Chapter Two

-][-

Louise could not believe her eyes.

As she had casted her spell, there was no immediately visible response. No explosion, not even a puff of smoke of a failed spell. A few seconds went by, and then half a minute, before the jeers from her classmates started again. Professor Colbert barked out an order for them to stop, and then… what came after was a haze, her mind was still trying to cope with the unfamiliar feeling of a sustained spell that did not blow up on her for the first time before everything went insane. That was the only way Louise could have justified what had happened.

A bright light appeared out of nowhere, blinding them for a moment, and the ground they stood on felt like it was in flux despite their legs not falling over in this movement. Accompanying this was a series of horrific screeches of some sort. If someone had told Louise demons were ripping open a gate from Hell into Halkeginia and declared an invasion with their war cries, she would probably had believed them with all that terrible noise.

Then, it had finally all ended. Disoriented and floored by the time her ears could not take it anymore, Louise dragged herself back up into a standing position with a groan. Others in the clearing with her made similar effort to do so as well, albeit with a lot more words unsuitable for a noble being cursed out in their process from the group of her classmates. The various familiars assembled were also in varying states of distress, with the blue-haired girl – the Gallian named Tabitha – her dragon looked as if it was going to retch all over that Germanian hussy.

Whether the poor beast did so or not was beyond Louise's knowledge as she caught sight of what appeared to be a giant tree off in the distance. It was larger than any other trees she had seen or ever heard about, putting even the tree airship port over in La Rochelle to shame from the sheer size. The trunk alone must have been larger than an entire town's size in width, and the large branches up high could probably hollowed out into hulls of an airship.

"Did I… summon that?" Louise said hoarsely, unable to fully give voice to her hope that she was indeed the one responsible – that she had summoned something instead of being a failure.

"The Zero, summon that?" Montmorency, one of her classmates, remarked scornfully. The other students have finally got their bearings and most of them gaped at the appearance of the new landmark in the distance. The Zerbst woman however was communing quietly with the petite Gallian, and didn't pay much attention to Montmorency's comments. "Right, as if the failure could have done anything this impressive."

Louise felt her face flush in anger, and was about to reply with a scathing remark before Professor Colbert interrupted. "Enough," he warned them as he took stock of the situation. "I understand you all are a bit stressed by what had just happened, but as nobles you all should keep in mind to be courteous at all times. Now, we will head over to the main hall and see what the headmaster has to say about this unexpected event, and I will not tolerate any more improper behaviour. Does everyone understand me?"

Everyone, including Louise, was a bit taken aback by Professor Colbert's demeanour. They knew he could be a bit stern at times, and mostly he acted like a bumbling professor, but acting like an authoritative person and taking charge was not something they were familiar with coming from him. Nonetheless, under his gaze they followed him quietly, unwilling to push the issue right now against a member of the faculty.

-][-

Kirito, formerly the 'Black Swordsman' of Aincrad and now a Spriggan player of Alfheim Online, gave a grunt as he came back to his senses. The last thing he remembered was feeling like his entire body was being torn apart, pain that shouldn't be present in a VR game, and then split into small pieces during his raid on the World Tree…

With a shock, he opened his eyes suddenly and went for his sword that somehow went from being in his hand back into its strap behind him. After a moment of hyperventilating and checking that yes, he was still in one piece and has all his limbs and clothes on him, he turned to gaze at his surroundings.

He was back at the entrance into the World Tree for starting the Grand Quest, and around him in the clearing were the fifty Slyph warriors and the ten Cait Sith Dragoons that had come out of nowhere to support him. Sakuya and Alicia Rue to one side was wincing as they shook themselves awake from what's probably a similar experience to his own before that blackout, and Leafa was lying prone next to him who looked like she's finally regaining consciousness as well.

"You're alright there, Leafa?" Kirito asked as other players seemed to be recovering from their ordeal. With a few blinks, Leafa stared at Kirito sleepily before her eyes widened and she tried to get up.

"Onii-chan, you…!" Leafa exclaimed, her loud voice making some other waking players nearby wince. "Are you alright? The last thing I remember was you being mobbed by the Guardian Knights despite mowing them down with our two swords-"

"Breathe, Lea-, no Suguha, breathe," Kirito grabbed onto his younger sister as she looked like she was going to fall back down from her sudden movement, holding her upright. "I'm fine, really. Though I admit I can't quite remember the exact moments before… whatever that was. Did ALO crash or something?"

"I've never been on ALO when a crash happened," Leafa admitted and steadied herself, "but I don't think a crash would be this bad."

"It's not a system crash," Alicia said as she walked towards the siblings. Both Alicia and Sakuya was among the first to recover, and being the current raid leaders they went around and checked if everyone was alright. "At least, it's not like the last time I was online when an update happened and crashed the servers. A lot less painful that time, and it just forced me to log off of ALO."

"That was back when Jotunheim was released, wasn't it?" Sakuya asked her Cait Sith counterpart. "Still, if it was a sudden update or a crash then why are we still logged in right now? Maybe we should call tech support…"

"We already tried, Sakuya-sama," one of the Slyphs from behind her called out to Sakuya as he tried to open the menu with his left hand. "We can't even get our inventory to open, let alone accessing the 'Call GM' function. Whatever just happened, it messed up the game system badly."

"No menu…?" Kirito repeated the Sylph swordsman's gesture to open the menu, with no results. The three females with him attempted to do the same, with just as much success as he had. "No way, it can't be…"

"Kirito-kun…?" Sakuya asked the Spriggan youth in front of her, who looked like he was horrified about something. "Is something wrong?"

"Don't worry Papa, it's not a repeat of what happened in SAO," Yui finally popped out of his coat pocket and tried to calm him down. "The Cardinal program running ALO is inactive right now, and if this was a repeat of what happened back in Aincrad it would probably be fully operational to cope with all the player data."

"Yui?" Leafa inquired at the navigation pixie, even as her face showed similar relief as Kirito's when she saw the tiny girl was alright. Kirito doesn't blame her in asking, he never did get around to explaining who Yui was to his sister.

"We – both myself and Yui here – are SAO survivors," Kirito explained to Alicia and Sakuya's unspoken question, both of the faction leaders were looking at them with raised eyebrows. "She's an AI that I adopted from back in Aincrad, and used to be part of the Cardinal program – the one that's like the self-correcting feature of the game, among other things like writing up quests."

"Papa saved me from being deleted when the main program decided that I had over-stepped my bounds as the locked-down mental health program," Yui added. "I was copied from SAO into his NervGear, and carried over to ALO as a navigation pixie."

"An AI? Truly?" Sakuya said in wonder. "I know we have life-like robot exteriors in real life by now, but an actual AI this advanced?"

"More importantly, it means Yui-chan here is an expert when it comes to these things," Alicia remarked thoughtfully. Both of the faction leaders present were willing to take Kirito's words at face value, despite some of the other Sylph players being doubtful of Kirito's claim. "So you're saying this has become something like what happened so SAO?"

"No," Yui replied, easing the air around them as the ALO players had involuntarily tensed up at hearing the name of that death game. "There are several key differences. The first of them is that the Cardinal program is down – at least I can no longer feel its presence – which should not be possible. Next, I cannot access many of the data that I had access to, even only as a navigation pixie. It could just be that I am locked completely out of the system, but that doesn't seem to be the case."

"Really? What makes you say that?" One of the other Sylph players from nearby asked. With both the faction leaders focused on Kirito and Leafa, it was no wonder the other players started to gather around them. He, and many others, looked like they were on the verge of panicking at the thought of being stuck in the game, while another group looked to be in denial that this was really happening. Thankfully, most of the players here was only trying to process the entire thing, and wasn't likely to cause trouble in the immediate future.

"The level of detail available to me right now is unlike anything I have felt before," Yui told them. "The ALO game engine is based from an older version of the SAO one, and even the one back in Aincrad it can't simulate the smell of the ground we're standing on to this extent, or the feel of the wind on our skin. The level of feedback to our senses just seems too detailed to be in a VR game."

"Speaking of which… mind if I try something?" Kirito unsheathed his large sword from his back, causing everyone else to tense and step back. Kirito ignored their reactions, and walked over to the huge gates that led to the Grand Quest. With all his strength, Kirito swung the blade against the door in a wide arc. Sparks flew from the gate, and Kirito's strike left a gash on the gate's surface.

"… That did not just happen," Alicia summed up the thought that went through the minds of everyone present with a small voice and widened eyes. The Cait Sith leader's ears were standing right up in her surprise, giving a nervous twitch now and then. "Shouldn't there be Immortal Object codes for buildings?"

"If we're still in a game, then yeah," Kirito replied as he walked back to the group. "I'm hoping I'm just hallucinating about what just happened too."

"Wait, so you're suggesting we're now actually faeries and this is all real?" Another Sylph player scoffed, trying to show bravado in the current situation. "Someone pinch me, I must just be dreaming this- OW!"

One of his comrades pinched his face like he asked to, while another gave him a punch to the arm experimentally. The one that initiated the punch was the one in pain however, shaking his hand after trying to make his punch's impact felt through 'Ancient Warrior' equipment.

"As you can see, there's quite a few things not quite like being in a VR game, such as the pain-absorb function," Yui commented at the spectacle. "I won't go as far as suggesting this is now all real, but this is something that didn't happen even in SAO."

"We can argue about all this later," Sakuya finally decided. "Right now though I think it might be best if we check up on the rest of Arrun and the players here. If the pain absorb function isn't working, we need to notify everyone before someone does something foolish like trying to log out via death. That can easily start a mass panic here."

"Sakuya-sama, I doubt people would be willing to try something like that in this situation, not after SAO," the first Sylph player who had commented earlier said dryly, but did not disagree with Sakuya's decision. The rest of the players here seemed to agree as well.

"Alright. Richard, take a squad and go check up on Sylvain while we deal with things here. Kotarou, you take some others and can go contact the Cait Siths instead. The Dragoons aren't exactly fast fliers."

"Not to mention we're not completely confident we can keep our dragons under control without the tamers on hand," Alicia said apologetically. "The dragons aren't one of the harder to tame mobs for nothing. So I can't just send some of my guys instead."

"That's alright. We have an alliance right now anyway, so hopefully the ones back in Freelia would understand." Sakuya said as she activated her wings.

"Are you sure we should be flying? What if there are more bugs in the system?" Leafa asked with a tinge of worry. She was loath to bring up this possibility, considering she loved flying herself, but she didn't want to drop out of the sky in mid-flight either.

"From what Yui-chan has been saying, I think the issue here is a bit deeper than just some bugs," Sakuya replied as she tested hovering just off the ground. "Besides, while these sandals are fashionable I don't think they're suitable for walking everywhere in, especially when things seem to be a lot more 'real' right now. I for one am not keen to experience blisters even in ALO."

And with that half-joking remark, Sakuya flew off with the others following.

-][-

Titania opened her eyes.

Instead of the throne room she was expected to be spawned in, she was instead laid atop of a four-poster bed in some kind of a golden bird cage, placed on the edge of the World Tree. The furniture in this bedroom were luxurious, but did nothing to hide this place was meant for a prisoner. The clothing on herself was not much better either, being a white dress with a blood-red tie at the front. While the quality of the material was undoubtedly high, the lack of shoes and the almost fetish-like design of the dress made it clear the wearer existed only at the mercy of whoever had set this place up. Titania concluded whoever was responsible for this had very bad taste – it was probably the fault of the GM that hijacked the Fairy King Oberon account.

Titania got up off of the bed, and went to the door of her current cage. The only way to open this was with system authority, without locks and such apparently on the gate. She tried to access the system to open this door, but it did not respond to her – it seemed not just Cardinal, but the commanding system of ALO itself seemed to be offline somehow. She could not directly change the data mentally, and trying to bring up a menu to fix the door in an old fashioned way also ended up as a futile effort. After a few rattles on the gate to try and break through by force also resulted in no success, Titania opted to try and blast the gate away with a beam of light instead. To her surprise, the spell she threw mostly out of just trying random options succeeded in destroying the bars, resulting in making a hole she can fit through. Titania had not expected that to have happened, as even as the Fairy Queen and one of the few Alfs, the Faeries of Light, in the game her spell should not have been able to destroyImmortal Objects.

Now that the gate had fallen to pieces onto the ground with a loud clang, Titania stepped through the door and onto the path outside. An experimental tug with her wings showed it was for some reason locked, yet she was able to bypass that limitation and delete the lock. She might not be able to access the system, but it appeared she can fix anything that is wrong about her current avatar's coding. Within seconds she was in flight, and she followed the footpaths and entered the World Tree.

Once inside, Titania blinked in surprise at the décor the GMs have chosen for the place. The walls and floor were only plain white, giving the place a sterile feel instead of anything that would fit the residence of Alfs and rulers. She had known, from the information Cardinal had prepared for her, the developers hadn't got around to creating the Capital of the Alfs for one reason or another, but she had thought they would make the place look better than some random laboratory. The style here looked to belong more in some other science fiction story or game than in ALO. Shaking her head, Titania looked at the map on the wall – why was there one physically when the GMs can just open a menu window for it normally, she thought, but ignored the sentiment as this ended up helping her – and decided to make her way to one of the closest available administrator access terminals. Surely not everything in this game had been broken, and how was she going to fix this current mess if she didn't even have the right tools?

Muffled sounds of what appeared to be melee combat reached her ears as she came closer to her destination. Now what? Titania thought, as she readied a medium attack spell, Small Comet, with one hand and opened the door with her other. With how things have been acting up, it did not hurt to be prepared. Did some kind of prototype mob went berserk or something?

The sight that greeted her was not what she expected, even with the vast amount of knowledge available to her. There were several hundred people in the large room, most of them huddled at the back. Closer to her were some warriors in melee with what appeared to be some giant slugs with multiple tentacles that did not match any of the ALO mobs in her database. Titania thought it was strange for the people here to be using melee attacks when the game was designed more with flight and magic combat in mind, but what had caught her attention more was that all the humanoids here are Alfs according to her senses. That should not have been possible – as far as she knew the Alfs are a player race not yet completed despite the game being released to public for a long time.

For a moment she had thought the ones here are all GMs, but then discarded the idea. It seemed unlikely for ALO to have – after a quick count – three hundred GMs, or for them to all be logged in at once. Upon another look, with kids that seemed no older than 13 years among the three hundred the GM option seemed more unlikely to be the case. Then there was the fact none of the equipment the people here are using was familiar to her; the various clothing, armour and weapons are different from the style of the faeries the developers designed. That made the idea of these people being some beta players testing out some new features of the game also unlikely…

"Asuna-sama?" One of the players closest to her said in surprise. He was wearing armour coloured in white with red markings, a colour tone similar to her current dress, and wielded a two-handed sword. It appeared in the time she had stood there thinking about the possibilities the combat had already stopped, with the slugs defeated and laid dead with slime oozing out of their corpse. With that man's surprised speech many of the other players here looked towards her, and their expressions seemed to light up in recognition.

"It really is her!"
"Asuna 'the Flash'!"
"She's here as well?"
"How's she doing that light trick?"

Titania ignored such murmurings of the other players, and extinguished her attack spell – it appeared she did not need to have prepared one after all. She then walked up to the man that noticed her first, and asked:

"My name is Titania, the Fairy Queen of Alfheim Online, and the acting GM program with Cardinal currently indisposed. Who are you people, and how did you manage to log in with those accounts?"

"… huh?" Whatever the man was expecting to hear from her, that obviously was not it. "You mean… you're not Asuna-sama? But you look so much like her…"

"I have no idea who this 'Asuna' is," Titania spoke, cutting him off. "In case you did not hear me previously, I said my name is Titania. Now, some answers, please?"

And so the man in front of her – he called himself Arguile – spoke. He said he, and the rest of the three hundred players present, were from another VRMMO called Sword Art Online, or SAO. That game was supposedly to have been cleared after being turned into a death-trap, and the remaining 6,000 players left were to be released from the virtual world. But after the system announcement, the three hundred players here had somehow instead of waking up on a hospital bed they found themselves here in ALO. Nishida, a player who looked like an old man, had come forward to see if she was this 'Asuna' or not, and ended up adding a few extra bits of information to try and help.

It was actually thanks to the old man that Titania got as much information as she did. Arguile kept trying to bring up irrelevant points like he was the lieutenant of the second squad of the guild called the 'Knights of Blood', and of a man named Heathcliff – or rather, his real name being Kayaba Akihiko, the creator of SAO – to see if she could remember anything about them. Titania was unfazed by any of Arguile's prompts, showing no signs of recognition at any of these tidbits, even as the identity of this 'Heathcliff' is actually Kayaba dropped a metaphorical bombshell among the other players. A moment of agitated chatter began to spread among them, before being quieted down by a cold look on Titania's part. Titania was not a program made to deal with players, so her knowledge of human emotions and expressions are limited, but she knew enough that such a look by her would suffice in regaining control of the situation. Otherwise her face was set in a default, neutral expression. Arguile had commented it made her look even more distant than she had been when she was the KoB's Sub-Commander, to which Titania had to explain, again, she was not the player they knew.

"So," Titania concluded, "you people have no idea how you got here, or why your accounts have been modified to be belonging to the unreleased player race of Alfheim."

"Unfortunately, that seems to be the case," Nishida said with a sigh. "I wish we actually do have some answers, this way none of us would be as confused as we are now."

"So, what is going to happen to us now, Asu-, no, Titania-san?" Arguile asked.

"I have the task of fixing ALO right now, and I don't believe any of you can help me with that-"

"Actually, Titania-san, I used to work as a network engineer and used to help maintaining the SAO servers," Nishida interrupted. "I don't specialize in the VR software part, but I believe I know enough of the basics to help out. Especially considering if this 'Alfheim Online' is running the same Cardinal program like SAO's one. Granted, I wasn't involved in developing the Cardinal of SAO, so I'm not sure how much help I can be…"

"…" Titania took a moment to consider Nishida's usefulness, before finally nodding her head. "Very well. You will accompany me to help me fix this current issue, after I send everyone else here to sleep here for the time being."

"To sleep? Why would you do that?" Arguile asked with a confused voice, tinged with disbelief that she can do that.

"My top priority is repairing what is wrong with the ALO systems, and after that the 61,340 registered ALO players that were online as of last count," Titania replied as glowing scripts began to circle around her, without any incantation or chanting. "None of which involves you people here. I do not have the resources or the time to be dealing with you people right now, and I cannot risk complications cropping up as I try and conduct my repairs. Therefore, sending you all to sleep is the best option here."

"Wait-"

The two dozen words written by some unspoken command from Titania remained in the air, and then glowed brightly. The room seemed to be waver, like being under the heat of the midday sun on the road, and then drowsiness assaulted the many players here. Soon, all of the players present were asleep, barring Nishida who gaped in surprise. From what Titania have been told, SAO didn't have spells and the old man was probably too surprised to do anything to stop her. Not that he would be able to do anything, anyway. Slumber Zone was a high level Alf AoE spell available to her personally as the Fairy Queen, something the designers left with her as they toyed with the idea of making her an boss character of the World Tree. She would have been the supporting boss character to Fairy King Oberon, casting buff and debuff spells while Oberon would be focused with the attacking spells. To make up for the high manoeuvrability and evasion capability of the Fae races with their wings, Slumber Zone had a 100% success rate of inducing sleep if it hits and was unaffected by the player's own resilience against status effects. To the SAO players unused to the nuances of an Alf character or even a winged Fae, sending them all to sleep was not difficult.

"Would they be alright?" Nishida asked worriedly, following Titania as she moved to leave the room. He had many questions to ask her, apparently, and she would answer the reasonable ones as she tries to find out about the rest of this lab.

"If not, I will deal with it later after the most pressing matters at hand are resolved," Titania said without hesitation, exiting the room. "I would be failing my duty if in trying to help these three hundred players, thousands of others players have suffered instead."

"While your motive to save as many as possible is admirable, I must object to treating people as only figures to be counted," Nishida said tentatively, showing his disagreement softly and did not try to make himself a target of being put to sleep. "Humans are a bit more than that."

"I am not a program designed to primarily to deal with human issues, so what are humans exactly is not my problem," Titania said somewhat bluntly. "If you have no logic to refute my earlier concerns about leaving them awake, then please keep silent on this topic."

"As you wish, then," Nishida acquiesced. "Maybe it's a good thing you're not Asuna-san after all… that poor boy, Kirito, would probably be heartbroken if he saw his wife became like this…"

Titania tuned Nishida's words out after that, not caring about topics that were not relevant to her current task and only gave short replies to relevant questions. The name 'Kirito' had sparked something akin to recognition for maybe a split second to her, before fading into the background.

Truth be told, maybe she did not have to put them all to sleep – Titania could maybe send them around the lab to scout for the locations of the rest of the command consoles, saving herself to focus on what she had in mind next. However, she instinctively felt for some reason it was best to make them all asleep and not running around this place. There was a few among the three hundred that inexplicably made Titania feel it was a bad idea to let them be awake, sending a proverbial chill down her spine. Especially those three hooded men, their body mostly hidden by dark cloaks, that had retreated into a corner and gazed at her like she was some sort of prey. Before she had control of the system back and make sure she has the properties of Immortal Object on her, she would not feel safe.

-][-

Colbert had finally managed to speak with Old Osmond, after the headmaster had eventually settled things down. Whatever lessons the students had left for the day was cancelled, and the staff members are to check for damages both to the buildings and people within the Academy.

"So, Professor Colbert, you suspect Miss Valliere to be the one responsible for the sudden appearance of that tree?" Old Osmond said as he reached for his pipe. The old man had a few vices, no doubt about that, and he took this chance for him to indulge in one of them. His secretary, Miss Longueville, was not around to harass him in trying to curb him of this habit at this moment, and he took the chance to take a deep huff of smoke.

"While that tree did not show up in the summoning circle, it, and the resulting… chaos, for a lack of better word, did show up around the time Miss Valliere's summoning," Colbert replied. "There is a chance that the tree is indeed Miss Valliere's familiar. Fortunately, we can test this easily enough – if Miss Valliere perform the 'Contract Servant' spell on that tree, we would know if that was the intended familiar or not."

"And you intend to take Miss Valliere to that tree, hmm," Old Osmond hummed thoughtfully. He shifted his glance momentarily to the young girl in question, and the other two students next to her. The Zerbst girl and her quiet Gallian friend had for some reason insisted to come along, and it was now that the brown-skinned beauty among them spoke:

"Old Osmond, we would like to come along to see for ourselves whether Louise here have really summoned that tree, or whether this was all just a coincidence."

"This does not concern you, Zerbst," Louise spat out the Germanian's name like it was some kind of foul curse, before Old Osmond could even reply. "I don't see why you insist on coming along."

"Miss Valliere does have a point, disregarding her unsuitable hostile manner," Old Osmond said blandly, shutting the pinked-haired girl up as she remembered with a blush she was speaking in front of the headmaster and another member of the faculty. Thankfully, the other members of the staff were busy elsewhere in the school checking for damages and did not witness her loss of control. "Additionally, you and Miss Tabitha here have only just recently summoned your familiars, it would be best if you two take this time to improve your bonds with them instead. A Salamander of the Fire Dragon Mountains and a Wind Dragon could be troublesome if not handled correctly, even after the Contract Servant spell."

Old Osmond thought he saw Tabitha's hand tighten ever so slightly at his mention of 'Wind Dragon', but he did not have any idea why she would have that reaction. His wandering mind was brought back to the topic at hand by Kirche's response:

"Of course this concerns me," Kirche said, puffing up her considerable chest with pride. "It is only natural for me to want to see if little Louise here has finally become a mage worth the Valliere name. The Vallieres have been rivals to the Zerbst family for generations, and it would be insulting if even after this Louise fails to provide any kind of competition for me. The von Zerbsts are not so blind as to declare weaklings as their rivals."

"I do believe there is a rule against taking family feuds into the Academy," Old Osmond remarked, even as the pink-haired girl's face coloured into a shade of pink even darker than her hair at Kirche's declaration. "That reason alone will not suffice in convincing me to let you or your friend here to go along with Professor Colbert, Miss Zerbst."

"Need external checks," Tabitha said quietly. "Staff members may be biased."

"Excuse me?" Colbert frowned at the blue-haired girl's words.

"With only Professor Colbert going along, we can't be sure if Louise really have bound that tree as her familiar or it is just talk," Kirche expanded Tabitha's reasoning. "Throughout the year Louise has been allowed to stay in the Academy despite having Zero successes with magic, something that should have expelled any other student. We would like to see with our own eyes that Louise here has truly succeeded, and not only allowed to stay in the Academy due to her family background or Tristainian nobles being lenient towards their own."

"Why, you…!"

"Enough, children," Colbert said sharply, tapping his staff on the floor loudly to gain their attention as Louise reached for her wand at the blatant insult to her capability, and to the integrity of her countrymen. "Do remember you're in front of the headmaster here."

"It's alright, Jean," Old Osmond waved Colbert's concern off. "It's not like I care that much about propriety myself. And it is a legitimate concern if students believe our Academy's capability is questionable.

"Alright, Miss Zerbst, and Miss Tabitha, if you truly wish to go along then you have my permission to do so. Nonetheless," Old Osmond warned them, "if there's trouble on the way the Academy and its staff members takes no responsibility. You both are Triangle class mages, and should be able to take care of yourselves. If any dangerous creatures that resides in the tree were to attack and you two are harmed, do not expect Professor Colbert to come to your aid."

"Hah!" Kirche gave a decidedly unladylike snort. "Do forgive me if I don't expect much from our esteemed pacifist professor here in combat. Me and Tabitha can take care of ourselves."

"I can. You, I'm worried about. Hence why I'm going with you." Tabitha said tonelessly.

"Tabitha!" Kirche said in a false scandalized voice. "I'm shocked you have so little confidence in me. I'm glad you care, though. Glad to know I have someone to watch out for me in case Louise accidentally blows us all up."

Colbert sighed as the situation once again threatened to spiral into petty violence, and had to be contained once more. Such peace-making was not included in his expectations as being a teacher when he had signed up for this job.