Unruly Summon Chapter 57: Rage (Patreon)

"You and Mistress Eve are looking happy today," said Mary, peering at me. "I'm glad you're both feeling better after that private talk."

Wendy stumbled as she missed a step, despite the track we were walking down being completely flat. "You poor, naïve little girl," she muttered, which I felt was undeserved. We really had only talked. There'd been a lot of air to clear after our disagreements about safety, and I was glad my freshly learnt spells had given us the opportunity to sort it; in a healthy relationship, that sort of thing should never be allowed to fester.

"Little? I'm less than ten seasons younger than you are!"

Wendy just snorted.

"Mistress?" asked Eve.

"Obviously!" answered Mary. "If Thomas is the Master, and he's your partner, then you must be the Mistress."

"... If you hadn't reunited her with her parents already, I'd totally be up for adopting her," laughed Eve.

"She's less than ten seasons younger than us, too!" I exclaimed. "I think. I'm still not a hundred percent sure how long a season is."

"Don't care," replied Eve. "She's just too cute."

Mary blushed.

"Anyway, we've collected our armour and new clothes," I said, changing the subject. "Shall we start travelling? What was the next settlement on our route? Vaynx?"

"Yes, let's," agreed Minoru.

"... I still can't believe you thought I'd wear that," complained Wendy.

"You requested blue. It's all blue."

Mary nodded in agreement. "Yup, the whole outfit would have gone with your hair perfectly."

"It's not blue, it's transparent!"

"Demons tend to use thin fabrics," I pointed out.

"It's not just thin. It's emaciated!"

"Don't be such a drama queen. It's not like we're forcing you to wear it."

"If you like it so much, why not have Eve wear it? We're about the same size. Heck, it would probably fit any one of us girls. There's not much of it to fit."

No-one responded, largely because Eve and Mary had tried it on—'it' being little more than a pair of harem pants and a wide band of fabric to wrap around their chest—back in the store, but had no intention whatsoever of admitting it. Minoru had been the one to add it to our basket, with the excuse that Wendy's reaction would be amusing. She was walking in front of us, but I could still see the side of the smirk she pulled as she was proven right.

Now Eve and Mary were both wearing far more sensible clothing, along with some light armour. Both had hauberks, gauntlets and greaves, with helmets packed away ready for when we left the city. Mary had been disappointed to discover the hauberk wasn't compatible with her maid uniform, needing to wear a padded shirt beneath it instead, but both she and Eve were tolerating the additional weight well.

"Have you got stronger again?" I asked Eve.

She hefted her chain mail appraisingly. "Possibly? I'll tell you once we've been walking for a couple of hours."

"What about Stephanie?" I asked. "If her endurance is increasing too, we'll be able to walk further between stops."

Wendy shrugged. "It's hard to tell."

"Given the layout of settlements, unless we want to camp outdoors, our itinerary is fixed regardless," added Minoru.

"So Vaynx is a bigger city?" I asked, gathering information on our next stop as we reached the town gate. No guards tried to stop or question us on the way out.

"It's big enough to be called a city, at least, but it's not huge. It's on the edge of a region that's not classified as corrupted, but is still tainted badly enough with miasma that the land is almost completely infertile, so there are no significant settlements there. It's mostly grown as a stopover point for people headed towards the capital from the south-west."

"If nothing grows, it sounds pretty corrupted to me," opined Eve.

"The formal definition of the corrupted lands is any region where the miasma is thick enough to spontaneously birth monsters," replied Wendy. "There's no gap between 'nothing will grow' and 'monsters', so that sort of land doesn't have a specific label. Rather, it's the other way around; it's possible to grow crops in the least tainted corrupted lands. The results take many seasons to reach maturity, are barely edible, and tend to be destroyed by monsters before they can be harvested, but it's theoretically possible."

"Interesting."

"Speaking of, now that we're out of the settlement..." said Minoru.

"Yup. My time to shine again. Maius Quies. Terra. Miraculum. Retexo. Did it work?"

"Assuming you just cast Miraculum, then yes. I didn't hear a thing," answered Wendy.

"Cool, so one layer of Terra is sufficient."

"We've been talking a lot about growth recently, but how is yours doing, Master?" asked Mary.

"Good question. Any chance of casting Maius Miraculum with a more sensible focus, or no focus at all?" asked Wendy.

"No. Casting a regular Miraculum still hits me hard. I could manage maybe five of them? A focus would need to more than double my efficiency to cast the big version."

"Still, that's not too far off. We can get you a fifty percent focus easily enough."

"You can borrow mine," suggested Minoru.

"Should I be casting to the point of exhaustion to train myself better?"

"Nah, if a single Miraculum cast is taking a fifth of your capacity, one of those a day is enough to stimulate growth. Besides, there's no point wearing that armour and then rendering yourself defenceless or knocking yourself out from mana exhaustion."

"True... But being able to cast Maius Miraculum would be worth it."

"Lux..." muttered Eve under her breath, but as usual, nothing happened. I'd bet she'd just had some thought about ritual casting with me, but as usual, was stymied by her complete lack of ability to wield mana.

The hours of walking were largely occupied by Minoru teaching Eve things that the world considered common sense, which I listened intently to, because it wasn't as if I'd been here all that long myself. Teaching 'common sense' was actually a fairly tricky thing to do, mostly because it was, well, common sense. People don't wake up in the morning, still in their bed, and think 'oh good, gravity didn't reverse overnight'. It's so obvious that things fall downward that you simply don't think about it, so when being asked to teach that sort of thing, it was easy to accidentally skip over stuff.

Thankfully, nothing else went wrong during the journey, and we made it to Vaynx by the early afternoon.

"It'll be a one-on-one in the arena today," explained Minoru. "A murderer by the name of Cyrak. He got into an argument with a neighbour about the exact boundaries of their gardens, and that somehow escalated into slaughtering their entire family. They had kids, eight and fourteen seasons old."

So, this time she was telling me his name. And he'd murdered a bunch of kids, apparently over a strip of garden. Yes, garden space was quite important here, where everyone used it as an allotment, but even so...

"It's the same everywhere," sighed Eve, with a small shake of her head.

"Oh? Not going to tell me I'm being an idiot and stop me?"

"You're not being an idiot, no. I'm not convinced you're being Thomas, but whoever you are being, they aren't an idiot."

"Huh? What's that supposed to mean?"

Eve didn't answer, and after a brief visit to our inn, a trip to the arena and stint in a waiting room that was once again mostly packed with slayers, I found myself once more standing in an arena, the jeering crowds staring down at me and my opponent. The intervening time had passed in a nervous blur, so much so that I didn't even remember if the waiting room had a buffet, but now that I was here, staring into the mad eyes of Cyrak, I felt an odd calm.

The man looked crazed. He was a fox-man with only ears and a tail to show for his demonic heritage, but his eyes were bloodshot, his teeth were bared and he was emitting a low, guttural growl that gave no indication it was coming from a supposedly sapient individual.

I gentle exhaled. "..." came the soundless shout as I subvocally cast Maius Omnia Visus.

"What the heck?!" I immediately exclaimed as the magical overlays spread across my vision, showing an entirely unexpected concentration of purple. "He has miasma poisoning?!"

My yell was drowned out by the noise of the spectators, but from the way the announcer cut out mid-sentence, he must have had some way to hear what the competitors were saying. A glance at his box showed some hurried activity going on up there, but I didn't get the chance to pay attention, because Cyrak chose that moment to charge.

He dropped to all fours, running like a beast on limbs that looked slightly out of proportion, and the growl strengthened into a primal roar.

Part of me wanted to cast Miraculum there and then, but there was no point. No way would it work on him, and it would give away my identity to the watchers. Instead, I focused on my magical sight, making use of the scant few seconds it would take him to cross the arena to work out what was going on. There was a mass of miasma embedded behind his heart, wisps leaking from it into the rest of his body. A shimmering haze of mana surrounded his entire body. Not body strengthening; it was external. It didn't look like battle aura, either. Whatever it was, if it was external, it could probably be dispelled.

"Retexo."

For a brief moment, Cyrak shimmered, as if viewed through a deep heat haze. Then he snapped back into focus, except that his skin was palid, with a purple tint, and his veins were black. Even his fur darkened. It was a sight I'd only seen once before, on Mary.

So the layer of mana was illusion magic. Someone had poisoned him with miasma and then gone to some lengths to hide the fact. When had that happened? I didn't know the exact effects of miasma poisoning. Could it have been responsible for him committing the murders in the first place? In which case, he was falsely accused, and Miraculum would work.

"All spectators, please evacuate in an orderly fashion," came the voice of the announcer, as I dodged Cyrak's initial blows. He was using no weapon, merely swinging his claws with wild abandon.

"Fine, I need to at least try. To borrow the phrase from Eve, if I don't, I'm not 'Thomas'. 'Thomas' isn't a killer, and couldn't risk even the smallest chance that he might be innocent. Miraculum!"

The spell radiated outwards, kicking up dust in an expanding circular shock-wave. It washed over the uncertain audience, who were most certainly not evacuating in an orderly fashion, where it only added to the chaos.

What it didn't do was have any effect whatsoever on Cyrak. The spell's mana flowed around him in an obvious act of avoidance, and both his corrupted body and the mass of miasma behind his heart remained intact.

The insane demon came at me again, and having confirmed that he failed whatever criteria Miraculum used to consider a target worthy of healing—or possibly that he was so far gone that there wasn't anything left to heal—I finally fought back, flinging a few subvocal wind blades at him.

He had no trouble seeing them, or, with his speed, avoiding them, but despite my displays of magic, he continued charging straight at me, taking no precautions against my attacks and only dodging reactively. That being the case, it was easy enough to wait for him to approach and then cast Ignis point blank into his face.

"You have my pity," I admitted as I walked towards the demon, who was left rolling on the floor, clawing at his own burning skin. "There's not a shred of intelligence left in there, is there? What happened to you? Was this deliberate, or did someone else do this to you?"

The only answer that came was another roar of anger, accompanied by a cloud of mana rushing inwards towards the demon. A mix of mana and miasma flowed into his blood, his body ballooning in response as it underwent a twisted mockery of the demons' animal transformation. Where once a humanoid had lay was now a snarling beast that fully deserved the label of 'demon'. An eight-eyed, furless fox, many times my height, drooling from a maw filled with a nonsensical collection of fangs that prevented it from closing fully, unless he wanted to impale himself. The black skin was covered in purple scars, each emitting a soft, eerie glow.

The demon snarled at me, its putrid breath almost making me gag even given the distance between us. I responded in the obvious way. "Maius Conflagratio!"