The Ogre Strength Fairy and the Eldest 'Son'-Chapter 378 - One Lucky Fox, Two Nice New Women

The creature delicately extracted another nut and crunched it with obvious satisfaction. When Klaytei didn’t immediately chase it away - or swing that deadly cleaver, it relaxed further and began grooming its whiskers clean from the slivers left behind.

Something about its casual attitude made her smile, so she set the cleaver aside and cautiously extended her hand. The fox sniffed her fingers briefly before tilting forward and allowing a gentle pat to its head. It wasn’t the same kind of weirdly gentle strokes as the much-too-strong cultivator used, but it wasn’t unpleasant.

"Well, you certainly have good taste. Those nuts cost her almost as much as she makes from one of those brooches."

The fox’s tail swished once as if acknowledging the compliment... and the wealth she meant. Then it stood and trotted purposefully toward the kitchen door, pausing to look back at her expectantly. It had places to be and plans to follow.

"Oh, so now you want me to open that for you to be on your way? Bold little creature, aren’t you? Well, you can wait just a while longer."

Oddly charmed by the fox’s confidence, she found herself smiling for a few moments as she returned the cleaver to its place. And truth be told, she was curious about what had brought such an unusual visitor to the estate at *precisely* this time. Helping her uncover one piece of strange evidence already.

’Those bags were not here when I left, do not belong here, and I was most certainly the last one to lock everything up before the final train left.’

With a dangerous gleam in her eye at being implicated by physical evidence, she finished preparing the tea service. Arranging two delicate cups all but touching each other... and adding a small plate of honey cakes as a treat she’d pulled from another hidden cache - still expensive, but much less than the nuts.

"I can repay her for their value, at least. It always makes me feel better when I’m treating the person I like with my own money."

The fox waited patiently by the door. Occasionally cleaning its paws... for the first time since it had become a vessel for a greater purpose. It had traveled quite far at quite an unforgiving pace.

After it managed to hop on one train and stow away in a space too small to even chew the itch on its hindquarters, it ran for another day and a half before scaling up things a fox was not really meant to.

To get inside a kitchen he wasn’t ’supposed’ to be in and open a latch that it shouldn’t have been patient enough to handle. And finally sneaking in to gorge itself on the food the avatar had suggested was waiting for it!

Elua knew that the biggest motivators for any creature was a purpose. Especially one that satisfied one of the primal instincts, like food. The promise of amazing food could move intelligent creatures to great lengths at hasty speeds.

"Come along then, I suppose. But you’re staying outside the study. I won’t have you disturbing our work."

---

"I brought you tea and a snack."

Klaytei entered the study carrying the service tray, a bright smile on her face as the fox failed to listen and let itself be visible in the doorway behind her. It had smelled something good in here and wanted to get a glance. As it thought, there was another soft female in the household.

But it didn’t think this cultivator was as strong and scary as the mortal that told it not to come inside, so it remained where it was. Being ’looked at’ did provide it a surprisingly interesting experience, now with the spiritual avatar helping filter the sensation even better. It could almost tell when something only wanted to pet it now!

Looking up from the documents she’d been reviewing, Dima’s expression took on surprise as she saw the creature. She pointed to the doorway and blinked a few times before the servant also turned back to see.

"Is that...?"

"A very persistent fox I decided was safer to befriend rather than chase it around the house with a cleaver."

She set the tea service on a clear corner of the desk, noting how Dima’s eyes quickly followed her movements with great attention. Enough to make her nervous and afraid she would blush - was she more important than the snacks?

"Cleaver...?"

"Well, I should finish checking the house properly. I wanted to get you this tea first, but there might be other... irregularities to investigate."

After evading an answer to that clarification, the fox made a soft yip sound from the doorway. Klaytei glanced over to find it watching her with those intelligent eyes. Again, she was struck by the sense of familiarity to her employer, but shook her head.

"Klaytei..."

"Hmm?"

The woman looked back over instantly on hearing her name spoken by the person she was interested in and Dima found herself caught by the extremely *direct* attention of those eyes. For a moment, she forgot what she’d intended to say.

A moment, distracted by the realization that she enjoyed being the focus of such an intelligent and capable person’s full consideration. A thought that made what she was about to say seem like a bad choice.

"Nothing. I’ll be here if you need me to help. You can keep looking."

As she smiled with a nod and left, Dima wondered again what she was doing here. Searching for evidence of a large conspiracy against a single family wasn’t her job. There was not even a guarantee it would affect her position as branch manager in the first place.

’But it would affect her...’

And that was the reason she stayed, she realized. She was trying to understand what it would take... to earn the kind of loyalty Klaytei showed so effortlessly. To someone who wasn’t even there to see it.

"I can probably get them to hire her full time, with all she’s done in the branch. She’d be fine, even if... this family is ruined. Financially."

Out in the corridors, the fox didn’t wander aimlessly or sniff around for more hidden treat locations as Klaytei had expected. Instead, it trotted through the corridors with a clear goal in mind and paused only to ensure she followed. Up the main staircase, through the family wing, until it stopped before Elua’s bedroom.

The creature sat primly and looked up at her expectantly, tail swishing as if feeling haste to go inside.

’Like it’s rushing me to open it.’

"You want to go in there? That’s... quite presumptuous for a wild animal. Though I suppose you clearly aren’t so wild, are you?"

The door opened with a soft click as she used her key and the fox immediately padded inside with the confidence of someone who belonged there. It headed directly toward the ornate chest where wedding gifts had been carefully stored and waited once more.

"How do you possibly know about this?"

The personal servant had followed, watching in amazement as the fox stood on its hind legs and pawed at the chest’s decorative latch. The mechanism was complex - a sigil method modified by the heiress herself that required a specific sequence of presses that only family members should know.

And would never be guessed by most people because it needed two more than the standard kind. Yet the creature seemed to understand exactly what it wanted. Striking the right sequence with its pairs of paws... but too improperly timed on the chest to have an effect.

"All right, all right. Let me help before you hurt yourself trying."

She said it in seriousness, as the sigil gave a pretty nasty jolt on the third failure - and that was to a human sized target. Her little caretaking responsibility had some dangerous ideas sometimes. Klaytei opent the chest and the fox immediately hopped inside and moved toward a specific item.

The triangular metal frame with its clear quartz disc inset. The Echo Coin found by the Whispering Winds Guild. Picking it up delicately in its teeth, it hopped back out then trotted over to the portrait of Qatrand that hung near the window.

It set the coin down and pawed at the painted figure, looking back at Klaytei with those unsettlingly intelligent amber eyes. Making its goal clear to the person that helped it. The avatar made it clear that if the woman thought it was stealing it, people may be sent after the fox.

"You want... to take this to him. To the young master."

The fox yipped once again - a sharp sound that somehow conveyed its agreement and its urgency. Klaytei sank onto the edge of the bed, staring at the creature she was essentially having a conversation with. It felt well beyond the birds, now.

"You’re... someone sent you. Someone who cares about what happens to this family."

She thought of how the young miss had always been... more than she appeared. Watching the four new birds at the competition grounds go from new acquisition to flying not just behind the original but on their own routes and purposes had made it clear the girl had an affinity for animals.

’This must be a new acquisition of hers. And she somehow taught it all of this. Of course! She must know something is going on to frame the family as well. But how did she know anyone would be here now?’

Whatever sort of social genius that was responsible, the servant was sure it was over her head. Elua er Goltbred simply did not conform to the nice patterns of the romance novels that the woman spent most of her time reading.

Not exactly, anyway - though Klaytei thought that what she and Qatrand er Yecine had was quite beautiful in its own way. No matter how pretty faced the Yecine heir was... the fact that she thought they had male traits lessened how *shining* the wedded pair was to her.

’I guess now that I know my preference is for a woman, real life males have lost their appeal. Or maybe I’m just realizing they never had any for me. Men on the page are just imaginative fiction.’

Though she was looking forward to someday seeing the young miss... have her own little miss or little master!

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