Jeffery turned his head to the side, staring at his cohorts with a strange expression on his face. He had dreamed of retirement, but he had never imagined there’d be so much babysitting involved. There was a talkative egg, an easy to forget pupa, and an easily lost woman he had to take care of. Luckily, both the egg and the woman were interested in the battle between phoenixes, dragons, humans, and bugs, so all he had to do was bring them there to get them off his case. As for the pupa, well, it didn’t want anything but any honey, so its opinions didn’t really matter.
As for why Mary was tagging along with him, well, Jeffery had his innate ability to thank for that. His innate ability was called Distinct Odor, and, well, it gave him a distinct odor that made him very easy for Mary to find no matter how many times he washed himself. As for Mary’s innate ability…. Jeffery glanced at the red-haired woman. She was pouting, and her arms were crossed over her chest. Her gaze was narrowed, her eyes staring at the web in the distance where a horned woman was slaughtering bugs.
Jeffery cleared his throat. “How about you go over there and say hello?” he asked. “Tafel’s a very busy individual; after all, she’s married to a dragon. Can you imagine that? If I had a dragon for a wife, you’d bet I’d pay a lot more attention to her than my friends.” The old man nodded as he looked off into the distance. “Dragons are prone to sleeping a lot, so you only have short periods of time to do things with them. You have to drop what you’re doing to make time for them even if you have prior engagements.”
Mary furrowed her brow and turned to look at Jeffery. His words must’ve been worth listening to since Tafel and Vur kept him around. It would also explain why Tafel was always busy and making the best use of time—save for the recent addition of the dragon tablet gnawing a hole in her schedule. Whenever Vur was asleep, the demon could give her attention to other things … like hanging out with her best friend. “I’m going to fight too,” Mary said, turning to look back at the sky. She drew her sword and stabbed herself in the leg, poking through the joints in her armor. Her eyes didn’t change as she withdrew her sword. She raised her arm, pointing her sword at the sky, letting her blood run down the metal. When her weapon was completely coated with the red liquid, she took a step forward, vanishing from her place beside Jeffery.
Tafel parried an insect’s mandible and thrust her sword forward, stabbing the giant insect deep in its mouth. With a grunt, her horns shone with a blue light, and a miniature frost nova exploded from the sword’s surface, sending shards of ice shooting through and out of the bug’s carapace. The threads in front of her dropped away as the bug was released by the web and fell to the ground, making space for another bound bug to appear. It must’ve been Vur’s doing; when a bug was killed or taken, it was discarded by the threads, and when a bug was thoroughly immobilized, it was also dropped to the ground to be dealt with by a giant earthen arm wielding a massive stone hammer.
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A ripping sound drew Tafel’s attention to the side, and a struggling insect’s mandible popped into view. Before it could get any closer, a woman in black armor appeared and sliced the insect apart, her strike opening a section of the web to reveal the trapped bugs inside. “Mary!” Tafel said. “I was wondering where you were.”
Mary turned to look at Tafel, scanning the demon from head to toe. “Are you using your innate ability? You said you’d show it off during the battle.”
Tafel stabbed her sword into the web, piercing an insect’s face. She scratched her head as she looked at Mary. “I can’t,” she said. “The webs are flammable.” The demon smiled at the red-haired woman. “What about yours?”
“It works great,” Mary said, looking down at her sword. “Better than expected.” In her vision, there was a glob of green light attached to her blade. Wisps of the light flowed from the blade, down into the hilt, and into her palm. With every pulse of green light entering her hand, the fatigue in her body lessened until the whole glob was consumed, leaving Mary completely refreshed.
Tafel glanced at the traces of mana connecting the dead Oebu Sin and Mary’s blade. “It’s not a soul attack, right?”
Mary shook her head. “I’m absorbing life force, not souls.”
“That explains why it’s all dry and withered,” Tafel said, examining the bug Mary had sliced in twain. The demon crouched down and broke off a piece of the insect’s shell, watching as meat in the form of powder crumbled out. “I wonder if we can rehydrate it.”
Mary crouched down before looking around. Although she was standing on the web like Tafel, the armored woman still wasn’t quite sure how it worked. “How do I know which thread is sticky?”
“Vur decides that,” Tafel said. “If he wants a thread to be sticky, then it’ll be sticky. He can change it whenever he wants, so the webs only hinder the bugs while doing nothing to us.”
Amber lights flashed from Tafel’s and Mary’s root bracelets at the same time. They looked at each other before looking down at their wrists. A furrow appeared on Tafel’s brow. “That’s not supposed to happen,” she said before opening a portal leading back to Vur near his feet. Tafel walked through and looked up, meeting Vur’s gaze. “Hey, you saw the message too, right? What do you think?”
“Hey!” Kim Hajun shouted from the distance. He ran towards Vur, crossing several meters with every step he took. “The severed hand Oebu Sin is attacking the tower! You have to stop it somehow, Vur! It’s your responsibility as the lord!”
Vur took in a deep breath and sighed. Couldn’t the severed hand have waited until the insect barbeque was over? How rude.