Ikky was no stranger to unfair fights where he had the number disadvantage. But the mindless tree people made it all the more easy for him to clobber.
There was a certain sense of unfamiliarity the tree men invoked in one's mind about the use of the prophets' bodies. They lacked combat sense and were more of just flinging their heads around to deter or defeat their opponents, rather than using the right body parts. Nevertheless, this did make them unpredictable and hard to deal with in their own way. Because with their behaviours in the alien bodies, they could strike with any body parts that was the closest to their opponents, albeit just to land a futile blow.
No matter what they pulled out though, Ikky had better cards. Where they were mindless, he was cunning, where they were sluggish, he was fluid in movement, and for every futile blow they threw, Ikky could divert them and fling them around.
Mind over body. Even if the tree people were stronger than he was, they had barely made a scratch.
Ivan also picked a few that Ikky had thrown towards him, disorientating them in mid air, while looking for the trees the tree people would react to as the wraith used her intangible scythe to return their souls back to their woody bodies.
Neither of the prophets realised their uncanny understanding of each other that was mostly brought by their near direct contrast in thinking.
It took almost an hour, but all eight remaining prophets had been freed from the trees' control.
With remorse flashing at the corner of his usually stoic blue eyes, Ivan began to wonder as he looked down at the row of unconscious prophets.
It was only possible to save these people because of Ikky's peculiar shadow partner. Many other prophets were possibly still out there, having their bodies being manipulated until they got too burdened and collapse under the forceful use of their bodies by the red trees.
There were many other prophets out there who needed help, yet their fates rested not on his, but on this smug amber-eyed man's shoulders.
The one out of the two who couldn't care less about them had the power to save lives... Fate plays mortals with irony.
"Where are you going?" Ivan asked as he noticed Ikky walking ahead.
Without turning around, Ikky answered, "I need to go stretch."
Ikky had run out of both night mist, and spiritual essence, so he was going to replenish his night mist and try to widen his spiritual essence capacity as it took time to restore itself automatically.
One's spiritual essence capacity was tied directly to their virtues. So the most significant way to improve that capacity was to improve the virtues.
For Ikky, one might suspect two simple ways to accomplish this as:
One, Ikky having to eat more essence crystals to improve Child of Nyx.
Two, let the wraith absorb them to improve Night Chant.
However, these statements would be false. To find out how to improve one's Virtues, that person first had to understand the spiritual significances behind them.
For example, Ikky's Child of Nyx represents how he feeds off the despair and unfairness of wherever he finds himself to grow infinitely greater than the person he was before those tragedies.
And these 'tragedies— despair and unfairness, were the evil spirits who cause curses to manifest from within him.
In other words, Ikky can only expand the spiritual essence pool of this virtue, by killing whatever profane spirit had incited the 'curse of exposure' on him when he had fallen into this haven.
The prerequisite to expanding essence capacity was usually absurd, perhaps because only after a prophet has expanded their spiritual capacity to the highest point it could reach, could they be able to try another Ordeal to increase their hierarchy.
Meanwhile for the Night Chant... Ikky was not sure what that virtue was supposed to mean. It's ability was for Ikky to summon an entity to protect and watch over him. This was really just a description of the life that Ikky never got to have. It didn't sound like a trait of his at all.
Nonetheless, if prophets could not improve their Virtues because of outrageous demands, they could still kill spirits to absorb their essence.
This was a very inefficient method for most prophets since they could only ever absorb an eighth of one spirit's entire essence.
Only human Sins could hope to absorb up to half of the entire thing... And like his first ever virtue revealed, Ikky was more closer to Sins. Essence absorption was a trait that made him more similar to them.
Ivan wasn't dumb enough to think that the amber-eyed man was really just going for a stretch, but there was nothing he could do about Ikky's business anyway.
But before he left, possibly for a long time however, Ivan had to ask,
"Tell me how to cure them... How your power works?"
Ikky waved in a carefree manner as he replied, "Well, unless you can somehow communicate psychologicaly with the tres, there's nothing you can do."
Communicate? The trees were parasites. The only communication they were capable of was during feeding. Besides, what good would it be even if one could send telepathic messages to the trees and asked them to stop? If they understood him then, why would they even obey? Ivan clearly had no idea about the true nature of the red forest, but Ikky had just revealed that he did.
"What do you want?" Ivan suddenly asked, making Ikky stop in his tracks.
From the amber-eyed man's slow walking, to his arrogant body language and the way he phrased his words for Ivan to believe that he had a mysterious cure for the people, Ikky clearly had an ulterior motive.
The amber-eyed man placed his hand on his chin and looked to the sky in pretend thought. He already knows what he wants.
———
"You know, you could do this in a nicer way." Ikky complained as he peered at the upside down world several feet below his head. He was being held up by the ankle as Ivan flew him around the forest, searching for their next sprite victim.
Regardless of what Virtue Ikky wanted to upgrade, getting spirits to hunt was a must. Absorbing spiritual essence could not only boost Ikky's physical traits, but also help his wraith get stronger.
But looking for those on land was a lot harder to do within the thick red forest, so Ikky wanted to try an aerial view.
So far, they had only found one, but this was in under twenty minutes, a good improvement considering the shortest amount of time Ikky had been able to find any sprite in the red forest was three hours.
"Can your pet speed up taking care of the sprites next time?" Ivan showed his own dissatisfaction, his voice trembling slightly as his sense of pride and dignity tried to push back the jolly feeling growing in his chest due to his Virtue. Joy to him was a drug he could not afford to get comfortable with.
The first sprite he'd seen the wraith kill was clearly weaker than it was, but the quiet shadow creature took its time anyway, hammering the sprite into submission before killing it off.
'What kind of virtue is that anyway?' Ivan had wondered.
It would have been understandable if the wraith was just an empty husk that Ikky could control manually like a puppet, however the creature clearly had its own separate line of thought and behaviour. If anything, it was like a Being type totem, rather than a virtue. But Ivan had already seen Ikky's totem, so the wraith was definitely a virtue.
Ikky looked down into the forest, at the tall shadowy figure as she ran speedily from behind, following them from the ground. Both of her scythes were strapped to her back to form an 'X'; one linked to her nape with a string, and the other made of fluid black mist, just floating above the first, yet following her despite not being attatched.
The wraith was still kind of weak to be left on its own, although now it seemed to be taking advantage of its limbs to fight, rather than before when she had just one scythe and simply swung her weapon and waved her string. After her evolution to the more solid being she was now, she seemed more mindful, and it was clear that she had her own grasp of the world, other than what Ikky fed to her. This and her own approach at fighting.
Ikky had left her to do as she pleased with the last sprite to see how independent she was, but instead, what she showed was a rather concerning behaviour.
She had started the fight by attacking the sprite, using the scythe that only inflicted fear and unrest on its victim, to engage. She would evade the sprites advances, then strike a controlled amount of fear into its head, just to repeat this for a few more minutes.
And just as the pitiful creature's soul had become completely frozen, leaving it a scared and shivering husk of its former self, the wraith drew her solid scythe before slicing its neck cleanly off, and releasing it from its misery.
For some reason, she was extremely sadistic with her methods of dealing with evil spirits— not that Ikky was certain she wouldn't do the same to people once given the chance.
Ivan might have had no care for spirits, but even he had felt pity. No creature deserved such a slow and cruel end.
"I'll tell it to do just that next time." Ikky agreed to Ivan's suggestion because time was of the essence. Especially now that the unconscious prophets were left alone back at their camp.
The two had wanted to ask Astrid to look after the cured tree people while they roamed the forest, but the short fairy was nowhere to be found. All she had left as a sign of her presence was a wide open space with fallen trees.
At least it was fortunate that she had cleared that part of the forest. It was now safer to let the unconscious prophets rest there without the influence of the trees getting to them again.
'Where did she go? Did she turn into a tree person too? Maybe that's why she had fallen those trees.'
The two had wondered, but concluded that they were already searching around. So with luck, they would find her in time while they were hunting sprites.
Speaking of...
With relatively lesser time than it would take Ikky on his own, the two prophets found another sprite. Or rather, the wraith found it.