Chapter 455: Was It Really That Easy?
Laz stood up and saw the looks on everyone’s faces, confusing him.
"What?" Laz asked.
"What exactly is that stuff in your hands?" Sylvia finally got out after a minute.
"Well. It’s bug killer. I’ll be honest, I don’t really like using chemical killers because even though they talk about being safe for animals or safe for plants and such, the fact is that they will put that on anything that doesn’t outright kill animals or plants. I mean, sure, they aren’t dead. But that doesn’t mean there might not be a long term effects that we are unaware of, right?"
Laz knew there tree was important to them but at the same time, he figured that if they were that concerned about the bugs, then they should be ok with at least this much. Although he couldn’t promise no damage to the tree, he wanted to explain that he understood their problem.
But he didn’t, not at all.
"Do you... is there more of that wonderful miracle potion you used?" Ivana asked, clearly coming to terms with the fact that she had no idea what to think about this situation.
"Tons. I’m not a bug lover or hater but you’ve got to be prepared. There is still a lot left in here since it was a fresh can and I still have several more."
"SOO MUCH?" Ivana yelled, her voice braking with trying to restrain herself. Surely this must be a magical invention and the supply would be limited, but if Laz really had so much...
"Of course. There are several companies on earth that make almost the exact same thing. This one is name brand though since I find it usually works a bit better and faster."
Laz grabbed a few more of the blue bottles from him sack and handing them out.
"Just pop this cap off, and now this little tab. Good, now just point and spray, making sure to soak the area of the infestation. And don’t use too much. There is more, but not enough to douse the entire tree. There you go old man, way to be." Laz showed the elders and even some of the white dressed, silver masked women how to use the bug spray. With this, they quickly got to work on the spots on the tree.
Throughout the entire time, they were super careful to kill the patches of beetles with as little of the spray as possible while making sure that there wasn’t a single bug left. Then they would move on to the next patch. While Laz didn’t have an infinite supply, he did have quite a bit more still since stuff like this he would normally collect and just through into his spatial pouch.
One thing of note was that the amount of space inside of the pouch had expanded as Laz got stronger. While injecting spiritual sense into the pouch was the way needed to find and retrieve something, just injecting spiritual sense by itself seemed to make the inside of the pouch grow.
’Or maybe it’s because of my internal energy? Maybe it feeds off that?’
Laz had thought about this before, but never had an answer. He knew that Ruby and Malene had these types of bags themselves from the last time he had run into them, but they never mentioned anything about the size expanding. He hadn’t either, but that was because he failed to notice it at first.
Laz had hung back with Sylvia and Ivana along with members of their protection detail and a few of the elders while everyone else, including the more energetic of the elders, started clearing the tree of bugs one spot at a time.
Laz, Sylvia and Ivana were standing off to the side on their own.
"I don’t know what to say anymore about this," Ivana admitted. Her tone had changed, being one of honest relief seeing how smoothly everything was progressing.
"What? It’s just bug spray."
"I... it’s just..."
"Laz. Dear boy, you don’t understand. To us Fae, the mother tree is the source of our life and prosperity. As long as she is thriving, we are thriving. But if something were to happen to her and she were to suddenly die, then we as a people wouldn’t be able to survive either. Our longevity is also related to the mother tree. A long time ago, back when your world was still new, the king species of our people whose tree was massive enough to cover half the world and reached beyond the heavens ended up fighting in a war we couldn’t win. Out planet was a marvel of beauty, made up of dense forests full of the offspring of the world tree that covered half the planet. Deep and clean oceans covered a good portion of the planet as well, providing nourishment to the many mother trees that lived there. Then one day, an elder of the king race noticed that a star had died and gone black. Several months later, another went gone out. My people weren’t scared as such things happened over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. And while two going out seemed unlikely, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. The king species told the people that nothing was wrong and that was where the matter had ended. But unknown to the people was the far sighted oracle of the dark fae. She had been observing the sky for quite some time while never interacting with others, all because she had seen the first star go out. But it wasn’t the same one the elder of the king race had seen, this one was way further away than that. And then another. And another. Using some calculations, she had figured out a problem that no one else had. The stars that were going out... where getting closer and closer."
"My queen..." Ivana said, stopping Sylvia from speaking anymore now that the others were back. While the story was one from the distant past, it was still a secret record of the mistakes of their people from the past. If anything, it was a testament to Laz’s new place in their hearts thanks to him protecting their mother tree from something that had been bothering them for a while now that Ivana hadn’t stopped Sylvia from telling him up until this point.
"Gone. They are all gone my queen," reported the female elder as she had come back just as excited as when she left.
"Was it really that,,, easy?" Ivana questioned, her mind not allowing her to accept what was before her.
"Yeah. Up until recently, my people were unable to do even the most basic magic. As such, we had to develop different ways to deal with even the most mundane things, hence, Bug Spray."
"This truly is an invention worthy of praise. I couldn’t fathom why the queen would bring you here and ask for your help instead of just threatening to cut off your man parts and make you eat them if you didn’t agree. But perhaps now I see that there is reason to go with the gentle approach as well," Ivana said and while Laz couldn’t see it, he felt like she might be smiling under that mask.
"Cut off my man bits and make me eat them if I didn’t comply?" Laz said, turning to face the queen. Sylvia simply shrugged her shoulders, as though something like that were normal.
"Anyway. I am glad I got to keep my man bits," Laz started.
"Me too," Sylvia whispered so that only she and Laz heard her.
"But I think you all are forgetting something here."
"And what is that young one?" The female elder asked, her tone a bit more respectful towards Laz than before.
"You said that you had only ever read about these bugs, but had never seen them for yourselves, right? And on top of that, the ones that had been read about were much, much larger than the ones we saw today, correct?"
"Yes. That would be accurate," Ivana replied.
’So let’s assume the one’s your people had encountered in the past were the adult size while these are the adolescent size. So then my question is this. If this is a closed off realm which we think it is, where could these little adolescent Infernal Beetles come from? Obviously there isn’t an adult that wandered in here and laid eggs or something since I’m sure you would have noticed."
"No. You are correct in that it would be impossible for us not to notice. For the Infernal Beetles, there isn’t a meal better for them than a mother tree. If an adult were here, there would be no way to keep it from eating the mother tree. And since their shells are so hard and they themselves are next to impossible to kill, the about of damage it would cause could destroy have the city. And this was the reason we were so worried when you told of us these tiny beetles as there was never anything mentioned anywhere of what could be used to fight them. From the histories, it would take hundreds of warriors working in tandem just to bring down one adult. As for these tiny ones, how could we even begin to remove them if we couldn’t fight them?" Ivana said, shedding some light on a few grey areas.
"Alright then. So if they didn’t come from the outside, that could only mean that..."
Laz didn’t finish the statement. Nor did he have to. Just by the looks on the ones whose faces he could see, he knew what they were thinking.
’Some one, one of our own people... tried to kill the mother tree....’
