Lena (3)
Several days had passed since we recruited Lena, yet we were still holed up in the inn without taking a single request.
The reason was simple: it would take time to toughen the little runt up enough to drag her along on commissions.
As she stood now, she was nothing more than Scrawny Kid A.
The last thing I need is to take her outside and have her die some miserable, screaming death.
Truth be told, I wanted to train her patiently until her mana fully awakened, but between the mounting expenses, we couldn't afford to keep refusing work indefinitely.
Lodging and food were no small matter either, and the prices of weapons and armor were enough to make your eyes pop out of your head.
Probably because every piece was crafted entirely by hand.
The small iron mace Noah used, for instance—we'd bought a sturdy one that could withstand her monstrous strength, and it had cost us a good five gold coins.
Given that the exchange rate between silver and gold was sixteen to one... that came out to a whopping eighty silver.
Considering all the money we've made from requests so far amounts to barely two gold coins, we're running at a total loss. If we hadn't robbed those cultists for cash, we'd have ended up in debt.
With the financial pressure slowly tightening, I estimated we had roughly one month left to do nothing but focus on Lena's training.
Let's strengthen her as much as we possibly can within that window.
Morning routine began with Noah's healing.
Lena's body was a truly astonishing wreck, battered inside and out from years of hardship, so we couldn't just heal her all at once—treatment had to proceed drop by drop, like gently soaking something in water.
According to Noah, it was far more difficult than treating ordinary wounds.
She even said it was more of a miracle that the girl's body had held out this long at all.
"Mmngh... Unni. It feels... weird..."
"Hold still. It'll be over soon."
"Nnngh...!"
"Could you stop making that weird noise?"
In our now-cramped three-person room, Lena's suggestive little moans filled every corner.
On top of that, there was little Lena nestled snugly in the crook of Noah's arms.
Depending on who was looking, the scene offered more than enough room for some very questionable imaginings.
Of course, nothing untoward was actually happening.
"Keep making sounds like that and I'll stuff your mouth shut."
"Hmmph...! But it feels... wei—aid!"
"Noah, you're doing this right, aren't you?"
"The sensation does vary from person to person. In Lena's case, I have to treat every corner of her body, so it may simply affect her more strongly."
"Ugh... Thank goodness this inn barely has any other guests."
The reason Noah and Lena had to be pressed together was purely for the sake of treatment efficiency.
Unlike external injuries confined to a specific spot, restoring the whole body apparently worked best with full contact.
The problem was that every time the girl received Noah's treatment, she let out these bizarre(?) noises.
Something about it feeling like an itch in a place you couldn't scratch, apparently?
She had improved a great deal compared to the first day, to be fair.
Back then, it had honestly been...
"WAAAAAHHH!!!"
"...Never mind. Today's actually worse."
"Mmmph! Mmmph!"
I stuffed a scrap of cloth into Lena's mouth.
Only then did the room quiet down a little.
Watching the girl squirm in Noah's arms and shoot me a rebellious glare, I turned my attention to the situation outside the room—better safe than sorry.
Nobody there. Whew.
About an hour later, the morning treatment finally came to an end.
"Y-you held up well."
"Whew... Ptooh! It's not like you're torturing me, so why pin me down so I can't move an inch AND gag me on top of it?"
"Who's saying that? People will get the wrong idea if they hear you."
"Hmph! I think it's a little late for that. The mister in the next room kept sneaking me snacks the other day. Told me to hang in there, and all."
"...Damn it. When am I supposed to find the right moment to clear that up?"
We had taken Lena in with the purest of intentions, but apparently that wasn't how it looked to outsiders.
A street orphan taken in and doted on tenderly—of course people would assume we had some less-than-wholesome purpose in mind.
And Lena's occasional outbursts of moaning(?) only threw fuel on that particular fire.
Not that it was easy to believe we were raising a shrimp like her as a party member... but surely the average person would assume good intentions?
Heartless bastards, the lot of them.
"Um... Unni?"
"Yes?"
"You can let go of me now."
It was time to move on to the next part of the routine.
Yet strangely, Noah simply kept holding Lena tight.
"What are you doing?"
"Ah, my apologies. It's just... it's been so long since I've seen something small and cute... I'm having a hard time restraining myself."
"Cute?"
"Jun has gotten far too big these days. I preferred him the way he used to be."
So that was Noah's type, huh.
Come to think of it, back when my body was small, she had picked me up and carried me around all the time.
She'd been inexplicably sweet on the village children back in the Pioneer Village too, now that I recalled...
Some kind of lingering attachment to her old, smaller frame, perhaps?
"I like things smaller than me, you see. They're like dolls."
"Eek! Let go of me!"
The word "small" had clearly ruffled Lena's feathers.
She squirmed and struggled to escape Noah's embrace, but naturally, there was no comparing the strength of the two.
In the end, Lena gave up and went limp.
Even amid all that, the fact that she refrained from any real swearing was oddly endearing.
"Heh heh. Consider it your treatment fee."
"You said party members don't charge each other for that sort of thing..."
"You're not a party member yet, are you?"
"Damn it... I need to grow up fast, huh."
There it was—her first genuinely harsh words.
Once Noah's healing session wrapped up, it was my turn.
For Lena, whose stamina was still fragile, I ran her through a training regimen built from basic movements.
"Haah... hah!"
"Ten more laps to go."
"I'm... gonna... die."
Lena circled the training yard round and round at my command.
She'd already been running for an hour.
She was panting hard, but to my eyes, she still had something left in the tank.
Decent endurance, at least.
Her raw strength, though, was an utter disaster...
"Grrrrraaagh!"
"Just one more!"
"You've been saying 'one more' for ages... ugh!"
Thud!
Mid-push-up, Lena collapsed flat on her back onto the ground.
She hadn't even managed twenty yet. Malnourished growth had left her strength alarmingly lacking.
Still, considering she couldn't manage even three on the first day of training, her rate of improvement was remarkably fast.
"Um..."
"What?"
"Is this training really necessary? Ah, of course, conditioning the body is important too, but..."
"You're wondering whether prioritizing mana wouldn't be better?"
"Yes."
Sweat-soaked Lena hurled the question at me, her strength spent.
It was a perfectly reasonable doubt.
From her perspective, awakening her mana and escaping her severed vessels would naturally be priority number one.
"What do you think it takes to awaken?"
"...How would I know? No—nobody seems to know. Everyone just says the moment of awakening arrives out of nowhere one day."
"Honestly? I don't really know either."
"...?"
In my own case, I'd awakened the instant I acquired the Inner Heart, so lecturing her from personal experience would have felt a bit hollow.
Still, it wasn't as if I was entirely without a clue.
"My guess is that a whole bunch of factors work together. But the most important among them, I think, is Will."
"Will?"
I sorted through everything I'd experienced so far, one piece at a time.
Noah, who had awakened her healing power to save me as I lay dying in that laboratory.
Ivan, who awakened while grinding through constant training with Alta, his bones breaking over and over again.
Beneath both of their awakenings lay a powerful will.
And considering that Will was involved even in the manifestation of sword aura, it was undeniably one of the forces that carried genuine power.
"I'm not about to preach self-help nonsense at you. The reason I keep stressing willpower is that, unlike innate factors like an affinity for mana, it's something you can forge after the fact."
"Oh...! So that's why..."
Physical conditioning was merely one part of the process of building her willpower.
Not that I thought Lena lacked resolve... but she'd surely never trained like this before, so it would do her some good in its own way.
And honestly, meditation offered zero physical stimulus, which made it a poor training method for provoking an awakening anyway.
Considering she pushed herself to the very brink of awakening through meditation alone... I'd have to say her innate talent is genuinely exceptional.
Whether in willpower or mana sensitivity, it was clear the girl possessed talent far beyond the ordinary.
With just a little help from our side, she'd awaken in no time.
"Hence these crude, brute-force exercises..."
"There are other reasons too. Guild members make their living with their bodies either way, so there's nothing wrong with starting now, is there?"
"...I wasn't trying to complain. I'm just a little anxious."
Lena steadied her ragged breathing and spoke calmly.
I couldn't exactly blame her.
When hope was within arm's reach, it had to be frustrating to walk a path that felt like a detour instead of the obvious shortcut.
"Let's stop the strength work here for today and do the meditation you like so much."
"Praise be... What a relief."
Watching Lena's trembling calves, I adjusted the schedule on the fly.
Best not to let her celebrate too early, though.
Flexibility training came right after meditation.
"Zzzz..."
It was barely eight in the evening, yet Lena—having polished off the day's routine splendidly—was already fast asleep.
She was snoring, just slightly.
That soft, rhythmic breathing had an almost childlike quality to it.
Noah lowered her voice so as not to wake the girl and spoke up.
"How is the foundational training coming along?"
"Good. She's got real grit at her core—she pushes herself right to her absolute limits every time. Her ceiling's a bit low because of her age, mind you."
"That's a relief."
"And the treatment? You gave her another massage before bed, didn't you?"
Lena was receiving truly first-class care, all things considered.
How many people could claim the luxury of a personal healer tending to them day and night?
Noah gently stroked the girl's hair as she delivered the good news.
"Everything looks good so far. In the beginning, never mind her blood vessels—even her organs were damaged. As of today, I'd say we've brought her up to about half the standard of a healthy person."
"Steady progress. But... how about that phenomenon of hers?"
The thing that weighed most heavily on the Lena Reinforcement Project was the strange affliction the girl herself had described.
A bizarre phenomenon in which, the closer she drew to awakening through meditation, the worse her severed-vessel symptoms became—and the more her flow of mana fell into disarray.
The issue of mana flooding in beyond what her body could handle was something Noah could resolve. But the matter of its flow was entirely Lena's own to overcome.
"Nothing so far. Perhaps because she hasn't actually reached orbit yet?"
"Strange. I expected at least some sign of it by now... I suppose all we can do is keep watching."
From days of training and observation, I could find no real fault in Lena.
Grit, an instinctive sense for movement, focus... everything was deeply satisfying.
The only thing that nagged at me was that eerie phenomenon.
I couldn't tell whether the thing dragging at a genius's ankles was part of her severed vessels, or an entirely different disease altogether.
Still, with Noah around, surely we'd manage something.
I believe in us!
The endless repetition of daily life made time slip away unnoticed.
Between watching over Lena as she absorbed every lesson like a sponge and kept pace with each new exercise, a whole month had flown by before I knew it.
Seeing her face every single day had long since softened that sharp tongue of hers—at least where the two of us were concerned.
Physically, she had grown beyond all comparison to a month prior.
Muscle gained in all the right places, a healthy flush of color in her cheeks.
Even her wrecked internal organs had recovered to better than the average person's.
As for her training... whether she had a natural gift for the martial arts or not, she had picked up a considerable depth of weapon techniques and combat skills in a remarkably short time.
With a bit more raw strength to shore up, she'd be able to pass the guild's examination with ease even without awakening.
It was hard to believe that a genius of this caliber had been scraping by in the slums.
But then came the event that made all of the above seem like nothing.
"Um... I AWAKENED!!"
One day, quite out of nowhere, Lena burst from her sleep and shouted it at the top of her lungs.