CH961 Thera’s Perspective

“Not in front of my eyes, please,” Thera asked the spirits around her, the density of them becoming a distraction as she did her best to use her newfound free time, taking hunting quests in the untamed lands.

Since Ben had a gate that connected directly to a well-used guild, it made the most sense and allowed her to find the sort of work that a place like Stonewall wouldn’t offer. While her home was concerned with granting quests taking place in the immediate area, anywhere on the gate network could have anything, including information on demon herds in need of clearing out, giving her a useful task she could do on any of the many days she now didn’t need to bother with hospital work, with her services being immediately desirable.

Usually, if something was deep enough out then unless there was a space mage to help, the chances of finishing on the same day were typically nonexistent. Anything close enough to the gate to be killed the same day would typically be found and dealt with, unless of course a swarm had caught them by surprise, but even if she herself couldn’t teleport, she was less limited by distance than others.

She could fly under her own power which meant she could move as fast as she could think and with the aid of Ben’s circlets, that could be very fast indeed, to the point that she’d begun to need to keep a barrier up around her to prevent the feeling of the air and any bugs that might have been in it from turning the journey into a nightmare. With the strength of her mana and her magic, it felt like the entire world was in her reach and made sure that, no matter where she was asked to go, she’d always be home by dinner.

Not that hunts were always successful, but that was to be expected. A swarm would move after all, and the demons’ hungry and destructive nature tended to mean that by the time a report made its way back to the guild, as often as not they were long gone, sometimes able to be tracked and sometimes not.

But it looks like this is going to be one of those easier times, Thera told herself. At least in the sense that I’m not going to be spending hours searching for them.

While she had found the group only a little ways off from where she’d been told to expect it, it seemed that the initial reports had severely underestimated the size of them. What had been reported as only one hundred was at least double that, the invading monsters having cleared a section of land of any life, no animals or plants to be seen, leaving only dirt in their base as they fought amongst themselves in what seemed to be their downtime.

So potentially not the most driven group, she thought as she observed them, hearing one loudly swear out in worldspeak as its arm was ripped off by another in a way that still left her uncomfortable. She knew they were technically people, the system qualified them as such and they were undeniably sapient, but hearing them use language still felt fundamentally wrong, even if a few words being tossed out by them was a common enough occurrence by that point, with only a spirit by her ear breaking her from her thoughts.

“Princess, shall we assist?”

“No. At least not yet,” Thera said back with her mana, lest any of those monsters on the ground below overheard her. She was still wrapped in her barrier so there was no chance of any smells leaking out, and while there was always the risk of being spotted, she was high enough up that it wouldn’t be an immediate worry. No need to risk giving herself away with a careless word. “If I end up needing help, I’ll ask you all when the time comes.”

After all, she had plenty of options to choose from for how to dispatch them, even when there were so many, and she started with one that matched her goals. She took her life magic and twisted it into death.

Two magics with the same endpoint, she was officially at what could be called the final stage of life magic, anything further venturing into the territory of souls and, since both Ben and the gods seemed to want her to achieve such a thing, she still needed to practice it.

Practice she’d done to death for the more traditional spells. She couldn’t think of many injuries she hadn’t healed, and she’d treated plenty of illnesses by that point as well, leaving only to focus on a more underutilized aspect of her training as she reversed it, using the death spells shoved into her brain and applied life mana to them, casting them down below and watched as most of the demons perished before they could understand that anything was wrong. Her power was simply too great, and in a surprise attack like that, it was hard to defy.

She could see the handful of survivors looking around, trying to understand what had happened, but only one looked up before the rest met their end. What death spells couldn’t accomplish, earth could, and she got to stare down from above as the ground swallowed them up, crushing them into paste and leaving no question of their defeat as notifications echoed in her head.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

A good result, both of her effort and the benefits she had. She still didn’t know how much Ben’s authority bracelet was doing, but despite the names of them, she was finding herself more and more happy to take it, but there was one other too, flying around her at all times. The soul spirits, hidden among all of the others.

When she’d asked them to support the healers they saw, both to ease Mora’s mind and to help the planet as a whole, it had left her admitting to herself that it would be for the best if she took any help she could get from them as well. She didn’t know if Mora had been using his magic on her and she wouldn’t have asked him to, but the soul spirits? It felt far more harmless of a favour.

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