The Seventh Patient
Bertha, a resident of Ahental Territory, still could not believe that day had been real.
He'd known the work was dangerous. Anyone with a shred of common sense could see that carving into a mountain's bedrock was never going to be safe. And yet five little mouths looked to him and him alone for every meal, and as for his wife—well, there was nothing more to say.
Signing up for the gemstone mining had felt like the natural course of things. Whether to reassure himself or not, he'd heard the same words from friends who did the same job more than ten times over. It's manageable. You'll be fine.
And now look at him.
My leg... my leg is rotting away...
Bertha lay on a cot lined with dried wheat stalks, still caught between what was real and what he desperately needed to deny. Flies buzzed around him. The feeling had gone from his leg. Things that looked like maggots crawled across the bedding. Even seeing it all, he could not bring himself to believe it.
"Goddess Gaia... Goddess Gaia..."
"Oh, please..."
"S-save me... please..."
The voices around him were enough to drive Bertha mad. Even knowing this was a Prayer House ward reserved for the critically ill, the place was hell. A healthy man would lose his mind in here before long. Maybe that was why there wasn't a healer, a pharmacist, or even a Prayer House attendant in sight.
We've been abandoned...
Only then did Bertha remember the friends who'd tried to stop him. There had been twice as many warning him off as there were ones saying it would be fine. Why hadn't he listened? The friend who'd sneered at him for volunteering to do a mining slave's work had been right all along.
"You crazy bastard... you crazy bastard... you crawled into a grave of your own making..."
Regret for his own stupidity hit him like a canyon wind. Thinking of his wife, who'd believed he would come home just fine, brought tears to his eyes. Then he thought of his five kids.
Fine. Just die, then. Going home a cripple would only be a burden on the family he had left.
He closed his eyes, ready to give up on living, but the fever burning through his body kept dragging him back to reality.
That was when he heard them.
"See? What'd I tell you. They're here again."
"Truly a blessing, that one. I never expected her to care this much about the patients..."
"Thanks to her, at least we're not short on food. Lady Erena's going to be rewarded for this, that's for sure."
"Young Lord Ereb came along this time too, didn't he?"
"Ah. That wastrel..."
"For someone with that kind of reputation, he was smiling in a surprisingly decent way. Didn't you see him carrying the supplies himself?"
"Hah, that's because you haven't been in this territory long. That man, when he loses it..... ugh, never mind."
Bertha wept at the voices of the Prayer House attendants drifting to his ear. They hadn't given up on them after all. Only moments ago he had resolved to die, but the human heart was a treacherous thing—hope found him in an instant, and with it, the will to live.
"Who's that other-race healer? I've never seen him before."
"First time for me too. A visiting healer, they said."
"Oh... visiting! Then he must be something special."
"Are you kidding? He'll slap on a few Heals and call it a day. You think Heal's going to fix a critical patient...? Hey, this guy's dead. Let's move him."
"H-huh. Yes."
The man lying near the door had stopped breathing. It was the one who'd been calling for Gaia. The two attendants hauled the body away and picked up the conversation where they'd left it.
"Anyway... don't put your faith in the healers they bring in. It's not that those people are incompetent—Heal magic just has its limits, that's all."
"That visiting healer asked to be taken to the critical patients, though..."
"Are you insane? You want to show him this mess? Just bring him the ones who actually have a chance, and do it fast."
"B-but still..."
"Hey! If you drag over patients they can't even treat, the healers just glare at you, and the ones who could've been saved get pushed down the line. Leave him!"
Bertha's breath came in ragged gasps. Leave him? No. He wanted to live. He forced his fever-cracked lips apart and called to them.
"T-take me... with you..."
"What?"
The attendant spun around in surprise—and that was the last thing Bertha saw before his consciousness went out.
Slap!
The stinging heat in his cheek snapped Bertha's eyes open. He came to in a daze, and one of the Prayer House attendants pressed a slip of paper into his hand.
"Mister, mister! Hold onto this tight. It's your number ticket! Hey? You hear me? Stay with me!"
It was the same babbling voice from before. The one who'd told them to leave him...
"You asked to be brought here! I hauled you all this way, so don't you dare die! Stay awake!"
Brought him... here?
Only then did Bertha look around. Patients sat with their backs against the corridor wall. He was sitting the same way.
"Ah... thank..."
"Ah, don't thank me. Just stay awake, all right? You're number seven, number seven! When they call you, you go in!"
Number seven... number seven... He repeated it to himself over and over.
The attendant was too busy to linger and hurried off, leaving Bertha alone to cling to consciousness by whatever means he could. When the numbers started being called, patients filed into the treatment room.
The man who'd just gone in looked as though one of his arms had been all but destroyed. Repairing a wound like that was beyond a healer. Unless it was a priest...
They'll probably just cut the arm and close up the shoulder. Still... that fellow's better off with one arm than I am with this leg...
At least the man would be able to stand on two feet and walk. That alone was something to be grateful for.
And then—
"N-next, number two!"
What?
The treatment was already finished?
His body shook with fever and the world tilted around him, but Bertha stared at the treatment room in shock. The patient whose arm had been all but ruined walked out with a vacant look on his face. They'd stripped away the cumbersome bandages, and the arm beneath was smooth—as if it were brand new.
"Ah... ah... ahhh—!"
The man collapsed in the corridor and broke into sobs, and the attendant calling numbers looked thoroughly at a loss.
"Ah, mister... you can't do this here. You're disrupting treatment. Please go on now."
"Waaahh!! Thank you!! Thank you so much!! Young Lord!!"
Y-Young Lord?
The man wailed his thanks loud enough to shake the corridor, and every patient waiting there turned to look. At the sight of him, the ones who'd been sitting limp against the wall began to rise, one after another. Something unnameable burned in their eyes. If it were possible to set the last of one's life alight, this was what it would look like.
Bertha stood on his own power too. He wanted to see more of a sight that deserved to be called a miracle.
Patient number two, whose face had been caved in on one side, walked out whole. Patient number three, whose eye had been gouged out by a colleague's pickaxe, did the same. Patient number four, who'd been swept off a mountainside, was carried in on a stretcher and walked out on two legs.
A miracle... and then another, and another. It was as if a high priest were inside that treatment room. No—as if a proxy of the gods themselves were in there.
At last—
"Patient number seven!"
At the sound of his number, Bertha limped forward. With every step it felt as though the wound tore open and blood poured out of him, but he could not stop.
Hope was in that room.
Messi laid the incoming patient on the cot.
The injury was... the leg. It looked as though something metal had punched through it, and when he asked, the man said a colleague's pickaxe had done it.
"This is the worst one we've seen yet. Is this even possible?"
Ereb frowned as he asked. The patient rolled his eyes, growing uneasy for no good reason. Messi offered the man a small smile, then leaned in to Ereb's ear.
"You're being loud."
"What?!"
"Miss Erena, please keep an eye on your brother."
"Ah... yes."
"...?"
Brother and sister alike were in a poor state. Erena looked half out of her wits as well. But Messi paid neither of them any mind. The injured man in front of him came first.
The pickaxe had driven through the thigh and shattered the femur; the sharp edges of broken bone had torn through muscle and capillaries. There was a reason the blood would not stop. Hygiene had been a problem too—maggots had already hatched where eggs had been laid, burrowing into the flesh and wriggling out of the wound. Severe inflammation had turned the skin of his entire body a mottled red.
"Boyle, some herbal water, please."
"H-here you are."
The same man who'd shouted that treatment was impossible when they first met had grown remarkably meek. Anyone who witnessed Messi's Heal would find themselves in awe, healer or not.
Messi poured the herbal water over the wound a little at a time and cleared away the maggots as they surfaced. When he dug into the wound with his fingers, the patient groaned in agony and his body shook violently. The attendants and Prayer House staff who'd come along pinned him down, and Messi was able to drive every last maggot from inside. He took a sharp knife and carved away the visibly rotten flesh, and with that, every preparation was complete.
A flash. With the activation word, he traced a magic circle with both hands, and the spell took form. A flood of pure white light poured forth, wrapping the seventh patient's thigh in warmth.
In that instant Messi understood the man's body, and from that understanding he began restoring it to what it had been. As he projected his will through the mana, the flush faded from the skin, and the flesh the maggots had eaten writhed and filled itself in. The bone found its place and closed the gaps.
Erena's mouth fell open. The wound she had been certain would be too much was knitting itself together before her eyes. It felt like watching a priest's miracle.
This man... didn't they say he was a healer?
Healer was the ordinary word for someone who used Heal. She had taken it at face value. But this was not a healer's work. The problem was that it was not a priest's work either. A priest's miracle was something that emerged only after offerings of every kind of treasure, the recitation of prayers, and the many stages of worshiping a god.
What Messi had done was... quite literally just Heal. The performance was incomparably different, but still...
"Erena, you planning to gape like that every time you watch?"
Ereb teased, smoothing a hand over her hair. Ordinarily she would have fired back without missing a beat. This time she couldn't.
"Yes... I keep being amazed. Truly."
"Heh. You think I dragged this guy all the way here for nothing?"
"It's... it's incredible."
While she stared at Messi, still half out of her wits, the Heal finished restoring the wound completely.
The light faded. No one needed to say that the treatment was over. The seventh patient flexed his foot and his leg, blinking in silence.
Then he began to tremble. Tears spilled from his eyes in a steady stream. He seized Messi's collar and bowed his head low.
"Th-thank you... thank you so much...!! This is enough. My whole family's gonna live...!"
Messi eased the sobbing man off him and answered evenly.
"For now, I'd ask that you offer your thanks to Young Lord Ereb and Miss Erena here, rather than to me. Young Lord Ereb in particular is the one who invited me to this territory. Without him, I would never have come."
"Ohh... Young Lord! Young Lord!! Thank you!!"
Erena stared at Messi, at a loss. From the first patient onward, he had been handing every bit of the credit to her brother. He was the one who'd actually saved them, and yet because her brother had brought him here, they were supposed to thank him?
Is he just embarrassed...?
That was possible. She herself felt a little shy whenever people thanked her. But this was taking it too far. Honestly, if you divided the credit, Messi had done nine-tenths of the work, and her brother might claim five percent if he was lucky.
The truly mortifying part was that even in that situation, her brother kept laughing and saying the thickest-faced things imaginable.
"Haha! What's all the fuss? As the heir who will one day inherit Ahental Territory, putting the health of my people first is only natural!"
"Thank you, thank you so much! Young Lord...!"
"Now go on, complete your discharge papers and spread word of my praises throughout the city!"
"Y-yes! I'll come pay my respects at the inner castle every morning, where the Young Lord resides!"
"Ah, none of that useless nonsense. Just tell your neighbors the story!"
"Yes!!"
It was her brother's doing, so why was her face burning? And what was Sir Messi thinking, watching it all with such obvious satisfaction?
But as she watched the man who had come in pouring blood and maggots from his leg walk out of the room, Erena felt something catch fire in her own chest as well.
Maybe...
It was a feeling she knew well, one she had not felt in a long time. One she had believed she would never feel again.
Maybe I could too...?
This... was hope.
"This is true?"
Ayres demanded, thrown off balance.
"Yes... they say that other-race treated over ninety critically injured trauma patients today... territory residents, all of them."
"...!"
There had even been that absurd rumor that exceptional Heal ability was proof of royal blood...
So it wasn't circulating for nothing, was it?
Ayres was turning over what kind of variable Messi's Heal might become when the knight who'd come to report produced additional information.
"On top of that..."
"Sir Haydn, why are you hesitating?"
"...Those ninety-odd residents are, ah... singing the Second Young Lord's praises, my lord."
"What?"
"They're calling him the true heir to Ahental Territory... saying he went to the trouble of bringing a saint from a distant land to save them when they were at death's door....."
"Hah!"
Ayres's face twisted as if he could not believe what he was hearing. He was the one who, as their father's proxy, had negotiated with the merchant companies entering Ahental Territory, expanded the list of imported goods, driven prices down, and poured his efforts into stabilizing the people's lives. He'd taken all of that as a given—and now a handful of dying men had been saved, and this was the talk?
"Shut those lunatics up. Even bullshit has its limits."
"We've already found other pretenses and had them thrown in jail through the watch."
"Unbelievable."
"The Second Young Lord and the other-race will be staying there for several more days... and the number of people walking out healed will only grow. Some kind of measure..."
It was absurd. But measures had already been taken regarding the other-race. Once the inquiry team brought in the Village Chief and the mercenary captain, the matter would be finished. The trouble was that waiting that long with any patience at all brought this morning's insolent Messi back to mind.
"Wait. I've just thought of something amusing."
"My lord?"
"No matter how gifted that bastard's Heal treatment is, it can hardly compare to a priest, can it?"
Ayres drew out a cache of hidden funds and smiled.