Two as One Princesses

ayfully jumped around Ciel, and as Ciel’s line of sight opened up, she was once again surprised by what she saw.
While I feel sorry for disturbing them as they’re having fun, I called for Ciel in order to move on from our current situation.

『Ciel, are you alright?』

『Ain! Ain! Somehow there’s a lot of these adorable things here! Right here!』
『Do they not scare you?』
『That’s right.
I wonder why? I don’t get any bad feelings from them at all.
What are they?』
『I want to verify that as well, so would you mind if I borrow your body for a while?』
『Sure, feel free.』

Ciel couldn’t even think of an answer to what they are, so she’s in pretty high spirits.
Though, even without that, it’s fairly obvious to see her excitement.
Still, I just thought that Ciel would normally at least have formulated her own assumptions about them.

As I borrowed Ciel’s body, the green girl who was jumping around looked at me with eyes wide open in surprise before fawning on me.
It wasn’t just her, the others also showed a different reaction compared to when it was Ciel as well.
While they are adorable and I would like to indulge them, I unfortunately can’t touch them, so I can’t really do much of that indulging.

Ciel’s refreshingly pouty 『Aren’t you quite popular.』 is also making me want to give more attention to her, but first I need to complete my objective.

Among these beings, the lady seemed to be the most knowledgeable.
Upon a closer inspection, her hair has flowers in bloom and she has wooden horn-like protrusions on her head.
Her clothes are white and pale green, and seems similar to some sort of loose fitting indigenous attire.
While she’s as pretty as Ciel, she leaves a more affectionate impression.

「Pleased to meet you.
Can you hear my voice?」

I approached the tree-horn lady—tree lady for short—and first verified if we can communicate with each other.
This is because although the green girl seemed to be giggling before, I couldn’t hear any giggling coming from her at all.
While we can see them, we can’t touch nor hear them.
I can’t rule out the possibility of them being unable to hear us as well.
Though, I do think that the chance for that is quite low.

The tree lady moved her lips, but she seemed to have noticed that I couldn’t hear her as she shook her head once before nodding.
I guess she means that we’ve already met so it shouldn’t be 「Pleased to meet you」 and that she can hear my voice.
Then perhaps it’s not that they just suddenly appeared now, but it’s that they were there to begin with and we could only see them now.

「I’m sorry to be rude, but may I ask a few questions? I don’t quite understand what’s happening.」

Affirmative.
To begin with, I’ll ask about their true identity.

「Am I right to assume that you all are spirits?」

This one’s an affirmative as well.
This is honestly the only answer I could come up with, so I would have been in trouble if she denied it.
I knew spirits existed only as information.
Or rather, I only knew that 『Spirit Channeler』 type Jobs existed.
Though, the explanation I’ve read said 「They channel the power of spirits to use magic.」 and only that, so I don’t know what kind of beings spirits are.

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From the information I can pull out of my past life knowledge and taking into account the current situation, they should be beings that preside over nature.
I can just ask for confirmation in this regard.
After all, from the smiling tree lady’s response earlier, she seemed like she’d gladly answer.

With that said, I asked a lot of different things.
I know it’s honestly impolite, but she still answered without any hesitation.

It appears that one of the reasons why we were suddenly able to see them was because we defeated the golden wolf.
However, the relationship between defeating the golden wolf and gaining the ability to see spirits is a mystery.
The tree lady seems to know the answer, but is having a hard time answering with only a yes or no.

Spirits come in various types and seem to regulate nature.
One example is that the more there are earth and plant spirits in a place, the greater their harvest will be.
Incidentally, the tree lady is a forest spirit.
Spirits use magic power to regulate themselves and if they use too much, at worst, they can vanish.
Their magic power recovers naturally, but there are places where they can recover more efficiently.
One of those places seems to be Ciel’s hairpin.
It was originally some sort of mysterious plant, but the forest spirit was the one that turned it into a hairpin.
She’s been with us for a surprisingly long time.
While it drains magic power, she doesn’t have any intention to hurt us, she says.

And finally, she recognizes Ainsel’s existence.
I’ve already had a hunch since she reacted to my words and chose my magic power to drain from, but she might be the first individual to recognize me as Ainsel.
From the spirit’s perspective, Ciel is a friend and I’m something like a parent, it seems. Why though?

She wants us to keep wearing the hairpin if possible, and so we’ll be leaving it on our hair just like always.
The spirit seems like someone Ciel could open her heart to after all, and she does seem to have affection for us.
Most importantly, she’s not human and promised to help if we’re in danger.

As I finished asking my questions, I finally remembered the golden wolf.
Yup, it’s definitely dead now.

Hiya~! The dance with the golden wolf has ended and, for some reason, our princesses now have new friends?

As usual, it’s really nice to see Ciel’s Battle Mage Dancer battle style.
The small detail about how Ciel still needs to keep some form of rhythm to “cast magic” with the Dance Princess is really nice to be honest.
And the part where Ciel was a bit irritated from how the roses didn’t bloom symmetrically as planned, lol.
Now in this chapter, we got to see another one of Ciel’s stages, the Stage of Frost.
It’s possibly a lot more brutal than the Stage of Water, and at this point I think a Stage of Fire would probably be the most sanitized and clean if it is ever used, lol.
While it’ll likely scorch the area, it’ll probably leave less blood and mess compared to the previous two.
If it exists anyway.

Also, Ciel being cute is, as one would expect, absolutely cute, lol.
We got new friends~! While the magic power-like energy is still a mystery, as well as how long the forest spirit has been with them, we at least know what the transparent flower is, or rather what it’s function is.
Basically a magic power hotspot for spirits, lol.

Also also, I tried something new with the attack names.
The thing with Japanese is that they have “Ruby characters” that show it’s pronunciation.
That’s why in really chuuni webnovels or Fate lore in general, they’d have a reading that’s different from kanji (Ex.
“Sword of Promised Victory” being read as “Excalibur”).
The reason for this is pretty simple logically speaking, kanji are pretty useful in painting pictures of what something is supposed to be, and it’s more obvious in RPG Skill system type stories.
The kanji would like “Rising Dragon Waterfall Reverse Mario Kart Slash” or something but that only works for kanji because each kanji only take a syllable to pronounce.
A direct translation would be a mouthful, so most of the times the writer will use Ruby Characters to show the intended reading as well (Ex.
“Beast-Style Travel Method” being simply read as “Beast Step”).
So yeah, what I wanted to say is: Is it better this way (the Ruby on the text main and the kanji translation in the references), or would you prefer the old open-close parenthesis?

Now then, I hope you enjoyed this chapter.
Please feel free to comment.
Stay clean, stay safe, and have a nice day~!

References

Ice Rose of Frost