By the time that Steve came home in the morning, I had improved five hammocks into metal-framed foam beds with silk sheets and big thick comforters, obtained the sample of meteoric steel from John's supplies, and quickly experimented with making, essentially, micro-chainmail with a single long thread that weaved up and down, linking into the previous rows, while spiraling down the torso. On its own, the single small thread of steel wasn't really powerful enough to stop deadly blows from very heavy weapons, but Jess assured me that the suit, being one piece, could be enchanted enough to defend her against most attacks.

Making the suit out of a single thread came with challenges, namely the fact that a shirt of mail normally had, you know, two sleeves, and other topographic features that weren't quite as straight forward as a basic tube, especially when it had to fit women. Although it hurt my brain to do, I did end up succeeding, creating a good garment that looked and felt like fairly normal chainmail, unless you looked very closely. The end result was something more flexible than common garden-variety chainmail, because the wire was thinner, while still being able to repel a common arrow or blade strike.

And that was before Jess got her hands on it.

John insisted that he didn't want the meteoric steel as his main piece of armor; although they declined to share his holy-metal poem to me, he did say that there was a type of shadow-attuned metal that would be perfect for his armor. Instead, he wanted a single-piece arm armor that would cover everything from his wrist to his bicep, could be removed, remained perfectly flexible, and exposed a certain spot on his inner arm that he said was important to the use of his powers.

"Does it also need to julienne fries?" I asked, deadpan.

"No," he replied in kind, "but if you could make it machine washable, I'd really appreciate it."

Steve's arrival was about three-quarters of the way through me figuring out a good way to accomplish all this, and I discovered that he'd really got my goat. I blinked to see him walking in with Carli in his hands, and the goat jumped down and bleated at me, seemingly proud of the blood on her little horns.

"What did you--"

Beat up fox! Carli informed me, proudly.

"I woke up," said Steve, sounding somewhere between good natured and on-his-way-to-angry-again, "wondering where I was and what had gone down the night before, to find that all my friends had gone and left me at the bar. Which," he paused and held up his hands, "I get. I'm not mad, though there was a moment there I was grumpy. I paid off the tab and all the damages, and I'm just leaving when some little kid runs up to me and says that the hero's goat is out on a friggin' pear farm covered in blood."

"So what do I do," Steve shrugged. "I'm a hero, you're a hero, you have a goat. I go out there and find that this little bugger," he knelt down and stared at Carli, who immediately turned and met his stare, "had chased down some kind of a... I guess it was a fox," he squinted at the goat, and Carli tossed her head in challenge. "Didn't even kill it, but had beaten it up and sat on it. How does a goat even restrain a fox without killing it, I have no idea, but that's where he was."

"She," I said, a little confused. "Carli's a she-goat." I knelt down and put a hand on Carli to get her attention, making her lose the staring contest. "Why did you fight a fox?"

Took from herd. Bad (undesirable) creature. Should not!

"It attacked Malla's place?" I interpreted, and the goat tossed her head in a definite yes-motion. "Is she okay?"

Herd lost one child (young). She (human-Malla) was not there (visible).

I sighed. "I ought to check on her."

"You stay," said John. "I'm getting sick of waiting here so I'll go check on your precious goat farmer."

"Do you need--"

"If I have any trouble finding an entire herd of stinking goats then I'm worth absolutely nothing as a tracker," John called, already on his way down the stairs.

Which... was entirely fair.

"I'll go with him," said Steve suddenly. "No offense, but I'd go crazy standing around in a tower waiting for you to do... something." He gestured at my pile of metal vaguely.

I waved in his general direction, dismissively, and went back to adjusting John's armor, using a replica of his arm in clay to keep the fit about right. Jess had been the one to insist on that, so that I didn't have to keep trying to fuss over her torso directly while I worked on the design for her armor, and of course it made sense in retrospect.

That left Alice to coo over my heroic little goat, Jess currently being elsewhere in the tower working on her enchantment stuff. I wanted to yell at Carli, honestly, but... if she was saving what was essentially family from a threat, then she really was being a hero, and what part of that could I really complain about? Without being a massive hypocrite?

So I went back to trying to mentally hold together all of the bullshit requirements John gave me, slowly refining the prototype into something usable. It wasn't terribly long before I had a nicely done piece of flexible arm armor, as John had requested, but with him out and ensuring my best goat's family was okay, I turned to Alice and Carli, to find the Hero of Purifying Light giving me a very odd look that took me a long moment to parse.

"Underwear?" I finally asked, and she nodded, apparently very serious.

The simplest part of what followed was giving her more (clean) copies of what she already owned, but then we got into little modifications. Some versions were a lot more conservative, while others were more risque, than what she'd been wearing on the day. For her bras, she had me adjust the fit of her cups, resize the bands so that they could be adjusted in a to a range of sizes she expected to need over time (which I would not have thought about, but she insisted there were a lot of reasons why her boobs would swell or reduce slightly, depending on things like weight, hydration, muscle mass, hormonal levels, and more), and added push-up and sports variants, with a particular emphasis on making sure the sports bra was going to support her girls right.

This process, naturally, left me staring for a long time at a mostly-undressed Heroine, with her sometimes jumping and gyrating. I, of course, did my utmost to be polite and professional. We both found it amusing for a little while, but once it actually got to working on the problems, there wasn't room in my brain for a boner, and forced to choose between the two, I decided to preserve my friendship instead of being a creep. Because while she was lovely, and while I knew the other Heroes had been banging... and while I kind of knew that Steve and Alice weren't really much of a pair, in her eyes, none of that meant that this was some kind of opportunity to push my own agenda.

Besides, I was still kind of interested in Miun, and the last time I'd gotten distracted from my current target it had gotten me a reputation, one that had taken me a long time to shake off. It'd be different if I got a complete rejection from her--I didn't consider her reaction to my first attempts at flirting a rejection, because I agreed that was a very early point in the relationship for me to have started with that--but we were still barely moving past those first knee-jerk reactions. We could end up as friends, or more, or less, but impatiently moving from one possibility to another was awful behavior, and I was sure she would agree with me on that. For certain, my past girlfriends would.

When Alice was satisfied, the two of us went to look for Jess. Alice went in first, and I was invited in a few minutes later, to find that Alice was, for the moment, sporting her one-piece armor, which I had to admit, from a distance might have just been a metal shirt. I half expected her to wrestle with getting it off, but she just gestured and it disappeared from her body and reappeared on the table.

"So Alice says you're willing to be our... provider," Jess said, and I could tell there was a layer of thick humor there, as though I were offering drugs instead of fitted bras.

"What are friends for?" I asked, not really sure that I understood the subtext. I glanced at her armor. "Did the enchantments take?"

Jess paused, as though unhappy to be distracted from the joke. "Yes," she said after a moment. "For magical metals, the Staff of the Diamond Mind can engrave the enchantments in some kind of secondary, non-physical space. It's actually more flexible than it was when you made it, but nearly indestructible. And the metal..." she paused, tilted her head, and decided to explain.

"I didn't mention, but meteoric steel's main benefit is that it passively generates stellar energy and can release it in a burst. For my armor, I have that linked to a defensive spell, while John will be using his for an attack, hence the arm guards. The metalwork you made is too fine for me to add a secondary effect, but I think I'll keep it like this for now. Maybe later I'll ask for a heavier version of the same."

I nodded, already reappraising the metal. I hadn't detected any sort of latent energy in it, but if Jess was content that the extra I'd generated really was meteoric steel, then I trusted she knew her business. "How quickly does it charge?"

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

"I say passively, but that's when it's being worn by me or John, as it reacts to the artifacts. For us, it probably recharges twice a day at most. Meteoric steel can also recharge under the light of the sun and stars, but much slower. Indoors or on a cloudy day, probably nothing."

I nodded, already considering setting up some kind of meteoric solar panels, though I wasn't sure what to do with the energy yet. "What can--"

"I'd love to talk shop," Jess interrupted, "but I'd also really like to get fitted before the boys come back, please?"

Fair enough. Fitting for Jess wasn't that different than for Alice, except that Jess didn't request any... adventurous underwear, either because she wasn't comfortable doing that in front of me, or because she wasn't comfortable doing it in front of Alice, who declined to leave on her own, and Jess didn't press.

Jess, however, also requested shoes. That included everything from three-inch heels to running sneakers, and she insisted on similar for Alice, despite the Purifying Hero blushing madly and insisting it wasn't important.

It was in the middle of this that we heard a commotion below that was the other Heroes returning, and I took the opportunity to escape and find out what had happened.

Malla, it turned out, was ...not quite alright.

"This," said John, as he lifted something that looked like a desert fox, if a desert fox had been handed to a video game designer with instructions to make it 'look evil', "was apparently trying to make friends with the local fox population. While your goat defended the herd, this thing attacked the goat herder, and dragged her off into the wilderness, I guess to act as a sacrifice or something."

"Yeah, it was weird," Steve said, helping lay Malla on a table that I had quickly raised up out of the ground. The old woman had a chunk taken out of her arm and another out of her leg, and had lost more than enough blood to be unconscious. Alice quickly stepped over and I could feel an intensity to her magic that I hadn't felt out of her so far, enough to convince me that it wasn't minor healing. "The thing drug the woman in a pattern like he was making some kind of spell out of her blood. John shot it in time to stop whatever it was, but..."

I felt immediately cold. Already, the idea that this little backwater town was safe from the Demon Lord felt like a naive little lie. "Where was it?"

"I'll show you," John said, and I nodded at him, following while Alice, Steve, and Jess watched over the goatherder that had only briefly sheltered me. As soon as John got outside, he suddenly blurred into a high-speed movement technique, and I forced myself to follow, the power of the Bracers of the Jade Will letting me push off from the ground like a cannon, while his Bow of the Phantom Arrow let him pass through miles of terrain like a phantom.

In truth, he could have just pointed in the direction, and I would have eventually found it. It wasn't that far, once you knew the location, and the blood circle was way too obvious to miss. I had to adjust a bit in midair, but landed safely next to the scene, studying the circle drug in the dirt with a rising feeling of both terror and disgust.

"Heptagram," noted John, and I nodded, having already counted the seven points of the star. "There's something inherently magic about the shape itself, maybe only when made out of blood... and I think the demon fox was also pouring some kind of evil energy into it as it drug the woman along."

I knelt by one of the lines, my Bracers easily telling me that something magical existed here, but not giving me details. Either of the other spellcasters could have told us more, I'm sure, but I'd run off out of anger and fear, not because we'd thought this through. "A part of the Demon Lord's Grand Work?"

"A part, a consequence, a prerequisite. I don't know. The Demon Lord isn't supposed to be active yet. Either this is part of what wakes him up, or it's a side-effect of the thing that will."

"Or it's gods or demons screwing with us," I said, grouchy, and stood. Although I might have waited for Jess to come over and study it, I flexed my will and broke the earth underneath the spell circle, physically pulling the thing apart so that it was no longer whole.

"We'll want Alice to clean this up," John said, turning to me, and I could see him distrusting the fact that I'd dealt with it myself. "It's her job."

Purifying, right. I nodded, sighing. "I... understand. I just don't like leaving it here."

"If you're nervous, I'll wait here while you get her. You can probably carry someone faster than me."

I nodded to him, turned, and flung myself back across the miles to my tower. By the time I got back, Malla was whole again and already sitting up, but she looked ...older, withered, somehow, as though the aborted ritual had been stealing her life force, whatever that implied. I kept my face impassive, though I felt like I wanted to cry. "Are you alright, Malla?"

The woman turned to me, and I saw fear in her eyes, but she pushed the emotion down. "Worst I've ever been," she said, "but I'll live. But that thing..." she turned and looked at the black-and-red fox that was bleeding on my floor.

It was dead, I noted when I turned to look at it, which was just as well. My powerup poem suggested I needed, like, at least two evil familiars, but I wasn't keen on rewarding something that had attacked my family with that kind of distinction, and I imagined Carli would agree. I went over and knelt down by the body, using telekinesis rather than my fingers to examine it, noting that while the fur was obsidian black with blood-red highlights, and its eyes replaced their white sclera with black, it otherwise physically normal--the claws and the teeth hadn't become black knives of pure evil or anything.

"What is it?" asked Malla, after a long moment.

"We think it's--" I started to say, before Alice interrupted.

"It's dead now," she said. "That's all that matters." She turned to me, and gave me a look that told me not to talk too easily about this stuff, and I frowned, but didn't argue.

"I don't think there are more," I agreed. "I think it was just... changed."

"Is it because you live by the cursed mountain?" Malla asked, and I could tell there was a deep fear in her voice.

"No," answered Alice, quickly. "I would know if that were the case."

Malla looked to her, and I frowned, but stood up. "On that note, Alice, can you come with me for a minute?"

She nodded, and Jess moved over to stand protectively next to Malla instead. I took Alice outside, and after briefly filling her in, I took her in another flying leap to the shattered blood circle.

Again, I could feel that her power was strangely intense, indicating that what had gone on here wasn't trivial. But when she pushed that power out into the segments of blood on the ground, she didn't just wipe away some kind of indistinct 'bad mojo'--the blood itself blackened, cracked, and lifted off the ground, turning to dust, while the ground itself, which had been only able to support thin grass before, suddenly sprouted incredibly thick, luscious, vibrantly green grass and a number of flowers, of kinds that I was immediately sure were not native--there was no way their seeds were just laying in the dirt here waiting for a little magic to grow. So purification on dirt would just spontaneously grow new plants from nothing? I wasn't entirely sure what to think about that.

By the time she was done, I almost didn't want to un-crack the ground, because the inside of the crevasses had filled with plant life, but I did anyway, ignoring the now-buried plants even though it bothered me to waste them. Now there was truly nothing left in the place that felt evil or demonic, and it... it had become something like a holy site in return, which seemed overkill to me.

I turned from examining the ground to find her and John sharing a moment, which I didn't interrupt, although my thoughts immediately wanted to protest that John had been with Jess before. Instead, I deliberately turned my thoughts to the garden I was intending to grow. While I certainly didn't want Alice to do all the work for me, it would be nice if I could get some food plants in season right away. In fact, while I had the others here, maybe Jess could help me with a more ideal growth environment? Was there a way to turn the Meteoric solar panel idea into the power source for an accelerated growth bay, or was the energy produced incompatible with that idea?

After a moment, I cleared my throat, and the two separated, embarrassed. I hauled Alice back, and John took his own way, as he had on the way out there. In total, only a few minutes had passed, enough that when we stepped back in, we could pretend that nothing of consequence had changed.

Malla was standing, if still leaning on the table. She looked... well, not great. I moved up and put a hand on her shoulder, meeting her eyes. "I'm sorry this happened," I said, meaning it. "Please let me know how I can help."

Malla shook her head. "Still need to take care of the herd," she said after a moment. "That's not something you can do for me, unless you plan to learn..."

I shook my head. "I can make things to help you get around, if you need that."

Malla snorted. "If I need something, I'll take a horse, or maybe one of the Caliman riding dogs. Those are supposed to be good with herds, but it'd be hard to find one of those this far east."

Riding dogs? That's nice. I let that thought wash past me, though I knew Jess and Alice would probably keep her in mind if they found one on their travels. Instead, I just nodded. "I could also make a large fenced area pretty easily..."

"Colin," she said, struggling a little with the name, as most people did. It wasn't quite how their language worked. "You're kind, but I'll deal with my own problems."

So I stepped back and nodded. "Okay. But if there are ever troubles, let me know, and I'll help."

She smiled back, but the smile was more fragile than it ought to be, missing something that had bled out of her in the dry grasslands.

"Also," Alice said into the moment of silence, "I should probably mention that I purified the place you were attacked, and there will be a lot of plant growth there for a while. A good place for your goats, maybe?"

Malla turned to look at her, surprised. Clearly, she didn't need to be told how far it was from here to there, having internalized the area after a life spent grazing herds across it. "You did? When?"

Alice smiled sweetly. "While you were indisposed," she said, and I smirked, then hid it when the woman turned to look at me, clearly confused.

"Alright," she said, I think trying to understand everything that had happened. "Just give me a minute, and I'll be on my way."

At this point, Carli, who had been... mostly, I think, trying not to be in the same room as the dead demon fox, finally sprinted from the stairwell where she'd been hiding to around in front of Malla, and stood up on her back legs, kicking her front legs in a way that was obviously desiring attention. Malla, nice!

"Aww, sweet thing," Malla purred, though I definitely got the impression she didn't hear Carli. She reached in and scratched her and pet her for a minute anyway, and I could tell that it made the goatherder feel better, too. "I'm glad you're getting along well here."

Nice, happy! Good Malla!

Malla cooed over her for another minute before standing up straighter and marching out the door, more resolute and energetic than I think she would have been otherwise. Carli let her go, following her out the door and watching, before suddenly getting distracted by what turned out to be a sudden need for her to make little goat turds in the wilderness.

"If we're all done examining this..." Alice gestured to the black-furred fox, and when nobody objected, she gestured, and a ball of light appeared around, it, light that had the intensity of an early-morning sun--it was too bright to look at, and cast long shadows in every direction, but it was still somehow gentle, stirring something within instead of creating any kind of fear or pain reaction. In only a few seconds, the light faded, and nothing remained of the demon creature, not even ashes.

I blinked away the afterimage, and studied the lack of remains for a moment. Then, with a shrug, I just turned to John. "Let's look at your arm armor," I said, wanting to get that done, finally.

The archer turned to me and nodded, and we went upstairs.