Chapter 855 – Kirmira (Patreon)

Kirmira carved a path through the clouds as he flew towards River Yanges at full speed, excited to return to his homeland for once.

A few decades ago, the thought of mingling with a bunch of low-borns and wasting his time in a backwater village would have made him scoff, but the most recent interstellar expedition he had participated in had greatly altered his view of his own mortality.

‘I’d better make sure to live a little, just in case,’ he kept telling himself.

In the past, Kirmira had spent his time single-mindedly studying his affinities and training to attain divinity, having never even entertained the possibility of dying a mortal. He’d always known that only a few Clear mages ever managed to forge an internal world, but he would just have to make sure that he became one of the successful Venerables.

Nothing else had interested him. What value was there to owning a piece of land or holding onto memories of a childhood so distant that he hardly remembered it?

But after seeing hundreds of his fellow demigods die at the hands of an enemy deity and realizing how easily he could have been among the casualties, Kirmira had been forced to reevaluate his chances of attaining his goal. Reaching the Concept realm clearly didn’t depend solely on his own efforts.

“It’s a simple mission,” Kirmira’s superiors had kept telling them. Galam was a newly risen lesser spring only a dozen light-years away, with only a single deity and around a hundred demigods.

Kirmira’s group had only been tasked with keeping the enemy god occupied until the second team finished butchering Galam’s Clear mages and looting the planet’s valuables. The inhabitants of that world hadn’t been particularly wealthy, but the Jambavanti deities had wanted to cross-reference their own runecrafting language with that of another faction, and they hadn’t been able to find any other places weak enough to invade.

Some losses had been unavoidable, but more than eighty percent of the Venerables had been expected to survive the expedition with valuable combat experience under their belts.

It was common knowledge that staying home and peacefully meditating on one’s affinities for tens of millennia wasn’t enough to comprehend a concept. One could be forgiven for thinking that combat had nothing to do with understanding the properties of a magical element, but Kirmira’s superiors had discovered a long time ago that it was actually the best way to push a Venerable past their limits and contextualize the effects of their affinity.

Seeing how one’s spells clashed against another’s and being forced to stake one’s life on the ingenuity of their magic permanently changed a demigod’s mental framework, allowing them to comprehend a foundational concept much faster. Most still ran out of time, but those who experienced at least a couple of dangerous battles every now and then were generally the only Clear mages who had a chance to succeed.

Unfortunately, Kirmira’s superiors had gravely miscalculated the strength of the enemy deity. At the end of the day, a Concept mage would always be a Concept mage, even if they had only mastered a single foundational concept.

More than eighty percent of the Jambavanti Venerables had fallen. The blood still drained from Kirmira’s face whenever he recalled how lucky he had been to be among the few who had safely made it back to their own deity’s internal world.

The only time Kirmira had been luckier was when he’d awakened his Green core as a child.

It would be such a shame if he got killed in another botched expedition without even getting to enjoy his privilege. Other Venerables regularly travelled around Jambavan and had fun lording their power over the low-borns or collecting massive harems of beautiful women. Compared to that, Kirmira hadn’t even asked for that much.

He just wanted a place to relax every now and then. To feel like a god among his fellow Jambavanti on the off chance that he never actually became one.

Kirmira was pulled from his thoughts when a small village appeared on the horizon, sitting within the river’s bend, right next to a small forest. He didn’t remember the current name of the settlement, as it had been renamed and rebuilt multiple times since he’d first left, but the nostalgic view of the river’s glistening waters curving around the village and washing against the ferns and bushes along its muddy shores was almost the same.

“Hmmm? Are they not done with the expansions yet?” he asked himself with a deepening frown upon noticing that the settlement hadn’t changed all that much since his previous visit.

Kirmira wasn’t too surprised, as there was still some time left until the deadline he had given them. In fact, he’d only given them that long because he knew that low-borns couldn’t work nearly as fast as someone like him. However, he was quite annoyed to see nobody working in the middle of the day.

“Chieftain! I gave you several months to complete the project because I thought your workers genuinely needed them – not so that you could sit on your asses all day until right before the deadline!” he yelled after landing next to the leader’s residence.

No response.

It was highly unlikely that the Orange-born chieftain would dare ignore a Venerable, but Kirmira still kicked the front door down and scanned the small building with his domain just in case the man had been paralysed by fear.

After confirming that the chieftain was absent, Kirmira rose over a hundred metres up and scanned the village more carefully. There was nobody walking around, and Kirmira was pretty sure it had been that way since before his arrival.

He spotted some commotion in the direction of the nearby forest – namely a falling tree, accompanied by a few people shouting to stay clear of its trunk.

‘Good. At least they seem to be doing something about my commission,’ Kirmira thought with a sigh. He was still going to demand answers from the chieftain, but perhaps he shouldn’t be too harsh towards the man.

Flying above the Yaksha, Kirmira finally found where most of the villagers were working, though he was greeted with another strange scene that he could hardly explain.

The low-borns were gathered in a relatively small area in the outskirts of the forest, and were taking their sweet time chopping the trees down. A Green – or even a Yellow – should have been able to slice right through even the largest and healthiest trunks with a single strike from their hatchet. In fact, most of them should have been capable of chopping the trees down with their mana, without needing external tools unless their affinity was ill-suited to the task.

However, it was clear that the locals’ hearts just weren’t in it. Most of them were hacking at the trees lethargically, while their attention was focused on a group of forest sprites playing their tiny musical instruments atop the branches of one of the largest trees in the middle of a clearing.

“Seriously?! Are you bastards wasting the time I gave you out of pity for the Yaksha?!” Kirmira yelled furiously as he landed among the villagers, startling everyone.

Only the sprites seemed unperturbed, continuing to play their – admittedly decent – symphony on their wooden instruments. Kirmira was a little surprised to see so many sprites in such a small forest. Granted, the size of a performing troupe was generally random and had nothing to do with the size of the Yaksha, but Kirmira didn’t think he’d ever seen a troupe with more than six members before.

Not that it mattered. He wasn’t going to give up on his vacation home on account of a slightly stranger forest. They had plenty of those lying around on Jambavan.

“E-Esteemed Venerable!” The chieftain ran towards Kirmira, bowing a full ninety degrees as he reached him. A few beads of cold sweat were rolling through the fur on the Blue’s ageing face. “You have my sincerest apologies, sir! We are definitely going to complete the project before the deadline, but we weren’t expecting you to return so soon!”

“I can see that,” Kirmira replied with a sneer, causing the chieftain to swallow hard. “Regardless of your intentions, I shouldn’t have to explain how grave a sin it is to pour anything less than one hundred and ten percent of your effort into a task directly assigned to you by a Venerable.”

The Blue trembled in his boots, as did several other villagers who had overheard the conversation, though nobody dared to utter a word of protest.

“Nevertheless, you’re lucky that it would be too troublesome to punish you harshly and have to find other workers to replace you,” Kirmira ultimately decided with a small shrug, much to everyone’s relief. “But it seems that I should lend you a hand in getting rid of the local pests, since you people seem to be a touch too soft-hearted to be relied upon...”

With a wave of his hand, he unleashed an invisible arc of willpower that sliced through hundreds of trees and destroyed around a fifth of the forest in an instant. The villagers’ eyes widened upon taking in the sheer scale of the devastation and realizing how easily their fragile bodies could have met a similar fate if they’d caught Kirmira in a worse mood.

Only the sprites were still playing their instruments, unbothered by their imminent demise. The colourful musicians didn’t miss a single note, grinning brightly even as their small bodies flickered into and out of existence and their tiny frames struggled to maintain their humanoid shapes.

That was another thing that Kirmira had never encountered before. It was common for Yaksha to perform for the Jambavanti, begging them to spare their forests, but Kirmira had never seen a troupe play so cheerfully while their forest was being destroyed.

“Please, sir, can you give us more time to relocate a part of the Yaksha and preserve their consciousness? It would be a shame to slaughter a troupe so talented and unique,” a female cub said while tugging at Kirmira’s robes, showing none of the horror that was evident on the adults’ expressions.

“Anika! Stop bothering the Venerable!” the chieftain yelled, rushing to pull the child – his daughter, presumably – away.

Kirmira clicked his tongue, annoyed by the girl’s rudeness. He wasn’t going to seriously injure a child over something this minor, but he couldn’t let the cub’s behaviour go unpunished either. Swinging his right hand at Anika’s cheek, Kirmira was about to slap her into a muddy puddle while knocking a few teeth out. That ought to teach her some manners while she was still young and pliable.

The girl winced in anticipation of the strike, but the back of Kirmira’s hand was somehow stopped just millimetres from the cub’s face.

Gasps and terrified exclamations echoed from every direction as the demigod twisted his hand slightly to examine the obstruction. One of the sprites was standing on Anika’s shoulder, casually blocking Kirmira’s attack with its own grey hand.

‘When did–’ Kirmira’s eyes narrowed. ‘Wasn’t that thing on the tree just now?’

The tiny figure was still flickering into and out of existence, struggling to maintain its shape, yet a bright, predatory grin was plastered all over its round face.

“Thanks!” the dying musician said.

“Huh?!” Kirmira was more perplexed by this turn of events than angry. Pushing more willpower into his hand, he tried to overpower the karmic avatar, yet it felt as though his domain had met an even stronger force, one that perfectly cancelled his strength without allowing the girl to feel a thing. “What are you thanking me for?”

The sprite’s grin widened. “For giving me an excuse.”

Then, the grey figure leapt right into Kirmira’s snout, its tiny fist pulled back and ready to strike. The flickering, transparent sprite’s attack looked downright comical.

Right until its fist connected.

That was when the demigod realized that he had never been punched so hard before in his life.