'What have you gotten yourself into, Astrid?' A deep masculine voice spoke to the fairy woman.
'Five...' The fairy lady ignored the voice and began to countdown in her head.
'Four, Three...'
Ikky still free falling with her, didn't seem to be worried by how high their fall was.
'Hm. Most people would have given in to me by now.' She thought.
'Why is he not, then?' The voice spoke to her again.
Astrid paused for a second, before a barely noticeable frown appeared on her face.
"Would you bite me for the cost of your head?" She asked the amber-eyed man.
Ikky was surprised at her question, because what she just asked summarised his thoughts. But with a shrug, he asked in turn,
"Izel told me to run if I met Believers like you. But if I ran, wouldn't you still catch me?"
Astrid was right. She was stronger than he was, stronger than twice himself even with the knowledge of his totem and the Night Chant now. But like with the zombie creature in the Kailash, Ikky would leap at her first the instant he was sure that he could not run away.
There were all sorts of factors that were not up to him in an encounter with a superior foe. But if both options of running or fighting would yield the same result, then he would rather make her bleed.
Astrid replied, "I will catch you."
'You and your big mouth.' The voice in her head sighed with frustration.
Funny enough, Ikky had acted against her bluff, and she was the one in danger.
...
Ikky's knees bent like he was bracing for the impact, but then his body began to slow down as as a mysterious cloud of black appeared behind him.
Astrid watched the cloud from into a more solid shape before suddenly chucking Ikky's body right at her.
The fairy swung her head back reflexively, however Ikky was already too close. He caught her face between his palms and was about to slam his head into hers when the fairy's head fell off her neck, leaving her body to fall into the red leaves of a tree.
Ikky's head slammed hard into hers regardless, but the hardness of the fairy's head made him cringe in pain.
"Aw, crap! I killed her!" Ikky exclaimed before tumbling into the same tree as the woman had.
"I'm not dead." Astrid sighed. "My limbs just fall apart when I'm tired."
'What the f*ck?!' Ikky had not heard such crappy words said with so much indifference. But this situation felt familiar to him.
"Wait! You're that short knight I met in my omen!" Ikky recalled her voice, with the similar situations of both their meetings guiding his memory.
Ikky remembered that small knight's manner of speech. And as he held her living head in his hands, he thought, no wonder she had acted so casually at seeing him decapitated in his omen. It was probably a normal thing to her.
"Yes. That was me." The fairy nodded. "Find me my body."
But another question popped up in Ikky's head: "How the heck did you get there?"
He hadn't expected a reply, yet,
"I kill calamity spirits right before they pour into the Lokahs. It saves us trouble."
"Wait, does that mean you can help prophets conquer their first omens?"
'Is this how the nobles get their heirs to become prophets?' He wondered.
"No." She answered straightforwardly. "You have five more questions. After that, you put my head right back on me.
Ikky brought her face closer to his, as he stared into her plain golden eyes for a few seconds.
"What are you on about?" Ikky was confused. But there were all kinds of virtues and costs, so he guessed there was something deeper guiding her strange behaviour.
"I am proposing a deal. Do you accept?"
Ikky thought about it for a few seconds before nodding. "An extra hand couldn't hurt."
For some reason he felt that the fairy did not sound at all like she was lying, so Ikky was darn sure that in his first omen, she would have let him die as well if she hadn't already thought he was dead when they met.
Ikky had been decapitated when a second spider spirit had come to completely end his life. But then she suddenly appeared out of nowhere, to kill it, most probably because she hadn't realised that Ikky was still not down for the count.
Thinking back, the curse of eternal suffering was the only useful curse Ikky had gotten so far. But that was before his virtue had advanced from Seed of Nyx to Child of Nyx, making the costs or curses he would get with his advanced virtue even worse. So that first and useful curse was most likely a one time thing.
"That doesn't hurt you, does it?" Ikky pointed at the black night string before walking towards one of the red leaved trees and pulling out a vine.
The fairy didn't reply to that question, and Ikky didn't force her to. She had said quite enough to satisfy his current curiosities. Setting her head aside, he lifted her limp body onto his back and tied her to his body. After, he picked up her head, held it under one arm before treading the dark red forest, giving the headless body a free piggy back ride.
"Now let's get out of here before unexpected company finds us."
"Wipe your spit off my face."
"Oh come on. I brush my teeth now. Arley says I'll need to check the dentist, but I'm fine. See?" He grinned at her.
Ikky's dentures were hard, sharp and white. But they were not clean-white, more like, carnivorous-animal- bone crunching-white. Nox's food consisted of a lot of bones in fact, so his cursed body had adapted to chewing and breaking. That adaptation was the reason for his body-enhancing virtue, Child of Nyx.
Simply, Ikky had good bones and teeth, yet gross hygiene.
"I do not care about this, Arley, nor about how often you clean your teeth . Wipe my face."
"Can it, subordinate. You don't tell me what to do." Ikky cackled.
"Damn. That was Yaga's thing I just did, wasn't it?"