Up until now, they had been able to drive away anyone who stepped foot into the mansion, but Teto and I had ignored all of their threats and forced them to reveal themselves. This must’ve been quite traumatizing for the poor little spirits. I was a bit at a loss about how to approach them; I mean, I was pretty much the bad guy in this situation. Thankfully Teto, always the friendly one, gently approached the spirits in my stead.
“Everything’s all right. Lady Witch won’t hurt you; you don’t have to worry,” she said.
Perhaps the little spirits felt that Teto herself was part spirit; they immediately threw themselves in her arms and started bawling.
“Lady Witch is really nice, I promise. Can we ask you questions?” she asked softly.
I decided to awkwardly stand back and let her do the talking for now. I felt really bad for scaring the little spirits and making them cry. It hadn’t been my intention.
After a few minutes, Teto managed to help them calm down. The animal-type spirits couldn’t talk, but the fairy-types could, and one of them stepped forward to act as the spirits’ spokesperson.
“Um, we’re very sorry for trying to drive you out,” it said.
“And I’m sorry for scaring you,” I replied.
The spirits seemed to relax a bit after I apologized and Teto nodded, satisfied.
“Why do you try to chase off anyone who comes here?” I asked.
“If you tell us, Lady Witch will fix your issues for you!”
“Uh...” The little spirit hesitated and turned around to look at its friends. They exchanged nods and the fairy spirit gave us the lowdown. “A greater fire spirit is sealed here.”
“A greater fire spirit?”
“What’s that?”
The little spirit told us that three hundred years ago, there’d been a war between humans and elves. It couldn’t tell us exactly why the conflict had arisen, but at one point, a human force had abducted a greater fire spirit who’d struck a pact with an elven magician. They’d sealed it under this mansion and abused its powers to fuel their secret research.
The conflict between humans and elves eventually came to an end, and this mansion fell into neglect. The mages who had conducted their research here left, and the little spirits—who had been watching from afar—gathered to help the greater fire spirit. However, they couldn’t lift the seal. All they could do was drive away any human who approached the mansion so that they wouldn’t abuse its powers again.
“But the greater fire spirit’s resentment for its captors has only festered and inflamed with time. Now the humans are the ones in danger, so we’re trying to protect them,” the little spirit concluded dejectedly.
“So for the last couple of centuries you’ve been doing this to keep us safe?” I summarized.
The spirit nodded vigorously.
That conflict must’ve dated back to before the Sunfield Empire had become the prosperous nation it was today. This would have been during the ascendancy of human supremacist thought; it was no wonder there’d been conflict with their elven neighbors. It was during one of these clashes that the greater fire spirit was abducted. When the previous dynasty fell, the modern Sunfield Empire that replaced it brought with it a much more cosmopolitan attitude; interspecies coexistence was the standard now, after all. But here in this derelict corner of the land, a trace of the old hatreds that defined the past era still burned hot as ever.
“A rampaging spirit, huh? That sounds like a pain to deal with,” I groaned.
“It’s like the mean spirits in children’s books!”
Stories and legends about spirits were prevalent in the Sunfield Empire, especially the closer you got to elf country. There were usually two types of spirits that turned up in these stories: good spirits who would hand down their blessings to those who were kind to them, and evil spirits who rained calamity on those who trespassed against them. Depending on the tale, spirits were either kind and compassionate beings who blessed people with luck, bountiful harvests, and knowledge, or evil creatures who caused misfortune and sorrow.
The lesson one tended to learn from such tales was that if you had to antagonize your spirit neighbors, you were best off not starting fights you couldn’t finish. If you ended up crossing a lower spirit, it probably wouldn’t be able to do more than pull a little prank on you, but greater spirits could easily cause large-scale calamities.
“We need to find a way to pacify it...” I muttered.
“Maybe if we talk to it, it’ll listen to us and stop being naughty?” Teto suggested, but the spirits shook their heads.
“It has nothing left but its anger. If you remove the seal now, it’ll unleash its fury upon everything in its path.”
“We could try killing it...” I mumbled. “Or not,” I added, seeing that the little spirits looked on the verge of tears.
Way back in the day, we had used a mana converter to destroy an Archdevil. The mana converter basically sucked the mana from mana life-forms and released it in the air, so we could technically use it to kill the greater spirit too...but the little spirits shook their heads vehemently.
“Under normal circumstances, I’d perform a rite to try and calm it down, but I’d need to keep repeating it for years, or even decades. We have our quest to take care of, though, so I can’t really do that.”
I looked up at the ceiling, trying to come up with something, anything to pacify the greater spirit, but my mind drew a blank.
“I haven’t managed to come up with anything yet, so I’d say that we resume collecting everything inside the mansion for now,” I said.
“Good idea, Lady Witch! We can’t forget our job!”
Perhaps we would find something useful while scavenging for treasures.
“There’s still money in this safe,” I noted. “Don’t mind if I do.”
“Lady Witch, there are lots of swords and armor in this room!”
With the little spirits’ help, we picked over the mansion from top to bottom, shoving anything of value into our magic bag. When we had taken everything, we made our way to the last room we hadn’t explored yet: the basement, the entrance to which was hidden in the study behind the bookshelf the little spirits were protecting earlier.