Even the Mining Slaves
Erena von Ahental.
She was eighteen, the youngest child of House Ahental, and from earliest childhood a congenital disability had kept her from ever walking or running. Her legs, then, were the wooden wheels of a wheelchair, and the strength to walk and run came from whoever stood behind her.
Even so, she had no complaints. Delicious meals arrived at every sitting without her lifting a finger. There were maids enough to help her, and her family loved her. She thought it a decent enough life.
But one day, gazing at the dolls that filled her bedchamber, she came to a sudden, unwelcome recognition of her own unsavory pastime.
You can't move either, just like me. But I alone can make you move.
It had never been a hobby of collecting dolls. Unbeknownst to her, something inside her had been twisting out of true. She admitted it: looking at those dolls in their appointed places, she had felt a peculiar satisfaction. She sat down and held a conversation with her own diseased heart.
From that day forward, Erena threw herself into service for others. She did not want to take her frustrations out on cloth dolls. She wanted to exert a kind influence on living people.
At first it went no further than listening to the troubles of the household's servants and maids and setting them right. Feeling that was not enough, she turned her gaze beyond the estate.
She went for the first time to the Prayer House, where the injured from the mines were gathered. She gave food, clothing, medicine. She heard thank-yous until she was weary of them. Her heart felt full.
But there was a side effect.
I will never get better, will I.
Those dying at the Prayer House were, in many cases, people who would have walked away whole if only a single priest had been present. The Prayer House was a place where everyone was dying for want of that one person.
She herself, meanwhile, had been attended by dozens of high-ranking priests her father had brought in to heal her congenital disability, and by hundreds of ordinary ones. If even they could not heal her, she came to believe she would never recover. She had lived all this while having already let go of hope.
And yet the man before her eyes was different.
If I were treated by this person... could I get better too?
It puzzled her. He was a healer her older brother had summoned specifically to treat her, and still he had not spoken a single word about being able to make her well. And that, paradoxically, made her trust him more.
Those who spoke that way had all failed.
But this man said no such thing. As if he meant to prove it through action—as if he were telling her to watch carefully while he healed. He was showing her miracles right before her eyes.
"H-here... please, have some of this while you work."
"Ah, thank you."
Messi drank the tea Erena had steeped with her own hands. It tasted quite good. If there was one thing he liked about this world, it was the tea culture.
"Are you tired?"
At Erena's question, Messi stammered for a moment, then nodded.
"I imagine so. Boyle has a hard time after using Heal on more than ten patients. Of course, Sir Messi's standards seem a little different..."
Messi had cast Heal on more than ninety people just yesterday, and another forty patients had already passed through his hands today. Honestly, Messi's inner feeling was—
Why am I not tired?
He was privately astonished himself. He had never used Heal in such volume all at once, and it was typical for magic to have a limit on the number of castings.
Mages used magic based on mental stamina. Mental stamina was a consumable resource everyone possessed, and on average the quantity was much the same. What was more, it was extraordinarily difficult to grow through training. A representative example: even a high-circle mage whose rings spun at a high count could draw in more ambient mana, yet in terms of mental stamina they often showed no difference from a low-circle mage. Such mages were mockingly called "one-shot mages," or in cruder terms, "premature casters"—because they loosed a single spell and then couldn't keep their feet.
By contrast, Messi's present case had to be regarded as an abnormal display of mental stamina.
Is this because of Enzo Muete too...?
Physical ability included the brain as well. The brain was the part of the body most closely tied to mental stamina. He formed a hypothesis: perhaps, as he absorbed the influence of Enzo Muete's physical abilities, even his brain had been developed.
"Still, perhaps because I saw so many patients yesterday... I think I should ease up and rest. Magic has its limits in mental stamina, so it's wearing on me."
Messi rolled his head in circles, putting on a show of suffering. If he displayed excessive ability, they would find that strange as well.
But Erena's reaction exceeded all imagination. She started in alarm, then immediately had the people around her fetch medicinal tonics, food, and the like. Messi had no choice but to eat and drink it all and rest for over an hour. Ereb stared fixedly at the spectacle.
"What's with that look?"
"It's weird... You're making noises like you're sick? I've never seen you say you were tired. I..."
"That's a magically illiterate thing to say."
"Magically illiterate? What's that?"
"You don't need to know."
"You little shit, that was an insult just now, wasn't it?"
Whether it was his contempt for the weak, he was quick to catch a subordinate insulting him. The two of them were still bickering when the Prayer House attendant who had been calling numbers came in.
"Um... Healer, sir."
Messi looked up, questioning.
"We've sent in all the territory's residents from earlier... Next are the mining slaves. If you don't wish to continue..."
This world was, after all, a thoroughly class-stratified society. It was not who was more critically injured, whose life hung by a thread, that determined the order of treatment—rank came first. On top of that, they were even asking whether he would treat them at all. The life of the slave class truly was as cheap as a fly's.
Mining slaves would have been assigned the harder work even in labor, so their injuries would be worse on average than the territory residents'. And many would have died while waiting.
Ereb cut in as if it were obvious.
"Why even ask something so obvious? Our invited healer says he's tired, so this is as far as we go. Treatment's over."
"Wait. Send them in."
"What are you talking about? You just said you were exhausted. You mean to work yourself to the bone for a bunch of slaves?"
Ereb looked at him as if he couldn't understand. It was because Lee Eunho of the twenty-first century still exerted some influence over Messi's decisions—and there was no way Ereb would understand something like that.
"Absolutely not. I refuse. To me, your one life is worth more than a few hundred slaves."
Ereb's expression turned stubborn. It was a declaration that this would not happen.
But what if Erena stepped in?
She had been deeply moved by Messi, who was prepared to exhaust himself to save even the lives of mining slaves. In her eyes, Messi had been elevated not merely as a man of mysterious ability, but as someone of great honor.
"Brother, just allow it."
"Erena, Messi is our valued guest. He'll be receiving treatment on the level of a retainer now. If Father hears of this, he'll be furious."
"If it were Father, he would have considered first what the honored guest wanted. And he would have done everything he could at his side to make sure he didn't overexert himself."
At Erena's counsel, the young lord let out a groan. So he was weak to his little sister. Nothing to be done about that, it seemed.
"Ten at a time... we'll take them for now. And I'll check your condition after every ten."
"Understood. Then I'll send them in!"
The Prayer House attendant began calling numbers as if greatly relieved. If Messi didn't treat them, they would have to simply watch the mining slaves die, so for them it was welcome news.
As expected, the mining slaves were in worse condition. From the first patient, a sigh came unbidden.
Both feet were rotting black, and it was a wonder he had endured in that state until now. The one mercy was that the rotting parts had not been left long enough to turn to pulp—and that, having no medical knowledge at all, they had not amputated the rotting portions.
There was a clear limit even to Messi's Heal: perfectly regenerating a body part that was already gone was difficult. Saving a body that had only recently begun to rot, on the other hand, was possible.
Patient number one was able to receive that miracle. The mining slave, without a word, prostrated himself before Messi and Ereb and offered his thanks.
As it turned out, he was a mining slave whose tongue had been cut out. Messi considered restoring the tongue, then gave it up. That was the mark of a crime committed. Unless he changed his station and washed the crime clean, even if the tongue were restored he would only meet the same fate.
After receiving several mining slave patients that way, they reached the one-armed eighth patient. As Messi healed that mining slave, he felt a flicker of puzzlement.
"...A mana user?"
"What? You're saying a mining slave knows a mana cultivation method?"
Ereb stared at the eighth mining slave in surprise. The slave looked startled as well.
"H-how did you know?"
"When I use Heal, the reaction differs between an ordinary person and a mana user."
It was a lie. When Messi used Heal, he could see even the flow inside the other person's mana circuits.
"I-impressive. Until I committed a crime and became a mining slave, I was a Silver Plate Mercenary. Part of my mana circuits were sealed, so I can't use mana now, but..."
Hoh.
So that was why some of the circuits hadn't been functioning.
"What was the crime?"
The eighth mining slave rolled his eyes, glancing around, then explained in a small voice.
"It was murder. A fight started in a tavern and I accidentally beat a fellow to death, and it turned out he was a serf of that territory. They told me to pay with my body for damaging the lord's property, and I didn't want to do that."
The rest of the story was easy to guess. He had tried to flee in secret, had an arm cut off and his mana circuits sealed, been sold here and there, and washed up at the mines.
"There'll be a few like him among the mining slaves. The mortality rate for mining slaves is high, so they figure they might as well round up criminals and put them to work."
At Ereb's cold words, the eighth mining slave broke into a cold sweat and added an explanation.
"Still, in my active mercenary days I made something of a name for myself. The Brawler of Pakitan, that was my nickname."
"...Pakitan? That place in the central-eastern continent? I've never heard of you."
"Ugh... time does pass. It's been ten years. Back then, even knights spoke highly of my brawling arts."
Brawling arts. The thought that they were techniques needed in close-quarters unarmed combat stirred Messi's interest. He was wondering how to ask naturally to see them, when—
"Then show us here, once!"
"Here, you mean?"
At Ereb's sudden invitation, the mining slave looked awkward. Whether he had been bored receiving nothing but patients, Ereb seemed to have found something entertaining.
"Who knows? If you catch this body's fancy, you might even become a free man."
"...!"
Messi was as startled as the mining slave. Ereb was absolutely not the sort of human being to bestow goodwill like this. Even though it was a promise without foundation, the eighth mining slave's face shook violently. That was how hard a mining slave's life must be. Resolve settled in his eyes.
"...I'll begin."
Was this the same mining slave from a moment ago? He radiated a savage, rough presence so intense it raised the question, then poured fists and feet into the empty air. The Prayer House room was spacious enough for one man to give a demonstration.
The moment it began, Messi tried to pour Heal toward the moving mining slave. But he had to abandon that intention almost at once.
Why... do I feel like I just know?
Just by watching the man's movements with his eyes, he understood how the muscles were moving, how the body was being used. Even granting that he had already taken in all of the mining slave's physical information, this was a phenomenon Messi was experiencing for the first time. He guessed this too might have arisen from absorbing Enzo Muete's physical information.
But the more he could see, the more unpleasant a fact there was. The man before his eyes was someone experienced in killing people with extreme cruelty. Even just watching the movements, the smell of blood clung thickly enough to feel—the will to beat an unseen opponent to death was unmistakable.
Whoosh! Whoosh!
Just now he had smashed someone's face in. He had torn someone's mouth open. He had struck a heart dead-on and stopped it, coiled around a leg and ripped it clean off with the strength of his whole body. What he was showing were movements you would only see when you had fully resolved to turn the other party into a rag. That he unfolded them with such mastery meant countless people had died at his hands.
He was missing one arm, so there should have been issues with his sense of balance, yet in terms of striking there was nothing to fault—the movements were fierce. Having unfolded every movement he knew, the mining slave panted, streaming with sweat. He became a different person from a moment ago, wearing a servile expression.
"I-it's been so long... and with only one arm, there's a lot I couldn't show you. I apologize."
"No, it was decent enough. An entertaining diversion in a tedious moment."
"Th-then... a-am I to be emancipated?"
Hope spread through the eighth mining slave's eyes. The what-if was making his heart race.
No. This man must not be freed.
Messi, who had caught the smell of blood in the brawling arts, was about to intervene when Ereb's laughter suddenly burst out.
"Bwahahaha!!"
Ereb snorted a laugh and shook his head.
"Do I look like that kind of bleeding heart? Haha, I don't look it, but you're an adorable little idiot!"
"Y-yes?"
"The ones sold to the Ahental mines are almost always heinous criminals, or people who've committed some enormous crime. Did you think I wouldn't know that? You came here for beating one serf to death? Kahaha! You expect me to believe that? You stupid bastard!"
Ereb was Ereb, after all. It seemed he had seen through the fraud from the start, thanks to his contempt for the weak.
"Get out of here! Unless you want the other arm cut off too!"
"U-uuuugh...!"
The eighth mining slave, his face crumpled, left the Prayer House room without even a farewell. Ereb smacked his lips as if disappointed.
"Shame. If he'd come at me, I'd have slit his throat. So, did you enjoy the brawling arts?"
"Yes. Knowing them should be quite helpful in close combat."
"That so? Then can you copy that too?"
That too? There was an edge to the words. Messi roughly grasped the situation.
Sir Ramang must have said something.
No wonder this young lord had invited a demonstration of brawling arts at such a perfectly timed moment. Ramang had been under the misapprehension that Messi possessed the insight to awaken to mana on his own and immediately copy Ahental Swordsmanship. That talk seemed to have reached Ereb's ears as well.
"So that's why you had him demonstrate?"
"It'd be weird if you asked, wouldn't it? From now on, if there's something you want to see, just say so. I'll help."
Honestly, Messi was a little moved this time. That that eccentric, foul-tempered human being had grown enough to be considerate to this extent... it was remarkable progress.
Listening to the two of them talk, Erena tilted her head, not knowing what they meant. She simply thought the two of them had many secrets only they knew.
Just then, the director of the Prayer House came in with an awkward expression.
"Um... Lady Erena. A difficult situation has arisen."
"Yes? Have more patients come in?"
"No, it isn't that... Priests have arrived from the Church."