Zelaine walked outside the house to take a stroll, circling the farm.
The house itself was a two-storied wooden structure with two bedrooms, one belonging to Mavine's parents and the other to Mavine herself, though since Zelaine had arrived she had been sharing the room with her.
She stepped out into the open air, intentionally keeping to the flower-lined pavement to avoid the unpleasant smell drifting over from the piglet pens.
The morning was quiet in the way that only the countryside could be not truly silent, but filled with the soft, unhurried sounds of nature going about its business.
Ellamele and Mark had built something remarkable out here, she thought absently . A pig farm, a fish farm, rice fields stretching out in pale green rows. It was humble and industrious and oddly beautiful in the early light.
She walked without thinking much about anything in particular, her arms loose at her sides, her eyes drifting from one corner of the property to the next.
It was during one of these idle, wandering glances that her gaze fell upon the well.
It sat near the edge of the yard, half-shadowed by an old tree whose branches leaned over it like a curious bystander.
She had passed it before without a second thought it was an ordinary-looking thing, stone-rimmed and weathered, the kind that blended into old farm properties so naturally that the eye simply skipped over it. But something made her stop now.
'What is that.'
White light was rising from inside it, a kind of light that screamed unnatural. This was something else entirely. A cool, pulsing glow that spilled up over the stone rim and scattered faintly into the surrounding air, as though the well were breathing it out.
'Could there be something inside it?'
Zelaine stood very still for a moment, just looking at it from a distance, half-convinced she was imagining things.
Then she leaned over the rim and peered down into the dark.
"It's so bright I can't see."
Then, before she could do anything, the white light spread instantly and the entire farm was covered inside it.
"What the hell!"
Zelaine stumbled back, her eyes closing instantly from the brightness of the light.
"Barrier."
She cast her skill, Barrier, which was a transparent spherical crystal shield protecting her from the sheer intensity of the light.
What she saw was nothing but white surroundings.
After a few seconds, the light vanished as if it were never there in the first place.
"Huh?"
Zelaine looked at the well, stunned. She checked the well again by looking into it, but there was nothing she could see.
Though, she did notice some faint residue of Yai.
"There's something inside the well."
Without thinking about anything else, she made her move.
Without a word of warning, Zelaine hopped onto the stone rim and nonchalantly dropped into the darkness of the well. A heavy splash echoed up the shaft.
Inside the freezing depths, Zelaine was perfectly dry.
She had constructed a spherical Yai barrier around herself, shimmering with a faint, translucent light. Playing Sherlock and looking for clues on the surface was never her forte, she preferred the direct approach.
Using the soft glow emanating from her barrier to cut through the murky silt, she navigated freely against the crushing water pressure.
As she descended deeper, the temperature dropped, and she felt the tingle of Yai residues energy that was the same as she felt a little bit earlier.
'What is that?'
Her gaze shifted, catching a pulse of light from below. A glowing white crystal sat embedded in the rocky floor of the well.
She warily approached diamond shaped crystal.
In reality, she was performing a regular walking motion inside her spherical bubble. As her feet moved, the barrier rolled along the bottom of the well, carrying her forward through the mud.
The design was ingenious the barrier was coded for defensive purposes, but as a by product of it's capabilities it shifted its surface tension to negate fluid resistance and maintain perfect stability.
'My rolling barrier is truly useful. I am proud of it,' she thought with a smug grin. It had taken her ten years to perfect the defensive propertives of yaicrystals for this skill, and it proved its worth in these niche moments.
"Come to think of it, I never thanked Atiya for teaching me to use this skill like this."
She pulled out the crystal by creating a hole in the barrier, coating her hand to avoid getting wet, and shoved the crystal inside a mini-portal that served as her inventory. Well, almost every yai user's inventory was like that.
"At least they should have come a little later," Zelaine grunted, hearing her temporary fake parents calling for her.
"Zelaine! Sweetie!"
She looked up and caught a glimpse of phone flashlights coming from above.
"Hah."
She unsummoned the barrier and swam upward so they could see her.
"Gosh! How did you get there?" it was Mavine.
"I came for a walk and somehow fell in! Mother, Father, will you please pull me out?"
****
Inumaki Village.
"Do you want to hear something interesting!"
The black-haired woman burst through the doorway holding a sheaf of papers against her chest, her eyes bright with barely contained amusement.
"What is it, Screja. I am in no mood for your jokes."
Priest Fredo did not look up from where he knelt arranging the altar candles, his movements slow and deliberate with the practiced calm of a man deep in his morning ritual.
Screja, as she often did, seemed entirely unbothered by this.
"I escorted the guest around the village yesterday," she said, wandering further into the room with her usual lack of ceremony, "and at some point during the tour he asked me for paper and pen."
Fredo's hands paused for just a fraction of a second before resuming.
'Paper and pen. Is he coding something?'
He glanced at her sideways. From the particular expression sitting on Screja's face, somewhere between scandal and delight, that did not seem to be the case at all.
She held the papers out to him without a word.
Fredo took them, straightened up, and began to skim. His brow furrowed. Then creased further. Then settled into a deep, sustained frown that aged him considerably.
"What is this."
It was not entirely a question. He could see perfectly well what it was. The drawings were rough in the way that first drafts are rough, loose lines and gestural shading, and yet there was an undeniable confidence to them, an ease of hand that made the content all the more brazen.
It was the kind of thing one might find tucked inside the early pages of a hentai manga before the artist had fully committed to restraint.
And the figures were not anonymous. He recognized them with a clarity that made his eye twitch.
Screja. And the Demonnes.
"You know Kellen's yaicraft," Screja said pleasantly, clasping her hands behind her back. "We had her take a look, to find out what he was actually putting down on that paper." She tilted her head.
"Naughty, isn't he. And quite the painter."
"I can already hear your next words," Fredo said, in a tone entirely drained of affect.
"So." Screja did not even attempt to arrange her expression into something more appropriate. "Since he is clearly fantasizing about me, can I seduce him?"
The want in her voice was plainly worn and as shameless as sunlight.
Fredo closed his eyes briefly.
'If the guest desires something,' he thought, 'then it falls upon my responsibility to see that he is well received before the ritual. That is the duty of this village.'
He exhaled slowly through his nose.
"...We will discuss it."
What neither of them said, what neither of them knew, was that the drawings had never been a fantasy of a teenage boy.
Atiya had made them deliberately, to redirect attention and assumption in exactly the way it had.
He wanted to be free of the assumption he was a yai user and was just someone lost in his own fantasy. It was the first successful step.
What he had not calculated, could not have anticipated, was the edge that turned back toward him.
It was, as such things often are, a double-edged sword.
This time Atiya was escorted by a different woman.
How is every woman in this village so gorgeous. He walked half a step behind her, telling himself it was out of politeness. I cannot take my eyes off them.
'Zelaine would be shooting daggers at me if she saw this.'
He was there for work, ostensibly. The village's structural layout, the arrangement of its closed gardens, the way the roads and pathways fed into one another. He had requested access to the garden sections early that morning, citing research.
Kellen and the priest were in charge of taking care of the guests of village, so the request had been granted without much fuss by her.
And what he was experiencing was the particular torture of walking behind a woman dressed in robes that was somehow transparent to a certain extent revealing the texture of her body.
'In this cold,' he thought, his gaze dipping despite himself toward the generous display of her neckline, 'why are you wearing something so revealing.'
He dragged his eyes back up to the middle distance with some effort, heat creeping up the back of his neck. 'I am going to get a boner at this rate. It has been days.'
Kellen noticed the occasional glances. The way his eyes would drift down and then snap back up with the guilty speed of someone pretending they had not done exactly what they had just done.
She said nothing about it. She kept her expression forward and let him suffer quietly.
The silver-haired woman was named Kellen.
He had not known that when the papers were first handed to him, there were residues of yai in it.
And she was the one who had used yaicraft on them, though atiya did not know.
Kellen. A friend of Screja's, apparently, had volunteered herself for escort duty.
Atiya too was plotting things on his end.
'They saw the drawings,' he thought, keeping his expression pleasantly neutral as he walked. 'Good. That is exactly what they were for.'
Kellen, for her part, was conducting her own quiet assessment.
'He is short,' she observed, glancing at him sidelong. 'Not really my usual taste.'
She looked away again, watching the path ahead. 'But I have been looking at the same old faces in this village for years now. There is something new atleast. will he be even to handle me, let alone Screja'
"What happened, boy. There is still some distance left."
She had caught him standing still, his gaze fixed on something far ahead. She followed the direction of his stare, ready to prompt him along again, and then her eyes went wide.
The words died in her throat.
"Follow me, guest."
She grabbed his hand without another word and ran, pulling him hard in the opposite direction, her grip firm enough to leave no room for argument.
"Were those yai beasts?" Atiya asked, matching her pace, his voice controlled despite the sudden urgency. "Are they invading the village? What about the barrier?"
Kellen had no answer for that. The village barrier had stood as a warding structure deep enough in its foundations that no yai beast had ever passed through it. or could pass through it.
That was the protection barrier created by the demoness.
She did not know how they had crossed it. Someone must have tampered the barriers.
However there was something even more urgent.
What she knew was simpler and more immediate. Atiya could not be put in danger.
Not now. Not with twenty-four days still remaining before the ritual.
Behind them, far into the distance, spider-like yai beasts the size of alligators tore through the outer edge of the village, their long limbs crashing through fences and stalls with a sound like splitting wood, their movements frantic and purposeless in the way that made them more frightening, not less.