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Punishment reincarnation 55
🕑 Added 2024-03-22 14:06:50 +0000 UTC55 – Water wisp
The light drew closer. Before long, it emerged from the fog that was obscuring its features, revealing itself for what it really was. There floated a spherical blob of magic, shining bright when seen with magical vision, and weakly when seen with normal eyes. An untrained adventurer, not used to searching the magical spectrum, might not have been able to see the little floating blob until they were so close to it that they might get attacked. But not Ishrin’s party: they were all studying the thing, their eyes tracking the small ball of light flying towards them in an erratic pattern. It spluttered and pulsed, its magic losing cohesion and pulling itself back together soon after.
“What a sorry sight,” Ishrin muttered. “It’s like the wisp I slew outside of Noctis for a quest, but this one appears to be injured.”
There was a sharp intake of breath. “It’s a water wisp!” Melina said. “What Tier is it?”
“No higher than Tier 5, this one.” Ishrin said, still shaking his head. “It’s still losing power even as we speak.”
“I will be the one to put it out of its misery.” Lisette’s voice was cold and monotone. She was still upset by what she had seen at the manor, and she hoped that granting mercy to a little spirit of the forest would help her feel better.
She knew it was probably a moot point: there was a reason people hunted these wisps without much care. They were little more than balls of elemental mana, unable to think and feel. But it still made for a sorry sight, the damaged boundary of its mana core making it leak power until it would be nothing more than a husk of its former self. She wanted to fight it while it was still strong, to grant it a warrior death—although the idea sounded silly to her rational mind, like walking headfirst into unnecessary danger.
“Wait,” Ishrin’s voice stopped her before she had even taken a single step. In that moment, she felt a flash of something, annoyance, she had never really felt herself feel before. She wanted to stop for a moment and analyze this new sensation, but there was hardly time.
Ishrin wanted to try something, asking the party to let the wisp approach from a safe distance. They waited in silence, almost as if collectively holding their breath in the eerie azure light of the wisp. It was faint to the eyes, but to anyone with a magic sight it was like being immersed in a wet fog. It tasted wet, Lisette thought idly, mildly curious as to how mana could even hope to stimulate the sensorium like it did. She was ever interested in magic and its workings, and she was happy to see that Melina too was getting into it with gusto after she had gained some personal insights. Together they always peppered Ishrin with questions, which sometimes he answered and sometimes he deflected, claiming that there were things they should figure out themselves. Still, it was a good bonding opportunity, and a way to mend the broken bridges of their relationship over a common interest.
The creature was approaching them timidly, as if beckoned by Ishrin and his outstretched hand. He was probably using his power to influence magic, she realized, subtly making the wisp approach without destabilizing it further. In the deep silence of the forest, soon they found themselves in the middle of a light show as the little creature, barely more than a bundle of tightly packed mana that had reached the considerable power of a Tier 5 existence, flew circles around them. It reacted to their every movement, and Lisette thought that together with the taste of water the creature was also making little sounds, like calls of the deep that reached their ears through the strange mist that surrounded them. The sounds did not echo, did not reverberate. They were swallowed back by the very same mist that made them, following the wisp in dense banks and thin tendrils, sometimes hiding its shape from the eyes—both mundane and magical.
“It doesn’t seem hostile,” came Ishrin’s voice, and it felt so far away.
“I think… I think it’s being playful.” Lisette heard herself say, and among all the strangeness of the day, this was what had her pause. She felt her jaw slack open in awe at the strange sight, even though she knew that she was not a stranger to magic, and a sense of wonder overtook her.
It was not wonder at the natural world, nor at the magical world. No, it was wonder at herself, for once again she was feeling and doing things that she had never thought she would feel of do. It felt strange, good but in a new way she was not yet quite equipped to understand.
“I want to try to heal it,” said Ishrin. It would be a good experiment, as well as a way to hone his power, he decided.
He reached out towards it with his power, as slowly and as non-threateningly as possible.
Suddenly the wisp began to move, first upwards and outside the fog, revealing its naked form for the first time. Then it shot back down and towards Melina, while Ishrin was still trying to touch it and had his eyes still closed, and it homed in on her with great speed like a bullet, its shape deformed from a sphere to an oval as it crackled and rippled with energy. Melina watched it approach. Ishrin’s eyes opened. He focused on the incoming projectile but didn’t act. Beside her Melina noticed that Lisette was gone before she even began to move to defend herself from the incoming danger. It was only Tier 5, not dangerous to either of them if they reacted accordingly and did not let themselves be hit. Ishrin surely knew it. She knew it. She could basically face-tank it. Probably. The wisp rippled and the mist swirled. A high-pitched sound like a tea kettle about to burst pervaded the air.
Then suddenly the light of the wisp separated into two as the ball of energy collided with an extremely sharp blade edge, and Lisette appeared right in front of Melina with her left blade unsheathed and her arm having already completed the cutting motion and coming to rest on her hip. The two halves of the wisp fell to the ground, their light dimming until one of them disappeared completely and the other left behind its sputtering Tier 5 core.
“Sad,” Ishrin said in a low voice.
Lisette sheathed her grey, shimmering blade and put it away on her back with one fluid motion. Melina stared at her dark hair, her flaming red eyes, the little beads of sweat on her head, the graceful movements, the lithe figure of her toned, muscular body with her mouth open, forgetting even to breathe. There was a proud smile on her face. Lisette grunted, nodded back at Ishrin, who had not moved an inch during this whole time, and disappeared from where she was. Once again she stood beside Melina, breathing a bit faster than before, but perfectly still.
“Well,” Ishrin’s voice cut through Melina’s and Lisette’s thoughts alike. The two girls were thinking things, confused as to how their relationship would be going forward. Did they still hate each other? And if so, why did they? “I guess it didn’t like being poked. Melina, you get the core.”
“Uh?” she shook herself out of her contemplative stupor. “Yes, sure.”
Picking up the crystal and putting it in her bag left Melina a few paces behind the other two adventurers, who walked on ahead. Instead of rushing to join them, she opted to walk behind them, watching Lisette walk next to Ishrin now that she wasn’t there to take her place, and thought. She thought about what just happened, continuing the train of thought she had left on pause.
Despite their animosity, Lisette had acted to defend her without second thought, immediately as danger presented itself, without stopping to ask herself if she should do it or not, without hesitation. The wisp might not have been dangerous to her, but there was no way to tell for sure because Melina had been so entranced by it that she did not even react when it tried to attack. What was Lisette thinking about all this? Perhaps she thought that Melina was becoming sloppy, distracted. Or perhaps she simply wished to defend a friend. She liked to think it was the latter option.
She liked to think that their relationship was healing. Healing in completely novel ways, she hoped. She did not like what the two of them had before, the way she looked at Lisette like she was some sort of broken goods that had to be led on through life because she could not do it herself. She was not some sort of caretaker, and Lisette surely did not need to be taken care of.
Then her mind decided to expand its thinking to encompass more of Melina’s life in Noctis. Thinking about it, she acknowledged that she had been acting much in the same way with the adventurers of the city. Like a caretaker. Micromanaging them, making sure they didn’t put themselves in danger. Running the Guild like an orphanage. Like a stern mother who thought that her children were still too young and naïve to think for themselves.
That was not, Melina realized, who she truly was. That had been an act, a way to keep things under control after being thrust in a position she did not want to be in. A way to convince herself that she was still doing some good to the world even with all the crap that the Guild represented. That, despite all, the guild was necessary and she was doing her best to make it a little less evil.
But the guild had been evil, rotten to the core. Even before Syrma. Even before she learned of the Tiers above 15, about the control they supposedly forced upon the universe… she had seen things happen and she had turned her eyes away from them, so she would not be forced to see. She had been exiled from Paradise, put in charge of a—at the time—harmless city: Noctis. Just because she was asking questions.
Why were they taking that particularly bright adventurer away? They claimed they wanted to teach him how to control his strange powers, but he had never returned, and all her attempts to find him again in the guild database had been blocked.
Why was there a mission to exterminate that particular band of goblins, who had managed to evolve past their base instincts and find a whole new way to cultivate?
Why was she personally tasked with the destruction of an ancient ruin, so that nobody could learn the arcane secrets hidden within? They said it was from a time before the world, that its magic was corrupting and dangerous. She had not been permitted to even read it. She torched the place, shedding lone tears. Feeling her cultivation harden and settle, stunting her growth. But she had done it anyway, hadn’t she?
It didn’t matter that she didn’t like how things were done. With her halted cultivation, she had not had the power to oppose the Guild, and had been forced to accept the transfer. Then Noctis had become a place of importance, and she was removed from her position. Again, powerless to do anything about it.
No more. She was not alone anymore. She had Ishrin, and Lisette. They were in this together, now. A band of misfits each with their own objective, but willing to fight so that the others could get what they wanted. She could feel it. The camaraderie. They had been through too much, they were too isolated from the rest of the world. It was inevitable. It warmed her heart.
