LIGHTNOVELONLINE 119 – Crow Issue
This was Krahe’s chosen tactic for the simple reason that Sorayah wasn’t lying when she spoke of her own abilities; based on Krahe’s cursory investigation, she likely had the superior firepower between the two of them. Deception and terror were tactical powerhouses of human history; when it came to going against a superior force, they became prime choices.
The knowledge of how abnormal her astral body appeared had not slipped by her awareness; it didn’t match any written description of how it ought to look while in a Partial Dive, and when she brought it up with Firminus during a checkup, he only confirmed it. With astro diving already being an obscure discipline, it made using her astral form as a tool of psychological warfare all the more appealing. There was the problem that she couldn’t speak while diving, but, since he was a native of the Gulf and spoke through a means other than the physical, Barzai was under no such restriction.
The raven returned to her at her beck and call, diving into her chest as she began ambling down the alleyway, making her way to a house in the same district of the city, which she had rented specifically to use while she was branded with Yao’s sign. Indeed, real-estate wasn’t exactly hard to come by. Audunpoint was, after all, a young, growing city built atop the bones of an antediluvian megalopolis. The place she’d rented was barebones to the extreme as a result, with no furniture and only basic amenities, but that wasn’t a problem, since its sole purpose was the basement, which was large and deep enough to be an indoor firing range. It was in part thanks to the noise of a nearby market and a tram station to act as coverup. Apparently, according to the building’s evoy owner, the whole Audunpoint underground was a vast sprawl of basements and catacombs, such that the tram system had busted through four different ancient crypts during its construction, and one of the stations was located in a repurposed subterranean cathedral. This building was actually the third option, as the previous two only had passive ventilation for the basement, while this one had been hooked right into the tram’s tunnel vents.
In the basement, she had set up some plates of steel as targets on one end of the room, and on the other end, two foldout tables, a cushion, and a portable burner. Mercifully, the building had its own central water supply, but unlike the church safehouses, there was no central power supply. As she sat, waiting for her talisman ink to stop bubbling and stabilize into a usable state, Krahe used the other half of the table to chop up vegetables into thin strips - carrot-like roots, peppers, and yellow cabbage. A pan, which she had hammered into the shape of a crude wok, sat atop the burner. Salt alone - rather, a fermented, strongly salty sauce - was more than enough flavouring for her stir-fry. While the vegetables cooked, she took a mass of cold, leftover rice-grain out of storage, leaving it in one chunk for now, followed by the meat component of her dish. It was dark red, almost purple, with veins of fat running between the muscle bundles. The quality was like high-grade beef with a much weaker smell, and apparently came from a kind of land-tortoise that was a common beast of burden and pack animal.
She set aside a portion of the meat, mixing half into the vegetables, breaking up the rice into the stir-fry once it was done. Thereafter, having scooped her meal into a bowl, she used the leftover oil to fry individual pieces of meat, partly to enjoy them on their own and because, for some bizarre reason, Barzai incessantly demanded a share. Eidolons had no need for sustenance, and yet not only did Barzai manifest and demand meat, he demonstrably recovered from exhaustion quicker when she fed him.
Just as he pecked for a piece of meat that she’d plucked out of the oil with a pair of construct-jade chopsticks, she yanked it out of reach, scolding the eidolon: “You won’t even do your job and you have the gall to act like this? Eh?”
She had yet to get the opportunity to put the Daemon Core to use, and she hadn’t tested it, either. Creating the individual constructs that would compose it was well within her ability, that much she had made sure of, but… Barzai wouldn’t obey. No matter how many times she tried, though the crow would let her get as far as forming the anathemic core and partly enclosing it, he would refuse to go any further. The moment the core would reach criticality, Barzai always returned to his avian form and vanished, becoming unresponsive for two hours or so.
Barzai hopped up, his head splitting along the line of his beak as he snapped it up.
“You said you wanted to become a Daemon Core. What gives?” she questioned, expecting no answer.
Barzai sat there, tilting his head back and forth. No mean in the oil, no meat to snatch, and for some reason, he didn’t so much as spare a glance for the raw stuff or that which had been mixed in with the sauce. He glanced at the oil, then back at Krahe.
“...Wah. Awawawawa.”
Despite lacking a perfect means of communicating with the spirit, Krahe could still feel his level of exhaustion through the system, and it seemed like he was near-topped up. Resigning to the temperamental not-bird’s demands, she fried another slice of meat and gave it to him, leaving her with only one more for herself in addition to her actual proper meal.
Once more, Barzai opened his beak. This time, a voice came out; a man speaking in a somber, slow manner, rather than the typical sound of a crow’s mimicry.
“Yea, the Eye of Ruin, in its great and terrible glory, shall not first gaze upon dead stone and steel. It shall scorch the flesh of the wretched, or it shall remain blind.”
Raising an eyebrow, she undercut the eidolon’s proclamation: “You seemed pretty content to use those eyes of yours on dead wood, and that was the first time I ever made you attack anything.”
