Just Watch the Vitals
Healer.
In this world, that was the name of a role more commonly known as a physician.
In the beginning, ordinary mages had handled healing as a side duty. In time, however, the second-circle spell Heal was carved out and reclassified as a specialized magic, and from that distinction an independent vocation was born.
Specialized magic meant spells that, regardless of circle, were broadly useful in daily life, widely applicable, and demanded deep study. They went by coarser names, too: meal-ticket magic. Breadwinner magic. Master that one spell, the saying went, and you would never go hungry. Heal, Enhancement, and Teleport were the classic examples.
Even so, the public held healers in low regard, and for more reasons than one. Heal was only a second-circle spell, so the barrier to entry was low — and self-proclaimed “healers” were everywhere. With numbers came riffraff, and that riffraff dragged the whole profession’s reputation through the mud. It was nearly impossible to tell who had received a proper healer’s education and who had not. The spell itself was of limited use; anything approaching a serious wound still meant finding a priest. And if you were going to a priest anyway, why bother with a healer at all?
Under circumstances like these, no one thought much of healers, and none had ever made a name for themselves in a combat party.
If every healer could have performed as Messi did, the story would have been different.
In this world, a healer wiping every trauma clean in the middle of a battle was, at the very least, a thing that simply did not happen.
I thought he was just a bit better than an ordinary healer…
With Heal alone, he’s far beyond House Ahental’s own retained mage.
At this level, even ten healers together couldn’t pull it off, could they?
That was what had the knights so stunned.
“Just watch the vital points. If you die in a single blow, I can’t treat you.”
Messi’s voice came from behind them, and the knights in the thick of the fighting felt their chests go solid with confidence. It was the first time any of them had understood why a healer might be necessary.
“Everyone — trust Messi and go in!”
“Just the vitals, just the vitals! The rest we can heal!”
As the knights’ spirits caught fire, the General Ant turned the compound eyes that occupied fully half its face upon Messi.
It seemed to have grasped the situation as well.
What?
In the same instant, the General Ant’s thrust cut through empty air. The blade that had been no more than an ant’s antenna stretched longer than a pike as joint after joint fanned to its limit.
The target was Messi’s head. He slipped aside by a hair. A sharp whistle of parted air grazed past his right ear.
A cold sweat ran down his back. Without the princess’s warning, he would have been skewered clean through. He had come within a breath of becoming the untreatable patient himself.
Thanks to you… I’m alive.
“You bastard! Ignoring us!”
“Protect Messi!”
The knights hurled themselves at the General Ant. A recovered Ramang plunged back into the fray. The General Ant’s limbs were suddenly very busy. Swords tangled in a chaotic dance through the air.
“You idiots! Why are you only going for the antennae? Your sword paths are fouling each other!”
“Open wounds over its whole body! It’s still a monster — pile on the damage and it won’t last!”
Under Ramang’s command, the firepower of fifty knights accumulated, steadily and faithfully, across the General Ant’s body.
For the General Ant, the result was infuriating. It had dealt out no small amount of damage of its own — and watched it all knit back together. In that moment, it was genuinely hard to tell which side was the monster.
At last the General Ant turned a reverse somersault and slipped away into the waiting swarm that had hung back from the fight.
“That coward!”
“Commander, do we pursue?!”
“Everyone follow — we hunt it down!”
“Sir Ramang, cease combat!”
Ereb moved fast to stop them. The knights were all running hot. Plunge into that swarm in this state, and they would only make a fine meal.
“Sir Ramang, this is not the time to fight. We need to get out of here — now!”
At Messi’s shout, Ramang remembered the blood he had shed.
“Damn it… shit!”
“Sir Ramang — and every wounded knight! You need to get those clothes off, quickly. When you were cut, the armor and the underclothes all soaked through!”
“A-a knight is supposed to throw away his armor and his clothes and run?!”
A deep boom shuddered through the earth. Then another.
Dirt and pebbles pattered down from above. The signs were bad. The ants, too, lifted their heads toward the ceiling.
“Sir Ramang! Get it off, now!”
When Ereb forgot even his manners and bellowed, a red-faced Ramang hurriedly called the knights in and started stripping his gear. The knights who had bled heavily did the same.
As the trembling went on, cracks spidered through the earthen pillars that spanned the air of the Central Plaza. The cracks became great rifts, and the pillars sheared and fell. Ants that had been looking down from above came down with them, raining like a cloudburst.
Crash! A heavier crash!
“Th-this — the whole place is coming down, isn’t it?! Leto, what do we do now! Aah! We’re done for!! Young Master, save us!!”
“Calm down, you crazy old man!!!”
The Village Chief screamed. If the sky fell, standing next to the young master would not matter in the slightest — they would all die together just the same.
“Hurry, hurry!!”
At Ereb’s urging, the knights’ hands shook as they unfastened Ramang’s armor.
They stripped the chainmail and flung it to the floor. The cloth underneath they simply slashed apart with their knives.
And then, at last…
Flop.
“...?”
Flop, flop.
“...???”
Rocks were falling from the sky and the dust was thickening into a fog — and still every movement in the plaza stopped, because every gaze had found the same point.
A kneeling knight had sliced through Ramang’s underclothes with a dagger and stripped them away, and something heavy had dropped. It had come so close it had nearly struck the man in the face.
“…I really chose the wrong bedroom.”
Ayla’s throwaway remark painted Ereb’s face a deep red.
“H-hey. Where is everyone looking right now?!”
“Sir Ramang. Put this on, at least.”
Messi threw him a cloak, and Ramang wrapped it in a hurry. Only then could anyone look away.
Ramang, if only for a moment, had overwhelmed them all.
“From this moment, everyone runs!”
Messi broke into a sprint at the head of the column. The ants had no attention to spare for humans. Dodging the falling rock was the only thing that mattered.
BOOM!!
KRAAAAAANG—!
The ceiling punched open, and something came through. Dust hid it too thickly to see clearly, but neither the roar nor the size of it was ordinary. Something enormous was writhing in the smoke. At the very least, it was not Ramang’s.
“Me—fuck! What the hell is that?!”
“I’d thank you to get my name right! That’s Uradios of the Earth Dragonkin!”
KRAAAAAANG!!
Uradios — a dragonkin whose entire body was packed tight with crimson scales, so sleek that if you ignored the head you could have mistaken it for an earthworm.
Stone shattered with a crack, and more Uradios burst out beside the first. They had likely been the monsters nearest the Ant Tunnels.
Crimson earth dragons a good ten meters long dropped from the air one after another and began to thrash wildly through the ants. From above, it looked as though giant earthworms were rolling waves through a sea of ants.
Excited by a blood-scent they had not tasted in a long time, they seemed to see nothing at all. They chewed and tore whatever entered their mouths. Ant fluids sprayed in great gouts.
Watching it, Ereb found Messi — the man who had led him into the Ant Tunnels — suddenly, damnably lovable. If they had gone through the forest, they would have had to fight things like that.
The little traitor who had been laughing from atop Messi’s head, looking down the long decline of the ant empire, vanished into the passage after the humans.
Behind them, monsters poured from the hole in the plaza and filled the space.
That day may well have been the last day of the ant empire.
A dark wood stained in purple leaves, some deep, some pale. A silent forest where not even a bird sang. Here, the movement of living things could not be felt at all.
The black trees of that forest were so thick and so vast their age was beyond guessing. It would have taken dozens of grown men, hand in hand, to encircle a single trunk.
Their roots ran thick and endless, heaving up the earth and clinging to it, leaching every nutrient. The soil, starved of sunlight and sustenance, had stained as black as the trees themselves.
The ground there twitched and heaved.
Thud!
A human arm came out. It went back into the earth, then thud! — it popped out again. After several repetitions, a human face finally emerged. The distinctive feature was the larva the size of a man’s forearm sitting on top of the head.
Once the princess, with her keen senses, had finished the first reconnaissance, Messi widened the hole and pulled himself free.
“Everyone can come out now.”
“This time it’s really near the fortress, right?”
“…It is. So come out.”
People caked in dirt climbed up one by one. One, two, three… As their numbers grew, it was no longer possible to call this a forest empty of living things.
It had been decades since this many people had set foot in the Forest of Resentment.
“Sir Ramang. Take a headcount.”
At Ereb’s word, Ramang began to count. He was in spare clothes. No armor at all — only a single sword.
“One hundred forty-three. One is a mercenary who went missing on the way.”
“Hmm. Couldn’t keep up?”
“That seems to be the case.”
“Only one loss in a situation like that is remarkable. Maybe going through crisis after crisis has forged them into elites. Impressive.”
It was the first praise the mercenaries had ever heard from Ereb. Not that any of them were in a position to be glad of it.
“Everyone move out. Tonight we eat at the fortress!”
Four or five days in the Ant Tunnels had left them looking like wrecks. They needed to get cleaned up, but it was better done at a safe fortress than here. Ereb pushed them all onward.
They divided into five companies for the march. Each was composed of ten knights, fifteen mercenaries, and six attendants — a measure to keep a long column from catching a monster’s eye.
Company One was the vanguard, as before. Ramang was still its captain. Messi was attached to it as their guide. Perhaps because Messi had saved his life, Ramang had been treating him a little more warmly ever since.
“Listen, Messi. When this is over, come to House Ahental with me, yeah? A man of your caliber would be treated like a king.”
“That again, Sir Ramang.”
The scouting offers, of course, had not let up either.
“I’m certain of it. A healer like you. Looking at you, I realized I’ve been wrong about healers my whole life.”
“I’m just a hunter from Benuda Village. A guide, at the moment.”
“Why on earth are you wasting that ability as a hunter? You’re a healer. Just shut up and be a healer!”
Ramang was unusually worked up today.
He had grown up being told he had no talent for the sword. That history had surely played its part in forging his stubborn nature. Perhaps that was why his hunger for talent — for ability — ran so deep.
He could not stand to watch someone with real gifts let a shining talent rot. What he had found this time was Messi.
“Becoming a healer wouldn’t necessarily make me happy. If that path had been the one that would make me happy, my master would have told me to become a healer.”
“Of course your master, considering you’re an outlander, told you to live quietly in some village. But are you really satisfied with that? Don’t you have dreams? Ambition? You’re young, aren’t you?”
Dreams.
If he had never come to this other world, how would he be living now? He would have had dreams, wouldn’t he? Would he have gone to university? No — by now he might have been in the army.
The word dreams stretched Messi’s thoughts out longer than usual.
“Oh my, Sir Ramang. I’m taking Messi to our Red Fox Mercenary Group.”
Ayla joined the bidding.
“How dare you! How can a retainer’s seat in House Ahental even be compared to a mere place in the Red Fox Mercenary Group?”
“We’d just end up some nobody healer at the bottom of the pile anyway, wouldn’t we? Looking at how they treat that Boyle fellow, I can already picture it.”
“Kh.”
It had only been a little while since Boyle, the house’s exclusive healer, had been begging to be spared. Everyone had been through too much to have forgotten.
“Messi. Better to be the head of a snake than the tail of a dragon, right? I’ll make you the snake’s head.”
“Hahaha! Since when is a mercenary company a snake?!”
This time Ereb entered the fray. So that was why he had been so quiet, listening from behind.
“The Red Fox is more like a chicken’s head. A birdbrain, basically.”
“Y-young master! That’s uncalled for! We have a name in the business too, you know!”
“Listen, Messi. If you follow me, I have no intention of using you as a mere healer. I’ll make you my confidant. Use my name and enjoy as much power as you like. How about it?”
Messi let out a long, deep sigh.
Today of all days, why are these people like this…
The princess bounced up and down on his head. Not knowing the first thing about the context, she saw only the bright side of it.
Messi gave Ereb’s offer no answer. He halted the column and pointed ahead.
“Young master. We’ve arrived at last.”
“…Arrived?”
Ereb cocked his head. What Messi was pointing at was, as far as he could tell, a tree. The largest of the giants around them, granted — overwhelmingly so.
“Don’t tell me… that tree is the Woodsman’s Fortress?”
Messi did not answer. He walked toward the base of the tree, to a place where a great stone sat, and put his strength into it, rolling the stone aside. It was a sizable rock, but it gave way cleanly.
Behind it, fine roots hung over a hole like a curtain. Messi brushed them aside with his hand.
A path appeared — an entrance, large enough for a person to come and go.
🏛 Type: Fortress hollowed from an ancient Black Wood
⚔ Height: Thirty stories / one hundred twenty feet
📍 Location: Forest of Resentment, near the ruins
🕳 Origin: Raised by forced ant labor