Commissioned by InfiniteChaosRai
Who Da Boss Lady?
Chapter 41
-VB-
“It’s wrong.”
Serafall looked up from where she was finishing the last of her paperwork for the day. Most of it had to do with import and export permissions for medium and large-sized businesses that were working to expand the Devilkind’s influence in North Africa.
While the Angels there - operating under the umbrella of both Christianity and Islam - were still hostile against them, they had their hands full trying to keep the human-sourced violence to a minimum.
Unlike what the nonbelievers and believers alike thought about how Heaven worked, the Heavenly Host definitely put in the work, which was one of the reasons why it was so hard for Devilkind to move into that region. In fact, they have been trying - and failing - to take the region from the Heavenly Host for the better part of two thousand years (from the original Satan’s rule to the Civil War and now to her and her allies’ rule).
Oh well. It’ll just continue to be a money sink.
“What’s wrong?” she asked Ajuka as her nearly autistic scientist friend-ally (ain’t that a mouthful) marched into her room without even knocking. Unfortunately for her, she had gotten used to his antics (and the lack of manners), but she’ll take it over his competitions’ lack of ethics.
“Your apprentice is wrong.”
That immediately got her hackles up before she calmed down just as quickly. “Well, yeah. She’s a Void Touched,” she chirped.
“No, not just that. The energy readings from the battle site are all off,” he said as he pulled out a thin stack of papers with big and nice graphs on them.
She took it, read it, and didn’t understand anything the graphs were trying to tell her.
She looked up.
Ajuka sighed, aggrieved that she wasn’t like him. “How does magic work?” he asked instead.
“Well, for us Devils, we just imagine it, put that imagination into our mana, and whoosh it happens,” she replied slightly childishly. Because she was just in that mood.
“Right. How do human magicians work?”
“They put their mana into formulas and bam it happens.”
“And the divine?”
“Kind of like the Devils? Ajuka, why are you asking me this?”
“Your little ‘apprentice,’” he drawled out as he pointed to the bar graphs. “Do not work like any known magical paradigm and discipline I am aware of.”
“... She doesn’t?”
“No,” he replied with a sigh. “Look, even Devils have a system, one that is dictated by our nature. Our imagination is the human equivalent of formulas. We are just very efficient with our magic by nature. Humans can technically do what we do but their souls and magics aren’t made for imagination-derived effect-.”
“So what about Mari-chan?”
“You called her Void Touched. You said she was Void Touched.”
“Yes?”
“How do they work?”
“They … don’t have a system? They’re just conduits for the things outside.”
“Correct. Your apprentice is not a conduit.”
She opened her mouth and stopped.
“What?”
“Your apprentice is a Void Touched because she can call upon the Void but she does not conduct.” He tapped at the bar graphs on the bottom half of the front page. “Those are magical residues we collected at the site. Notice anything strange?”
She looked at them.
Each collection site had two bars.
“No?” How was she supposed to know what “Principle Elemental Composition per Site” was supposed to mean? Aside from specific magical elements. “All of the bars are each site are the same height?”
“Exactly.”
“Wait, what? Really?”
“Yes. Most spells are mono-elemental. More complex spells start to incorporate multiple elementals or traits like how our dear leader does. His Power of Destruction acts as its own element when he is forming spells, so you can always detect a hint of his Power of Destruction on sites where he incorporates it into his spells.”
“And?”
“According to what your sister and Miss Gremory reported, none of the spells your apprentice used showed void usage. Yet when you look at the graph right there…”
She looked back down.
The first set was an atmospheric sample. An equal mixture of light (not holy) and void.
The second set was the ground. Unknown cause for increased gravity (pull from below or pressure from above?) End result: an equal spread between gravity, spirit, and void.
The third set was also from the ground but where one of Mari-chan’s Final Spark struck. The same as the first set: an equal mixture of light and void.
“But that’s…”
“It’s wrong,” Ajuka repeated. “And we need her contained as soon as possible.”
“What?! Containment? She hasn’t done anything awful! Or look awful.”
Sometimes, looking awful as a Void Touched was enough for them to put down the Void Touched. Most of the time, when a Void Touched looked “wrong,” their mind was already gone.
“Look at the second graph.”
She flipped the page and she did.
The title of the graph was “Standard Void Decay vs Sampled Void Decay.”
The regular void decay was in black. It looked like one of those half-life graphs, sharply dropping down from 100% to 1% in under … one minute.
But the graph measured up to a full hour.
And the red line, the sampled void decay, stayed steady. Steadily declining, that was. But it wasn’t the sharp decay that was the regular void decay.
“The standard is the mean between the site of the Incident of 1377, Zaliv Terpeniya after it disappeared, and Malinovoye after … that.”
She grimaced. The last one had been a personal headache for her because it was her former house, House Sitri, who produced the Devil that made the contact with an eldritch being that led to … that happening. Most of that lake was still open to visitors but the part where the ritual had taken place? That place had been shunted off into the Dimensional Void.
The fact that Mari was using void element was already troubling.
The fact that she used the void almost in equal measure with regular elements and mana was perplexing.
The fact that the void lingered?
That was … that was really bad.
“But it can’t be her that is doing this,” Serafall reasoned. “Void doesn’t just … linger.”
“We know it isn’t her.”
That made her perk up. “Really?”
“Yes. There is something else loitering around in the area.”
Her brief joy withered into a bone-chilling horror.
“You mean…?”
“There is a void entity lurking in Kuoh Town, and since it hasn’t gone after anyone else, it may be looking for a chance to attack your apprentice.”
Fixed Corruption-Destruction Mix-up