Chapter 30: Chapter 28 – Towards the City

As I turned to leave the store, I remembered one more thing I was interested in.

"Oh"

"Yes? Is there anything I can help you with? Like maybe dinner? I have a bottle of fine wine we'd been keeping for a special occasion"

(If you have something like that, sell it and get some more stock in. Or at least use it to find a way to bring in more business instead of lazing around in the back room)

His over eagerness almost made me turn back around and leave immediately, but someone who worked at the village's only store was likely to have the information I needed.

"Have...you heard of the name Alicia?"

"Huh? Oh, I have..."

(Bingo)

He looked to the side awkwardly.

"I was wondering if I you could tell me where her family lives? She was a little girl about six and couldn't see"

"If you don't mind me asking, but what's your relationship with Alicia?"

"We lived together for a while"

"Really? In that case, how's she doing right now?"

"She...even when we first met, she was sick, and just recently..."

I bit my lip. I'd been crying so much lately, I didn't want to do so in front of a stranger.

"Haaa...I see. Well, I suppose that much is alright"

 

After receiving directions and a bit of wandering, I found the house I was looking for. The single floored wooden building was dilapidated and had dried mud forced into cracks in the walls.

Once again, I wiped my face with my sleeve. In the end, I couldn't stop the tears from falling, but I did manage to stifle any open weeping. I suppose that was progress, but progress towards what? I wasn't sure that was a destination I wanted to ever reach.

The sun was starting to reach the top of the forest to the west as the trees cast looming shadows that climbed over the western village walls.

There was a faint orange glow visible through the open windows, and I could hear people talking.

I walked up to the door, but my courage faltered and I couldn't bring myself to knock.

"Mama, I'm hungry"

"I know dear. But you know that if we don't finish spinning these threads, we won't be able to buy dinner"

(What?)

"I know, but I'm still hungry"

"That's right mama!"

"I'm hungry too!"

"*sigh* The faster we finish, the faster I can buy ingredients for dinner. If we make enough, maybe we'll even have enough for breakfast tomorrow"

"I'll do it! I'll make a ton!"

"Me too! It's been so long!"

"What's breakfast?"

(Just what is...)

I slumped down on to my butt as I heard their conversation through the open windows. Without any glass, anything they said was clear to me through the open shutters.

(To think it really was this bad)

Right up until this moment, I had suspected that what Alicia had said about always being hungry was something that only happened to her, that her family might have taken advantage of the fact that she was blind and unfairly given her smaller portions or something.

But everything about this village screamed poverty, and if Alicia's family couldn't even afford three meals a day, then things had to be pretty bad.

I had no idea what I was going to do when I confronted them, but now I couldn't bring myself to even show my face. I wanted to blame them, to yell at them for abandoning a helpless little girl, but it was obvious they had no choice. From the sound of it, they really were near their limit.

Anything I would've done, could've done, it was all gone now.

There was only really one thing I could do.

And so, I took a few steps from the door and put a few haunches of boar meat along with some fruit and vegetables on to the ground. Beside them I folded an old potato sack with some holes cut out of it and left it on top of a magically made a stone slate with an etched message.

[Thank you for taking care of her until we could meet]

 

I flew through the air awkwardly. After leaving those gifts, I activated [Spirit Form] and bounded over the village walls.

For some reason, it felt like there was warmth spreading from my chest. Was this Alicia giving her approval?

(Naw, it's probably just my imagination)

I shook my head of my delusions and concentrated on the future. Apparently the next city was five days away if I followed the only road out of this village. If that was the case, then I might as well learn a form of high-speed movement that wasn't just sprinting really fast.

At first I concentrated on leaping into the air while using [Float], but the air resistance really messed that up and prevented me from going too fast for long. Alternatively, using wind magic to eliminate drag meant that I fell back to the ground pretty quickly. Using both on the other hand got me the best of both worlds, though changing direction mid-air was a problem, as any attempt to do so using magic would bring back all the drag as the first spell would fizzle out. But with just this, I could leap far and quickly, and it was really efficient on my MP.

Though I had to stop because the little fluffballs couldn't keep up.

Instead of going at full tilt, the second the sun sank under the horizon, I tried experimenting with something different.

It was the artificial wings made from [Alter Silhouette].

Remembering how I did it months ago, I formed large wings from my back, complete with the proper bone and muscle structure needed to make them move the way I wanted. Together with a running start, I flapped those wings and took off using the [Flight] skill.

Then smashed my face into the ground a few meters ahead.

The fluffballs circled around me. It felt like they were laughing. At least someone was enjoying it.

My pride and dignity had been caved, but my motivation to hadn't.

With my feet under me again, I move my wings up a bit along my spine and try again, this time making it a few meters before landing on my hands and knees. A few more adjustments and tries later, and I was gently gliding across the ground as I did my best to avoid having my arms and legs flail around in the new, awkward position.

It felt so unnatural having my body supported by nothing but the air under my artificial wings and the power of my [Flight] skill. Instinctively, I wanted to keep reaching out and grab something to support my body, but being a few meters from the ground, there was obviously nothing to grab on to, aside from the little fluffballs who'd been orbiting around me excitedly like they were looking at a baby deer take it's first few steps.

No, from their perspective, maybe it really was something like that.

I never liked zoos anyways.

That aside, I doubted very much that the spirits would be able to support my weight. Even worse, if I tried it, their lack of a physical body suggested that they lacked any real mass as well, so I'd probably just flip end over end and fall to the ground out of control.

I wasn't about to give them another reason to laugh at me.

 

Run, leap, glide, land. Run, leap, glide, land.

Until I was able to make myself settle down and glide without any flailing, I monotonously continued to practice basic gliding for minutes, maybe even an hour or two.

The little spirits quickly got bored, so I gave them a few mana treats here and there so that they wouldn't run off and disappear on me. Sometimes it felt like I was just taking care of a bunch of feral cats. At least they didn't scratch me out of nowhere.

When I felt like I had a hang on just gliding straight forward, I tweaked it, banking side to side, more and more...until I fell into an uncontrolled spin and over corrected to spin the other way and slammed into the ground, raising dust into the air.

As the dust cleared, the fluffballs were laughing again.

Never in my two lives did I want a fly swatter more than I did then.

My persistence paid off and I avoided repeating that mistake. Banking from side to side became reliable and easy.

But the real test was to move from simply gliding to actually flying.

I took a few deep breaths and folded my wings to give myself as much height as I could in a single jump.

With a running start, I hopped, planted both feet onto the ground, then sprung up with all the force I could muster, leaving the ground behind. The air rushed past me, flipping back my hood. I held my hat down with a hand before it could get blown away.

As all things that go up, gravity won out over my momentum and I started my descent. But of course, I wasn't content to go without a fight, so I spread my wings, entering a smooth glide as I pulled up from the near vertical drop.

The glide was as perfect as I could ask at my level of skill. There was some great forward momentum helping to maintain my stability as I felt the wind wisp past my body, giving my senses the feedback I needed in absence of an actual instinctive sense of how to balance myself in flight.

The wind felt good, the way it caressed my cheeks and flowed roughly around my body. The noisy flapping my robes did in the wind was annoying, but it was better than going around in what was little better than a bikini. I was in human territory now, no excuses to be uncivilized.

(But speaking of flapping...)

*floomf!*

The heavy sound as my wings beat against the air reached my ears as I felt a sense of instantaneous vertigo, before the feeling flipped on itself and I was back in free fall.

My mind had trouble coping with the unfamiliar mix of sensations, but the instinct I had started developing came to my rescue, arresting my fall and bringing me back into a glide as they stretched out and stabilized me.

(What was...?)

I tried to wrap my mind around the feelings. It was like I was suddenly throw into the air by a giant, then immediately after being in a high-speed elevator that suddenly started to descend.

(Actually, when I word it that way...)

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What I experienced was obvious. The single flap was strong enough to lift my body up a substantial amount, and in my confusion, I simply didn't raise my wings back to prevent me from dropping right after.

I felt stupid, but humans weren't made to fly like this. Not like I was human, but that was beside the point.

Once more, and much more carefully, I flapped my wings. This time, the same hard pull of momentum resisting my body assaulted my senses, but it wasn't nearly as bad as the first time.

Without anything nearby to compare against, it was hard to tell, but it seemed like my high rank in [Flight] meant that even small flaps meant that I'd rise quickly and easily. The possibility of what I could do once I got used to this was pretty terrifying, yet extremely exciting.

The image of flying through a dense city fast enough to shatter windows while weaving in between buildings and through narrow alleys made me grin like a little kid.

Though actually doing such a thing would cause a ton of trouble I didn't want to deal with, so such a dream would never come true. Maybe I could try weaving through the foliage in the forest around my home instead someday?

As I slowly got used to actual flying rather than simply gliding, I flapped my wings again and again, gaining speed as I circled around the small army of glowing multi-coloured lights that chased after me all excited.

From simply banking, I moved on to doing loops and barrel rolls (the real kind, as well as the weird useless kind otherwise known simply as an aileron roll), flat and rolling scissors, a vertical climb ending in a stall turn, then to a flat spin and a recovering dive as I fell. If someone was looking, they'd probably be wondering what the retarded bat was doing, but I was having so much fun I couldn't care what any observer was thinking, though it wasn't like anyone aside from the spirits could've seen me. It was both dark and I was using [Spirit Form].

Maybe once I got good enough, I could dogfight like this, firing off [Tempest Magic] at flying enemies or something? When I went back to the dungeon, it was definitely something I wanted to try against all those flying enemies I found annoying to fight against.

By the end of it all, I found the dirt road I was following at the beginning and came down, ending my little air show by flaring up with a cobra as I fiercely flapped my wings, sending up dust and dirt before I touched down as gently as I could.

With another strong flap to push the dust away from me, I turned around and waited for the spirits to catch up. In the end, I had been going much faster than they could, but they seemed to enjoy chasing after me as I did those weird manoeuvres.

As if to emphasize that point, as each one got close, I could've sworn that they all did their own impressions of the cobra manoeuvre as they gathered around me.

Kinda as a reward, I gave each one a mana treat as they completed their imitations, though it was really hard to tell since they were more spherical than anything, it just sort of felt like they did cobras.

No sooner as they danced around after eating their little treats did they become curious of my little addition, and started flocking to my bat-like wings stick out through the slits in my robes. They circled around me, bounced off of the thin membranes, or just rubbing their bodies against them.

Whether it was because the sensation of touch on body parts that I didn't normally have or because the spirits were so fluffy, I had a hell of a time trying to avoid jerking around, like they were trying to deliberately tickle me. But the more I resisted the harder they rubbed themselves against my wings, and the more my wings trembled as I tried to desperately avoid batting the fluffballs away.

In the end, their persistence overcame my self control and I flapped my wings hard, knocking all the spirits away before shaking my wings to get rid of the tingly sensations that was left.

"Geez you guys. That was going too far"

But as if they didn't hear my words, the fluffballs circled around me. Rather than be scared of what I did, they were all laughing, enjoying the little ride of being blown away. At least that's what it felt like.

Exasperated, I shook my head before stretching my wings out again.

With a short run up, I jumped lightly and flapped my wings, lifting off again, this time actually following the road eastward rather than simply fooling around while doing circles.

 

While the intent was to make progress to the city, we ended up fooling around along the way. Simply flying in one direction quickly got boring, especially when I was trying to maintain a low speed so that the glowing spirits wouldn't fall behind. Instead, I went back to doing all sorts of aerial manoeuvres as if I was practising for a stunt show or something.

The fluffballs followed me the best they could into my manoeuvres, though less like a military squadron doing formation flying and more like a mob of children playing reverse tag.

(...?)

Below, I sensed quite a few presences. It looked like a large group on the side of the road.

Looking down, I could see just that. It was a wagon with a pair of horses tied nearby. Surrounding it was a small group of people, and around them was a much larger group of brown wolves.

(This...is probably bad, isn't it?)

The people only numbered four, and one of them didn't even have a weapon, while the wolves numbered over twenty, and at the head there was a striped wolf twice the size leading the pack.

Rather, I recognized the monsters. The smaller wolves were the same as the ones from the first floor of the dungeon, while the big one was like the boss, though even bigger. They weren't really that tough at all, but this was quite the number. When I first came to this world, I'd have been easy prey, but now even these numbers wouldn't have been able to do so much as scratch me. I was more concerned with not getting my clothes dirty than getting hurt.

But these guys, they were shaking. And one of them was completely backed against the wagon. He didn't even have a weapon, effectively making the fight about eight to one. That boss was also quite a bit stronger than the other wolves, easily worth as many as five or six of the normal ones if my memory was accurate.

It looked like that same boss wolf got tired of waiting and charged towards the closest person.

Without a moment to lose, I flapped my wings and went into a dive, accelerating as much as possible.

As I got close to the ground, I erased my wings and undid [Spirit Form]. With a quick spin, I gave the big wolf a simple heel kick in the back of it's neck before landing with a heavy thud. No matter how light my body felt, it seemed like the momentum was enough to dent the ground with a foot print several centimetres deep and kick up a ton of dust all around me.

But such dust was meaningless to my [Sense Presence].

Remembering the position of everyone here, I put my hands to the ground and spread out my mana into the earth before activating [Terranian Magic]. Stone spikes jutted up from the dirt, the scent of blood filling the grasslands as most of the reactions to [Sense Presence] disappeared.

A quick application of [Tempest Magic] and all the dust was blown away, revealing the carnage I had just conducted. All the wolves had been cleanly impaled by the stone spikes where they stood, not even given a chance to react.

Well, there was a massive difference between level one and level 255 after all. It would've been more weird if I couldn't do something like this at this point.

A quick glance around confirmed that I hadn't missed any wolves nor accidentally gotten any of the people I was trying to save.

What an embarrassment it would be to be commit friendly fire against the very people you were trying to save.

But as fortune would have it, all four people and two animals were accounted for, with no unwanted damage done at all. Aside from the unarmed guy's pants. Those were one casualty to water damage, but I pretended not to notice.

With their safety confirmed, I undid my magic and the wolf bodies collapsed to the ground with a series of thuds, making everyone jump for a moment.

The three armed people put away their weapons as they stared at me.

First was young girl in a worn out one-piece dress and a simply made leather chest plate over it. She had a dull grey metal long sword strapped to her hip.

Second young man in an equally worn out shirt and pants with the same leather chest plate on top. He had an axe with a dull grey metal axe head on one hip and a small wooden shield on the other.

Third was another young man wearing worn out pants and a vest that didn't look like it was big enough to close to cover his chest. He wasn't wearing any armour, but had a spear with a gleaming silvery spearhead strapped to his back. Unlike the others, he had pointed ears on top of his head and a thin, erect tail sticking out from behind.

 

(Why are the cat bois always so sexy?)

Frankly, it was more annoying than anything that he'd deliberately expose himself like that. What was his deal anyways?

"Umm...are you guys..."

Before I could finish, the closest person rushed up to me and grabbed my hands.

"You! That magic was you just now, right? Thank you! Thank you very much for saving us all!"

(Close! Too close! Way too CLOSE!)

The young man stared at my eyes as he thanked me, so close I could smell his breath. The only thing that actually registered in my mind beyond him being so close was the fact that he really needed a breath mint.

"That's right! We're really grateful! Thank you so much!"

Another person grabbed my left elbow as she came close, practically pressing her chest against my arm.

(Very close! Much too close!)

"Ah, to be saved by such a beauty! We're truly thankful"

On my right, the third person also grabbed my arm as he tugged my right elbow.

(Personal space! Assault on personal space!)

"Aah. All three of them have the right of it. We're all thankful for what you have done. If there's anything I can do to repay you"

Thankfully, the older man didn't decide to approach me, but the disappointing smell still reinforced the others on the attack on my personal space.

"I, I was...just..."

"That's right! If there's something we can do to repay you"

"Could you give us your name? Mine's Mary, and this is Jason and Aaron"

"Is there anything you want? Maybe a warm bed to sleep in?"

(Aaahh, it's too much!)

"No, I..."

"""Yes?"""

All three of them pressed their bodies against mine in excitement. Their youthful faces covering up my view of the surroundings. Rather, their bodies as well, as they were all taller than me despite not looking past half their teenage years.

"I need to get going!"

I forcefully broke out of their grip and went off in a run.

"We're going you guys!"

Calling out to the spirits who were fooling around the wagon and horses, I activated [Spirit Form] to disappear, then leapt into the air and used [Alter Silhouette] to produce my wings and fly off, escaping from my situation.

To think that I'd be punished in such a way for my good deed.

Or rather, for me to react so poorly just for getting a bit of attention. My years of solitude must have done a number on me.

Or maybe I've always been like this? I never was one for attracting attention. It took me more than a little effort just to talk to strangers, and I've always hated doing presentations of any kind.

I didn't think I was this bad around people though. Maybe only having Alicia to talk to for the last four years had a bad effect on me? I didn't think I was doing so bad around those villagers, but none of them stared so closely at me, and they were all one on one.

(This...was probably going to become an issue in the future, wasn't it?)

 

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