The Ogre Strength Fairy and the Eldest 'Son'-Chapter 385 - Lonely Aerial Dance Of The Mint Eyed Fairy
Chapter 385: Chapter 385 - Lonely Aerial Dance Of The Mint Eyed Fairy
Freefalling from that great height, Elua folded her spiritual sense tight as her essence field molded the gases around her. All her attention shifted to the sort of practice she could never reasonably do at home. The sort of ’flight’ made easier by denser essence being already present - and without the need to monitor who was watching.
Jets of air pushed against and circled the annoyed Ogre Fairy’s form in jagged, frustrated bursts. Her silver dress whipped and snapped around her legs as she tumbled through the first hundred feet, angry essence manipulation sending her spinning and cartwheeling in graceless arcs.
’Stupid, stubborn, impossible woman. One-track mind. In my day, people would have loved to spend months trapped with a stronger cultivator that both talked to them and hadn’t killed them on sight!’
A particularly violent sustained updraft, meant to fling her further back up, caught her at a bad angle again. The disorientation broke past her spiral of irritation and forced her focus back to the immediate task of ’flying, not falling’.
Elua straightened herself by rolling into a ball and more *gently* maneuvering, over three to four seconds of dropping like a stone, before unfurling with a sharp exhale. Her feet touched formed panels of solidified air that she could apply the Adhesion technique to. She found her center of balance on less than completely stable platforms.
’Better.’
When the essence lattice of that one shattered, the next compression of air formed a more firm version beneath where her feet would ’land’. All practice meant to discover exactly how quickly she could make them in this environment, exactly how firm, and exactly how mentally draining it was.
The manipulation and calculations took the majority of her active thoughts. The people above on the cliffside disappeared from her considerations. But it couldn’t steal her desire to see Qatrand.
Pressure built as a counter force to her ’standing’ weight, at least for the solid heartbeat it took for her to softly stomp in ’useful tantrum’. Force that could crack stone instantly turned up the pressure by thousands of PSI inside the already highly pressurized gas. Creating an explosive charge she’d shaped to exit on the other side of the panel.
A lightning crack of sound of thrust propulsion unleashed and launched the brunette up a dozen feet in a more graceful ballistic arc than the prior tumbling had. Trailing wisps of condensed ice crystals formed by the instantaneous moment of jet propulsion. The cloud of them sparkled in the short moments before the atmosphere’s temperature balance was reclaimed.
The rhythm of stepping in the air came back to her gradually, in this new expression of it. Compress essence (and air) ahead of landing, step on the panel, leap off of it. Sometimes it was a ’stomp’ for a bone-cracking instant of movement. Sometimes just simple hops that made use of fine timing between Adhesion and a body’s full springing motion.
A three-dimensional dance through the air that no earthbound cultivator could achieve - not without years of specialized training. Here, with essence thick as the honey her facade always added to her voice... and no observers to maintain appearances for...
She could remember what it felt like to truly be unbound by the reality of mortals.
Tinier, increasingly well timed taps of force lead to loops and flips that carved through the Astral Exclave’s air. Lingering annoyance at being stuck here for months at minimum had fully dissolved into concentration... for each turn required perfect timing.
Release her hold on the essence too early and the compressed air would disperse before her Ogre Physique’s instantaneous force could ever react with it. Too late and her essence field itself would thump and strain with the feedback.
Wrongly positioning them would cause her to plummet past her ’stepping stone’ panels of essence and air. Slowly all that new math was being noted and collected into a modified spiritual fragment that could serve as an almost ’muscle memory’ automation, in the future.
Growth that soothed her ancient mind in ways that shouting at a scared woman never could. In a spiral, she controlled her descent while compressing even more air into a tight new charge far below. To discover just how much lift the physical force behind cracking stone could provide at her current capability as an elementalist.
A perfect crouching motion caused two stomps and two grips to contact the contained pressure. Sudden, violent recoil met this test as an even louder sonic boom traveled out. Sent away from the spectacular shock diamonds in the air, she watched as her arched back tore through the slowing atmosphere in an instant.
From zero to over sixty miles per hour, from a few hundred feet from the water surface to a couple hundred feet higher in one blink. Hanging suspended at the apex, she spread her arms wide before the dress started billowing around her like silver wings. The same dress with so many sigil protections on it that, even were she were still only an Enchanter, all these intense forces would have been ’safe’.
The dark cobalt lake stretched below, no longer so still as the jet burst of air pierced and rolled its surface into rippling waves. The formerly mirror-smooth, near black wavered with the reflective gold tufts of cloudscape behind her in the impossible seeming violet sky above.
’Qat would love every bit of this.’
The thought came with a sharp pang of longing. Her beloved would absolutely crave to learn these techniques - or at least the form of them that would be achievable with her particular set of Aspects. The Yecine would dutifully practice until she could match up to any aerial maneuver Elua demonstrated.
The image of pigeon-blue eyes bright with determination and the joy of a first successful ’flight’ made the ancient cultivator’s chest tight. For that was only one joy of many that she might be missing in the following years. And that felt like a betrayal to herself, to not be there for every single one of them.
But there was still a recognition that this sort of freedom - this ability to be completely unrestrained right now, was something she’d needed more than she’d realized. Since being reborn, she’d carefully tried to fit into boxes and only slowly expand the scope of them. To link the ways they connected because it was valuable to Qatrand if she did so.
However, ever since the marriage she knew... survival for herself had stopped being all that motivating. Risk was always so minimal, and the Ogre inside had been hammering at the confines as if it was begging to be included in who she was in this life.
"I’ll try to come to better terms with it, my fortress."
Not an heiress to an affluent family wearing a facade over the remnant of the Acid Tongued Villainess that people knew. Just being Elua er Goltbred as she was and could be - and would be, so that the person she loved and who loved her most would stop worrying so much about her mental well being!
"So you don’t have to worry about me cracking the protective walls down that you’ve let me stay inside."
As velocity picked up in the final second before impact, the cultivator engaged all three energies. Folding her essence field tight, her spiritual barrier just as much, and rallying physical energy foremost toward the parts that would contact first in the dive.
The transition from air to water was seamless - a silver arrow with a pair of glowing mint lights piercing the surface with barely a splash. The lake’s depth swallowed her form quietly. Minutes passed as bubbles of discarded carbon dioxide rose like pearls toward the surface.
There was less oxygen in the water to survive on, but there was some there - and breathing as much as a mortal did was unimportant to someone with efficiency in techniques in the first place. Far less important than a few moments of perfect, uncomplicated peace.
⟠ ⟠ ⟠
The ’silence’ stretched for nearly three minutes after the crack of splitting stone faded. After the whumps and thumps of strange loud sound bending over the cliffside, especially the very rumbling last one.
Sevra still stared at the fractured ground where Elua had stormed off, her face even paler with this new proof of physical strength. In the interim, Madrigil had been examining the damage with obvious fascination. Walking around the impact point and occasionally crouching to trace the exact patterns made with his finger.
"Truly fascinating. I believe there was a sort of stabilization of the ground done right before the point of contact. Otherwise, the precision required to fracture rock in this exact radial pattern would make no sense. Not while maintaining such focused directional force to fling her in a direction... superior control even under emotional stress."
The scout whirled to face him, her eyes widening with disbelief at his purely academic amazement. He was talking like he had seen what happened, but like another person witnessed it!
"Control? She just threw *herself* off a cliff! That was anything but controlled!"
"Was it not?"
The man straightened to his full height and held his chin before expressing his researcher’s opinion on the matter. As a scholar so often refuted, he didn’t expect to convince anyone of anything, but it never stopped him from hypothesizing.
"That small girl could have directed that force at us instead of the ground. Probably could have simply shattered the work she’d spent her time on over there if she wasn’t careful."
Against the foreign noble’s sense of calm that the scout could not process, her panic rose further. The woman needed someone else to understand the way she did.
"She’s unstable! Dangerous! Do you really not see how easily-"
"You say *she* is dangerous and unstable, but how is that different from our current circumstances?"
The question sliced through her building panic while filling the cut with boiling hot confusion. Madrigil remained conversational as he gestured between them as if implying the distance was not so great despite being a couple dozen feet apart.
"You’re right here assuming safety based on my apparent scholarly nature. But you surely saw me break down that workshop door in my... stimulation earlier. You have no information about my combat capabilities beyond that display of strength."
Tapping on his lips while taking two steps toward her, he shrugged and shook his head. Any closer to make his point and he would endanger himself.
"For all you know, I could have killed you the moment she left because she wasn’t around to stop it as the strongest one of us here."
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