Investigation days two and three. As with day one, we split the members into three teams and continued the investigation. Though I say that, this period of two days is just a warm-up for ascending the sacred mountain.
As we know, the sacred mountain has collected a lot of Mana in it. However, there are cases in which dense Mana ended up having an influence on the human body. The reaction seems to vary from just light dizziness to, at worst, diarrhea, vomiting, extreme headaches and difficulty in breathing.
These are said to be the symptoms of poisoning due to the inhalation of dense Mana, but seeing that there are individual differences between people and that if you slowly acclimate yourself to Mana, you'll just end up with lighter symptoms, it may be a lot more similar to altitude sickness rather that poisoning.
Since that happens in places dense in Mana, does it also happen in Dungeons like the『Abyssal Forest』? I wondered so, but it seems that since the Mana of a Dungeon is mostly used up for the Dungeon's growth and the production of Monsters, it doesn't have an effect on the body. But still, it seems that if someone does stay inside the Dungeon, then the symptoms would properly appear, so probably it's the so-called「There are no immediate side-effects」kind of thing.
On the second day, we just accustomed ourselves on the thinner areas, and there weren't any particular problems. So today on day three, we decided to try going to the slightly denser areas but……
「Lily, are you alright?」
「It looks like I have absolutely no problems with it. Bisan, what about you?」
「I'm fine, too. If I decide to live here, then it may be a quite difficult, but for a Mage, then it's not a problem.」
「Then the problem is……」
「Ugh…… Sorry…」
「Forgive me… For it to be this difficult……」
In the first place, it seems that nausea due to Mana doesn't happen too much to Mages. That's because the influence of Mana to the body is due Mana Overdose which causes the MP inside the body to be disturbed. Since, naturally, Mages are people who exercise Magecraft, they're used to controlling the Mana inside the body. If it's disturbance from just a bit of Mana, they can subconsciously regulate it to back to the usual.
It seems that to Dog-ear kins like Urania, or rather some of the beastkin too, would originally have no problems with this. It's because beastkin has their trump card, their ace in the deck. It's the Skill called【Beast Transformation】which by taking in the Mana outside the body and mixing it with the MP inside the body, allows the beastkin to ignore the laws of mass and enables them to transform.
However, Urania isn't able use that skill since she's is still immature. As for the MP inside the body, it seems that Urania has also trained to sense it in the past, but in the end she got frustrated from the failure.
As a result, Urania can't do anything against the Mana disturbing the flow off MP in her body and got down with the sickness.
As for Gray, he's a normal human that hasn't even gotten any training with Magecraft in his life. There are individual differences from people to people, but it seems that he magnificently got down with Mana Overdose.
Since both of their conditions are just light dizziness and headaches, there won't be any problems if we just immediately descend the mountain and have them take a rest, but at this rate we can't really do any investigation.
「Now what do we do with this?」
「Well in any case, their condition will just grow worse if we stay here. For now, let's descend.」
「Agreed. Urania, Gray, can you move?」
「Somehow……」
「Nn…I can sti…ll…」
「Whoops, don't push yourself.」
Gray seems to be able to get up by himself somehow, but Urania seems to be faltering even with just that. It looks like Urania's condition is quite bad.
On the brink of collapsing from trying to stand up, I hold Urania into my arms. Naturally it turns into the so called Princess carry, but after eating Urania's Life Essence and having a part of my physical ability as a Succubus released, just carrying one cute girl is no problem at all.
「Oho?」
「For now, let's descend. Urania, don't force yourself, okay?」
「Nn……」
As expected, Urania seems to be really embarrassed about it, and tried to resist a bit, but any resistance in her weakened state feels like practically next to nothing, so after replying to me she just buries her face on my shoulder and stays perfectly quiet. Well, before she buried her face on my shoulder I looked at her face and she didn't seem to hate it, so it's probably fine. Oh, and of course if it's the case where Urania can walk by herself and Gray can't, I'll just use "Levitation" on him and drag him. The end. Who the hell would Princess carry a grown man by choice?
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「Also two people down for you, huh.」
「For our team~ Kety's out too~」
「For us it's Jarvis and, for some reason, Arisa down.」
「Eh? Why!?」
「Like I'd even know! Ask her about it!」
Arisa… aren't you a Mage? At this time I still didn't know this, but it actually seems that even Mages get affected by Mana. It's strictly based on individual differences, so it seems that cases like Arisa's wherein a Mage collapses from Mana aren't totally zero.
As an example, in the past when the Twelve Sages went to investigate the sacred mountain it seems like one of them, the Sage of the Heavenly Bow got down with a heavy case of Mana Poisonig. According to him, 「Never again will I ever go near a Mana pool that's always on the brink of turning into a Dungeon! The Death Potion that Scorpion is a hundred times better!」 or so.
「In any case, really we don't have too many choices, huh.」
「Yeah. Luckily we still have seven people left that have high tolerance against Mana. As expected, splitting up would make me feel a bit uneasy, but it's not to the point that we can't investigate.」
「Agreed~ If we start an all-out investigation on the mountain, dispersing our team's strength would be stupid, right~」
And furthermore, we just guessed from the situation at the foot of the mountain that the cause of this may be at the top, but we might have missed something down at the bottom. I already used Magic on the sick ones, so the five of them should be able to move by tomorrow.
In this case, having the ones who can climb to investigate the mountain, while the ones with low Mana tolerance investigate the bottom of the mountain should be a good use of time.
Finally, in case something ever happens, it's quite problematic that everyone on the bottom team can't climb the mountain, so we decided to have Emy-san stay behind with them.
With this, we decided to investigate with the mountain-foot team consisted of six people with Urania, Jarvis, Gray and Kety-san as vanguards and Arisa and Emy-san as rear guards; while the mountain-top team consisted of also six people with Grim and Jessicsan as the vanguard and me, Lysha, Audrey-san and Bisan as the rear guard.
Leaving the mountain-foot team out, with the number of rear guards the mountain-top team feels a bit unbalanced, but since Audrey-san is practically a middle guard uses both the sword and Magecraft, I'm not too worried about that.
If you ask me, I'm frankly more concerned that once we start climbing up we can't descend for about three days. Can I bear three days without Urania? I'm a bit worried….
Heya! Lol, Lily literally and figuratively can’t live without Urania anymore.
Well, as you can see, I’ve tried the color thing for now. The color’s are mostly to differentiate the groups, since they mostly act on groups/factions so far. I’ll be saying which group is which, so don’t worry. I can also put the names of the speaker, but that’s a bit tasteless and there some times where I can’t really differentiate some, so that’s that. Feel free to comment on how you feel about it.
In other news, I think I’ll be adopting the Mon, Wed, Fri schedule starting next week, since it’s become quite comfortable for me. I don’t know if I can keep it up when school is back, but I’ll make sure to announce it.
Anyways, happy weekends and see you next week!
P.S. If you ever missed it
Little Fairies: Lily, Urania
Grim March: Grimhart, Gray, Lysha, Arisa, Jarvis
Invuerno Fyneh: Audrey, Bia, Emy, Jessica, Kety