The Half-Elf's Tears
The West Continent really was a strange place.
She woke the next morning, just as the exhausted horses had fully recovered their strength and were whinnying cheerfully again.
"Mmm..."
"Are you awake?"
I had stayed by her side the whole time, just in case, and at last her eyes fluttered open. She blinked those round eyes over and over, clearly unable to make sense of her surroundings.
Well, of course she couldn't. She had collapsed from sheer exhaustion in the middle of the desert, only to open her eyes and find herself indoors beneath a ceiling.
"Don't worry. You're inside the carriage."
"A carriage... What on earth happened to me..."
"You were lying unconscious in the middle of the desert. Do you not remember?"
"...No. I remember everything."
Her expression was complicated—a bitter little smile that said she had endured something painful, yet understood it all too well. Something must have happened. Hella and Helena had been tangled in their own headaches, after all. Noble houses were always like that. I knew it well enough; I had grown up in one myself.
"More importantly, does anything hurt?"
"No... I'm fine. Thank you for saving me..."
Still sitting, she bowed her head deeply toward me. I wanted to reach out and stroke her hair, but the thought that she might be someone of high rank kept my hand still. I had patted Helena's head without a second thought. What was different this time?
Anyway, that wasn't what mattered right now.
"Hehe, receiving thanks always makes me happy~ ♬"
When someone ought to thank you and doesn't, it makes me furious! Receiving proper gratitude—something that seemed far from guaranteed on the Central Continent—brought a smile to my face all by itself.
Even though she had just said nothing hurt, she began examining her own body. After checking here and there, she suddenly started patting herself down as if she had lost something.
"Did you lose something? I put your clothes away safely, so don't worry."
"No... I don't care about the clothes... but the wounds... they're all gone..."
Come to think of it, her body had been covered in an unusually large number of injuries. I still didn't know what had caused them.
"I made some medicine yesterday and gave it to you. Looks like it worked better than I expected. I only just realized it myself."
"Medicine..."
The potion I had worked so hard on yesterday was still left. I had boiled serpent dragon blood and scales together with medicinal herbs, and the effect was nothing short of amazing. I should try it myself the next time I got hurt.
More importantly, it was about time to prepare breakfast. On a carriage journey we always ate right before setting out and prepared lunch in advance, since there was no time to stop at midday. We would race from morning until evening without a break, then stop for dinner and rest once night fell.
"Erna~ Are the soup ingredients ready?"
"Yes. I've washed and prepared everything."
Perfect. All that was left was to brown the roux and simmer the soup.
"Then let's get started. Um... may I ask your name...?"
"M-me? It's Lumine..."
"Lumine, is it? What a pretty name."
Probably taken from "luminescence." Not rare, but not common either—just the right sort of name.
"Thank you..."
"Is there anything you can't eat, Lumine?"
"Ah... no."
"Then I'm making soup right now, so eat with us. You can't say no, all right?"
Of course that wouldn't happen. Time to get the soup going~
The soup bubbled merrily. I ladled it into bowls set beside me and arranged them on trays, then pulled steaming-hot bread from my Inventory. I had bought a huge batch of this delicious bread in Free Port City. Dipping it into the soup made it taste even better—the soft, moist crumb reached its absolute peak in perfect harmony with the broth.
"If you need more, just say so~ There's plenty~"
"Big Sis, thank you for the meal."
"Lady Esilly, thank you for the meal again today."
"Come on, you don't have to thank me every time~"
Enge and Erna always offered their thanks before eating. It was a little embarrassing, honestly!
"Thank you for the meal..."
Last of all, Lumine gave her thanks, then carefully scooped up a spoonful of soup and brought it to her lips. Naturally, the taste of my soup made her eyes fly wide open. My soup was different from the ground up. I didn't just boil plain water—I used the piping-hot chicken stock I had bought in bulk in Free Port City. That was the beauty of the Inventory: delicious food anytime, anywhere.
"It's... really delicious..."
"Right? It's good, isn't it? Ehehe... wait... huh...?"
Apparently it had been a little too good. Tears suddenly began to drip from her eyes. At first they only fell one by one, but as the moments passed the drops grew heavier, until at last she was weeping in earnest.
W-was it really that tasty? She could have as much as she wanted—there was no need to cry...
How long did she cry? Only after a whole pile of tissues Erna had handed her had accumulated did her tears finally stop. Enge even wiped the tears that kept sliding down her cheeks. As a mother herself, she probably couldn't just sit still while a young girl sobbed so heartbrokenly.
"Are you all right? It wasn't because of my soup, was it?"
"I'm sorry... You even made soup for me, and all I did was cry..."
Lumine hung her head, clearly mortified at having cried while eating. But she didn't need to worry. The only person here who would tease someone for shedding tears over delicious food was me!!
"Not at all. There's plenty of soup!"
I told her not to worry, took her bowl, and refilled it. After all, hadn't I myself cried while eating delicious lobster and beef in Free Port City? I understood perfectly. Food eaten after enduring something harsh was truly precious.
After that we lingered over the meal for a long while. I pulled out extra ham and cheese as well, and we enjoyed an outrageously heavy breakfast. Soup needed bread, and bread needed ham and cheese. A meal without ham and cheese simply wasn't a meal.
"I'm so full..."
"Big Sis, you overate again today, didn't you?"
"N-no I didn't?"
I had only eaten seven pieces of bread. That was practically light eating, not overeating. A growing elf needed a proper amount of food. Calling this "a lot" was just wrong.
Ahem... Now that the meal was finished... rather than fretting over my so-called overeating, shouldn't I hear Lumine's story?
"Lumine, do you feel up to talking now?"
"I'm sure you have many questions... To Lady Esilly, Lady Enge, and Lady Erna, who saved me, I will tell you everything."
She nodded as if she had steeled herself. In her eyes lived a resolve I had never seen before, side by side with the same sorrow I had been watching all along.
"The truth is... I was a servant of the Lord Alliance's ruling house."
"Huh? A servant?"
"Yes. I served as the Chief Mage of the ruling house."
"You look rather young to be a Chief Mage..."
Enge voiced the doubt before I could. She was the type who couldn't stand leaving a question unanswered.
"I may not look it, but I'm a half-elf, so I'm actually quite old. I'm thirty-seven this year."
Lumine raised both hands to her ears and chanted a spell. I couldn't catch the exact words, but I thought I heard one ancient elven phrase that meant "release." Sure enough, the ordinary human ears she had worn until a moment ago transformed into slightly pointed elven ones.
"Lumine is... an elf?"
"Unlike you, Lady Esilly, I'm only half—a hybrid."
"Don't call yourself that... Please don't speak of yourself so harshly."
So even in this world half-elves weren't treated well. There was almost no real difference between pure elves and half-elves. If anything, half-elves born of human and elf were said to inherit the best of both and were far superior. She was certainly more outstanding than someone like me, who sat awkwardly between human and elf minds.
Yet for some reason Lumine began to shed tears again. What had I done wrong this time?
"Y-you're the first elf... who's ever said something like that to me... Lady Esilly..."
"Of course I would. Anyone who discriminates against half-elves is just an idiot."
"That's right. From a human's perspective as well, half-elves are no different from fellow humans."
Enge agreed with me! Or rather, she meant every word from the heart. I really was a sinful woman, making girls cry one after another...
"So then? Why was the Chief Mage of the ruling house collapsed in the desert? Couldn't you just use water magic or something?"
"...I had already been surviving on water magic alone... for two full weeks."
"T-two weeks?"
After that I listened carefully to her story. As Chief Mage of the ruling house she had handled all sorts of duties. This time she had been dispatched to the middle of the desert on a territorial matter. The people who went with her were colleagues... or rather, subordinates who simply shared the same workplace. They had never even spoken properly—only a purely professional relationship.
Lumine herself hadn't thought much of it, but her coworkers had apparently viewed her with open dislike. Why?
"Because I'm a half-elf... They said I only became Chief Mage because of my high mana..."
"Well, that's only natural..."
Elves possessed far greater mana than humans. Half-elves inherited that trait and had extremely high mana as well. Those colleagues had been jealous of something they had no right to envy—like resenting the moon hanging in the sky.
In any case, the moment Chief Mage Lumine arrived at their destination she fought monsters. Because her mana was the highest, she had poured out the strongest offensive magic first. She defeated the monsters just as her mana was about to hit rock bottom. With only a sliver left, she couldn't even hold onto consciousness and simply closed her eyes.
"No way..."
No party in the world should work like that. Even if one person had overwhelming firepower, the rest of the party couldn't just stand around watching. Magic had to be used together—push with maximum power while the healers restored stamina and mana so the barrage never stopped. From Lumine's account, that party had no healers at all; she had been casting alone the entire time.
"And when I came to... my colleagues were already gone..."
"They left you behind?"
"More accurately, they abandoned her."
Enge corrected my wording. Yes—they hadn't simply left her; they had abandoned her. Leaving a collapsed comrade in this scorching desert and bolting was nothing less than abandonment. And her mana hadn't even recovered properly. That was as good as telling her to die... no, it was murder itself.
"I just kept walking. Whenever my mana recovered a little I made water with magic, drank a bit... walked... drank... and repeated it."
But drinking water alone couldn't restore mana. She clung to life for a week somehow, yet in the end her mana refused to recover even a fraction. That was when Lumine collapsed—and Erna found her.
"I could thank all of you a hundred times and it still wouldn't be enough."
She bowed her head deeply toward us. Beside her, Erna shook her head vigorously, insisting it was fine.
"It's all right, it's fine."
"L-Lady Esilly?"
"Big Sis... me too..."
"There, there. I'll pat our Erna's head too."
I stroked both of their heads at once. Erna enjoyed the head pats like a contented cat as always, while Lumine's face flushed bright red with embarrassment.
While we were doing that, Enge looked... more than a little angry. No—she looked furious.
"How insane..."
Huh... Enge seemed even angrier than I was.
"S-so? Are you going back to the ruling house?"
I decided to change the subject and asked Lumine straight out. She shook her head as if she had already decided her answer.
"No. That place is no longer somewhere I can return to."
"Isn't that a shame? You were the Chief Mage."
"Even as Chief Mage, I have no confidence I could do my work properly there anymore. How could someone abandoned by her colleagues ever go back?"
"Yeah. I think the same."
I understood completely—I was in a situation that amounted to abandonment myself. If someone asked me whether I wanted to return to the kingdom, I would happily punch them a few million times in the gut and follow it up with a million shots of Inferno.