Chapter 40: Chapter 38: Coping with the aftermath

The next day, I decided to take advantage of the new dynamic we had with Nymph and the village. Lacking information had always been our problem, and being locked up in our room had always been our biggest frustration. Now that we had a proper understanding about the reasons why things were they were, we could take proper precautions.

Getting some fresh air was definitely good for my head after last night. The boys seemed really concerned about me. I was doing nothing but laying in my bed after Eirlathion left. I even buried my face in my pillow.

I had to smile at their approach at cheering me up though. They didn’t come over to pester me or anything. Instead, they started training. It was obvious from everything about their body language they wanted me to see them training too. Of course, I joined them. I knew from experience it would be the best way to clear my head. I’m sure Rolwen was the one to come up with that.

We went at it until both of the boys dropped from exhaustion and went to sleep. By then, my mental fatigue had largely cleared and I was back to being unable to sleep. I felt suddenly let down at that thought. It may have been because of stress, but I had seriously felt for the first time since I was reborn that I had to sleep. A part of me was actually looking forward to it. Now, that was gone, so I decided to peek my head outside and sit on Nymph’s upper boughs.

As I said, proper precautions. There were roughly 2 problems with going outside. One was inviting attacks due to being seen by dark elves. The other was being targeted by members of the village who were desperate to save themselves by offering my head as a sacrificial tribute to ward off another potential attack. Sticking to Nymph’s upper branches solved both problems.

As if that wasn’t enough, I also began practicing the fifth element of my meditation. The void element. We had identified there was some form of magic attached to all the elemental katas. Wind fired a wind bullet equal in power to some of the most powerful mounted gun turrets back on Earth. That was quite likely the most straight forward of all the elemental attack magics I had. The others each got progressively stranger compared to what you might think they do.

When I use the fire kata, it freezes things. When I use water, it throws waves of pure force. I can even choose between making it a push and making it cut, so it’s easily as deadly as the wind element. But Earth element is the strangest of all. Levin had been causing small tremors for a while now as he practiced the Earth kata, so I expected to do something similar on a larger scale. But, the one day I decided to timidly try it out, that’s not at all what happened.

With a lift of my hand, objects in the room started gently rising from where they were placed. When I got confused by this and let go of the magic I was putting out, everything came clattering down again. I can imagine a local of this world being confused, but as people from Earth we figured it out immediately. Unlike Levin, my use of the earth element manipulated gravity.

It makes sense, the philosophy of Earth taught by the style actually says gravity is the greatest power of the earth and the one we are most skilled at manipulating. I just always thought that by that they meant that we make people fall to the ground with joint manipulation techniques or knocking them off their balance. It’s pretty much a stable go-to method of our style after all.

Tia was absolutely freaking out when she heard that. She was going on and on about gravity magic being in the second strata of primordial magic or something like that and that mortals were never meant to wield it. We eventually reached the conclusion that no matter what, we should not allow anyone to find out about me having gravity magic. It seemed like it was some kind of really big deal.

The elemental magics were all quite ridiculous, but it was the fifth element that I was the most interested in. That was the void element. It’s effect was incredibly useful and fit right into the whole ninja theme of the style. There was nothing straightforward about the void at all. Even in the training books, there is nothing about the void except describing the kata. The four other kata all have a focus and a philosophy, and they tell you exactly what you should be envisioning as you do the strike within the kata that forms the attack.

In the case of Void though, the training books literally say nothing. There is only the motions for the kata, but it gives none of the advice and there is no philosophy. The attack portion is strange too, there is no counter-attack portion to the void kata.

The void, simply put, is defined by it’s lack of the things that should normally be there. In other words, it is the definition of void. The state of something being absent. It’s not just that there’s nothing there, it’s that there should be something there but there isn’t.

The void is defined by the very fact that it lacks the things that the other kata have. The void is… just that, a void.

The void is something that you have to put some effort into understanding. But, once you do understand it, it is incredibly powerful. The magic effect attached to it is no different.

Tia came up to the top of the tree and called out my name. “Asa, you’re still up here, right?” She asked. I dropped the void element effects I had focused around me, and suddenly Tia’s head whipped around and she looked straight at me. I gave her a wave.

“Thought so. Nymph was completely freaking out because she couldn’t sense you anymore. She asked me to come up and check on you.”

“I’m planning to stay right here.” I told her. “I’m just concealing myself so that nobody notices me.”

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“Right. I told her that, but she still wanted me to come up and check. Unlike you, Levin, and Rolwen, she doesn’t seem so inclined to take me at my word.”

I sighted. “Nymph seems to have a lot of different issues. I was willing to overlook most of them before, but now that I’ve seen how out of control she can get I am really starting to get concerned. Things could have been a lot worse last night if I wasn’t constantly reigning her in.”

“She can hear you, you know?” Tia asked.

“She needs to hear it.” I told her. “Anyway, if you want to escape from her, then why don’t you stay up here with me? Ironically enough, wherever I am is now the one place she refuses to go since last night. It’s completely ridiculous that now she’s bossing other people around because she doesn’t have the spine to look me in the eye anymore. You don’t deserve that.”

“I think I might.” Tia said and then laid down on her stomach as she peered over the edge of the tree.

We both looked down at the ground. The elves were all moving about, carrying and gathering the dead from last night’s attack. They were all being placed around Nymph’s tree, all with their heads facing toward her trunk. The dark elf bodies were being placed in a similar manner, but they were put on the far side of the tree away from the rest of them.

Just a little earlier, I had seen Nymph arguing with them, demanding they all be berried at her roots because it’s her right as the strongest spirit in the village. From the conversation, I gathered that it was some form of custom among the elves where the bodies nourish the tree spirits, and so they give all the bodies of the dead to the strongest tree spirit in the village in hopes of it becoming powerful enough to protect the village.

There was apparently some disagreement with giving them to Nymph though. Seems like last night had gotten them all really scared of Nymph. As such, they didn’t agree with the idea of making her stronger. Eventually though, they agreed. I’m just glad she didn’t do anything crazy like come to me asking for mana in order to let her rough them up.

It looked like all the dead had been gathered. Several of them were in pretty bad shape. Fire had been the primary method of combat last night, and a lot of the corpses were burned so badly that their humanoid shape was the only thing that showed they were people before this all happened.

From my vantage point, I had been counting the bodies. I counted 12 dark elves, and 18 elves from the village. Almost all of the villagers were killed with fire, there were only a few that were killed with arrows. I saw several among the mourners who seemed confused looking over the dead bodies. They were burnt so far beyond recognition that they couldn’t even tell which body belonged to the loved one they had lost.

All they could tell was that whoever they were looking for had to be one of the charred bodies by sheer virtue of the fact they were not among the living villagers. The population here was small, it wasn’t that hard for them to recognize everyone there was in the village and do a simple headcount to see whether the number of bodies lined up with the number of people unaccounted for.

I saw Eirlathion standing at one corner of the gathered mourners. He was standing next to a woman who was looking at the bodies with a very serious expression. I had seen this woman a few times when I used to go out to play. She would always keep at a distance and watch me. There was something very different about her from the other elves. I had learned to identify that it was because her spirit was far stronger than the others. It was not quite at the level of the boys, but it was not very far from it either. This far outstripped all the other elves. It was even stronger than Eirlation, and I mean by a lot.

Because of her stronger spirit, I could also sense her emotions a lot more clearly. She had some very conflicted feelings whenever she looked at me. Pain, grief, fear, regret… it was all negative. There was some malice as well, but even though I could sense that malice more clearly it did not have the same feel as the other elves of the village. It contained none of the desperation or irrationality that the others did. What’s more, she seemed to feel disgust at her own feelings of malice.

With her wearing her emotions on her sleeve like that whenever she looked at me, it was not hard at all to figure out who this woman was. I had kept my distance until now out of respect for the pain she was feeling, but unfortunately I was not going to be able to steer clear of her for much longer. Not if she was traveling along side Eirlathion. He was never with her when he came to see us, but I could tell from the way this woman regarded him that she was likely right by his side the rest of the time.

Well, this is certainly going to make what I have to do next awkward.

Before I could think about that too much more, an old man stepped forward and turned to address the crowd. It looked like some kind of funeral service was about to start.

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