.
Terror closed in. My limit arrived. I tried a few spells against the demon, but it was like watering a fish.
This was bad. There was no answer.
Am I going to die like this?
It had been a short life, and a good one… no. Honestly, it had been a shit life. That old saying about luck being seventy percent and skill thirty was nonsense. In reality luck was ninety percent and effort barely scraped ten. Let that be my final lesson. I closed my eyes.
Just as everything was about to drown in despair—
Don't give up.
From above, it sounded like the voice of a goddess.
The man was sinking fast. It was the exact same situation Tiria and Rachel had faced the previous afternoon.
A mage was still only human in the end. Dragged under without warning, he looked helpless. Magic didn't seem to be working either.
Enemy or not, she had to help him. She owed him a debt.
She would leave every judgment to her conscience. Drawing the Goddess's staff, Tiria dove at full speed. As a senior officer and as a Saintess, she had lived through more than her share of crises, and her response was razor-sharp.
KRA-KOOM!
Sacred flame crashed down onto the water spirit's head.
Tiria's holy arts dealt devastating damage to the soul. The closer a target leaned toward the spiritual and the evil, the more that power multiplied.
Stronger against monsters than living people, stronger against lingering spirits than monsters, stronger against demons than lingering spirits — against a raw, wicked soul, the strike was all but fatal.
The spirit screamed and scattered. Tiria did not stop. To deliver the Goddess's wrath, she spoke the words that drove demons out.
"———."
Sephiron surged outward in a sphere. Under that overwhelming holy power, the water spirit seared white.
At last the water spirit vanished without a trace.
Tiria swam to the man. She caught his arm, slid her own under his armpit, and locked him in place. The solid muscle and clear warmth of his body came through without filter.
Embarrassment could wait. Saving a life came first. With both legs and one free hand, Tiria cut through a current that had more than doubled in weight and drove them upward.
"Puh-haaah!"
They finally broke the surface and made it to shore. Her chest burned.
"Mage! Mage? Are you all right?"
"Cough— cough!"
The man hacked violently.
"…I nearly died."
"You did. It's a good thing I was nearby and could react quickly. If you'd been alone, you wouldn't be of this world right now."
Tiria added,
"Does this settle the debt from dawn?"
"Of course it does. That said…"
Whatever the process, she could tell he had no direct connection to this island's secrets. He had been so absorbed in bathing that he hadn't even noticed her approach.
Now it was time to worry about actual survival. They needed drinking water, food, and insects to use as fishing bait before heading back. While Tiria was turning those thoughts over—
"Perhaps we should put our clothes on first?"
"…Huh? Ahkyaaaah?!"
After finishing our bath, the Saintess and I filled our water and pushed deeper into the forest. The goals were hunting, foraging, and reconnaissance.
The island was large enough that I still held out hope someone might be living somewhere on it. While we were at it, I meant to look for that man as well.
A fair amount of time passed.
I carved an X into a nearby tree and turned around.
"Let's call it here for today and head back."
"…"
I hadn't managed a single real exchange with the Saintess for a while. More precisely, I kept talking and she kept not answering. Her irises had been pink the entire time.
It wasn't as if I didn't know why. I knew perfectly well, which was exactly why my own face was burning.
I scratched hard at the back of my neck.
"Miss Caston, I forgot to say this earlier. Thank you for saving me back there."
The Saintess lifted her head.
"When the water spirit dragged me under, you dove in after me without even caring that the robes you'd just finished drying would get soaked again. A moment later and I would have died in that demon's hands."
"…!"
"I'd lived my whole life with nothing but bad impressions of the Holy Church, but meeting you has changed that a little."
She seemed to grasp my meaning at once. Her iris color shifted from moment to moment before finally settling on yellow.
A Lumina's yellow eyes meant positive emotion in general — joy, gratitude, relief. It was the first time she had shown me that color.
"…No. I did it for myself. If we're going to get off this island alive, I need your skills too. There's no need for either of us to dwell on it."
Right. Our strategy, put simply, was this:
Can we just pretend it never happened?
The whole thing had erupted without warning, and it had been a life-or-death rescue. For a Saintess, there had been no other choice.
It was a lot like the night I'd ended up sleeping in nothing but underwear, tangled up with Valkira. Unintentional, but necessary for survival.
Before long the Saintess seemed to have sorted her feelings. The proof was her eyes returning to black — the color of neutrality.
"You said that water spirit was actually a demon?"
"The way it pathologically demanded mana makes it certain."
"Why would a demon be on this island — and at the bottom of that lake, of all places?"
"Almost certainly a newly born lesser demon."
The principle behind a demon's birth was still unknown, but research had mapped out their growth to some degree.
"Lesser demons feed on the surrounding environment or a host's mana. When the time comes, they begin shedding and undergo explosive growth. A demon that completes two sheddings becomes a greater demon — and extremely cunning."
"So mages just… fall for them? Greater demons?"
"More or less. They sweet-talk you with everything you want to hear. Think of them as opium. Even mages who start out rock-solid eventually hit a point where temptation starts to work, which is why the rule is not to listen to a demon at all."
"And you nearly died to one of those lesser demons."
"This was the first time I've ever been attacked by one. That's why I had no real way to counter it."
"You're a 1st Class Mage."
"Do you think a National Mage qualification is some old adventurer rank?"
"Still."
"Matchup disadvantage."
The Saintess huffed a small laugh.
Trading that kind of idle talk as we walked, the incident at the lakeshore gradually faded. We found a thicket full of berries and filled a basket, then split open tree bark, pulled out the grubs inside, and collected them in a separate container.
Why no animals, then?
"The forest is strange. I haven't heard a single birdcall."
In the end, the spear shaft I'd brought hoping to at least catch a squirrel was serving only as a walking stick. Still, we managed to find several edible plants — Peredi leaves, and a stone-crop variety called Sakecornil — and stripped those to take with us.
Ooooooh…
"…Did you hear that just now?"
I snapped straight into a defensive stance. The sun hadn't set yet, but there was no telling what might be nearby. Monsters weren't required to wait for nightfall.
The sound was coming from that way — from a deep thicket. My eyes narrowed. A pale mass of smoke had taken on a human shape.
"It's a spirit."
The Saintess said.
What? So I can suddenly see ghosts now?
"A soldier of the Holy Kingdom. He says he died at the Battle of Tatankur. Hmm."
The Saintess, still speaking with the spirit, let out a sigh.
"I'm sorry. I can't kill this man."