Chapter 347 - Hubris IV

Virillius was assaulted by a mild headache the moment he walked through the demon’s portal. It was not a function of the spell itself, but the scene that awaited him on the other side. The disgruntled moose raised both hands to his temples and slowly massaged them, but he was unable to free himself from the cycle of suffering.

The fox reacted similarly. She stood just outside of the rift, blinking repeatedly as the gears in her mind ground to a halt. Rubia, on the other hand, sprinted across the ring. She ran towards the ten-meter snake-moose at its centre and wrapped her arms around her tail.

It wasn't as if the man failed to recognize his daughter. Her form was unfamiliar, but he had known it was her from the moment he caught sight of her scales. Her ears only aided in the proclamation and confirmed her identity outright. He was certainly surprised by her monstrous shape, but it was really the result of the trial that had driven his stupor. He had expected her to survive, and he had expected her to be battered—the moose had chosen the Victor Redleaf precisely because he had determined that he was perfect for pushing her limits—but never in his wildest dreams had he imagined that she would be sitting in front of a mound of corpses.

Even the goddess was appalled. He could feel it. Her domain was trembling with excitement, shaking as if to echo her battlelust and anticipation. It wouldn't have surprised him if she fell from the ceiling and demanded to challenge father and daughter at once. But fortunately, no such event occurred.

"Claire. What did you do?" groaned the moose king.

"Nothing," she said, with an obviously fake smile.

"Then how, exactly, do you explain that?" His eyes were on her collection. There were seven bodies in all, two belonging to gods, and the other five to notable celestials. It didn't make any sense. They were immortals, powerful fighters recognized by the goddess of war herself. She shouldn't have been able to best so many, even with their powers mostly sealed away and their ability scores brought down to her level. Their technique and martial prowess should have won out over the trump cards she had refused to show him. It wasn't like she had only fought the weakest links. One of the corpses belonged to the god of trolls, whose absurd constitution had earned him ninety-seven of the hundred consecutive kills he needed to see himself released.

"I felt like killing them. So I did."

"And how did you manage to release them from their cages without a key?"

"I have one.”

He sighed. It was an obvious lie—the daggers that served as Vella's symbols reacted strongly in each other’s presence, and his was dead silent—but he dismissed it with a shake of the head. There were too many questions to ask for him to be focused on something so trivial. Alas, he was never given the opportunity to voice them. Having finally recovered, the fox dashed towards his daughter and casually jumped on top of her head.

"You should probably go to bed," she said, after taking a moment to examine her seat.

"I'm fine."

"You look pretty tired to me.”

"I’m not.”

“Mmnmnnn… if you say so,” said Sylvia.

“I do.” Claire briefly glanced at her father. “Let’s head back. The others are probably sick of waiting.”

Rubia looked up with a pout, but Claire brushed it off with a tail-driven pat of the head.

“Don’t worry. I’ll stop by again soon.”

The clone paused for a bit before reluctantly letting go and taking a step back.

“Thanks, Rubia.”

Claire brought her face close and lightly pressed her nose against the fake’s. Her father looked like he had something to say, but she dismissed him with a wave of the tail before standing up on her feet.

After a brief delay, she ripped open a portal half a kilometer from the cabin and slipped her way through. It closed as soon as she was gone, only for a bigger one to open in its place just a few seconds later. Claire grabbed her dead foes’ bodies, and ignoring her father’s surprise, dragged them into the forest beyond. She didn’t think it would work, but evidently, Vella had only considered the case where her examinees would enter and exit by key.

“Wait a second. You can open portals again?” asked Sylvia, with a tilt of the head. “Doesn’t that mess with circuits?”

“Not anymore,” said Claire. Flapping her wings, she lifted herself into the sky and dragged her victims along. The bull was especially heavy, but she counteracted its weight with her vectors and lugged it back to base.

Sylvia blinked. Thrice. “Does that mean you’re fixed now?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“Then how the heck are you opening portals!?”

Claire shrugged. “Vector magic almost doesn’t count as magic anymore.” She still used her magic circuits to perform the system calls, but the resources used were negligible. Each command consumed exactly ten points of mana and one point of divinity, regardless of the instruction in question.

“Uhmmm… Right.”

The sky was no longer dark and gloomy, but she could tell that the rain had only just stopped. The plants were still covered in moisture; their trunks were soaked and thick watery beads hung from the leaves and flowers. The ground was so muddy that the carriage and its turberi were sure to get stuck.

In her true form, her looming shadow was large enough for the cabin’s inhabitants to notice her immediately. Jules, who was standing guard outside, didn’t even have the chance to speak before the door was opened.

Chloe was the first person to step out, but she wasn’t the first to interact. Having greeted his mistress with two idle blinks, Boris had long set himself to following her commands and consuming her quarry. Or more specifically, their gear. Summoning seventeen copies, he bit through their equipment before anyone could voice a word of complaint.

“I have been expecting your return for three and a half days,” said Arciel. Her lips were twisted into a bit of a pout. She had very intentionally lowered her fan just enough to show it.

“I was training,” said Claire. “And I told you before I left.”

“Perhaps, but I would have appreciated a more detailed warning, considering the duration.”

“Uhmmm, in her defence, she didn’t really know,” said Sylvia. “We were supposed to come back right away, but then we got caught up in all sorts of stuff.”

Everyone’s eyes went straight to the pile of ragged, half-naked corpses.

“The cow looks like it’d be good as a steak,” said Claire.

“I can try making something of it for lunch,” said Chloe. “but it’s too big for me to butcher it by myself.” The celestial bull was nearly as long as the caldriess, and at least six times thicker in every which way.

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“Uhhmmm… you should probably leave it alone anyway. It’s got a whole lot of divinity, so eating it’ll make you super sick.”

The brigade’s eyes collectively shuffled to the resident lizard, who had started munching on the celestial bull’s flesh after running out of metal. He did pause briefly to return the stares, but his feast continued right after.

“Boris looks fine to me,” said Chloe.

“Well uhmmm… I think that’s probably ‘cause it just hasn’t kicked in yet?” said the fox.

“He’s eaten weirder things before,” said Claire. “Like Vella’s dagger.”

“I guess he kinda has,” said Sylvia.

By all means, the ikarett should have minded. Divinity was potent and indigestible enough to upset cast iron stomachs, but having been modified by Dorr, and subsequently ascended for even greater compatibility, he saw no trouble in its consumption.

“What kinda training were you doing exactly, Miss Augustus?” asked Ace. He glanced at the rest of the corpses. “Doesn’t look like anything normal, at least.”

“I fought people,” she said. “Idiots that sat in cages all day.”

There was a moment of silence.

“A colosseum?” asked Lana.

“Something like that,” said Claire.

“I presume these were your opponents?” asked Arciel, as she looked over the spread.

Claire nodded.

“Why’d you bring them back?” asked Jules.

“Their bones might make for decent materials.”

Another moment of silence.

“Except the elf’s,” she said, as she assumed her humanoid form. “I crushed all of his.”

“Then why the fuck did you bring him!?”

Claire shrugged. “We could eat him,” she said. “He was respectable enough.”

The clam made a flabbergasted face, somewhere between horror and disgust, but Arciel stepped in before he could voice his concerns. “I would certainly not mind partaking in his blood,” said the vampire. “Its scent is rather delicious.”

“His bark tasted like cinnamon,” said the lyrkress.

“His bark?” The witch slowly cocked her head. “I suspect that you will need to describe the nature of your training for the claim to make sense.”

“I was fighting in a strange arena, and the elf was my first opponent.” Claire smiled, softly but visibly. “He was annoying to fight, especially after he turned into a tree, but he died when I caught and squeezed him.”

“He assumed the form of a tree?” said Arciel. “How bizarre.”

“It’s a metaphor,” said Krail. “It’s pretty normal for members of the Redleaf tribe. Most of them are sword-wielding bards, and their most common ars magna is a domain that lets them embody a tree.” He knelt down by the body and carefully looked it over. “This one’s pretty clearly a pureblood, so it doesn’t seem too surprising that he could pull it off.”

Elves were like humans. It was only in a few key traits that the sister species differed—elves had no body hair, sharpened ears, and traded their sexual desires for a love of speculation. As was the case with humans, knife-ears were rarely changed by their ascensions; their bodies stayed more or less the same, with the accompanying increase in their lifespan serving as the primary indicator. And it was precisely that trait which had stopped Krail short of asking questions; he had no idea that he was examining a god, not that he would have believed such a claim in the first place, given the nature of his species.

“His name ended in Redleaf,” said Claire, with a nod. She raised her tail and directed it at another one of her kills. “I fought him second. He was a good archer, and he was strong enough to shake me off when I tried to strangle him, but he died when I bit his head off.”

“That much is clear,” said Arciel, as she looked at the stump that was his neck. “Though I must say, his size is rather unimpressive, for one of his species.”

Claire nodded. At only three and a half meters, he was clearly vertically challenged. “After him was a group of idiots,” she said. “I overpowered them easily.”

It wasn’t her intention to brag, but neither had the battles been quite as easy as she had made them out to be. Her third and fourth opponents were both mages, and as such, she had challenged them by charging straight in. The third—a large bird that resembled a snowy owl with a second head growing out of its back—had tried to escape after incinerating her face, but she caught it off guard by negating its vectors and subsequently ran her claws straight through its chest.

Opponent number four—a giant lizard with a huge jaw, two tiny arms, and an expensive top hat—had put up a bit of a better fight. It reacted in time to escape her charge and even countered with a barrage of spells. Despite losing more than half of her flesh to the assault, Claire eventually closed the distance and indulged in some good old deicide. It was much the same story as with her fifth opponent, only the lizard had changed places with a duck-billed beaver, and the magic with throwing knives. The platypus’ weapons were sharp enough to cut through her scales, but in her true form, the wounds they left were far too shallow to note. She endured its attacks, countered with her own, and came ahead without the use of her brain.

Immortals they may have been, but duelists they were not. All three were fighters that functioned best in groups with allies to serve as their swords and shields.

“The cow was the strongest,” said Claire, as she laid eyes on her sixth opponent. “It was as fast as the assassin we fought the other day, and at least three times stronger.”

“With that body?” Chloe furrowed her brow.

“I cannot imagine that to have been an easy battle.”

“It wasn’t.”

The celestial bull was her most difficult opponent. Half the challenge came from its careful specialization. Unlike all of her other opponents, the bull had no investment in magic. It had enough spirit to resist her vectors—which did still scale off of her wisdom score, in spite of the change to its function—but everything else was dumped straight into its speed, strength, and finesse. It was only by imitating the elf’s trick that she had come out of the fight at all.

“What about that guy?” asked Sylvia. Her paw was pointed at the final corpse, a fanged troll with black and red markings scribbled all over his frame.

“He convinced me to let him out because he thought he could kill me,” she said, as she recalled the warrior’s statement. He was the only one in the arena that had been capable of speech. Most of the others had their mouths sealed. “But that was the height of hubris.” She didn’t know exactly how strong the troll was, exactly. He had fallen before he had the chance to show his stuff. “I tripped him with magic and stabbed him to death with his own sword.”

Though he didn’t serve much of a challenge, executing the troll had proven quite difficult. He had certainly proved his worth as the god of resilience by living through a seemingly impossible number of stabs. Claire didn’t know exactly how long it had taken to kill him, but she was fairly certain that it had spanned half the time at least.

His regeneration outpaced her life drain at least twofold, and his health barely ticked down even as she stabbed him ten times a second. Her blades would even get stuck whenever she slowed; his flesh quite literally regenerated right over them, trapping them in his body for just long enough to undo some of the progress she so diligently made. It was ridiculously difficult, even with him pinned, but she eventually managed to whittle him down and deal the finishing blow.

“It really is quite underhanded, that trick of yours,” said Arciel.

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

“Uhhhmm… Claire? That doesn’t really work as well when everyone knows it’s one of your favourites,” said Sylvia.

The moose averted her eyes. “Enough talking. We should eat befo—”

The statement was cut short by an explosion. A metal weapon, glowing with a bright pink light, plummeted from the heavens and fell upon the corpses. They were instantly disintegrated, deleted so quickly that Boris found his mouth empty when he tried to take another bite.

The foreign object was halfway between a spear and a gauntlet. It had a massive, armoured knuckle that was large enough to wrap around the elbow. It was a blocky piece of metal, tipped with a single needle as thick as the average human’s forearm.

More than half of the brigade’s members threw up their guards, but Claire couldn’t be bothered. It was clearly another one of Vella’s attempts. She could tell, even without reading the note taped to its handle.

You can’t have these bodies. I’ll give you another small piece of mine instead.

- Vella

“The goddess of war? Again?” asked Arciel. She read the note from over the caldriess’ shoulder.

“Unfortunately.” Turning Boris into a shovel, Claire dug a hole and immediately buried the weapon inside. Some of the group’s members clearly wanted to protest the decision, but she ignored them. They could dig it back up and keep it if they wanted. She didn’t care, so long as it had nothing to do with her. “When are we leaving?”

“It will be another few hours,” said Arciel. “We shall depart once enough of the soil has dried.”

“Okay. Wake me up when it’s time to go.”

Meandering into the cabin, the lyrkress picked an empty room, hugged her fox close, and went right to bed. She had promised Rubia that she would visit soon, and playing with her seemed like as good of an excuse as any to see Vella’s so-called gift ignored.