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Chapter 1103
“You know my name?” Astria’s eyebrow quirked. “Yet you still dare to trespass on my property.”
“Your property?” I asked, a bemused expression on my face. “Isn’t this Deek’s lands?”
“You dare to speak that man’s name in my presence?” She spat, her face turning red with anger.
“That man? Did you forget your Master so soon?” I responded.
“Hehe… good… I might have considered sparing your life, but you’re making it easy for me to kill you.” She started laughing a hard laugh.
“I admit, I am a bit curious how strong I’ve gotten. It will be interesting to see how I compare to the pair of you.”
“A-are you sure about this, Master?” Alysia asked nervously. “I’m not sure I can control myself in a fight. We might end up hurting her.”
I chuckled softly. Alysia was certainly still herself. It never even occurred to her it might be Astria hurting me. Our victory was inevitable in her eyes. Actually, I felt the same. I couldn’t exactly explain what it was. The second I looked at someone, I got a feeling about whether they would be a challenge or not. Was it a culmination of all of the other skills? I couldn’t say. However, since coming out of that soul dungeon, I hadn’t met anyone who made me feel danger.
That wasn’t to say I didn’t feel any pressure from Astria. Compared to anyone else I had fought; she was the strongest. It was just a feeling like everything would work out.
“If things go too far, I’ll just remove my mask,” I reassured her before summoning her out from my hand.
“You’re a fool who craves death.” Astria frowned. “I’ve never seen someone who showed so little fear when facing me. It’s time you learned your place.”
I grinned back. “I’ll be showing you yours soon enough.”
“Die!” Astria didn’t pull her punch.
She sent out a beam of black light. It struck the ground where I was standing, sending out a wave of destruction. The ground erupted in an explosion, and a black bubble grew around the area, obliterating anything that touched it. When the light faded, I was no longer there. Astria’s eyes darted to see me racing down the street.
“Running already?” She called out.
I realized as soon as she threw the first punch that this fight would destroy the town. I was racing to the edge of town where we could fight more properly. I realized I had reached a point where any real fight I had would cause collateral damage. Dungeons, although they appeared like normal places, were a lot sturdier, but a town or city was likely to be destroyed.
Astria began to chase me, flying in the air. Compared to the quickness of most fairies, Astria was quite slow. The wings beat in big waves, much different from the fluttery way the other fairies moved. She threw out her left arm, and then her right arm, each one creating a beam of dark light aimed at me. I dodged them but cursed at her. She was creating pockmarks in the street. All of this damage was something we’d have to fix later. Terra wasn’t around to make these kinds of fixes easy, and I didn’t even know where she was.
I curse Astria’s destructive personality in my head as I tried to leave the village in a rush. As we left the city, Alysia let out a gasp.
“What’s that?”
I had come into town from the other side and hadn’t noticed it before, but in the distance was a large shoot of white light.
“Just what is happening to Chalm?” I muttered.
Chapter 1104
“What did you do?” I turned back to Astria and pointed at the large chute of mana. “Is that a mana spring?”
When a mana spring was finished, they would shoot out mana into the air like that. How did that differ from a fairy spring? Well, fairy springs were in fairy groves and managed by fairies. This didn’t seem important, but it was. A mana spring would continually lose mana.
Originally, I had believed that the fairy grove Astria and Celeste had built in my mansion’s backyard had been to hide the grove. I was right, but the hiding was more than just from physical sight. The plants around the grove absorbed excess mana and then injected it into the land. It’s why fairy springs made the land fertile and rich.
However, this spring had no such mechanism, so the mana exploded into the air and then rained back down. In a way, it distributed the mana across the land quicker and led to much faster fertility and a much wider distance. However, it was also a beacon that let everyone know where it was. It was also temporary and unsustainable. It was more like a temporary mana geyser.
These were extremely rare, as the mana of this continent slowly decreased, the gushes of mana also decreased. Thus, it was so odd seeing one here, so close to Chalm. Furthermore, it wasn’t shooting straight up, but out to the side like it had been aimed away from the direction of Chalm proper. This was the other reason I hadn’t noticed it before, because it was quite low to the landscape. It was something done at great expense, and I could only guess it was Astria’s doing. This was because the fairies had fled that way and Astria had come from that direction.
I should also point out that I couldn’t even see mana until quite recently. It was my experience in the soul damage, and training with Alysia to be able to cut the mana feed from spells, that had allowed me the sensitivity to be able to recognize mana. The people in this village almost certainly saw nothing. However, to the creatures of the wilderness in the west, they almost certainly could see it and might even be attracted to it.
After yelling at Astria, she stopped creating another bolt of dark magic, seeming surprised by me suddenly addressing her in battle. She glanced where I was pointing and then laughed.
“Oh? That? That’s the start of my new kingdom. In time, I will possess enough power. You’ve already met my fairies. I’m building an army of evolved fairies.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Why? Hmph… you’ll have to defeat me to find out, and since all you’re good at is running, I guess you’ll never know!”
“To take over the world?” I guessed.
“Heh, to start!” She shot back.
I looked away, feeling a bit conflicted. “I thought… you may have changed over time. I thought, maybe… as a slave…”
“Deek…” Alysia comforted me in my head.
“Slave?” Her expression turned fiery again. “You dare speak of those times? I don’t know what you’ve heard but forget it. I’m the one who is in charge here, do you understand? Now, stop moving and just die!”
She created a dark ball that had red cracks over the surface about the size of a small house and then threw it in my direction. I dodged the attack, then started running. This time I moved using phase shift to increase my speed. My direction was the mana spring. I had to see what was happening.
Chapter 1105
As I ran across an open field, Astria was chasing after me, throwing out spells in an attempt to knock me down. However, I was able to avoid most of her attacks. Once or twice, I struck with my sword, cutting her spell in two. This especially frustrated her, as she had no clue how I was doing it. In her experience, such a thing should have been impossible.
The other issue was that I was moving far too fast. She wasn’t anything like Celeste, who could move like the wind. In fact, she was probably the slowest a fairy could be. As she chased after me, she did everything she could to keep up. She was even huffing as her wings beat to keep up with my speed. This also irritated her, and so she was even more wasteful with her spells. I was fine if she tired herself out throwing useless spells though. It wasn’t like I had anything riding on victory here.
I finally reached the mana spring, and I could see what was going on. The few remaining golems that Terra had built appeared to be under her control. They appeared to build a palace. That palace was catching the majority of the mana shooting out. As for the mana spring, it was built at a very distinct angle. In fact, it wasn’t natural at all. It looked like someone had bored a hole at that angle.
“What is this… this is tapped into the fairy spring?”
I began to realize what was happening. This wasn’t a new source of mana, this was the old source of mana, the fairy spring. Astria, for whatever reason, had bored a hole from the side, mining the mana reservoir and stealing it from the city of Chalm to use for her uses!
“She doesn’t have the right to use it anyway!” Astria snapped. “I was here first! I built it! I wouldn’t allow her to destroy everything I built! Hey… where are you going?”
I had already switched directions. This time, I was heading toward the palace. Over the palace were hundreds of fairies. They were dancing around right where the mana was splashing, likely absorbing the mana energy. However, they were full size like this, and thus instead of looking cute, it made the entire palace look foreboding.
I slowed finally as I got a view of a line of beds. The wall hadn’t been finished yet, so I was able to look right in. There, lying on the beds, was a line of little girls. Faeries gathering the spray of mana came down and occasionally showered mana on the children. The entire palace seemed to be built to gather all of the mana and dump it on these children.
This was something I didn’t truly grasp. I had no clue what Astria was trying to do with the children. However, some of them were crying, and a few looked genuinely unwell.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
The chasing Astria stopped again as I addressed her once more. She gave a dark grin.
“Behold, my future army. It doesn’t work on adults, but children are still pure enough. If you shower them with mana, their bodies will eventually break down, and they can form new bodies, mana bodies”
“You… you’re turning them into fairies?” I let in a breath.
“Clever, isn’t it?”
My hand tightened on Alysia so hard that my knuckles turned white.
“Deek.” Alysia tried to soothe me.
As soon as I left, Astria had fled the city, conquered a small piece of land, turned my citizens into food for her fairy army, kidnapped their children to turn them into fairies, and cut off all of her ties to me. I had wanted to see things to the end. I did. Now, I was very angry.