Chapter 35
Kairos stood utterly still, his face contorted with pain. The landscape, meanwhile, had transformed into an entirely unfamiliar place.
‘Let’s stay calm. I have to stay calm.’
The first thing I needed to do was assess Kairos’s condition. I hurriedly crouched down and examined him. His faintly trembling eyelids, tightly pressed lips, and bloodless face came into view.
“Gasp.”
At that moment, Kairos suddenly jerked upright.
He sprang up—literally. In an instant, his face was right in front of mine.
“Eek?!”
Th-that startled me…! I fell on my rear and scrambled backward.
As though I didn’t matter to him at all, Kairos immediately placed a hand over his chest and squeezed both eyes shut.
His voice trembled faintly as he muttered a diagnostic spell.
“A-are you okay?”
I asked carefully, looking up at Kairos with concern, feeling at least a little relieved that the worst-case scenario I’d feared hadn’t happened.
He gave no answer. Kairos remained completely motionless, his eyes tightly shut. After a long while, he slowly opened them, looked down at me, and spoke.
“I broke two ribs.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t worry too much. I’ve at least prevented the injury from getting worse.”
Kairos staggered as he tried to get to his feet.
“W-wait! You broke your ribs?!”
I hurriedly grabbed his shoulder and made him sit back down.
Kairos bit his lower lip hard for a moment, then nodded with an absurdly calm expression.
“Yeah.”
“Y-you say that so calmly! How can you be so calm?”
I had broken a bone once when I was young, in a riding accident. It had been my wrist rather than my ribs, though.
In any case, what I’d learned that day was that human bones were far more sensitive than I’d expected, and that a fracture hurt badly enough to make an involuntary ‘oof’ escape.
When I looked at him in disbelief, Kairos let out a short sigh and placed a hand over his ribs.
“Of course I have to stay calm. Given the situation.”
Then, gritting his teeth, he struggled to rise. Faint beads of sweat formed on his forehead, as though he were trying to suppress the pain.
This time, I couldn’t bring myself to force him to sit down again. I barely managed to settle my churning stomach and rose alongside him. Kairos turned to me again and spoke.
“We’ve been hit by transfer magic.”
“T-transfer magic?”
“Yeah. That damn brat’s doing.”
With his lips pressed tightly together, Kairos muttered through gritted teeth, “I should’ve cut her tongue out beforehand.”
A chill ran down my spine as I asked,
“Who on earth is that child?”
“……”
Kairos began glaring at me without saying a word. S-so he really was angry? I averted my gaze without meaning to.
After a brief silence, Kairos’s voice rang out in a low tone.
“You don’t need to know.”
It was the most overtly irritated tone I had ever heard from him.
‘He must be angry after all….’
I couldn’t say anything in response. I merely bit my lip and lowered my head. After shooting me a glare for a moment, Kairos began walking with unsteady steps.
“Let’s talk after we get out of here.”
As Kairos limped along, his hand naturally came to rest over his aching side.
I couldn’t bring myself to ignore him, so I approached and put an arm around his shoulders to support him.
“……”
Kairos glared sharply at me for a moment, but he didn’t outright refuse my help.
After walking in step with him for a while, I carefully asked,
“S-so where are we right now?”
Now that the immediate crisis of Kairos’s condition was under control, it was time to determine the result of this strange ‘transfer magic.’
Kairos inhaled deeply and answered in a quiet voice,
“I don’t know.”
“Huh?”
“I told you, I don’t know either. I don’t know exactly how far we were sent.”
Kairos continued in a voice tinged with a sigh,
“Of course, that brat wasn’t at full strength either, so she couldn’t have sent us very far. We’re probably somewhere deep in the western forest.”
“K-Kairos, even you don’t know exactly….”
“……”
Instead of answering, Kairos stared straight at me.
I tightly shut my eyes and lowered my head.
“I’m sorry… I shouldn’t have interfered.”
Of course, I couldn’t claim I was completely blameless, either. It was true that he had been brutally cornering a girl of about ten.
But it wasn’t the time to bring that up… Kairos’s manner was far too grim. Two broken ribs were hardly a minor injury, either.
As expected, this wasn’t the time to let my pride get in the way.
“……No, Rene. You must’ve been startled too.”
His voice was still tinged with a sigh, but his tone was much gentler than when he had said, ‘You don’t need to know.’
After a brief silence, his voice came again.
“So, Rene, how did you end up all the way over there?”
“Th-that’s….”
What was I supposed to say? My heart began to race.
I bit my lip and hesitated for a moment before answering carefully.
“I came to gather herbs, and happened to hear your voice, Kairos….”
There was no way I could honestly say, ‘I came to scold you.’ I could discuss the matter involving Christina calmly later.
“You heard my voice?”
Kairos asked again with a faintly suspicious look in his eyes.
“I-I was using a hearing-amplification spell because of wild animals.”
I knew it was a flimsy excuse. Amplification magic wasn’t all-purpose; at most, it only amplified sounds within a radius of about three hundred paces.
“I see.”
But Kairos accepted it surprisingly readily. Then he continued with an unexpectedly cautious expression.
“You must’ve been really startled, seeing me like that all of a sudden.”
“Ah… y-yeah, a little.”
“I’ll explain everything properly once we get back. For now, just understand that I wasn’t tormenting that brat without reason.”
“I-I will.”
As expected, Kairos was unfailingly gentle when it came to Rene. If I had been in his position, I would have been furious beyond words.
After that, silence fell for a while. Only Kairos’s increasingly ragged breathing and the soft rustling of grass beneath our feet continued.
We were walking east, so we should have been headed toward the school, but a familiar landscape refused to appear. In this unfamiliar forest, where everything looked the same in every direction, even my sense of time grew dull.
I looked around uneasily, then briefly raised my head to check the sky.
‘……Judging from the sun’s position, it’s around four in the afternoon.’
In other words, the sun would set in two hours. Once it did, we wouldn’t be able to continue along an unfamiliar path through such a deep forest.
‘Making it through until tomorrow… might be impossible.’
With fractured ribs, the greater problem wasn’t the fracture itself but the possibility of the broken bones damaging his internal organs.
He still seemed fine for now… but if his magic ran out and his self-healing stopped, something truly serious could happen.
“Kairos.”
Having made up my mind, I carefully called Kairos’s name.
“What?”
“How much magic power do you have left?”
“Magic power left…?”
Though puzzled, Kairos quietly closed his eyes.
After a moment, he continued in a cautious voice.
“Not much. I used up too much earlier, too.”
“I thought so.”
Someone capable of using transfer magic on this scale couldn’t possibly be an ordinary mage. Though he had appeared composed, Kairos must have just finished a fierce battle with that brat.
Still supporting Kairos, I turned around.
“R-Rene?”
“There’s a cave not far from here.”
It was a place I had already confirmed with detection magic.
“A cave?”
“Yeah. Let’s at least get your broken ribs stabilized there.”
There was little chance we could reach the school in time anyway. We had no choice but to prepare to spend tonight in this forest.
“You say you’ll stabilize them… You have medical knowledge too, Rene?”
“No.”
“Then?”
“I’ll use healing magic on you.”
“What?”
Kairos took a step back, seemingly flustered.
Then his expression hardened, and he spoke seriously.
“At your level, Rene, treating fractures is impossible.”
It was a valid point. Setting broken bones was an entirely different matter from stitching torn skin or reconnecting ruptured muscles.
“I know.”
In the first place, it had been an injury serious enough that Kairos himself couldn’t heal it. There was no way my healing magic, which wasn’t even my specialty, could be better than his.
“So I’ll focus on keeping your condition stable.”
But preventing the injury from getting worse was within my abilities.
Rather than setting the bones, I would focus on immobilizing them so the broken edges wouldn’t cause further damage to the surrounding tissue.
“In the meantime, focus solely on recovering your magic power—enough that you can walk a long distance tomorrow without any trouble.”
If we kept walking until tomorrow, we would definitely be able to escape the forest.
Although the western forest was vast, it was still nothing more than an urban forest.
“That’s impossible with your magic power, Rene.”
Kairos stated this firmly, his expression serious.
“It’ll be possible if I maximize my efficiency.”
I answered just as firmly and pulled a bag of moonlight grass from my pocket.
Then I looked him straight in the eye and continued,
“So trust me for now. I’ll make up for my mistake.”