Leticiel couldn’t forgive Diane’s treatment of Claud because she had personally seen many of her subordinates and comrades die while protecting her on the battlefield in the past. Leticiel had experienced many injuries, both light and severe, in her previous life. Once, she’d even had an arm ripped off. Even if she could put her body back together with sorcery, she couldn’t erase the wounds that the pain had made on her heart, and sorcery was not all-powerful. The people she hadn’t been able to save and the parts of her that she hadn’t been able to heal were scars etched on her heart that would remain there forever.
With a snap of her fingers, Leticiel lifted the hallucination technique that had been affecting Diane. Freed from the various hallucinations, Diane slumped to the floor in a daze. She covered her face with both hands and started to cry, but Leticiel had no idea where those tears were coming from.
The door Diane had emerged out of earlier opened once more and Scarlough came out into the hall to see what all the fuss was.
“Wha…?! Why are you here?!” he exclaimed the instant he saw Leticiel. Running over to his wife, who was cowering and sobbing on the ground, he pulled her into his arms and glared at Leticiel. “You! What have you done to Diane?! Leave this home this instant!”
“Naturally, I’ll leave as soon as my business here is done.”
“I don’t remember ever inviting you inside! I don’t care what business you have. Get out, now! How dare you disobey me?!”
Disgusted by Scarlough, who was arguing just for argument’s sake, Leticiel wrapped herself in a mantle of somewhat intimidating sorcery. She started to walk toward Scarlough with the technique activated.
“Eeeek! D-Don’t come any closer! You cursed abomination!” Scarlough quickly lost his bravado, unceremoniously falling on his rear end.
“I’m here for Claud. If you want me to hurry and leave, tell me where he is.”
Scarlough scooted backward. Just when she was about to take another step toward him…
“You disrespected Drossell.”
“You insulted Drossell.”
Childish, high-pitched voices, sharp like invisible blades, echoed in the hall. A chill ran down Leticiel’s back. Thinking, It can’t be, she turned around and saw Tina and Deet piercing Scarlough and Diane with gazes as sharp and cold as icicles.
The blood drained from the faces of everyone there—Leticiel included—as they instinctively sensed the difference in power between the two sides, even if one side happened to look like young children. Since the two had been quiet for so long, she’d forgotten that they had come with her.
“You don’t have the right to say that when you don’t know anything about Drossell.”
“We won’t let you say that when you’re the one hurting Drossell the most!”
A ferocious wind erupted from Deet’s body, striking Scarlough and Diane head-on and throwing them against the wall along with the surrounding furnishings that had gotten caught up in the wind.
Since Deet was the Spirit King of Void, he excelled in Void magic. There were only a few Void spell techniques that could be used on their own, but the one he had used was one such technique. It temporarily gave substance to aether to hit the technique’s target.
On the other hand, Tina was creating a sphere of light above her head. Leticiel assumed that she was concentrating rays of heat in one place. Scarlough and Diane, who were coughing from having been slammed against the wall, seemed to recognize the object being created in front of them. Abandoning their sense of shame and respectability, they scrambled to run away.
At this, even Leticiel paled. She knew that the Spirit Queen was angry. She could understand that she was upset. But still, Tina…
That’s going a little too far!
The sorcery Deet wielded made the objects in the entry hall float and attack the duke and duchess one after another. He hadn’t hit either of them yet because his aim was so shoddy, but it was only a matter of time before he landed a blow.
Above Tina’s head, a giant ball of light that seemed more than ten times her height made the air sway with tremendous heat as it continuously grew even larger. Leticiel recognized the technique, as she had used it before, herself. It was a technique that refracted the light in the air to gather heat and create a pseudo-sun.
Spirits often had simple personalities, likely because they lived simple lives. They said exactly what they thought and acted on their words. Naturally, what humans considered common sense did not apply to them. At best, they were independent and easygoing; at worst, they were a race that acted without consideration for others.
Leticiel knew that Tina and Deet were more upfront about their emotions than adults because they were still young and she didn’t intend to reproach them for that. But unlike humans, who could only obtain aether from the outside world, spirits could also use the aether they created inside of them. Therefore, in sorcery, where the technique’s power was determined by the amount of aether and the scale of the technique, their strength was fundamentally different from humans’. Which meant that, when a spirit was serious about using sorcery, not even a human with no magical power could stop them. At this rate, the entrance to the duke’s manor would be blown away.
I suppose it can’t be helped. Leticiel immediately decided to use sorcery. It would mean making the existence of her sorcery known, but that was better than everyone in the manor dying.
Black particles gathered around Leticiel, gradually coiling around her and transforming into a jet-black dragon. The Darkness-attributed dragon dutifully obeyed Leticiel’s order and crashed into the sphere of light, swallowing it right as it was about to break through the ceiling. Hot air struck Leticiel’s long silver hair, lifting debris that had been scattered on the ground into the air.
Leticiel sensed the nature of Tina’s sorcery through the dragon technique. The Light sorcery was so highly concentrated that humans’ sorcery seemed like a silly parlor trick in comparison. If Leticiel tried hard to structure her sorcery she could probably create a concentration even higher than it, but she got the feeling that Tina wasn’t trying at all.
“Ruvik, take the gardener and leave! That’s an order!”
“Y-Yes, my lady!”
Watching out of the corner of her eye as Ruvik tumbled out of the hall with the young gardener beside him, Leticiel looked up at the light and darkness fighting each other in the air.
This is probably only ten or twenty percent of her power… How frightening.
Since she had fought Tina and Deet before, Leticiel was quite familiar with how weak their attacks had been. It was obvious from the fact that the floor and ceiling hadn’t yet been destroyed that they were using less power compared to the technique that had shot randomly at her before; likely because there wasn’t much aether in the manor.
Judging that the spirits wouldn’t want to listen to her, Leticiel—who had only used fifty percent of her power—deemed that the light spell technique would never be neutralized at this rate and summoned another Darkness dragon.
Even though it wasn’t a live creature, the second dragon roared as if it were alive before wrapping itself around the sphere of light, which had hit the ceiling.
The sphere expanded once and gradually started to turn black. Leticiel added a wind technique to circulate air through the windows and doors, dissipating the heat from around them.
BOOOOOM!
The moment finally came after a steady battle. In the very end, the sphere of light exploded and broke through the entrance hall’s ceiling, disappearing into the sky. The force of the explosion and the following gusts of wind shattered all of the windows and rubble fell from the broken ceiling. The very ground shook, cracking open. But Leticiel had put up a barrier, so Ruvik and the other servants who weren’t involved in the mess were safe.
“Wh… Wh-Wh-Wh-Wha…? My…my manor!”
“What in the world was that?! Why…why is the manor so…?!”
Scarlough and Diane were unable to hide their shock at the devastation in the hall, their faces flushing red with fury then paling in dismay. But if Leticiel had allowed Tina to activate that spell technique, the entire hall would have been blown away, not just its ceiling, so she was relieved that it hadn’t been that bad.
“Drossell, why did you stop me?” Tina asked.
“Drossell, why can’t we kill them?” Deet questioned. Both of them looked dissatisfied.
Already using sorcery to repair the manor, Leticiel replied, “Even amongst bad humans, there are people you must beat and people who aren’t worth beating. Those two are the latter. There’s no need to put any effort into defeating them.”
For the time being, she had restored the broken ceiling and stairs. But she hadn’t repaired the ornaments, like as the ceramics, so there were still pottery fragments and spilled water from the flower vases on the floor.
“Oh. Well, if they aren’t worth it, nothing else can be done.”
“Oh! If there’s no point, then it can’t be helped.”
Innocently leaving a fairly mean last comment, Tina and Deet were convinced and amicably retreated behind Leticiel. They likely hadn’t thought twice before saying it, but Scarlough was red in the face and struggling to hold his temper.
“May I interrupt?” Suddenly, a calm voice rang out in the hall. It wasn’t a loud voice, but it reached her ears clearly. The manor was still half-destroyed, but Leticiel paused in her repairs.
A tall boy came out of the door Scarlough had come out of. Though he was dressed lightly, it was obvious with one glance that his clothes were of fine quality. The young man, who had deep indigo hair and gray eyes, gracefully approached them.
When Leticiel looked at his feet, she saw that the debris on the ground was slowly parting, moving out of his way. I see, he’s using magic to create a path he can walk safely on.
“What is all of this?” the young man murmured. Behind him, Scarlough and the head butler turned pale. Leticiel tilted her head slightly at the boy with the somewhat mature appearance; tall and slender, his features made him look gentle while still being dignified.
The boy’s arrival brought a heavy blanket of silence to the entrance hall. Looking around, he asked, “It seems there was quite a fuss, but is everyone safe?” His voice echoed in the quiet hall.
“Prince Lionel…,” Scarlough murmured, his voice trembling. Leticiel raised an eyebrow at the name. Lionel… If she remembered correctly, that was the second prince’s name. For a split second, she thought she could see a shadow of King Oswald in the mature boy, who exuded a distinguished elegance and dignity despite his youth.