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I had a feeling, something between a paranoia and a sixth sense, that Naread was going to backstab me at the first opportunity. Even if he wasn\'t, I didn\'t plan on taking chances. Thankfully, Naread\'s slow speed of traversing the mountains gave me plenty of time to prepare for everything.

\'Pest, tell me, can you use magic to speak aloud like Marianna and Naread did?\'

\'Sure. It\'s one of the simplest spells.\'

\'Can you make the sound come not from me, but from somewhere else, then?\'

\'Oh, that\'s trickier—but I can it now, yes. Even while keeping the poison delaying spell on you. You didn\'t spend EXP on me for nothing, Master. Keep spending it, yeah! And I learnt some tricks from the books Bishop brought, so if you find any more…\'

\'Yes, yes, yes.\' I rolled my eyes.. \'I had enough annoying curses for today. Keep it down with the blatant desire to suck on more EXP, or I will ban the word from your lexicon. I will assume invisibility is beyond you "for now", yes?\'

\'It is. But, in just, say, a few more days, I will level up my abilities enough.\' Pest sighed. \'But it won\'t give me anything to deal with your poison.\'

\'And isn\'t that unfortunate… Alright, Pest, when I give you a command, I want you to do this…\'

⠀⠀

Naread appeared near the place I picked as my temporary camp almost half a day later, when the sun fully set and the sky turned dark. When I stepped out of my cover to greet him, he appeared to be one longer set of legs away from jumping with excitement and anticipation.

"Are you ready, Voren?" he asked. "The invisibility spell will last for half an hour, but it\'s fragile. If you bump into anything at speed, it will break. And it will only make you invisible, not unscentable or unheardable. You will have to be careful, sneaky as a snake, sleazy as a slime—convenient to you, since you already seem to be quite slimy." Naread leaned forward, as if to tap me with one of his legs, but I jerked away.

"I know how to be silent. Just cast your spell."

"Of course… Oh, I almost forgot. You didn\'t tell Marianna anything only the two of you would know, didn\'t you? If you did, tell me, in case she asks. Just in case! I doubt you did. You knew her for how long? And she already proved herself to be a bitch. I\'m sure you didn\'t want to share any secrets with her."

"That\'s right, I didn\'t. Marianna knows nothing about me, so you\'ll be fine as long as you don\'t talk so much." I nodded impatiently. "Is that all?"

"Yes. Now, behold! You didn\'t get to that level of magic yet, did you? I\'m sure you will too, soon. These mountains are a prime place for hunting—so many thick monsters that you can drain for months on end before switching them, and so few adventurers to be an annoyance. I actually think about making a few new curses in a couple of months, when I will have some spare EXP. And Marianna, she regularly spawns them with migrating dragons. You know, greens, yellows, and so on." Distracted by Naread\'s chatter, I only noticed him finishing a spell when he proudly exclaimed, "Ta-da!"

I looked at my hands—or the place where I could feel my hands be—and saw only snow below. There wasn\'t even any wobbling in the air, just clear space. Experiment for, I closed my eyes and looked with blind sense. In it, my body was still clearly visible. I also was still leaving footprints in the snow.

To avoid the latter, I flew up and hovered half a meter above the ground.

"Alright, I will put a few more spells on myself and go forward. Don\'t go in ahead of me, Voren! Marianna will spot you. Go after, and while I talk with her, sneak into the treasury. It should be right behind her fat lizard ass."

I waited for Naread to finish the magic. As someone who didn\'t have draining curses\' innate talents in sensing it, I could only tell that he was done because Naread said so.

"Good luck!" he wished to me. "Oh, this is going to be good. Maybe she will get so angry, she will decide to get off this mountain for good, and then I will be free from her tyranny…"

Having said that, Naread crawled into Marianna\'s cave. I followed, with the quiet sound of my wings slowly flapping to keep me in the air completely hidden by the sound of dozens of chitinous legs tapping on the stone floor.

Marianna didn\'t appear to move from the spot where I first saw her at all, but as soon as Naread crossed the border of her lair, her lazy demeanour from before changed at once. In a flash, she stood up on all fours, her blazing eyes piercing the darkness and staring at the centipede.

"Naread! How dare you to appear before me? Do you think that our kinship makes you safe to do whatever you want?" She was this close to blowing smoke out of her nostrils and ears. "I told you to not set foot here, and I told you what will happen to you if you do!"

"Naread? I\'m Voren, you liar! You set me up!" Naread said in a perfect copy of my voice. "You forced me to pit against another draining curse. I could\'ve died, you conniving bitch!"

After hearing this, Marianna immediately relaxed her posture, though she didn\'t lie back down. Instead, she laughed. "Oh, but look how it worked out. You won! Isn\'t that great? And I didn\'t lie to you… I just didn\'t tell you about him."

While she spoke, a tip of Naread\'s tail was making subtle, but insistent flicks towards the passage that opened to my sight when Marianna stood up. A signal for me to move and a direction.