Chapter 21: Spirit Forest 4

Lily didn’t ask why.

I’d spent all this time drilling sword stances into her at dawn, and somewhere in there she’d apparently decided that if I yelled something in a crisis, she should probably listen. So when a certain bleeding wreck on the ground screamed at her to do a spirit call in the middle of a monster attack, the sweetest girl in the world dropped her sword point to the dirt, planted her feet, closed her eyes, and called.

The Warden took another step toward her.

[Come on. Come on, come on, work, please work.]

Her mana came up.

I’d seen Serena’s call. That had been a wave of heat and pressure that made my nipples tingle.

Lily’s was different. It dropped straight down instead, through the grass and into the ground, and the whole meadow went quiet. I felt it in my teeth. The fleeing spirits stopped fleeing. The Warden froze mid-step, one huge mossy leg still raised, its green eyes fixed on her.

And then the spring answered.

The water Lily had been standing next to when this all started, the one at the heart of the forest, the one I now remembered writing as "the spring the Warden guards" in a margin note I never explained to anyone including myself, went dark. Then it went bright. Then the thing that lived in it came up.

It came up out of the water slow and white, and it kept coming, and coming, until it was a serpent longer than the Warden was tall, made of pale coils, old roots, and slow-moving water, with a head like a deer skull grown over in white flowers.

It rose over the meadow and looked down at Lily.

The scale was crazy. Serena’s mana had scattered every spirit in a hundred meters. This thing had felt Lily’s blood from the bottom of its spring.

And it leaned closer.

The skull-head lowered until it was level with Lily. She hadn’t opened her eyes. Her intent was still pouring off her, and I could read it from the ground: save her, save her, save her.

The serpent touched its flowered forehead to hers.

The light that came off the contact washed the entire meadow white, and through it I heard the notification chime in my own head, secondhand, like hearing a phone go off in someone else’s pocket.

Then the Warden lost its mind.

I understood it, honestly. I wrote its whole personality in one line: it guards the thing at the heart of the forest. That was its job, its reason to exist, the entire character sheet. And it had just watched the thing at the heart of the forest crawl out of its spring and sign with the intruder.

If my life’s work shook hands with the enemy in front of me, I’d also start screaming.

The sound it made wasn’t a roar, it was a building coming down, and it didn’t stop. Every plate of moss on its body flared and split, green light bleeding through the cracks. It stopped stalking and charged.

"LILY, MOVE!"

I yelled that out, but she didn’t have to. The serpent moved for her.

The two monsters met in the middle of the meadow, and the impact blew away every blade of grass between them and me.

The Warden swung a massive arm. The serpent flowed around it, coiled up the limb, and squeezed until the arm burst into wet splinters at the elbow. The Warden staggered, drove its antlers down, caught a coil and tore it open, and water and white petals sprayed out instead of blood. The coil sealed shut before the spray even landed.

[Holy shit.]

Serena had backed up to me at some point, blade still out, doing her job of standing between the fight and the wounded even though her contribution to this weight class would’ve been roughly a strongly worded letter. Lily stood where the contract had formed, swaying, eyes finally open, one hand pressed to her chest.

The serpent’s skull-head reared over the Warden, jaws open, and the water in its body all rushed forward at once.

I shut my eyes. When I opened them, the Warden was on the ground in three large pieces and several dozen small ones, the green light in its eyes going out, and the serpent was settling back toward its spring, coils dragging trenches through the meadow.

That was, naturally, when the cavalry arrived.

A dozen response instructors burst out of the treeline in full combat gear, staff weapons up, battle formation, the works. They got about ten steps into the meadow and stopped as a group, taking in the scene: one dead landmark, one enormous ancient spirit yawning its way back into a pond, and three first-years, one of whom had a broken everything.

The lead instructor took one long look at all of it and said:

"Uh... S-Secure the perimeter," he said.

Lily turned toward me. She managed one full step, said my name, and then went down. Yeah, pulling a spirit like that out of its bed probably would take a lot out of her.

Then a shadow fell over me.

Serena crouched, worked one arm under my knees and one behind my back, and lifted me off the ground like I weighed nothing.

It was at this exact moment that the adrenaline faded and I felt every bit of pain flare up at once from the many, many broken bones I had.

Serena ignored my pained moans. She just started walking toward the gate, staring straight ahead, holding me against the two most comfortable pillows in the kingdom, and that scared me more than the Warden had.

[Serena Frostfall, speechless. I should be taking notes. Ow. Later. Notes later.]

From ground level, my weasel trotted alongside us the entire way, and every time I glanced down, it was already glaring up at me.

[What? What did I do?]

It flattened its ears at me.

A little chime came at that moment.

[CANONICAL EVENT INCOMPLETE]

[Lily Everdawn forms her Spirit Contract during the Spirit Forest Exam]

Original: Lily contracts a lesser wind spirit alongside Sir Perrin’s encouragement.

Actual: Lily woke up the forest spirit but did not make any contracts.

[... Ah. So, I was wrong. We’re gonna have to come back.] I would have sighed, if my bones would bear it. They would not. [I hate this isekai.]

---

I woke up to a white ceiling.

An infirmary, going by the bandages. There was a warm weight curled on my pillow. The weasel, napping away.

There was also a taste in my mouth. Something sweet. Ah, right. Healing potions. I’d made them taste good when I wrote them into this world... for some reason.

[Right. So they poured the expensive stuff into me. Which means I was in bad enough shape to justify it, which is not comforting, and also...]

I tried to lift my hand. It arrived late, like it had gotten the message on a delay.

[...also that stuff makes you loopy for a day. Wonderful.]

"Good morning to you too," I croaked at the weasel. "Hahaha... fat weasel."

Immediately, I saw a small dragon materialize to the right of the weasel and breathe fire on it.

Given that the weasel didn’t react, I could only surmise: it wasn’t real.

[Oh. I’m high as FUCK.]

At the same time, the room was doing a slow, gentle sway, like the whole infirmary was a boat. I kinda liked it.

The door opened.

Marisol Vantecca stepped in, closed it behind her, checked the hallway through the gap first, and then turned to face my bed.

Man, she was a looker. Her hair was perfect. Her uniform was perfect. In her hands was an actual, physical scroll, tied with ribbon, which she untied and unrolled to what I estimated at three feet of prepared text.

I watched all of this happen knowing that none of it was real.

[Yeah, right. The noble mean girl came looking for me? That’s not a thing that happens. That’s a thing my brain does when it’s swimming in painkillers. No way.]

She cleared her throat.

"Kohaku Sakana," the hallucination began. "I have observed your operation for three weeks."

[Yeah. Yeah, see, real people don’t say "your operation." Good try, potion. Very creative.]