Scars (2)
Seven days had passed since the girl first regained consciousness.
Seven days had been enough time to take a few cautious steps closer to her, but it was far too brief to heal the deep wounds she carried.
On the first day, she awoke.
Faced with a girl having a violent panic attack at the mere sight of me, all I could do was change out of my uniform and tap gently on her closed door. It was my own clumsy attempt at initiating a conversation.
She did not open the door that day. There was no answer, not even the faintest response.
All I could glean through the thick wood was the sound of ragged, frantic breathing from across the room and the subtle rustle of a small body trembling uncontrollably. The sun set, the moon rose, and dawn broke once more, yet she remained huddled in the corner of the bed, her wide eyes locked onto the door. As if sleep were a luxury she could not afford, she stayed perpetually vigilant, never taking her focus off the presence lingering just beyond the threshold.
In the end, the only choice left to me was to confirm she was safe using my sensory perception, then sit down and keep watch outside her door.
On the second day, she still did not sleep.
Even as the morning sun climbed into the sky and daylight flooded the world, she lay rigid in bed, staring unblinkingly at the door. I quickly wrapped up my daily chore of clearing Gates and knocked softly several times, but the only answer was unbroken silence. When the sun reached its zenith and poured golden warmth through the window, she shrank back, hiding herself in the shadows of the room's darkest corner. Hours trickled by until the sun sank below the horizon, but she remained in the exact same spot, frozen in the exact same posture, watching for any sign of a threat.
On the third day, she continued to watch the door.
A neat pile of books grew beside me in the hallway, and one by one, those volumes were read and set aside, yet her vigil never wavered. Seeing her maintain the exact same posture for two full days—more than fifty continuous hours—stirred a fleeting sense of awe within me.
That awe, however, did not last long. In its place came a heavy, aching question.
What kind of life had she lived, what horrors had she endured, to react like this? It could not be written off as simple PTSD or the routine abuse of a bioroid. The trauma etched into this girl was far more severe than that of any combat-fatigued survivor I had ever encountered.
Yet aside from realizing just how deep her scars ran, there was nothing I could do. To approach someone wounded that profoundly and forcefully offer treatment would feel no different than threatening to tear their injuries wide open.
So, just as I had over the previous two days, I spent the third day letting the hours slip by on the floor outside her locked room. The only thing different this time was a fleeting thought that crossed my mind:
…Should I bring her something to eat?
I wondered if she might be starving. At the time, it felt like a foolish, trivial concern.
On the fourth day, she collapsed.
What I had dismissed as a foolish thought the day before had struck straight to the heart of the matter.
It was entirely unexpected, arriving without the slightest warning. Around midday, returning to the hideout after sweeping the local Gates, I sensed a subtle shift in the air. Call it intuition, or perhaps a sixth sense. Unsure what was wrong, I hurriedly spread my senses through the manor, only to discover her lying motionless across the bed.
At first, I felt a brief surge of relief, assuming she had finally given in to exhaustion and fallen asleep. But within seconds, I realized she was not resting. She had lost consciousness entirely.
I kicked the door open without hesitation. A quick examination revealed the cause behind her sudden collapse: severe malnutrition and acute anemia. Stripped of all nutrients and biological energy, her physical vessel had simply shut down.
It was utterly baffling. Fainting from hunger? She was supposed to be a Hero. Even after plummeting from the upper atmosphere ten days prior, her physical condition had been pristine, cradled and shielded by cosmic Causality Correction. To think an entity like that had passed out from an empty stomach seemed completely absurd.
There was no time to sit around complaining about the ridiculousness of it all. Starting that evening, I began scouring ruins across the continent, searching for usable intravenous fluids.
On the fifth day, she did not wake.
Procuring IV bags was the easy part. The real problem was that my medical knowledge extended no further than battlefield emergency aid for espers. After devouring stacks of medical textbooks salvaged from abandoned libraries, I spent nearly an entire day carefully setting up an IV line with fluid that had undoubtedly expired decades ago. Naturally, there was no need to mention the trial-and-error tests I had run on my own immortal body beforehand to make sure it was not lethal.
Having done everything in my power to stabilize her, I pulled up a chair and finally let myself sleep beside her bed. Even though my body no longer required rest, the sheer exhaustion of that day was something I could not resist.
On the sixth day, she woke up.
Whether the saline had worked its magic or her dormant regenerative abilities had kicked back in, she opened her eyes around noon. Naturally, I wore neither a military uniform nor a white lab coat. I had thrown on a casual blue hoodie, judging that something soft and ordinary would be least likely to trigger her trauma.
"……"
She said nothing upon waking. But unlike that first day, there was no violent convulsion, no desperate scramble to get away. She simply sat quietly atop the mattress, watching me with wide, cautious eyes. Something about that quiet stare made me feel as if she were waiting for me to say something, so I took a breath and began to gently explain the situation.
I told her how she had fallen from the sky, how she had remained unconscious for days afterward, and that I had only acted to save her life. I promised her that I had no intention of harming her or using her.
I spoke with utter sincerity. Though, to be fair, the part about having "no intention of using her" pricked my conscience just a tiny bit.
She showed no reaction after hearing the entire explanation. She merely lowered her head and retreated into silence, looking as though she were slowly turning every single word over in her mind. After watching her for a few quiet moments, I slipped out of the room, closing the door behind me.
On the seventh day, she opened the door.
And not just the wooden barrier between us.
As the morning sun crested the horizon, I tapped softly against the door frame. I had not expected an answer, but the result caught me completely off guard.
"…Please, come in."
A faint voice drifted through the wood, gently fracturing the morning silence.
Having received her permission, I turned the handle and stepped inside. The moment the door swung open and her voice reached me, my eyes fell upon an unexpected sight. Sitting timidly on the edge of the mattress, she had wrapped the bedsheet tightly around her entire body, leaving only her pure white hair and pale face poking out from the bundle.
In that fleeting second, an inappropriate thought crossed my mind.
She’s actually pretty cute.
A bundled little cocoon.
Her constitution is far weaker than I expected.
That was my immediate thought as I watched the white-haired Hero drift back to sleep after only exchanging a handful of words. Of course, one had to consider that this had been our very first actual conversation. Being stranded in an unfamiliar place and speaking to a complete stranger was bound to send anyone's stress and anxiety spiking to its limit.
Even so, her stamina was abnormally fragile—especially for a Hero who had closed lethal, catastrophic injuries overnight. Granted, there was always the possibility that her regenerative reserves had been entirely spent, or that her healing drew directly on her physical stamina. Most esper healers I had known back in the day operated on similar principles; converting stored energy and vitality into bursts of rapid cellular regeneration was why healing espers were notorious gluttons during downtime.
Looking at her frail build, it was glaringly obvious she had not consumed sufficient calories in a very long time. Collapsing into near-total exhaustion after burning through what little energy she had to repair herself made a certain kind of sense.
The real issue, however, lay elsewhere.
"Why on earth did her Causality Correction drop?"
While she was unconscious, she had clearly possessed Stage 3 Causality Correction, rendering her completely immune to physical harm or outside interference. Yet now, that divine protection had vanished. Without that absolute defense, an ordinary projectile could bruise and pierce her skin. At this rate, I could not even tell if she retained Stage 1 protection.
I know Causality Correction naturally degrades over time, but…
According to what I had read on the Demon Lord Gallery, a Hero’s correction slowly waning as they acclimated to the world was standard procedure. But for it to plummet two or three entire tiers in the span of a few days? In all the posts I had browsed, I had never seen anyone mention a drop that steep. I had no idea what to make of it.
"When in doubt, check the board."
Rather than racking my brain alone, it was vastly more productive to sift through the archives or drop a question in the gallery.
A shelter, plaza, and community of the demon lords, by the demon lords, for the demon lords.
Welcome to the Demon Lord Gallery.
Because my entire focus had been consumed by the girl over the past week, I had not opened the gallery once. Strangely enough, I had not felt the slightest urge to browse it. Thanks to that, I had spent the time reading through various books and absorbing useful medical knowledge, so perhaps it had been for the best.
At any rate, logging back into the forum after a week revealed a remarkably ordinary front page. The thread titles on page one were the usual mundane chatter, suggesting that no multiversal catastrophes had broken out while I was away. If anything had changed, it was that the repulsive shock images seemed to have drastically decreased. Glancing briefly at the Recommended Board, the page looked surprisingly clean.
"Looks like the new deputy managers are actually doing their jobs."
Muttering a rare compliment for the moderation team, I posted a thread on the Question Board and fired off private messages to a few reliable fixed nicknames. Given the length and specificity of my queries, I would likely have to wait a while before getting any detailed answers.
Since I had no intention of lurking for hours, I closed the interface without lingering.
The moment the transparent screen dissolved and my vision cleared, I realized something I had completely missed while absorbed in the forum.
"……"
The girl, whom I had assumed was fast asleep, was awake. Peeking out from beneath the blankets, she was staring blankly straight at me.
"……"
How long had she been watching?
A wave of cold dread washed over my mind. If she had just opened her eyes, it was fine. But if she had woken up in the middle of my browsing session, I had a massive problem. To someone on the outside, I would have looked like an utter lunatic, chuckling to myself while frantically tapping and swiping at empty air.
The Demon Lord Gallery was completely invisible and inaudible to anyone who was not an acknowledged Demon Lord. From her perspective, my behavior would have been indistinguishable from madness.
Unaware of the cold sweat forming on the back of my neck, she maintained her impassive silence, her wide eyes locked onto mine for what felt like an eternity.
"…I just woke up."
Her quiet voice shattered the silence, bringing an enormous wave of relief crashing through my chest.
"Are you feeling uncomfortable anywhere?"
Because I had not yet settled on a comfortable way to speak to her, relying on an awkward mix of formal and casual speech felt unnatural on my tongue. Even so, it was leagues better than sitting through that suffocating, paralyzing silence.
"…No."
Perhaps her guard had lowered somewhat; unlike the days before, her voice no longer held that fragile, terrified tremor.
"…My thoughts are in order now. That is why I woke up. There is something I need to tell you."
"Pardon?"
"I thought about it while I rested, and I have finished sorting through it. I think… I can answer what you asked me earlier."
Her slightly odd phrasing about thinking while she slept barely registered. My mind seized entirely on the second half of her statement: that she could answer what I had asked. What had I asked her before she drifted off? Her origin? Her past? I had thrown out several clumsy questions trying to make sense of her identity.
Just as I was racking my brain to recall the possibilities, her lips parted once more.
"I would like to tell you the story of my life, if that is all right with you."
What spilled from her quiet lips was nothing less than the answer to every question I had ever held.