Chapter 219 - The Witch of Twilight

A quiet, somber tune escaped the lyrkress’ lips as she flapped her wings and soared through the ever purple sky. The flight-oriented limbs were of the very same translucent blue cartilage that made up the flippers growing out of her ankles. As a humanoid, the oversized dorsal fins were much smaller, but as a lyrkress—the form she had assumed mid-flight—they measured in at over two meters each.

Sylvia had joined her in singing at first, but she grew tired of it by the end of the first hour and curled up atop the lyrkress’ head for a nap beneath the morning sun. On most other days, the flight would have ended before the vixen tuckered herself out, but Claire had decided to stay out and explore the ninth floor for a little bit longer. Arciel was sure to pull her into a discussion with Meltys if she was free, and there was little she could do to occupy herself and otherwise cite as an excuse for her absence.

Another Cadrian in her situation would likely have spent her time practicing the martial or mystic arts, but Claire could do no such thing without arousing suspicion. They were certainly guests in Meltys’ space, but the duck had yet to fully warm up to them, and Claire hoped to keep her secrets in case of another conflict. The unorthodox techniques she employed were especially potent when she could catch her foes off guard. More importantly, she saw no reason to allow any witnesses to judge her peculiar choice of style. The combination of her shapeshifting lizard weapon and her ability to nullify her own momentum allowed for heightened control over the battlefield, but the sudden, jerky movements made for an aesthetic unbefitting a lady of her standing.

It was precisely to preserve said carefully crafted image before their new frenemy that she turned humanoid, transformed her armour into a dress, and carefully combed her hair with her lizard before landing atop the mountain and creeping her way into the temple. All of it had been repaired by the dungeon following the battle; every part of the mountaintop villa was exactly as it had been before. And missing lives aside, the same could be said for the city below. There was not a single spelunker anywhere in sight, be they of a Cadrian or Vel’khanese origin. Sylvia had forced them back onto the ship, and would deport them each time they stepped foot inside and wandered too far.

One would expect a holy place like the temple to see a great number of pilgrims and visitors, but it was completely devoid of life. The lyrkress’ party aside, the only outsider that would drop by was an old, greying owl. She came every morning in order to remove the wastewater and replenish the supply with a series of buckets freshly drawn from the local spring.

Everyone else present was tied to the divine protector by blood. There was not a single servant anywhere to be seen, or even an assistant to help them with any of their tasks. The two adult birds did all the cleaning themselves, even with the religious institution having enough space to house a hundred. Lia had offered to help on the first night of their stay, but she was summarily rejected on the grounds that she didn’t do a good enough job. She didn’t let that dissuade her however, and devoted herself to polishing one of the common areas in hopes of earning their hosts’ approval.

Claire was bored as well, but she had no intention of committing to a task so mundane. She flew straight into her room, and after changing her magical outfit into something more casual, sat atop the bed, crossed her legs, and took a moment to breathe. It was a fresh exercise she had added to her morning routine, introduced to her by the divine protector she had been unable to best.

“I would have won if the stupid fox didn’t step in.”

Claire closed her eyes as the idle complaint left her lips. She allowed her consciousness to drift inwards, as it often had when she first worked with her mana as a child. But rather than focusing on the raging tides that pulsed through her circuits, she moved her senses deeper, past the layers built into her flesh and into the bizarre skeleton she had acquired upon her ascension.

According to the bird, it was a lack of understanding, specifically pertaining to her nature, that had prevented her from controlling her ars magna. Claire was reluctant to acknowledge the fault, but with no other leads, gave into the duck’s advice and took a more active approach in interacting with the element that bore her alignment.

When she beheld the world again, a minute or so into her meditation, she found herself not seated on her bed, but atop a glacier accompanied by an infinite expanse of ice, sea, and sky. Unperturbed by the already routine scene, she phased through the frosted layer beneath her feet and dove into the ocean, where she found a projection submerged beneath the waves.

The mess of scale that was her true form was roughly twenty meters long. For the most part, she resembled a massive snake with four legs. The forelimbs were tipped with talons, while the rear ones ended in hooves, but they were otherwise identical. Both had large, blue fins growing from their ankles, and both were just long enough to push her a few meters off the ground. The abyssal horror was effectively a chimera. Her cervitaurian and lamian traits had been combined with those of a dragon and a qilin. The draconic resemblance was the most prominent and could be seen especially clearly through the shape of her wings and head. In her chest sat the greatest qilin influence. There was a large horn sprouting from it, a much larger version of the original shard that had nearly killed her once in the past.

The projection of her body changed when she opened the hundred and forty one eyes scattered all over her body. Her flesh vanished, leaving only her icy frame in its wake. She took a moment to look at her skull before slowly floating over and placing a hand on her snout.

She could feel the power coursing through it; her bones were a source of elemental power, through and through, and as much as she hated to admit it, she had no idea how she was meant to harness its strength. The most she could do was modify its form with ice manipulation or grow its volume through the use of her divinity. But in both those cases, she was putting power into her skeleton, not drawing from the dormant energy that lay within.

Casting ice magic provided not a single bit of insight. Her spells cost the same amount of mana as they had prior to her ascension, and were otherwise perfectly pedestrian in nature. Any other mage would likely do better if given one of her bones for use as a catalyst. Even the borroks and volcano whales had drawn on the shard’s power, one way or another. But she was unable. No matter how hard she tried, her body refused to relent. Her skeleton deigned not to serve her as anything but a frame for her flesh and a battery for her divinity.

Sighing, she dismissed the hallucination and returned to the real world, where she was still seated on her bed, her legs crossed and her hands in her lap. She took a few deep breaths, cleared her mind, and dove in again, but her second, third, and fourth tries all repeated the result. It simply refused to listen; she could not handle her element the way that the holy duck had handled hers.

“Whatever. I’ll figure it out later.” Claire picked the fox off her head and gave her a light shake. “Sylvia.”

“Mmmnnn?” The critter blinked awake and groggily tilted her head. “Did you need something?”

“Can you make a bubble? The kind with two layers.” The frosty longmoose raised a finger and formed a small ball of holy light. “I feel like getting a bit of practice in.”

“Mmk.” The overleveled vixen yawned. “Just give me a sec…” She clapped her paws, wrapping them both in not two, but ten extra thick layers. “There... you should be all set.”

“Thank you.”

Scratching the not-dog’s ears, she took a deep breath and began to manipulate her divinity. Carefully at first, and faster after a brief delay, she moved the holy energy around and around, forcing it to spread out from her bones and course through the circuits spread throughout her body.

She modified its properties after completing two full cycles, turning it from orderly to chaotic, a pure gold to a melange of reds and blacks. As chaotic energy, it was much harder to control. During the process of her ascension, she could manipulate it freely, but now, she could hardly convince it to move in the direction she wanted, let alone complete a lap around the track without it escaping her body in every which way. If not for the fox’s barriers, she surely would have spun up a whole myriad of problems. The bits that were ejected from her frame did so in the form of ice. Large purple spikes shot from her flesh with enough force to pierce the temple’s walls.

The spines refused to retract until she returned her chaotic tide to its regular, orderly state. As far as appearances went, the exercise was simple. Its magical equivalent was something that even a child of three years could perform, but with divinity, its difficulty bordered on extreme. Only five minutes had passed, but Claire was completely out of breath. Her brow dripped with sweat, her back was left hunched, and it felt like her entire skeleton was on the verge of collapse.

There was a strange pain in her chest, originating from the shard and echoing outwards, coursing through the rest of her frame. It was not as bad as the backlash she had experienced the first time she had used her divine energy, but neither was it delayed.

Her mortal flesh simply could not handle the load. That was why the holy energy was not scattered through her form like her mana, but stored solely in the true ice that was her other failing.

Gritting her teeth and clenching her fists, she cast her eyes on her status and confirmed that she still had another fifty points to drain. Her total had increased over the past few days, going from 139 to 141. She was tempted to think that it was a fruit born of her training, but Meltys had confirmed that not to be the case.

Divinity was the opposite of faith. For each individual that held belief in a concept and acknowledged its master as a greater being, said master’s divinity would grow. Only one point was typically provided, but those of greater faith, particularly those explicitly recognised by the greater being in question, could provide more. That was the one and only way it grew. While faith could be cultivated with discipline, divinity was effectively in the hands of the faithful, be they believers in the present or past. Even a brief moment of reliance would bring eternal power to a god, as would swearing in one’s name, regardless of the mortal’s beliefs.

Because the two concepts contradicted, only faith or divinity could be active at once, with the higher value displayed in one’s status, and the dysfunctional one hidden away. The zealous nature of most societies all but ensured a faith stat in the tens or hundreds. Unless you were high-ranking nobility, of course, or perhaps a god-hating elf.

Those born to the uppermost crust were taught from an early age to hold their faith, to preserve it so that they could select a god for a cause in the case that the political need arose. It was precisely this preservation that led the gods to value their blue blood. Those in power could easily sway the masses with their words and bring a new wave of followers—a new wave of faith that would bolster a specific deity’s power.

Of course, to a real god, the ten or hundred thousand points that such a movement generated was but a drop in the bucket, but neither Claire nor Meltys were real gods, despite what the latter had claimed. Both were only twice ascended, too far down the ladder to even dream of breaching the divine border.

That minor technicality, however, did not prevent their worship, nor the gradual accrual of their divinity, though in the longmoose’s case, she had not the slightest clue as to its source of its growth. While Meltys had a whole nation of worshippers, she had only a group of drunks that had jokingly declared her a deity on another drunk’s whims. It was not as if the idiots would simply propagate, especially if they were convenient enough to unknowingly bring her power.

“Okay. I’m done.”

Dismissing her status screen and uncrossing her legs, Claire breathed a heavy breath and pulled her fox into her arms. She couldn’t keep practicing. Any more, and she was sure to ache all day.

“Finally!”

Sylvia transformed as she sat in the other girl’s arms, turning from a forest critter to a full-sized foxgirl.

“What are you doing?” Claire kept her arms exactly where they were, not moving an inch to account for her pet’s newfound size.

“Well everyone else is still asleep, so I thought you were probably gonna turn small again.” Though unable to move or breathe with the vice grip around her ribs, the four-eared elf fairy relayed her words with no issue. Her reflection had exited the room’s giant dressing mirror and started casually chatting away.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, come on! Stop playing dumb, I know you didn’t forget! You said you were gonna do it if I teleported everyone!”

“...Fine. If you can catch me.”

Grumbling under her breath, the lyrkress shrank to her childlike form and bolted for the hall, but a magical vector locked her in place before she could get out the door.

“You’re not getting away that easily!” A predatory grin upon her face, the fox-elf took a four-legged stance, raised her tail overhead, and pounced atop her disgruntled prey.