Chapter 811 – Elemental Troubles 5 – Light and Dark

Chapter 811 – Elemental Troubles 5 – Light and Dark

There were many things John Newman did not know, and some of them, he genuinely felt bad about. Failing to look at the Mother of Water’s actions from more than one angle? Naïve, but understandable, given her actions. How he would allocate the budget for the next quarter? Not a pressing issue, but he should know about it. What to do with demons? Still not something he was sure about and still something that genocide was the potential answer to, as horrible as that sounded.

Not knowing that the asteroid-sized, golden-scaled, rip-and-tearing, grown-up crocodile-dragon he called his light spirit was actually a renowned advice giver?

That just showed that he didn’t show enough interest in the private life of his male friends and family.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Stirwin hadn’t spent the millennia previous to the contract with the Gamer just sitting around inside his seal. There had been a lot of time to think and a lot of time to talk to several elementals that came to visit him. First out of curiosity, then out of awe, they had sought him out. With time, Stirwin had turned into some renowned guru.

While waiting for the elemental girls to gather a few trustworthy individuals (and for Siena to become released from whatever her mother was doing), John followed the advice-giving. Most of it was the basic kind one expected. A little motivational talk here, a bit of listening and encouragement there, nothing too out of the usual.

At other times, Stirwin absolutely ripped people a new one.

“Celestial Devourer, I just don’t know who my heart belongs to. I love both of them and I don’t know I can live without either, so I can’t figure out what to do,” a very suave looking elemental, basically a gentleman of a dark complexion with a suit of gold, confessed. “What do you say, who should I stay with? How should I break the news to them that I’ve greater interest in the other girl?”

“Do I understand correctly that you informed neither of them of the relationship you had with the other?” Stirwin’s growl was accompanied by him rising to his feet. As suave as the gentlemanly elemental may have looked, it was only normal to be intimidated when four-metres of crocodile dragon suddenly shoved their maw into your face. The answer was delayed, as the advice-seeking male audibly gulped. “ANSWER!” Stirwin demanded, his deep voice reverberating in the air.

“Y-yes, Celestial Devourer!” the gentleman answered.

Raising his left front leg, Stirwin warningly placed a claw on the smaller elemental’s chest. “Listen closely. You deserve neither of them. What you will do is: you will gather both, get on your knees, confess what you did, and if they forgive you for what you did, then you can think about the future of your relationship. You have built it on the lie of being true to one of them. Even if you intend to become monogamous now, you have rot inside your foundation. You will own up to your mistake and not repeat it in the future. Do you understand?!”

“Y-yes.”

“Good lad,” Stirwin backed off, his tone switching from threatening to benevolent, “return here once the affair is done. I will gladly help you out further, no matter what may happen to you.”

“Thank you, Celestial Devourer!” The gentleman disappeared into a trail of light, returning to his home plane.

There was a momentary lull in the people running up to Stirwin, as the crocodile laid back down. People seemed to gather their courage, before running the risk of getting similarly curtailed in their excesses. In that pause, a certain cat tapped his way up to the magical reptile. “Look at you, being useful for a change,” Copernicus remarked.

Just like he had quickly figured out what the small elementals wanted him to do, John knew where they were heading after just a few minutes of walking. A ridge of mountains, darker and with more pronounced spires than those found on the rest of the Guild Hall, was clearly visible against the intense light from the temple to the north.

The mountain was filled with caves, but they ignored all of them but one. A particularly large entrance led into a tunnel so slanted one had to be careful not to fall and slide down over a dozen metres under the surface. The deeper they went into that cave, the more the darkness and silence changed. They went from being the ambience of the environment to being that which dominated the space.

“That’s weird,” Rave mumbled, looking at the sphere in her hand. It gave barely enough light to show the outlines of dripstones on the ceiling and floor around them. “I ain’t spending less mana on keeping this up, yet it keeps getting dimmer.”

“That’s expected, really,” John said and narrowed his eyes at the ceiling. Somewhere around here, the elemental essence had to be located. “You can feel the Mother of Shadow being around, right?” He stopped when he finally caught the movement of droplets flying from the spikes on the floor upwards into a pool under the cave’s ceiling.

“I gueeeeeee-“ Rave started and her word stretched out, causing John to turn around to check what she was startled by. Just barely, he caught a grey-skinned hand reaching out. Sharp, dark red nails tipped slender fingers, which closed around the sphere of light and extinguished it with the effort John would have expended to kill a fly.

For a moment, the darkness was absolute. Then, as if it was moved several layers down in a photo manipulation program, it took to the background and revealed a female shape.

The grey arm belonged to a body of the same colour. The person’s curves were slender, her chest almost petite and hidden by a dress of dark, flowing mist. When she took several steps, her smooth, long legs cut through the long skirt as if it was a tender waterfall. Gracefully, she almost seemed to hover through the absolute darkness they now found themselves in.

She was beautiful beyond even a poet’s description. Her eyes were of a greyish blue, a surprisingly normal colour, and had an exotic almond shape. Her mouth was a luscious display of sultriness, curved into a flirting smile, revealing a hint of teeth and the sharp canines. Her nose was an oddly cute button, partly hidden by a strand of white hair that ran across her face. It and all the other strands of her hair were so long that John couldn’t see the end of them. They faded into the darkness, became one with it. Some laid and dragged over the floor, others hung as if attached to something else in the darkness.

The woman moved up to John, put her arms around his neck, and stretched up. She did all of this with such fluidity that nobody even had the opportunity to do anything if they wanted to. Stretching past his lips, she reached his ear and whispered, “Fade.”

The sound etched itself into his mind, heart and soul. It wasn’t a word, it was power vocalized, a meaning made clear through all languages and understandable even in the absence of any. Under normal circumstances, John would have thought it an incantation, but the window that appeared persuaded him otherwise.



It was her name. The name of the Mother of Shadow wasn’t just an assortment of syllables that she was called with. Her name was the very concept of something fading, vanishing into nothing. Her name had power beyond anyone else.

The oldest elemental slowly backed away. “Keep taking good care of my adorable daughter.” In person, her voice was the opposite of the presence of her mind. It was nothing but velvet and kisses on his ears. “Disappoint me, and I will see you ruined.”

With those words, she faded. The darkness around them lost its completeness and the silence transformed into a quiet. The tiny sounds of drops of shadow essence uniting with the upside down pond was all that could be heard for a moment. Then there was a long, frustrated sigh.



“Mother is such an annoyance,” Siena announced her presence.