The Ogre Strength Fairy and the Eldest 'Son'-Chapter 526 - One Woman’s Stellar Decision Is Three Other’s…

Chapter 526: Chapter 526 - One Woman’s Stellar Decision Is Three Other’s...

A/N: Chapters re-jiggered. Those who read both already should start at least by going back to last Chapter that way this starting section makes more sense! (Nothing changed with El’s section)

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Eventually the pair arrived to the small garden flourishing near the entrance. Meyran emerged, coincidentally, before they’d reached the door... moving through polite curiosity at the presence of approaching guests to a warm smile as recognition set in for the Coiled Serpent branch manager. The courier outfit of the mortal took a bit longer to parse... but he managed it in time.

"Dima. Klaytei. This is an unexpected surprise. You should have sent a letter ahead."

"We traveled suddenly. When we were able to find the time. It rather seemed a waste of a messenger.

"This is a delivery from my Lady Elua."

Helping her unlash the box from the frame after explaining their presence, Dima lifted it with one hand before presenting it to the Talcres man. He recognized it instantly, the nice box with fitted slots for each piece that used to sit openly in his dining hall. Then sat buried in the large cupboard at the back of it before he suggested it as their gift to the young couple that year.

"Why return it?"

"I told you we should have stopped for the letter."

"No, I have it up here. It said that she was honored to use it, but..."

Klaytei paused and wiped at her forehead where the strap had chafed slightly. Finding the right words from the document she’d memorized was easy enough. Just not when feeling an itch at the side of her hair when she poked at her head. Or with the woman she fancied helping her out of the backpack frame.

"That it belonged with those who might have new reasons to enjoy it in the coming years. That your family is destined to expand one way or another, and so its treasured appurtenances should remain with those who value-"

"She really used that word?"

"My Lady is very grandiloquent if you had yet to notice."

The fox’s fluffy tail flicked lazily against the questioner’s arm and Klaytei watched it enviously from the corner of her eye. A look which was caught, ’misunderstood’, and led to the creature being passed to a new chest-seat. Meyran’s gaze lingered on the mortal, then the cultivator as something possibly mannerless crossed his expression.

’It’s good to see more young love.’

"You came all this way here together, so you should let me unpack it and make a pot. And of course stay the night if you’d like."

"That would be... lovely."

Chuckling at Klaytei’s attempt to remain visibly unbothered while the other woman smiled out of her sightline, he decided to press once more. An innocent, simple observation to see if she would praise the sigilist.

"I’ve never seen such an unnervous fox. She’s good with mothering difficult animals, isn’t she?"

The servant opened her mouth to respond with an appropriate agreement - perhaps something just a little insinuating of her esteem for the other woman that she would never understand meant more. Yet, a set of warm arms wrapped around her from behind before she could say more than a single consonant. One around her midsection, one around her arm to pet the fox, with Dima’s chin settling comfortably on her shoulder.

"Yes. She is very patient with them. Much too patient with hiding her *deeper* opinions on stubborn animals and what they do, if you ask me."

Klaytei was feeling some very deep feelings indeed, with a hand cupping her waist and a chest pressed into her back. She was pretty sure she was daydreaming... and that she would ’come to’ still on the train. Only realizing after the tea was served that she hadn’t spoken at all while her hand had been held by her Princess for almost fifteen minutes straight.

That at least a portion of her dreams now lived in the same reality as her. The same one as-

⟠ ⟠ ⟠

The Greater Colonizer still hung in the sky, awaiting the generation and release of its army if deemed necessary. An order that would come from the very misty jellyfish creature being used as a mouthpiece for the creator of their inorganic ’species’. Black-blood vapor churned to keep the Arbiter in its ’base shape’ - something the Divinity behind the wheel cared about only because appearances during discussions were important.

And letting his construct turn into a suffocating miasma against a handful of Lower Realm cultivators outside of a Descent period would just be inordinately rude and callous. As usual, the master of Void was the very picture of a weary gentleman capable of coming up with an idea that coldly culls the number of those living throughout the cosmos.

\\ You are asking to dismantle a three-hundred cycles old construct. \\

"I am. It’s hard to ask and lose the favor, but it’s easier than dodging you while being infuriatingly unrepentant for my actions."

Forgiveness was something she would only ever beg from a self-effacing altruist, after all - and not a fellow arrogant ends-justifier. When the Void Divinity’s ’voice’ eventually came out again, it carried Intent she could only describe as ’exhausted’. It was well known by his peers (and Elua herself) that his social battery had never matched the number of people his power touched.

’Could be why I like bugging him~’

\\ I am not going to be the one who says yes or no to you. I will not have an opinion on your actions that could later be pointed to as favoritism or an attempt to get involved in whyever the others are bothering. This conversation is concluded. \\

The entire Arbiter disappeared on the next beat... sucked into a single point of Spatial Element around its true core. Flinging the much more valuable representation of Hivemind Astralism into the depths of empty space to await pickup by a younger Colonizer. Far away from whatever the reincarnator planned to do with the ritual that he had to pretend he didn’t understand.

"Well, that wasn’t a no! I’m also pretty sure that was a lot of words that suggested they would *not even consider it*, which technically means he still owes me. What a nice result~"

The brunette turned back to her guests in their state of shock recovery. She even seemed to have a bit of ’sympathy’ flowing out of her spirit as she lessened the covert spiritual barrier shielding around them to blunt some of the effects. Sevra had even managed to regain enough composure to look merely alarmed at the entity still up above rather than paralyzed by it.

"Welcome back to my beloved’s Astral Exclave, all of you. I assume we have a lot to talk about, but we can discuss that shortly. First, I have this final housekeeping matter to attend to before we can adjourn to a more accommodating location."

Her hand pressed dramatically down against the control surface despite essence already flowing through. This project had taken months of carving, worked on slowly at night for a while and then much more insistently once her three students could self-manage. The targeting array hummed to life, drawing power from that excess left by the realmshard meant for teleportation accidents. Flipping an intent to ’save’ into one to ’harm’.

The weapon array was the likes of which hadn’t been seen in this corner of the cosmos for seven thousand years, since the last vagrant Demi-god thought to explore the cepheid void and approach the galactic center directly. The ’projectile’ firing sigilscript had no obvious barrel in any traditional sense. What the sigilist had spent weeks constructing around the edges of the arrival zone was better described as a crown.

A ring of eight inward-curving black ceramic pylons, each one threaded with conductive sigils and tilted to aim above the arrival area. They surrounded the foundation in a circle eighty meters in diameter, grounded deep into the bedrock and serving multiple purposes. Earthen stabilization, rainfall drainage, and of course... magnetic containment. They hummed briefly then hissed loudly as gas surrounding them turned into a cold plasma.

Silver dress reflected the first bits of ghostly violet glow, lines that shot from each object to the sky above the heiress’s now raised hand. A stream of magnetism shaped into a flux tube that delivered the containment to a space roughly fifty meters above them, where the intense Magnetic Element finally bloomed into a holding pattern that would keep her ammunition. That’s when three sets of ears popped from the air pressure change.

A pulling sensation against their clothes, their hair, and the very moisture on their skin. The loading crown was inhaling - drawing atmosphere from miles around into the pylons - to spiral viscous Gas in a forced and directed hypersonic travel along the tubes, toward that central point. All eight of them slamming slightly ionized gas into a single zone that would grow three meters wide before they knew it. And when they did know it - that the still ghostly know of light was tightening into an impossibly bright ’starseed’... 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

’She’s... compressing it?’

The scout’s spiritual sense could barely process what was happening in those seconds. Air Essence was spiraling everywhere. Loose debris - dust, mostly, from the new arrival platform and beyond - skittered along the ground. Zyris was now the one holding tight onto Nohre, trying to hold herself steady against the force around them before the sphere inside containment clearly ignited a hazy red.

A color of hot gas that had grown dense and excited enough to glow out like a neon sign. Then shifting, climbing through orange into blue into violet-white as the temperature and density of the forming plasma rapidly exceeded anything a mortal forge could produce through fire. Three cultivators had to look away as the bulk of energetic material reached two meters, now too bright.

"Hope you understand that this was not just business. It is very, very personal."

Underneath everything, including Elua’s voice, was a tearing roar like a beast being born. Crackling Lightning as the back pressure turned the spirals of fuel into occasional arcs grounded (and saved) by the multi-purpose pylons. Energy that activated the secondary ritual in the targeting array. The Gas cultivator’s awareness of every molecule of Gas in the atmosphere ballooned in her mind.

As this central control area became the source of a three-dimensional mapped Illusion, she began to manipulate it with the precision of a surgeon. Laying out incision lines that properly converted essence carved with, peeling miles and miles of ribbon-like channels in the sky. Under her guidance, the ammunition would not just disperse into one bursting lance that fought against the distant air.

It would go exactly where she told it and do exactly what she wanted it to with exactly the volume of plasma needed. Air slid aside in silence as high above, the clouds found themselves parting around these flattened channels curved in trails that left ghosting condensation. Altogether looking like a giant spider decided to build a web between the vantablack hyphae of the Colonizer.

"Thank you for your service. But I’m choosing to make use of you for bringing life into the cosmos, instead of bringing more death. As long as I raise them right."

Hearing her speak, the visitors understood without seeing it - they knew in some dim way that she was about to release containment on the starseed. They didn’t get to see how the glow filled the channels at its thermal velocity when the Magnetic Element squoze the plasma into the vacuum. How it was like water rushing through empty pipes... because speeds over mach-fifty was essentially instantaneous.

One moment the guiding ribbons were only known by their atmospheric side effects, the next they were solid radiance like a bolt of lighting. Which itself was slowly, over the next second, highlighted further by the intensity of glow wreathing the charged state of matter. Each was thinner than a sword’s edge but carried more energy than the vacuum chilled surface of a stellar body.

The impact screamed worse than the charge-up. Ichor didn’t melt so much as vaporize as the eldritch creature was vivisected. Wound edges forced apart with explosive thermal pressure differentials, film boiling in effect even as the heat cauterized the vantablack into charred scab layers. The Voidling shuddered even while disconnected tendrils all across the aerial dome of the Exclave spasmed.

Elemental cohesion which held the Greater Colonizer together failed entirely. Not because of the hundreds of parts it had just been carved into so much as the removal of its core organ. A pyramid of blackened nothing that separated from the main mass after careful angles of her Starlance dug it out and separated it to begin falling.

The rest of the giant being followed... though without the organ to stabilize its existence as a unified construct - which was still happening with the dark slag the organ was contained in - the volume of accumulated and shaped into ’material’ Void essence making up the main body and ’fungal’ canopy released into a single flood of ichor.

No longer an ocean of power, but a real cascade of black converting at slow speed to miasma, falling toward the land below.

Zyris could feel it - just like someone could feel the sun shining on their face... and she made another sound that wasn’t quite a terrified sob. Nor was it quite a happy laugh. It was just inconceivable and overwhelming. For her, the sky was still falling like it was for the others - but it was also raining with more ’nourishment’ for someone who had to *train* to be hypersensitive to the substance to even find it.

’Like a succulent growing in the desert as the flood season loomed, roots that wouldn’t be able to help themselves but drink in and store it all.’

Elua er Goltbred had no intention of letting her sort-of-disciple be the kind of cultivator to drink so much she burst. She’d already had enough of that with ’friends’ over the years. But more importantly, she had no desire to slowly kill all the life in the Void’s splash zone. Pirouetting on the ground, two quick steps landed her on a new control surface.

"Almost finished, just a little longer. I hope you brought food, unless you like black clay baked vegetables. Maybe some more tea? Oh, please tell me-"

"MASTER WHAT THE-"

Too used to silencing the interruptions with ’a look’ lately, Nohre choked on air thanks to the corrective little burst of spiritual pressure. But El didn’t regret being a bully to her friend quite yet. Not until the important question of fresh tea that Rezzue had spoiled her with was answered!