Chapter 1679: Chubby Maid
Rosie slid off the Bloomguard’s lap mid-braid.
"Princess, where are you going?"
The archer’s fingers hung in the air with three strands still pinched between them, and by the time the confused words left her lips, the dryad girl was already twenty paces away with her bare feet cutting through the grass toward the western edge of the stronghold.
The young lady never jumped out of any woman’s lap who was in the middle of pampering her.
Never.
’What is going on...?’ she wondered, but the question stayed inside, because of the far too serious look Rosie wore.
Her destination sat behind three layers of illusion, and most people never found the first.
Rosie’s roots sank into the earth beneath the first step, thin as spider silk, and mapped the truth the illusions were built to hide.
Where the magic said the wall was solid, the ground said it was empty air with the real door six steps to the left.
The girl walked through all three layers without slowing, bare feet light on the real earth while phantom walls passed through her like mist, and the face she wore while dismantling the strongest layered defenses in the stronghold was the same serene focus she wore when arranging flowers in her hair.
Celeste was waiting on the other side.
Yoruha’s personal maid stood in the dim interior of the den with her eight blonde tails fanned behind her in a neat arrangement, golden hair pinned beneath her headdress, every line of her pressed uniform immaculate.
The eight-tailed foxkin’s role ranged from attendant to handler to the only creature alive willing to manage the ancient fox, depending on the day and the severity of the antics.
When Rosie stepped through the final barrier, Celeste folded at the waist in a bow toward the dryad girl, smooth and graceful. "Welcome, Young Lady."
Rosie gave Celeste a salute. Crisp, solemn, borderline military.
Celeste’s right eyebrow climbed. The young lady she knew would have launched herself at her tails by now, or demanded a piggyback ride, or asked whether Yoruha could be convinced to play house again. This girl hadn’t smiled since she walked in.
"Is there something I can help you with, Young Lady?"
Rosie didn’t answer. Her amber eyes had found the shape at the back of the den, and they stayed.
Yoruha lay curled in her true form, a colossal kitsune of midnight-black fur that stood three meters tall at the shoulder when upright, now folded into a loose ball with all nine tails fanned around her like a dark corona.
Rosie walked forward, and thin green vines began sprouting from her fingertips.
They moved with precision, winding through the air in tendrils that reached for the tails and closed around them one by one, first through ninth, pulling them together into a single bundle that the dryad girl wound around her small forearm with the businesslike efficiency of a sailor coiling rope. "Hmm..." Yoruha murmured in her sleep and shifted an ear. The tails twitched once against the vine grip, then stilled.
Celeste could only take so much. She stepped forward, intent to stop whatever she was up to.
"Young Lady, I must ask you to-"
"No."
A hundred vines erupted from the stone floor around Celeste’s feet and lashed upward, pinning her arms, her eight tails, her ankles, binding the foxkin maid to the spot with a speed and violence that belonged on a battlefield.
"What?!"
The girl standing in front of her looked nothing like the child she’d played house with. The stare that met Celeste’s from behind the bundle of nine tails wound around her arm was clear and calm and far too composed for the face it sat in.
Rosie planted her feet.
Her small body coiled backward with the weight of the ancient fox, legs braced, core wound, and the vines around Yoruha’s tails went taut as the dryad girl loaded a throw that defied the physics of a child holding a creature fifty times her size.
"STOP SLEEPING AND DO SOMETHING, YOU DAMNED HAG!"
Rosie’s body uncoiled, and the colossal kitsune left the ground in a graceless arc of black fur and tangled tails. A [Warp Gate] split the air in front of the fox’s trajectory at the exact moment she reached the apex, and the continent’s oldest living legend disappeared through it in a blur of black.
...
"...Huh?"
The sound left Yoruha’s mouth on the other side of the portal, still thick with sleep and carrying the confusion of a creature that had gone from a warm den to open sky in under a second. Her luminous gaze cracked open.
*BANG!*
A dwarven warhammer hit her in the side of the skull.
The dwarf responsible had been aiming at a target behind the tear and found a three-meter-tall fox materializing in his backswing. His form was good. His follow-through was excellent. The connection was solid.
Yoruha’s head moved roughly two inches to the right.
Her lids opened the rest of the way to reveal violet irises carrying the full weight of millions of years behind them. Yoruha rose on all fours, and the ground beneath her cracked under the weight she’d been hiding while curled.
Her tails bristled, every strand of midnight fur standing on end until each tail looked twice its size, and the aura that poured off her hit the slope like a change in atmospheric pressure.
Soldiers stumbled. Dwarven shields dipped. Elven archers lost their draw.
Then Yoruha’s head snapped down.
Her jaws found the dwarf who’d hit her with surgical precision, teeth sinking into the weak seam between his gorget and helmet, and the bite that followed was not elegant.
It was an animal killing something smaller than itself because it could. Her head wrenched sideways, the neck came apart, and the helmeted head left the body in her jaws before she spat it into the ranks behind him with enough force to bowl the front man off his feet.
"...Where am I?" she mused, blinking blood from her muzzle.
The [Warp Gate] pulsed behind her, and Celeste stepped through with her uniform crumpled, her golden hair escaping its pins in three places, and vine marks still imprinted on her arms where Rosie had held her down.
"I’m terribly sorry, my lady..." The foxkin’s composure was in ruins, and the tight-lipped professionalism she delivered the words with only made the state of her clothes more tragic. "I couldn’t stop her."
Yoruha’s gaze swept the battlefield. Dwarven heavy infantry in blacksteel. Elven archers in disciplined volleys. Undead surging from a dimensional tear.
The Primordial Villain’s women fighting across every front with their skin blazing, and the man himself in the sky with a mutated dwarf king’s fingers crushing his leg.
"Oh..."
Her tails fanned behind her, and a slow, cruel grin sprawled across her face.
"This continent is finally getting fun..."
The tails moved.
Nine independent illusions erupted across the battlefield in the same heartbeat. The dwarven shield wall dissolved into chaos as every third soldier saw his comrade turn hostile and swung at the man beside him.
Elven arrows chased phantoms that bled when struck and reformed behind the archers, undead battalions charged empty air, and the real defensive line regrouped twenty meters south.
The ancient fox sat in the middle of the carnage with her lids at half-mast, each tail pointed at a different sector of the battle, conducting nine private wars at once.
She yawned again.
"Celeste, I believe it’s time for us to exercise a bit. You’ve been getting concerningly chubby, I might have to get you new clothes at this rate. You laze around too much."
A vein surfaced on Celeste’s forehead and throbbed with the righteous fury of a woman who had spent the last several minutes pinned to a floor by a child’s vines while her mistress, the single laziest creature on the continent, accused her of sloth.
Her eight tails snapped taut behind her in utmost feminine fury, but her posture shifted from maid to fighter, and her golden eyes went flat.
"Yes, my lady. I’ll go on a diet."
She stepped into the carnage without looking back, and the battlefield learned very quickly that the eight-tailed foxkin was a lot more than just pretty decoration.
Then Yoruha’s luminous gaze found the dimensional tear, and the arrow volleys still pouring through it in disciplined waves.
"Celeste. We’re going through."
Celeste’s lips parted to protest, but Yoruha was already moving.
Yoruha launched skyward, fur catching the light as she broke into a loping stride across open air. Warriors below the tear tracked her ascent and archers redirected mid-draw, three volleys climbing after her in tight formation.
"[Phantom Court]."
