Chapter 700: – Exodus |
“Thanks for saving my brother,” Elaine said, though she sounded nothing like her usual cheerful self.
It was hard to be, given how tired she was, and how many relatives she had just watched die. Even her father was currently unconscious, having suffered serious injuries at the hands of a Blue with a fire affinity. Thankfully, Archibald had already tended to his son and reassured his grandchildren that Gawain would be alright after some rest.
At least Owain had made it out of the scorched forest in one piece. The boy was understandably a little rattled, but that would hopefully just motivate him to train harder and not do anything dumb in the future.
“He’s lucky that he stood out as the only person with a Yellow core on the battlefield,” Percy replied.
Saying those words felt strange, since Percy was technically also a Yellow beneath the seals. Still, Owain was just fourteen, and had clearly bitten off way more than he could have possibly chewed.
Elaine nodded.
The two cousins were standing outside the mansion, watching as the non-combatants of their family emptied out the building, stuffing as many of their possessions as they could into dozens of spatial amulets, and loading the rest onto carriages.
House Avalon only possessed a small stable, fused into a side of their main building. There was only enough space for a handful of horses, which was fine because people rarely rode them. Those at Yellow or higher could travel just as fast – if not faster – on foot, while Reds and Oranges almost never had a reason to leave the province.
While this wasn’t much of a problem on any other day, it made the current relocation of the entire family exceedingly complicated. The life users would probably need to have whatever clones had survived the battle carry both people and objects to the Fungal Spire. Even then, it would take multiple trips to move everything.
Between the Alchemists’ Guild and the tens of millions of wasps under Percy’s control, House Avalon technically possessed more than enough power to protect themselves against an attack like today’s. The problem was that the insects couldn’t survive away from the Fungal Spire for an extended period of time, nor could the alchemists abandon their responsibilities and leave the whole planet without elixirs. It made more sense to move the family near the settlement and was something that they should have probably done sooner.
Their allies had offered some assistance with moving, but they couldn’t stay in the Camelot province for long. They had their own territories to defend, and rivals who had undoubtedly taken advantage of their absence to advance their goals.
Archibald was busy tending to the most seriously wounded, though Percy knew that his grandfather was impatient to pass those not in critical condition to the other healers, so that he could begin replacing his clones. The patriarch would need weeks to replenish his decimated army, leaving their family vulnerable to a follow-up invasion until then.
It was unlikely to happen, since Theseus and Morpheus would hopefully be busy healing Machaon and trying to piece together what they had just learned about the Dance, yet this was way too important to leave to chance.
The urgency to restore some semblance of their House’s fighting strength was also why Archibald had fixed Percy’s leg before healing anyone else, despite his grandson’s injury not being life-threatening. Furthermore, it was one of the main reasons Percy and Micky had rushed to rein their rampaging mana in, stabilizing their artificial advancements and refilling their cores and channels.
Unfortunately, they hadn’t been able to reverse their partial demotion merely by gathering more mana, otherwise they would have managed to do that during the stalemate across the ravine or by asking Nephthys to consume a few Yellow wasps and send them the soul mana. Fixing the Cradle had required Percy and Micky to carefully work alongside their seals to re-compress their reserves – something too delicate to be done in the middle of a domain clash.
After repairing his grade and mentally noting the threshold that he had to avoid falling under in the future, Percy had used his bloodline to try and possess Machaon. There hadn’t been any other Whites on the planet in such a critical condition, so finding him hadn’t been difficult for the clone. He had hoped to forcefully enter the patriarch’s body and mess up his soul from within, to finish him off.
The problem was that the other Whites had managed to stabilize their colleague’s condition by the time Percy attempted his assassination. Even a healer of Archibald’s calibre would probably need an entire week to fully mend Machaon’s devastated body, and Percy wasn’t even sure his enemies had somebody that skilled, but healing him just enough so that he wouldn’t die if left alone hadn’t been too difficult, apparently.
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Micky was currently sitting inside Percy’s old room, pouring their shared domain into the zelesian beads. The transparent marbles were down to about a third of their capacity, so it would take over a week to refill them. A small price to pay, considering how much the priceless artifacts had helped just hours earlier.
“Elaine… I’m sorry that I brought this upon our family,” Percy muttered hoarsely.
“Don’t be,” she said with a strained smile. “It’s not your fault Machaon did what he did to the wasps, nor was it wrong of you to expose him.”
“Still. I could have ended this war today if I had made different choices. We wouldn’t have had to leave our ancestral home,” he insisted.
Percy had lived away from the mansion for a very long time, and it wasn’t like he had always appreciated this place in his youth. Even so, some of his fondest memories were from within those wooden walls, or among the now-destroyed pines in the distance, and he knew that this was doubly true for Elaine.
His cousin sighed, scanning the mourning faces of those who had lost somebody close to them, the strained expressions of those labouring toward their expedient relocation, and the line of charred trees in the horizon. They had already put out the fire, but about eighty percent of the Whistling Woods had burnt down. What was left of the forest still emanated plumes of black smoke and would take decades to regrow.
Leaving their province was more than an inconvenience. The neighbouring families were unlikely to get any funny ideas of invading again, so House Avalon’s lands would hopefully remain intact until they were ready to reclaim them. However, moving far away from their towns would leave their commoners without support.
Archibald would have to arrange for people to check up on them regularly, delivering any vital resources that they might lack, all the while hoping that their enemies wouldn’t decide to take their anger out on the peasants. Then again, Machaon and his goons could already do that if they wanted, since it was impossible for House Avalon to station enough people in each of their towns to defend against multiple Great Houses.
With any luck, distancing themselves from the commoners would be safer for everyone involved.
“Let’s not play that game. We could have all done things differently,” Elaine said, shaking her head. “I’m sure that Grandpa is currently blaming himself for not moving us earlier, and I can also think of half a dozen decisions that I could have made while practicing my spells that might have allowed me to beat my opponents and help you and Grandpa.”
“I suppose…” Percy responded weakly, though he wasn’t convinced.
Balling her fist, Elaine playfully punched his shoulder like she used to do when they were young. Only, it didn’t hurt this time, and not because she was weak by any stretch of the imagination. By anyone’s standards, Elaine could be considered an absolute monster, her rise through their family’s ranks having been nothing short of meteoric. She still had a grade on Percy, but only one instead of two, and his physique was more than strong enough to absorb the impact.
“Don’t ‘suppose’ me,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Didn’t you just beat the living crap out of a White? I know that you like aiming for the stars, but some of the smaller things are still worth celebrating.”
It was true. Their enemies might have come out on top after the recent clash, but Percy and Micky had fought quite well at a personal level. Even their family had performed better than Machaon’s, having lost fewer mages both as a percentage and as a raw number.
Percy had been so caught up in his family’s losses, the aftermath of the fight, and what it would mean for everyone moving forward, that he had failed to appreciate how shocking his performance actually was.
He was a Red-born, not even fifty years old, and he had just turned the patriarch of a Great House into a disfigured cadaver! Machaon was a monster who had lived over a hundred times as long as Percy, had further boosted his strength through the very spell that he had stolen from Percy, and was still only alive right now because of his allies.
“Do you finally get it?” Elaine asked upon seeing that his mood had improved slightly. “Today was a slap in the face for all of us, but that’s all the more reason to make sure we win the next one.”
Percy nodded, resolving himself to do whatever it took to protect himself and his loved ones.
It wouldn’t be easy, because their enemies had just received a major power-up in the form of the Dance. Considering that Machaon had spent a decade trying to wrap his mind around Circulation, it would probably be a while before he figured out the much-more-demanding Masterful spell and spread it to his forces. Percy would have to figure out a way to keep up.
His allies would learn the technique even faster under his guidance, but he was more worried about the top-level combatants. The enemy patriarchs would effectively grow half a grade stronger, while Percy and his family wouldn’t, because they were already using the complete Dance.
‘We’ll need to rope more allies into joining us, and find new ways of growing stronger,’ he thought.
Now that he and Micky were done with the void tournament and their artificial advancements, there was no major project eating up their time. They could finally redirect their attention to the clones, and all the smaller things that they had previously placed on hold.
“And… there’s one more thing I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Elaine said, breaking Percy out of his thoughts.
“Hmm?”
She pointed at a certain patch of grass in the garden, next to the stump of a tree that Percy used to practice his spells on as a teenager.
“Remember what I said the last time we were sitting there, chatting? I don’t think I ever apologized for it.”
Percy smiled. He’d never forgotten, even before his fusion with Micky gave him eidetic memory. His cousin had spoken out of concern – not malice – but her words had still hurt, due to how self-conscious Percy used to be about his birth grade.
She’d asked him to stop practicing with his bloodline. That it hadn’t been worth hurting himself, because even if he had become the strongest Yellow on the planet, it wouldn’t have mattered. And yet, here they were, a few short decades later.
Elaine smiled too. “I’m sorry, cousin. I was wrong.”