Isagi was completely stunned when he heard about it.
But this was, in fact, exactly what Cecil, Asfi, and Airmid had been doing all along.
It wasn't even in the planning stages anymore — they had already started.
Goddess Aphrodite had not only handed over the right to use the Holy Grail, but had even occasionally come by in person to lend a hand, using divine charm to help move things along. (Said beautiful goddess: "Heyy~☆")
"Well, it couldn't be helped..."
After all, Yuufi was simply too dim.
According to Goddess Astrea, they could wait until the little Spirit grew up a bit more before proceeding — but this girl was already several hundred years old, and she was still this much of an airhead. How much longer were they supposed to wait?!
Gods clearly had a very "abnormal" sense of time.
And so, Cecil and the others had naturally begun doing things their own way.
"The primary purpose is educational."
As for the relationship between a Spirit and a [Hero] — given how ancient the subject was, everything could only be verified through books that had been passed down over the ages.
But most of those were heroic epics or assimilation tales that had been heavily "artistically embellished," which made them feel thoroughly unconvincing.
And when they asked the gods, they got nothing but thoroughly vague answers.
Things like "trust," and "bonds," and "holding nothing back — becoming the most important existence in each other's lives."
The more they said, the stranger it got!!
And that, naturally, had ignited Cecil and Asfi's intense "curiosity," and they had found themselves unable to resist launching a proper investigation.
As for how Airmid had gotten swept up in it all — well, that was because Isagi had previously asked her to join the project to create a "puppet," hadn't he.
The idea at the time had been that perhaps they could extract Alfia's soul from the Dungeon and transplant it into a new puppet in order to "resurrect" her.
Naturally, in the course of all that, Airmid had ended up having a great deal of "exchanges" with Cecil and Asfi — and somewhere along the way, she'd stumbled onto what they were doing and found herself muddled into joining before she knew it.
Though for the most part, the young woman simply stood to the side and watched.
She was purely curious.
After all, the story of [Spirits and Heroes] was a legend that the young woman had grown up hearing since she was small.
And now, the reason Cecil and Asfi had called Isagi over was, of course, because their "research" had produced results.
"Isagi, come here a moment."
"Ah..."
Following the sound of Miss Asfi's voice, Isagi walked up to the workbench — and there, he saw Yuufi's dopey little face tilt upward as she looked his way with those chubby, pudgy cheeks of hers.
She'd been hypnotized.
Those slightly vacant eyes of hers were all too familiar to Isagi.
And as Asfi leaned in to whisper something in her ear, Yuufi promptly raised one small hand and made a little pinching gesture in his direction.
Wind.
It began to flow.
The woman's laboratory was actually rather stuffy — she didn't much like opening the windows, as a rule.
Apparently, it was because she couldn't stand her own god, Hermes, constantly crawling in through the window without warning.
And now it was winter on top of that, with the charcoal burning away in the fireplace nearby, draping the entire room in a heavy, drowsy warmth.
Under such conditions.
Isagi quickly noticed that a faint thread of wind was coiling around him — not urgent, not pressing, but flowing steadily and gently, like a small stream.
"Try it."
Asfi tossed him one of the daggers she carried on her person.
And in the instant he caught it —
— the green wind wrapped around the blade in the blink of an eye, like silk spinning into a cocoon. When the wisps of wind finally dispersed, what remained was a breathtakingly beautiful short blade of deep green.
Miss Asfi's dagger had become something completely different from what it had been before.
Isagi could feel a certain kind of power emanating from within the weapon — a power very similar to the "wind" that Ais used.
It was a flowing existence.
Or perhaps more precisely — it was simply adhering to the dagger, and could change and shift at virtually any moment.
And that, in practice, was exactly the case.
Asfi quickly produced another dagger and drove it at her own arm.
Yet what happened was —
— as the gentle wind stirred, Isagi quickly noticed that in the very instant the woman's dagger was about to fall, an invisible breeze transformed into a beautiful vambrace and blocked the strike outright.
"Wind is fluid. This may be Yuufi's own ability, or it may simply be the ability of a Wind Spirit — but what we have confirmed through testing so far is that she is capable, at any time and in any place, of granting different effects to different weapons and equipment —"
"So it's enchanting..."
"Enchanting?"
The new word seemed to strike Asfi as quite apt.
"Something like that, yes. And furthermore — it isn't limited to just you."
At that, Cecil leaned in from the side. The girl produced the great iron hammer she always carried — and the wind that had been coiling around Isagi instantly flowed over onto her weapon instead.
"Perhaps it's because she feels a particular closeness to Goddess Astrea — from what we've seen so far, Yuufi's wind can be used by every member of Astrea Familia."
"What about you, Miss Asfi?"
"No. Even with hypnosis, it doesn't work."
She shook her head.
The conclusion that the women's "research" had ultimately reached was this: Astrea Familia had gained a "team mascot."
Not bad at all.
Isagi thought as much — though he was curious about exactly how Asfi and Cecil had managed it, getting this airheaded little Spirit to be so obedient.
And then there was one other matter.
"Has there been any progress on the thing I asked you about before?"
"Mm."
Hermes Familia regularly took on all manner of strange commissions — and so, after returning from his last adventure, Isagi had issued them a request: to locate the "resurrected Alfia."
"What we can confirm at this point is that she's still in the city."
"Oh?"
"We've found several witnesses. It should become clearer before long — but if what you said is true, and Alfia really has been resurrected, then what is she planning to do by staying in the city?"
She couldn't possibly be thinking of going back to being an adventurer, could she?
"No idea..."
Isagi shook his head too. In truth, he hadn't even fully sorted out for himself why exactly he was looking for her.
Persuade her to join Astrea Familia?
Or perhaps...
Treat her as a powerful ally and drag her along for another expedition to fight the Black Dragon?
Isagi shook his head and decided — it was better to find her first, then figure out the rest.
—
The same night.
Following the faint traces of magical energy, Alfia tracked down the place where Lefiya and the other girls were "training" — out on the plains beyond the city walls.
The area lay close to the Beio Mountain Range and was almost entirely free of human traffic.
It made for a good training ground for mages — and Alfia also noticed, not far away, a mountain peak that appeared to have been completely erased by some kind of magic.
That was nothing particularly shocking to her.
She herself could do the same.
Among the adventurers of Zeus Familia and Hera Familia in her time, there had been many who could as well — but what genuinely surprised her was that today's adventurers, the current generation, were apparently capable of it too.
The juniors of the city were growing fast...
Well.
That was simply how adventurers were.
She herself had gone from receiving her Falna to becoming a Lv.7 adventurer in nothing more than a few years.
A little-known fact.
When Alfia slew the [Leviathan] — when she shattered the sovereign of the seas in a single blow — she was only seventeen years old.
The world was that mercilessly unequal.
Things that many people spent their entire lives unable to accomplish were, for her, effortlessly within reach.
That was precisely why [Heroes] were so immeasurably important.
The city had developed over a thousand years.
And yet it was not until the era of Alfia and her generation that the three Great Quests were finally completed — for exactly that reason.
And so the woman wanted to see for herself — the state of the juniors who had come after.
She had memories of fighting them in the Dungeon, but those were not clear enough.
Alfia sat in silence, perched high in the trees on a forested hillside, gazing out at the distant scene unfolding on the grassland below.
She watched the savage, surging bloodlust of the Amazon girl.
She watched Lefiya, who appeared to be attempting yet again to reshape her tower magic into some other form entirely.
And then — the golden wind coiling around Ais.
The [Sword Princess] seemed to have become something very, very different from before.
In truth, when it came to what lay before her eyes, Alfia could not make sense of it at all — she could not understand what had happened to Tiona and Lefiya.
It was a deeply unfamiliar feeling. As though she did not belong to this world.
And then her mind drifted back.
To the boy clad in that jet-black greatwolf armor.
[Intriguing.]
More than merely intriguing, even.
By rights, the very first thing Alfia should have done after her resurrection was to go and check on the child her younger sister had left behind.
And if possible — she would have lived out her days in obscurity from that point on, no longer as an adventurer, but as some ordinary farmwife tucked away in a forgotten corner of the world, fading quietly into death.
That was what she had wanted to do.
But for some reason —
Alfia gently closed her eyes. She seemed to recall a memory from a very long time ago — the moment when she, gravely wounded and a patient of the Familia, had been left in the city while the others set out, never making that journey to Dragon Valley...
____
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