The Ogre Strength Fairy and the Eldest 'Son'-Chapter 548 - Showing Off Illusions, But Only *Explaining* Cognitive Delusions

Chapter 548: Chapter 548 - Showing Off Illusions, But Only *Explaining* Cognitive Delusions

"Are you quite done?"

The old man still leaning on his sword, calmly in his seat, finally opened his mouth - to see if he could get words across in all this... dramatic behavior. It might have surprised the others to know, but he’d done his own private digging and rethinking about everything involving the ’witch’ of a Goltbred heiress. Especially over spots where his Yecine family had made mistakes in dealing with her as they should have.

The strange behavior of Qatrand in particular, when it came to the unchivalrous physical handling of the brunette, had been a sticking point in his mind for a while. He had thought that perhaps it was a behavior learned from the temper prone Anper. But now, he had internalized it as a corruption of values from *outside* even that man’s teachings.

More than that, Yatrel er Goltbred had demanded a derogation of the usual rule, where wives to active cultivators within the Yecine compound’s membership were cloistered away. Arguing that their firstborn was *their* successor and therefore needed to remain able to come and go. The former orphan was unwilling to bend in her own ideals of what such a covenant should be about.

Clear signs that they should have broken off the engagement with the other family before the wedding ever progressed.

"Done? Not, even, close~"

That was the whole reason, in his mind, that they generally sought out wives of respectable but ultimately unimpressive cultivation legacies. He’d only agreed to it in this case, with a nouveau riche heiress of a recently founded surname, because certain members had lobbied strongly for it. People in this very room that he now also knew *much* more about, considering they had been plotting against others for the sake of the family under his nose for at least a decade and a half before things went to hell.

Perhaps not quite as Cocytus-cold of one as what was coming for some, he could tell. The men whose greed and fraud sat overtop the layer of family treachery that he’d been wondering what to do with. But it didn’t mean he had any intention of doing the same as them, throwing members under the runaway carriage in front of them.

He had a duty to stand his ground in front of the danger for everyone’s sake - for that was his pride and tradition. So he hardened his resolve again to speak. Even as he was the only allowed witness to the Frost spreading across the floor of their council chamber where she had walked.

"What more could you have to say? You’re clearly here to fight. Or worse."

"Oh, I’m not - really... and oh, I can *say* plenty. I won’t tell you that everything you people see in your own kind of way is wrong. Much of it is even absolutely reasonable from where you are stand... sitting. I suppose *you* are sitting, still. Despite being the one to take a stand."

’And she missed me making vile puns, too! What is taking her so long?’

Spinning on her heel, her hand raised up in the air and seemed to grip on something. Something that she visibly flexed her arm muscles against while holding. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

"Traditions can indeed be wisdom. Systems can work as designed for the betterment of more than a single individual. People who leave an organization for greener pastures can be investments that didn’t pay off."

Her copper blade ’materialized’... simply there between one word and the next - greener, specifically, because she did have a sense of humor despite hating the low effort of puns. Showing off the very sort of color she spoke of and making it clear *she* was the better place to be.

Every set of eyes, most of them the steely grays that dominated their bloodline, followed the motions she made. As the two-handed weapon that looked to be copied from the *basic idea* of their style of blades, before being made intentionally ’divergent’ in its craftmanship, rested with its reddish-gold flat so casually against the young woman’s own shoulder.

"But I would be a very poor excuse of a person, with a point to get across, if I let you keep believing that what you think you see is all there is."

The blade left her shoulder... in a motion belonging to their kata that began like a deep upper back stretch and ended in a descending arc toward one of the marked elders. At least, that was what each and every one of the wrongdoers, and only them, ’saw’ in the moments after she stopped speaking. To deflect that ’weak’ copper swinging toward them with proper steel, to drive toward the challenge aggressively as trained... was, unfortunate enough for them, their only thought.

Which is why, with only the force of *their own* swings against the Illusion of the mint eyed Elua lunging into combat at them... the embrittled material fractured. Cleanly, along the balance point that she had chilled so very deeply. The separated upper portions of their great blades reversed direction, ever so slightly, against the sudden snap. Then fell down to the floor with an almost musical series of differently pitched pings, clangs, and thumps.

’How I love doing that. Much cleaner than corrosive fumes, as well.’

The former Acid cultivator, choosing to put effort in to expand her horizons instead of limit them, had managed to copy the spirit of one of her old life’s tricks while avoiding the use of such substances. Not because she wasn’t confident in controlling heavily acidic vapors with her new life’s Element... but because now she was not *limited* to them. In fact, she was tempted to forgo the cold snap effect next time and test out methods of pressurized hydrogen embrittlement!

Throughout the room, the Yecine elders looked at the eight men who moved as one like marionettes. Every one of them holding only hilts with shocked faces, forcing at least a dozen men also holding onto their weapons to... loosen their grip. For none of them could understand what just happened - they only knew that they tried to attack and their weapons broke.

It was easiest to assume that the cultivator in front of them, bringing her blade down and placing the tip on the stone, had done something. But whether she could do it to all of them or not was hard to say. Why she had chosen them - or why they had attacked her - was not even much of a question, as everyone there knew the faction that had raised their schemes against the Goltbreds.

"So, with that out of the way. I’ll now begin informing you of how things are. Objectively as possible, I assure you."

"...She used her Projection!"

One of the men caught on, thanks to the fact that she was standing in the same spot as before. But another immediately felt that was incorrect. As did another, and-

"No, that wasn’t it. I heard the sound of her step as well."

"The swish of her sword. You don’t think..."

"He was right, she *is* a witch. A taboo wielder!"

"She must use Illus-"

"That sword was my father’s, and his father’s before him!"

The youngest of the enemy elders had actually sunk to his feet as he cried, hand on the fallen piece of blade. Elua almost wanted to warn him not to touch the supercooled edge, but if any sword user was ignorant enough to poke at broken parts of metal... that was on them! Instead, she chose to comment about something else.

"Very bold of you to wear something that I made right in front of me. You as well, dear Patriarch."

Speaking to the one on the ground, she first tapped along her arm to describe the guard he wore underneath his suit sleeve. One of the inferior versions of her Qat’s design, sold through black market routes which instantly made either him or people connected to him ever more suspicious. Next, she looked at the leader of the group and tapped over her chest... or rather, almost directly on it in a very provocative way that caused everyone to frown.

But the man knew what she meant, as for a while now he kept one of those famed healing brooches sewn into his inner pocket. It was small, but he had found himself feeling like he was growing stronger the longer he wore it over these years. One of the side effects of lowering the overall rate of drain of any system that all sorts of sigil rituals sought to achieve and manipulate while enabling certain phenomena.

"Though I didn’t come to brag. I came to proselytize, from your more historically recent form of rigidity into the flexibility to make use of things that enable true growth. You must be aware, Patriarch, that the laws of your family have *drastically* changed in distinctly recorded and visible times to any competent historian?"

"Explain."

He was aware that the situation sat on a knife’s edge. But keeping her talking seemed better than letting anyone else speak. Something she was grateful for, in her own way. The longer she had to monologue, the more chances that Qat would arrive to stop her from going ’too far’!

"You see, it is blatant from evidence of policy decisions recorded in Guild archives. Tithe ledgers for the Continental Army that your family submitted over the centuries. Mixed with other historical accounts around the same time periods, and threading through some general cultural changes across the regions, as new territories were born in the wake of Descents..."

A dark chuckle followed, not because she was pleased but because the next thing showed just how perilous merely living was for some.

"Or in the case of the aftermath of two hundred and twenty one years ago, drastic family change during the reseeding the existing territories. After a particularly nasty plague took out a quarter of the continent’s mortals, including half from your own holdings."

Numerous things altogether had led to that rather severe cholera outbreak. Most of all the fact that society hid in the superfortresses during the invasions and sanitation was not always a priority during the active fighting. But primarily, in her opinion, that no one competent seemed to actually *remember* how to recognize and treat the disease.

An ignorance spurned on by the burning of a particular sanctuary of medical knowledge two Descent’s prior... by some person or group that she now suspected were part of this stubborn cult being forced to the surface. Luckily her own knowledge was safe in her private spiritual library, with many consolidated topics having been stocked in the Astral Exclave’s physical location. More books than Madrigil could read in a mortal lifetime if he spent every second doing so.

"And these fundamental shifts were enacted by men in rooms like this one, who were just as certain as you are now that their version of tradition was the immutable one. Isn’t that amusing? Ah- objectivity, yes. Isn’t that... *ignorant* and arrogant?"