A Serpent's Tale
Chapter 311: Hopeful Expectations

Chapter 311: Hopeful Expectations

"It may be possible to get her out of this though." Morrigan said, lighting a spark of hope within me.

"What? What is it?" I turned and immediately asked her in a frantic tone. I wanted to get her out of this state as soon as possible.

She already looked malnourished in her current state, so I wanted to wake her up as soon as possible to avoid a horrible outcome.

"Well, there are many different ways, all with varying degrees of success depending on the individual themselves." The witch began by explaining the varying factors involved in waking someone like this.

"As I said previously, it depends on the person themselves, how much trauma they’ve experience and how much it impacted them, but their willpower and strength of character are also important."

"So take for example, if you have a powerful but weak-willed sorcerer, he would be easily fooled by an illusion. But if you had a weak yet strong willed rookie, he would be far more likely to overcome such a situation."

"Now, the methods to dealing with this issue are also numerous, from just simply waiting for them to wake up themselves, to using Soul magic, to forcefully waking them up through fear and intimidation or inflicting some other intense emotion into them."

"I doubt the first option would work here, so that leaves us with Soul magic, or force."

"I can’t do the former as my school of magic isn’t delicate enough, and I don’t have the right kind of force to properly awaken her. I can get someone, but it will likely take some time to get them over here."

Once she finished that last sentence, she stood up and patted me on the shoulder warmly, with an equally warm smile blooming on her face.

"But I have faith that you will be able to do all of this yourself, you have the power after all." And after she said those extremely confusing and vague words, she left.

And the moment she left, I felt something shifting, and everyone that had been just outside the door suddenly came bursting on, all of them falling to the floor in the doorway.

The shifting feeling I was all too familiar with. It was [Spatial Shift], or at least a variation of it, as it seemed to have a different effect.

That wasn’t important right now though. But it did explain why everyone didn’t clamber in right away the moment the evil spirit made itself known.

This spatial displacement that shifted or sealed the room, prevented everyone from coming in, and when it suddenly disappeared, the scene before me happened, everyone piled up halfway in the doorway and outside.

They all clambered to get off of one another and all filtered into the room and surrounded the bed and began to frantically ask several questions at once, overloading my brain.

"SHUT UP!" I screamed just a few seconds later. *Sigh* "One at a time please."

When I looked back up at them all to see their expressions to see who would speak up first, I also took a count of who was here.

There was of course David and Ashtraz, who were both more worried about Asty’s situation than anything.

After them was of course the Duchess herself, alongside some of the caretakers and a pair of mages of some kind that stood at the side of the Duchess.

And the most important figure here took the initiative and spoke first. That being the Duchess.

"What exactly happened here?" She questioned in a demanding tone.

"You’ll have to be more specific." I responded without any sense of urgency or curtesy.

This clearly upset the Duchess, whether it be the lack of respect in my tone, or the lack of an actual answer, I’m not too sure. Not that I really cared in the first place.

The Duchess sighed and reworded her question, "What happened in this room the moment you entered it. I’m aware of the detail leading up to it, and quite frankly, everything makes me suspicious of you."

I was about to answer when she said this, "I do remember you by the way, and I won’t forget what you did, the way you treated me last time we met."

’Ah, she remembers that... Whatever, she had it coming to her.’

"Well, to tell you what happened, something came in and possessed my friend here, so I got rid of it." I didn’t want to tell her the whole truth, and I wasn’t lying.

The Duchess squinted her eyes at me, obviously seeing that I wasn’t spilling everything.

"Possessed by what exactly?" She pressed further.

"I dunno, some kind of evil spirit." Which was a hundred percent true. I genuinely had no idea what it was before Ouroboros reawakened the God inside of it.

The Duchess was clearly unhappy by my lack of proper and fully articulated responses, but she didn’t press any further as Ashtraz asked the next question.

"Will she be okay?" Her eyes were shaking with her hands clasped together in front of her bare chest, the desperation in her voice evident.

"I... Don’t know. I have an idea on how to get her out of this comatose state, but I don’t know if it will work or not." I answered dejectedly with my head lowered.

The mood in the room obviously lowered with that statement, but there was an underlying hint of hope, mainly from David and Ash internally begging for it to work.

"And what is this plan of yours exactly?" One of the mages inquired.

Both of them were wearing starred robes, one with five stars and one with four. The one who asked was the one with four, who was wearing a pointy hat and holding a wooden staff of some kind.

When she asked this question, everyone immediately turned to look at me expectantly. But I wasn’t going to reveal anything, not in front of the Duchess. She was staring at me in a way that looked at me as if she was undressing me.

Which was weird as I was naked right now. But the way she was looking at me was reminiscent of that kind of gaze. But with her, it was more disturbing, as if she was trying to peer directly into me and trying to pry into my soul to find out my deepest, darkest secrets.

I stared back at her with a deadpan, defiant gaze, and answered the mages inquiry, "In privacy."

The Duchess harumphed and left, not bothering to argue with me. I don’t know why she dislikes me all of a sudden.

I know why I don’t like her, but she seemed to want me so desperately before, but not she’s acting like some weird conspiracy theorist or something.

The two mages seemed reluctant to follow also, but in the end left with the Duchess.

When I turned to look at the caretakers, they nodded in understanding, knowing that I wanted them to leave.

David and Ash then began to leave, but I called for Ash to stay, telling her that Asty would need her by her side more than me when she awakened. David rolled his eyes as he made his way out of the room.

"Uh, how exactly are we gonna get any actual privacy in here?" Ash asked as she looked over to the door, which was currently lying flat on the floor from when I broke it earlier to get in.

"Oh, simple." Instead of explaining, I pulled her up onto the bed and used my magic to float the bed up into the air before sealing us inside of a spatial bubble and then encased it in [Hell Fire], which should prevent anyone from prying into the bubble.

She was a little shocked at first when she saw the flames surrounding us, but upon noticing that they didn’t seem to harm or affect us, she calmed down a little, though I could tell she was still on edge with the way she clenched her hand in front of her heart.

"Don’t worry." I wrapped my hand around the one that she was leaning on and reassured her, "Everything will be okay, I promise. And I promise that she will wake up, okay?"

Ash looked to me and saw my smile, a little tired, yet resolute. I was determined to do this, and once we were done, I could finally have some proper rest.

She could clearly see that I was tired, but also didn’t deter me from doing this, either out of a selfish need to see Asty again, or some other reason.

I didn’t care either way. All I cared about, and needed to focus on right now, was making sure that Asty would wake up.

She hadn’t moved at all since I extracted that spirit essence or whatever it was out of her, and was still just lying on her back with her head tilted to the side with a dull and listless gaze.

I just hope that that evil spirit wasn’t lying when he said that she was still in there.

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