"I will talk! Just... Just don't hurt him!"
Those words were like honey to my ears.
"It's nice to be dealing with someone sensible," I replied as I turned back around and took a step closer to the girl.
I then reached out and brought one of my fingers to her chin, gently raising it up, as it forced the girl to look straight in my face.
"So you are going to tell me everything I want to know? Even if that might mean bringing doom to all your friends back at the camp?"
In theory, probing this poor girl like that was counterproductive. For what reason I could be trying to explain the consequences of fessing up to someone I was about to interrogate?
For one reason and one reason only.
Because I needed to figure out whether what she would tell me had anything to do with the truth. And judging her reaction to my probing was my only, relatively easy way of figuring it out.
After all, if both this girl and the man who tried to help her just came up with complete bullshit... No, even if one of them spoke the actual truth, that would still be less than sufficient.
'We should've grabbed more people,' I thought, looking back at the raid with a small sense of dissatisfaction.
The more people we grabbed, the easier it would be to figure out the actual truth. But at the same time, with every captured person, the risk of being slow enough for humans to catch up to us grew...
In the end, unless I managed to figure this girl out all on my own...
'Wait, why am I trying so hard to figure a clever way out?' I asked myself, baffled by the massive oversight on my end.
"I guess I was right," I muttered under my nose while rolling my eyes.
This time, however, I didn't even get to make a step. The girl spoke out when I only started to turn on the spot.
"Wait!" she called out, hints of perplexed desperation appearing in her voice as she glanced in the direction the celestials dragged her colleague. "It's not something I should know but I think..." The girl bit her lips... before blushing and averting her eyes, as if unable to bear anyone looking at her. "I think it's the imperial order to find Herald Weaver flower."
To the side, Leinei uttered a long, exasperated sigh.
She then stepped forward and swung her wrist in a circle, only to produce a relatively small yet extremely vibrant, yellow flower.
"Is this the flower you have in mind?" Leinei asked, ignoring the angry looks of all the celestials and divines around.
'I guess she doesn't really have the right to speak between all those guys,' I thought, taking a quick glance around.
As little as I cared for it now, the dynamics between celestials and divines... or even between each specific celestial and divine was something that I had to understand soon... But thankfully, not just yet.
For as long as the problem of human invasion remained on the agenda, I could limit myself to just gathering information about the political situation of the forest. And hopefully, I wouldn't have to use what I've learned anytime soon, for it would inevitably mean stepping into the realm of politics.
And quite honestly, I didn't feel ready to become a member of the most commonly hated class of people.
"T-this..." the girl opened her eyes wide, staring at the golden-colored flower growing out directly from Leinei's finger. Then, the girl moved her eyes up, at Leinei's beautiful face. Only after a closer stare, did she finally start to realize what I had known for quite a while already.
Leinei's face only appeared beautiful. How could a human consider a face to be beautiful, if it was fully made out of wood, wine, and plants?
"A-are y-you a d-dryad?" the poor girl's voice started to tremble as if this realization was even graver than the sight of the flower entire armies would be sent to fetch.
"Yes, I am," Leinei sighed, ignoring the hostile stares of the divines and celestials. "And I can tell you already, this flower won't help. If my guess is correct, what you need is a Crowned Herald Weaver," she announced and shook her head. "And that flower went extinct seven hundred years ago, with the death of the last god."