A Sickbed Visit
At last, Dighton emerged from his room, apparently finished getting dressed.
"Sorry to keep you waiting."
His outfit was surprisingly put-together. His hair had been combed down into a neat fall, and he wasn't wearing his usual short-sleeved T-shirt either. It wasn't exactly the kind of clothes you'd lounge around the house in — but it wasn't his clothes that caught Luke's eye.
"Dighton, what in the world happened to that arm of yours? Was it an injury from battle?"
Dighton's right arm was wrapped in layer upon layer of bandages, set in a cast. No wonder getting dressed had taken him so long, with a hand like that.
"Battle, huh…"
At Luke's worried question, Dighton closed his eyes a fraction, as if turning the matter over carefully in his mind.
Admitting Actually, Yerina beat me up. It hurt like hell would have been thoroughly uncool. Embarrassing in front of Luke, too. And since Luke clearly didn't know, Yerina must not have said anything either. For both her sake and his own, Dighton decided to keep his mouth shut.
"Battle. Yeah. It was a battle."
She was about as aggressive as a monster, I'll give her that…
Dighton pictured Yerina laying into him. She hadn't exactly been swinging to kill — but it had still hurt for real. An elf's physical enhancement, backed by superior mana sensitivity, was simply more effective than a human's even when casting the same spell. And body-reinforcement magic adapted the flesh that used it: the more you cast it, the better your body became at receiving it. Yerina had over ten years of Forest Keeper experience behind her. A body tempered by that kind of practical reinforcement wouldn't have fallen far short of an actual monster.
Yerina, for her part, had felt both guilty and puzzled that Dighton had been hurt by her hands.
No matter how hard I hit him, he always seemed fine…
She had always been especially heavy-handed with Dighton. Most of the time he had it coming, so she never said anything — and he never let on that it hurt, out of sheer pride. So of course Yerina had ended up thinking things like, Oh, so that much is fine! Dighton's a tough one, isn't he? And then a little emotion had slipped into the blows, and her control of force had failed.
"A monster, you say… You ought to have been more careful."
Luke simply nodded, as though the explanation made perfect sense. Forest Keepers fought monsters on the front lines; injuries were practically part of the job. Nothing particularly surprising there. What puzzled Luke was something else entirely.
"Did you not use Healing?"
"It wasn't that bad."
Healing. A spell that analyzed an individual's mana array and used mana to stitch and reconstruct the body to match. It was also an extremely expensive, top-tier medical technique — classified as a high-class magic of Class 6 or above.
Magic class rankings involved any number of fine-grained criteria, but heavy weight was given to the potential for abuse and its side effects. That was why any magic related to medicine, without exception, started at Class 5 or higher. Medical magic was at its most vicious when turned the other way around. What if Healing were run not to rejoin flesh, but with the emphasis on bodily alteration? What if Cure Poison were used to strip every chemical substance from the body, completely ignoring the balance of internal chemistry? Magic that could act directly on a human body was also magic that could end a human life. Spells that operated on the flesh itself were inherently dangerous — and so they were inevitably ranked high. They could become killing techniques at any moment.
Which was why Dighton's bandages were simply enchanted with a Class 4 Haste spell, meant to accelerate local recovery. Luke, reading that enchantment with Mana Sight, tilted his head.
Why use Haste?
Wouldn't divine power be easier and faster? Magic was grounded in human understanding, and human understanding made for a poor foundation when it came to healing. Divine power was different. Humans were the creations of the gods, and the gods understood humans perfectly. Divine power that used a god as a "filter" — a blasphemous turn of phrase that would have sent priests into apoplexy, though Luke rather enjoyed putting it that way — was far better suited to recovery, even when drawing on the same mana.
"Have you not prayed to the gods?"
"Huh?"
Luke's sudden question left Yerina and Dighton blinking in confusion.
"Gods? Pray?"
At Yerina's reply, Luke looked at her and asked again.
"I mean, is there no temple here?"
"A temple? Ah — so Luke believes in the gods."
Yerina nodded, thinking, Well, for Luke, believing in gods wouldn't be strange. Things must have been desperate enough that she would have clung to anything. The thought put another miserable look on Yerina's face, and she turned her head away. Deana, watching her, piped up with something like, "Yerina, what's wrong? Something in your eye?"
Luke was nonplussed.
"Believe or not — the gods are a concept that actually exists…"
Hadn't it been a god who had granted Renier the power of immortality in the first place? Five thousand years ago, relations between mages and the temples may not have been warm, but no one had denied the gods' existence. Mages believed in what was real — and the gods of that age had proven themselves real. So why was anyone talking about "believing" in them now, as though faith itself were no longer a universal given…?
"Don't tell me this world no longer even has gods?"
The moment the thought fully formed, Luke felt a puzzle piece click into place regarding why Renier had died. Had the gods vanished for some reason? But why? The concept of a "god" was not something that simply faded away. Annihilation? Severance? Or had the gods simply chosen to ignore them?
Luke was already floating hypotheses and knocking them down in his head, building out a chain of logic, when Yerina caught the gravity on his face, made another oh no expression, and hastily changed the subject.
"Hey, Dighton! Here! Take this!"
The gesture was exaggerated — awkward to anyone watching — but…
"Wow, you didn't have to go this far…!"
Dighton accepted the fruit basket Yerina held out without a second thought, a pleased smile spreading across his face. He hadn't been looking at Luke's expression at all. His eyes had been locked on Yerina the entire time.
Dighton gazed at the fruit piled high in the basket and thought, This is pretty much the classic 'poison the wound, then offer the cure' routine…
Still — thanks to it, he got time off work and Yerina had come in person to visit him. That counted for something! He felt like a man who had made it in life. With a reward like this, he could almost welcome the injury. Not that he had any masochistic streak. The point was simply that basking in Yerina's worried gaze had put him in an excellent mood.
"S-so, how are you feeling? Have you been resting okay?"
At Yerina's concern, Dighton laughed heartily and started putting on a tough act.
"Of course! Haha! I'll be back on duty before you know it!"
Yerina let out a relieved breath.
"Haa, thank goodness. Maybe the rest is doing you good? Your color looks better, too."
"Y-yeah, right!"
In truth, the healthy color was pure excitement at Yerina showing up at his house — but never mind that.
"Oh, look at me. I should offer you something. Just a second, I'll bring out some te—"
That was when it happened.
"Brother! Brother!"
Deana had already sidled up beside him and was pinching the hem of his pants.
"What is it?"
Conscious of Yerina, Dighton made his tone as kindly as he could. Deana beamed with the smile of someone who already knew she'd won.
"There's company over, so I wanna have ice cream!"
"Ice cream?"
To anyone hearing it for the first time, the leap in logic was severe. What did guests have to do with ice cream? But Dighton knew exactly how the chain of reasoning worked. When company came over, you brought out tea or snacks — and every time, his little sister would hover nearby and freeload off the spread. Nobody got angry at a child for eating the food that had been put out, so for Deana those visits were prime time to openly overindulge. On ordinary days she only got the tiniest portions, on the grounds that sugar would rot her teeth and ruin her health. So this time, apparently, what she wanted wasn't just any snack — it was ice cream. The weather had warmed up, and no child alive disliked ice cream.
"We don't have any ice cream, though."
Only a few days ago it had still been cold out. Letting Deana eat something icy in that weather and catch a chill was out of the question, so of course there was none in the house.
"Aaah! Nooo!"
Deana wailed as if the world were ending.
"Then buy some!"
"That's just what you want. No."
The answer was firm. Realizing that throwing a fit at Dighton wouldn't work, Deana switched targets.
"Luke! You like ice cream, right?!"
Deana's reasoning was simple: no girl roughly her own age could possibly dislike ice cream. Luke's answer, however, sailed clean past every expectation she had.
"Deana, that… what exactly is this 'ice cream' of which you speak?"
"……"
Deana stared at Luke as though she had just heard something unspeakable.
"That don't make no sense! You're lyin', right?!"
"……"
No matter how hard Deana stared, Luke could only look bewildered. Deana finally seized Luke's arm and started whining, "Ice cream~ Ice cream~," and Luke fretted as if the whole mess were somehow her own fault.
"Yerina? Would you please tell her? That I am not lying."
But Yerina had already made up her mind.
"…Dighton. Want to go buy some ice cream?"
"Huh? S-sure!"
Dighton silently cheered at the unexpected windfall.