It’s been a day and a half. Kale and I are freaking exhausted.

  It took a lot of flying around and monitoring my own energy versus the rate Kale got tired, but it seems like he has around 800 energy to work with. Or, well, at least 800 functional energy he can use before the exhaustion starts kicking in, you know? So maybe it’s actually closer to 1000. Which sounds like it should be a lot to work with, right? I’m sure it’s the most of any other person I’ve come across so far, for sure.

  But his energy efficiency is absolutely terrible!

  From what I can tell, his flight magic’s energy consumption rate seems to be based on how fast he flies, how heavy of a weight he’s lifting, and if he can use both of his arms. Honestly, if Kale's flying without me, he could probably fly for about triple the time at the same speed as he’s been flying while carrying me around, which… doesn’t make me very happy to think about. But yeah, if it weren’t for him having to cart me around through the sky, then he’d probably be just fine escaping these dregs alone. Too bad that’s not the case, though!

  In the end, Kale can only fly for about half an hour before I have to give him more energy. And considering that I have to burn through about 1600 energy just to freaking get him back to full so that he can fly for another half hour since [Rejuvenate] costs me double to use, it’s an absolutely trash conversion rate! If I didn’t have such a rge energy pool to work with, [Divinity 1] giving me double the energy regen, and free refills whenever I leveled, then we would have immediately been out of luck before I even really got to use the damn skill in the first pce!

  Thankfully I managed to level pretty soon after I got the skill, which enabled me to do my testing with Kale and quickly come to the realization that flying wasn’t going to be the sole way out of this. In the end we decided to save it for emergencies, like when the dregs were getting a bit too close, and decided to adopt a new strategy, which I quietly dubbed the ‘Arissa convoy’. It’s nothing exciting, really... All it is is me leaving my wellbeing to Kale while he carried me and I focused on becoming a dreg killing machine. He handled the mobility, and I handled the killing. In a way, I was finally fulfilling the ‘if I had infinite time’ kill pn from before, although it wasn’t nearly as clean as I’m making it out to be, considering we didn’t really have infinite time or anything. Killing the dregs in front meant that I’d thinned out the competition a bit, and there were plenty of times that the dregs ended up suddenly catching up to us a lot quicker than usual because of it. There were also plenty of times where things got messy and the dregs got a little too close, or the trees let up a bit too much and we started getting absolutely bombarded, and I had to pump a looooot of energy into shielding, curing, and using [Rejuvenate] on Kale to get us out of there. And whenever that happened, it basically screwed me over for getting any free energy to put towards killing dregs for a while.

  That’s how we've gotten to about a day and a half with only a little over 30 of the dregs that have been chasing us killed.

  Around 30 killed out of the 70ish that we started with is almost half of them dead, so I’d love to be all thrilled and say we’re making progress, but we haven’t slept and we’ve been running without a bit of rest. Our bodies are tired beyond belief at this point. If I weren’t able to heal us up, we would have already easily crashed by now from the strain of it all. It’s only a matter of time until we can’t keep this up anymore.

  -Which is why it feels like a gift from the Goddess that we found this pce!

  Heck, I don’t care who it’s a gift from, I’d take it no matter what at this point!

  See, while we were running around, we found a dipidated vilge. It was already completely screwed, like a rge horde of something had already run through it and killed everyone. Maybe it was even one of the towns that I’d been told the dregs had demolished before they came to mine. Maybe I was just leading the cause of this town’s ruin right back to it. To tell the truth, I didn’t really care too much about it at the time, though, since it just meant that the wreckage might slow the dregs down a bit. Honestly, I was pnning to just have Kale fly right past it and not give it too much more thought.

  But then something called to me.

  Weirdly enough there was an area of the town that looked oddly pristine. The only thing there was an old but beautiful stone shrine about the size of a two story house, but for some reason there was absolutely nothing out of pce. Nothing had been touched, not a single brick had been broken… Only this one, holy-looking pce had been spared. And when I told Kale to nd there and went inside, I somehow instinctively understood why.

  No, I’m lying, it wasn’t instincts at all; I actually had a notification pop up that told me about it.

  {You've entered a zone affected by [Consecration]!}

  Yup, must be that skill that’s keeping this pce safe. I could even see the dregs that had been following us being stopped by some kind of shining force field when they tried to follow us in, so it must work exactly how I expected it to. It’s crazy that someone was powerful enough to set up a skill like this for this long, though. It must be a priest to use such holy-sounding magic, but I don’t think I remember ever hearing about a regur person being able to use such a high tiered skill like this…

  I asked Kale to check with his magic, but he wasn’t able to find anyone in the vicinity. This town is well and truly dead for sure, it seems. So then who’s the one keeping up this [Consecration]? They should have been safe from the dregs if they had this on their side, right?

  …Well, I guess now’s not the time to worry about that. Should I maybe start killing some of these dregs off since they can’t touch us? Or maybe it’s better for Kale and I to get some sleep in while we can. Who knows when this safe zone might end, considering the person who cast it isn’t here. We should take advantage of it while we still can!

  …But maybe it’s better if we did it in shifts, huh?

  Nobody wants to wake up to getting killed by giant bubbling monsters, now do they?

  ~~~

  If we weren’t absolutely exhausted from everything then it might have been hard to fall asleep, what with all the noisy dregs outside. By the time we were done sleeping, the pce was practically crawling with the things. It was like a horror movie watching over 40 of them all piling up against the invisible wall, trying to find a spot that would let them in. Considering Kale and I each took 4 hour long sleep and lookout shifts, it was amazing that a full 8 hours had passed without the [Consecration] running out. I’m sure it must have been a super costly skill for how crazy good it was. Heck, even I, with my insane amounts of energy, wouldn’t be able to keep something up for this many hours, I’m sure.

  Which must mean it’s not a person, but an object that’s causing this.

  …If that’s the case, I think I might’ve heard about this kind of thing before.

  “Kale, tell me if you see anything that looks particurly holy, okay?”

  “...Are you perhaps looking for a previous Saintess’s relic, Saintess?”

  “Huh?!”

  What the heck?! How did Kale know what I was thinking? Or was it maybe an obvious thing to think, and I’m an idiot for realizing it so te…?

  Eh, I wasn’t born here, their common sense means absolutely nothing to me.

  I’m new here, so it’s not bad if I didn’t think of it right away!

  “Um… Yes, yes I am.”

  “I thought that might be the case as well; I can sense a divine energy simir to yours coming from this pce.”

  Yup, that’s definitely gotta be a Saintess relic then! What else in the world could have my exact energy and create such amazing phenomena?

  “Do you know vaguely where it might be in here?”

  “...No… I’m sorry, Saintess. You would be much better at finding the energy than I would.”

  He says that, but so far that hasn’t really proven to be the case, has it…? Oh, but I guess I did feel this pce calling out to me, didn’t I? Is it maybe some kind of ‘A Saintess recognizes another Saintess!’ sort of mystical magical deal? I don’t know, I never really tried to feel for any energies before, but maybe Kale has a point. Maybe I should give this a better try before I just give up on it!

  Let’s see… Energies, energies… Do I feel any energies? Maybe if I concentrate? Meditate? Close my eyes? What was it that it felt like when I thought I was being called to? How exactly did that feeling feel to me?

  It was…

  It was kind of like…

  -Sister.-

  Yeah, I think it was a bit simir to-

  -This way, sister.-

  Mhmm, that’s it. If I just follow this call, then-

  -Come find me, sister.-

  Yes yes, I’m coming, just keep calling out for me please!

  “Saintess!”

  “Oop-!”

  Kale’s thick, feathery arm yanked me back from where I’d been wandering off to with my eyes closed. It wasn’t until I opened them in surprise that I noticed the clear-looking spring that I’d been about to fall into. There’d been several of them id out in this shrine, and Kale and I had drunk from one of them while we’d been resting here after I’d used [Cleanse] on it. But this particur spring was much bigger, and the decorations around it were far more intricate.

  And there, in the center of the shallow water, I could see a small, beautiful, glittering gss box sitting there, just waiting to be picked up.