Expressionless members of the Demon Race worked with their heads down, forks and spades in hand, turning the soil back and forth with total concentration. Apart from Aura's orders, they were deaf to every other sound in the world.
"Lady Aura, teach me the Magic of Obedience!"
Little Übel grabbed hold of Aura, who was in the middle of directing the Demon Race in their farm work.
When Aura didn't react, she gave Aura's fluffy purple hair a tug for good measure.
"Hey. Are you an idiot? I knew it, most Humans are idiots."
Aura glanced sideways down at the brat who came up a head shorter than her, then swatted Übel's hand away.
"What a Human. Nothing in that head but yourself."
"Why not, Lady Aura?"
"Are we close?"
"Umm... not very close. But you're Grand-Master's companion, aren't you? So why can't you teach me magic?"
"So you're not just stupid, you're also good at being clever in all the wrong ways."
Aura pressed a hand to her chest and looked down at Übel, cold with an edge of menace, chin tilted slightly up. "Do you have any idea who I am?"
"Aura is Aura. Uh, the lord of the Kinton territory? An amazing Great Demon?"
"Wrong! In the old days your head would already be off your shoulders!"
Aura's haughty, frigid tone failed to frighten Übel in the slightest.
"So how amazing is Aura, then?"
"One of the Seven Sages of Destruction. A genius second only to the Demon King in all the history of the Demon Race... one of them, anyway. My army once swept across the Northern lands. The Humans I've killed would fill several territories!"
"That's so amazing, Lady Aura. So now we're close, right? Can you teach me the Magic of Obedience?"
Übel put on her best innocent face.
"You really are the type I hate."
"Then at least show it to me, Lady Aura. Your Magic of Obedience."
"You see impressive magic and you want to learn it. You badger people without ever asking their permission. You Human, your head really is stuffed full of nothing but yourself."
"?"
Behind a tree near the fields.
"Wow. What am I hearing? Lady Aura has a tongue like that?"
"She didn't used to, I think. It feels like her grudge against the world just keeps getting heavier."
The human and the demon watching from hiding murmured quietly to each other.
"Nanoda is simply too lenient. And that brat called Yuna, she was just as annoying as you once. It took a bit of education before she learned where she stood."
"..."
Behind a tree near the fields.
"Did Aura abuse you back then?"
"No. Not at all. After Lady Aura mocked me a few times, she went out of her way to avoid me from then on. I could tell Lady Aura doesn't like Humans, so I made a point of staying away from her too."
The human and the demon watching from hiding went right on watching how things developed.
"Magic is something of enormous importance. Many of the Demon Race spend their entire lives studying a single spell. So what's the difference between handing over the magic you researched your whole life and simply handing over your dignity? Besides, the Human system of magic and the Demon Race's are nothing alike. There's no possible way you could learn it."
"But I can only be sure of that once you've shown it to me, Lady Aura. And didn't I learn Lady Nanoda's magic anyway?"
"That one is an exception."
At that point Aura seemed to run entirely out of patience.
"You two hiding behind the tree. Would you kindly come out and do something about your dis-ci-ple?"
"Ah, we've been found out."
"Obviously. Aura's Mana Perception is excellent too. At this distance we were absolutely going to be spotted."
"Master! Grand-Master!"
"That's enough, Übel. If Lady Aura genuinely doesn't want to, then badgering her isn't nice."
Yuna stepped forward and patted Übel on the head.
"Ohh~"
Just as she'd thought: education has to start while they're still small.
Now that Übel was her disciple's disciple, Nanoda had no intention of letting her grow into the sort of girl who spent all day chasing some eye-obsessed boy around.
With that in mind, Nanoda added another round of moral instruction for Übel's benefit.
"The fundamentals matter most. You're still young, Übel, and studying magic that's too complicated will only hurt you. You need to understand that biting off more than you can chew gets you nowhere. And when you deal with other people, respect them first. Yanking Aura's hair like that was wrong. You also mustn't use magic carelessly to hurt others or to do harm."
"Okay."
This time Übel neither threw a fit nor argued back. She just nodded obediently.
"If you really feel hard done by, then by all means, come find me once you've grown and issue a ranking challenge for the position of Apostle. If you can defeat me, a Great Demon of more than five hundred years, then I'll teach the Magic of Obedience to you, a Human who'll live a hundred at best. How's that? I have at least that much magnanimity in me."
Aura was as arrogant as ever. Unless she was facing an opponent on the level of Nanoda, Qual, or Macht, nothing else was worth her notice, least of all a Human child who hadn't even finished growing.
"Sure! Then it's a promise." All at once the girl was brimming with energy and drive again.
"That's not really all right, is it... Aren't Apostles supposed to all be of the Demon Race?" Yuna, however, sounded worried. She knew how strong Lady Aura was. Even as she was now, if the distance between them opened up, she'd stand no chance at all.
"I don't see a problem. Humans and the Demon Race warred for ages, and in the end it was the Humans who won, wasn't it?"
Nanoda, in fact, was rather looking forward to it. Übel had grown up a self-taught Mage running wild, with no formal instruction in magic at all. Through stolen glances, stolen lessons, and her own understanding, backed by talent beyond imagining, she had reached the first-class threshold that even Serie acknowledged. Calling her a genius of an unorthodox kind was no exaggeration.
"All right, all of you clear out. Stop getting in the way of my work."
"Yes, yes," came three voices at once.
And right at that moment, a streak of red flashed across the sky.
"Lady Aura. Oh~ and Lady Nanoda happens to be here too."
Lugner descended from the air holding a rope made of congealed blood. Bound at the other end of it was a young guard in light armor.
"Lord Lugner, please believe me, I'm not having some kind of fit, it isn't a delusion, he's real! That guard with the whiskers really does exist. I, I was drinking with him just a few days ago!"
The guard shook his head wildly, his frantic eyes shot through with red veins.
"What's going on here?"
Nanoda swept the bound guard once with her Mana Perception, then studied him more closely.
Aside from a slightly elevated heartbeat, everything about him looked normal.
"It's like this. This guard finished drinking and then went around the streets looking for someone, claiming his drinking buddy had gone missing. The security patrol got reports from the residents and brought him to me. I was thinking of having Lady Aura use the Magic of Obedience to ask him whether this whole thing is just a prank of his."
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