Chapter 472 - The Land of the Listlessly Lethargic IV

  Cire made a mirror out of a block of ice and quickly looked herself over. She briefly considered returning to her humanoid form, but settled for adjusting her clothing. Her magical shape-shifting cloak changed from a pair of ear cuffs into a neckerchief and a celestial raiment. The translucent, silken cloth hovered over her shoulders and flowed down her limbs to form a shawl that looked far better on her noodle-like form than any dress ever could.

  Though fond of the overall aesthetic, Cire wasn’t quite content with her initial creation. She adjusted it a few more times, tweaking its precise colour, length, and opacity whilst slowly twirling around and observing herself from all different angles.

  Only when fully pleased did she knock on the door in front of her. A series of defense mechanisms disengaged in tandem. There was the obvious deadbolt, which made an audible click when twisted out of position, as well as a series of spells that obfuscated the room’s presence and directly assaulted any potential intruders. The whole castle’s security had been heavily beefed up since Vel’s st invasion and many of the spells had been tuned to prioritize elimination over prevention—a request that Cire had made to keep Allegra away.

  Thanks to all of the overly complicated processes, it took ten seconds for the door to finally creak open. What awaited on the other side was not the guest room in which they had their first reunion, but an entire wing meant exclusively for her mother’s use.

  The hidden, three-story annex had a thousand different luxuries built in. There was a library, a kitchen, and a dozen different recreation rooms spread throughout, each built with a theme in mind. Some, like the field in the basement and the pool that sat beside it, allowed her mother to stay in shape, while others, like the sewing room and the atelier, were built so she could pursue her hobbies.

  Though she often found her in the middle of doing just that—Cire had eventually realised that Allegra couldn’t trace her path if she simply teleported straight into her mother’s room—Violet was already waiting by the door by the time it opened. The purple-scaled snake-woman had her arms crossed to support her voluptuous chest and the faintest smile painted across her lips. It was a teasing, almost amused look. The same one she always wore.

  “And here I thought you were about to leave without visiting your dear old mother,” she said.

  “I thought about it,” said Cire.

  “Now that’s just awful.” Violet rubbed her cheeks with her hands balled up and pretended to sob. “You’re supposed to have daddy issues, not mommy issues!”

  Cire sighed. “Are we really doing this again?”

  “Yes,” said Violet. She stuck out her long, forked tongue and ughed before leading her daughter into her home. They passed both her servants along the way—the green-scaled Esmeralda was reading something in the library, while the pink-scaled Camellia was working on her forms in one of the gyms—and entered the purple snake’s study.

  Though it was on the annex’s second floor, its window provided a perfect view of the castle’s front yard, where much of the party’s luggage had already been loaded. Driven by the artifact built into the windowsill, the panes could see through any other on castle grounds.

  Violet didn’t speak again until they were both seated, settled into the armchairs by the firepce with a tiny wine table situated between them. “What time are you leaving?”

  “Whenever the others gather,” said Cire. “It’ll probably be another hour or two.”

  “So soon?” Violet lifted the leather-bound book beside her desk and gave its spine a gentle stroke. “I was hoping for a little more time.”

  “I can stretch it if it comes down to it.”

  “It wouldn’t be very nice to keep your friends waiting.”

  “I meant like this,” said Cire. A pulse of energy echoed through the room as a golden light crept its way through her eyes. The clock that sat above the door slowed down mid-tick, the accompanying click becoming a minute long echo. And then, all of a sudden, her eyes were back to normal, and so too was the world around them.

  “You know, your father used to do that exact thing to hide the fact that he was a quick shot.”

  Cire pinched the bridge of her nose. “I think I have a headache.”

  “I felt the same way,” said Violet. “You’d think a horse that can easily fight for ten straight days would be able to hold it in for more than ten straight seconds.”

  “Can we please talk about anything else?” asked Cire. “And he’s a moose.”

  “Same difference,” said Violet.

  “Moose have antlers.”

  “I don’t see how that changes much of anything.” For a moment, Violet emuted the cold, bnk expression that her husband and daughter wore so often—had their colours been the same, they would have been identical—but she broke into a ugh when she caught her daughter’s gaze. A smile on her lips all the while, she leaned on the table between them, her elbows on top of the gss and her face in her loosely-balled hands.

  “You’re not coming back, are you?”

  Cire shook her head. “We’ll be heading to Valencia as soon as we finish with our training.”

  “I thought as much.” There was a moment of silence as the older snake lightly ran her fingers through her daughter’s hair. “Do you still remember how you felt right after you looked through the mirror?”

  Cire nodded.

  Violet smiled and continued. “I know it doesn’t excuse what we did, but we wanted you to be strong. We needed you to be strong,” she said, “and we had to loosely follow Vel’s pn if we wanted to stop her from acting. It was the only reasonable choice we could think of.”

  “I know.” Cire closed her eyes and took a breath. “You don’t need to expin.”

  “Your father never knew. He’s clumsy, silly, and honestly a bit of a dork, but he was always just doing his best. For both of us.”

  “I know.”

  “I want you to forgive him.”

  “I know.”

  “Cire…”

  The snake-moose averted her gaze. “I’ll think about trying.”

  Violet sighed. “Looks like those daddy issues of yours are even worse than I thought.”

  “I don’t have daddy issues.”

  Violet grabbed Cire’s snout and gave it a solid squeeze as she ughed. “You’ve grown far too cheeky for your own good.”

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

  “Sure you don’t.” The signature retort was met with a ugh and a pinch of the noise. “Where are you heading?”

  “Further north,” said Cire. “To Elysium.”

  “That probably isn’t as good of an idea as you might think.”

  “It’ll be fine. I’m strong.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of how little you’d gain.” Violet let go of her daughter’s face, settled into her chair, and closed her eyes. “You’d have to do something as drastic as what your father did, if you want any more levels.”

  “What did he do?” asked Cire, with a tilt of the head. The mirror had shown her all of the events relevant to who she had ultimately become—she knew Flux’s story, she knew Vel’s scheme, and she knew her father’s struggles—but it wasn’t like she had suddenly ingested the past in its entirety. The coarse brush had left the finer details obscured, and most of the events she witnessed happened either ten, a thousand, or ten thousand years prior.

  “He killed nearly every aspect on the continent,” expined the mia.

  “Is that all?” She took a moment to recall Kael’ahruus’ hit squad. She remembered their faces and their csses, but she knew little of their powers. “The aspects I killed barely gave any experience.” One would think that they would have activated their ultimates soon after she took out the first, but none of her assaints had done anything worth noting.

  It was possible that they were simply weaker than average, around the bottom of the barrel, but even then, they were aspects. She should have gotten some experience for orchestrating their untimely deaths, but the bar had barely budged.

  “Honestly, I have no idea,” said Violet. “I know what he told me, but he doesn’t always talk much about his battles.”

  Cire blinked. “Not even to you?”

  “He’d only talk about them if I pressured him, and I rarely did,” she said, with a faint smile. “Virillius has never really liked gloating or bragging. He always got all shy when I sang his praises. Put him in a frilly pink dress and he’d probably make for more of an innocent maiden than the two of us combined.”

  “Mother, please. I could’ve done without the mental image.”

  “If you think that’s bad, you should’ve seen the time he wore my lingerie,” she said, with a giggle.

  “He did what?” The urge to vomit welled up within the lyrkress’ chest, but her morbid curiosity got the better of her. “Why?”

  “I thought it’d be funny, so I snuck it onto him while he was sleeping.”

  “Oh.”

  “What? Did you think it was something dirty?” asked Violet, with a grin. “Like daddy, like daughter, I guess.”

  “Please never say that again.” Cire paused for a second. “Wait. What did you mean by that?”

  “Nothing.” The serpent’s lips remained curved into a perfect crescent.

  “Somehow, I seriously doubt that.”

  “I’m not really sure you should.”

  “You’re the one insinuating that Father… behaves curiously in the bedroom.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Violet, with a cheeky smile.

  “Mother…”

  “Did you not like the taste of your own medicine?”

  “Mother, please.”

  The back and forth continued throughout the early afternoon, ending only as Sylvia knocked on the door and informed them that the others were ready. One st hug ter, mother and daughter parted ways, leaving the former to her hobbies, and the tter to cross the mountains.

  At least for Cire, the journey proved to be more of a sightseeing trip than a grueling expedition. Hordes of monsters attacked the party, but she only fought the ones whose first kill bonuses she had yet to cim. The others needed the experience, and a quick test had affirmed that she gained next to nothing even if she opted to contribute.

  Frustrating as it seemed at first, she found that she was happy to ze about while the others put their best feet forward. She inspected the trees for changes, took notes about the monsters’ biology, and messed around with her fox. Most of the time, she didn’t even follow the other members directly and either rushed ahead or caught up ter, depending on her mood. After all, the mountains were filled with things to discover, things that she had failed to note when she first explored them.

  There were, of course, the dastardly dungeons filled with the strangest monsters to which any living Cadrian had ever borne witness. They served as the most common type of ndmark, one of every three that Cire had counted, but so too did they serve as more than just dens for the wicked and bloodthirsty. Both in and out of the dungeons were impossible sights brought into the world by the abundance of mana. There were floating rocks that produced the purest of water, lost civilizations whose runic inscriptions were with clear purpose no longer, and oases that warmed the mountains and provided a climate for those unable to endure the bite of winter. There were clouds with tiny fae kingdoms built atop them, kes that led to brand new worlds, and shrines whose gods had long since fallen.

  Like a sandbox, the mountains awaited, providing those who dared to brave them with all the experiences and adventures that they could have ever desired. And Cire frolicked haphazardly between them, visiting everything that happened to catch her eye.

  A small part of her had wanted to comb through every st nook and cranny to truly see the Langgbjern mountains for what they really were, to understand the depth of their history and the many things sequestered by time. As, she hadn’t the opportunity. Traveling at full speed with their focus on pressing ahead, it only took two weeks for the brigade to push to the end of the continent of Pria.

  Squeezing their way out from a narrow mountain path, the party arrived at the edge of an icy expanse, a frozen field that measured fifty kilometers from one end to the other. Jutting out as the continent’s northernmost point, beneath its final summit, it was precisely their destination.

  And so too was it an empty field.

  “I do not suppose this is what you had in mind when you suggested we visit Elysium?” asked Arciel.

  “It’s not quite what I expected,” said Cire.

  “I must admit, the mana’s density is most impressive. There must be a hundred ley lines underfoot, perhaps even more,” said the squid. Drawing her fan and tapping it against her chin, she started walking towards the vast expanse of nothingness. “It is difficult to trace them with their density so absurd, but they appear to be converging just further ahea…d?” The Vel’khanese queen stopped to examine the space in front of her when she found her chest smooshed against an invisible wall. Taking half a step back, she lightly pressed a hand against the perfectly ft surface. She walked back and forth as she kept her fingers in contact, tapping it occasionally with her fan.

  “Is something wrong?” asked Chloe.

  “How curious,” said Arciel. “There appears to be some manner of object preventing my advance.”

  “Let me see.”

  She was joined by the rabbit, who raised both ears and closed her eyes as she pced both hands on the wall. Allegra hummed, hawed, and pushed her own mana against the construct, before stepping back and speaking with a nod.

  “There are so many criss-crossed ley lines that it’s hard to tell, but there are at least a dozen different enchantments at py. The spellwork is so incredibly detailed and intricate that I think we’d be best off giving up. Breaking them isn’t impossible. There seems to be a validation mechanism that uses some sort of key, and we could probably forge one with enough time, but we’d be talking at least a few years for each yer. I don’t know how many there are exactly, but I sensed at least te—”

  The long-winded lecture was interrupted by a sharp crack. The first was but one of the many that echoed through the once-desote nd. With its veneer ripped away, it had become a quiet vilge, a tiny, zy hamlet, built into the end of the world, bnd and humble as any other, scattered across the nd.

  Slowly craning her neck, Allegra cast her eyes on the cause, who had passed right through the defense and revealed to the others what she had seen all along.

  Cire had known that there were a number of barriers, even before Allegra voiced her observation. Her ultimate had informed her of their presence even whilst rendering their effects inert. She hadn’t the faintest clue as to the shields’ precise functions, but they were ultimately irrelevant. They broke at the lightest touch in spite of the divinity that went into their forging.

  “What are you standing around for?” she asked, with a devilish smile. “Let’s go. We don’t have all day.”