Interlude: The Half-Elf’s Doubts

Interlude:
The Half-Elf’s Doubts

 

Marielle

 

“REST!” I screamed. A ball of light shot out from my staff and enveloped the blood-stained villager. The gaping wound in her stomach closed, and color returned to her face. Her breathing would be normal soon.

That was the last villager with life-threatening injuries. My vision warped, and my hands trembled. The bottle I held slipped and shattered on the ground, the last drops of green liquid that remained splashing out.

Mana potion. It instantly recovered your magic power, but the side effects were dire. Drink two bottles in a day and you’d suffer the worst death imaginable.

“Marielle, please let me use that medicine! There’s some more back at the house, isn’t there?”

I rose to my feet as my apprentice, Myria, ran over. She was the only person in the whole village besides me who could use white magic.

Mana potions were extremely useful since we didn’t have any other practitioners, but I couldn’t let a regular human, much less barely-out-of-childhood Myria, drink such a thing.

Not only would it stunt her growth, it might even shorten her life span.

“No one else has life-threatening injuries. It’ll stunt your growth if you drink it.”

“But you’re also—” She realized what she was saying and her eyes widened.

This was one of the things I loved about her, but if I allowed it too often she would forget who was the master and who was the apprentice. I would lose face as the town elder, too. I didn’t mind being teased, but I needed to be serious in my leadership role for the village. Now more than ever.

They needed a strong leader to rebuild the ravaged town, and there were plenty of better-suited candidates than me. I had one in particular in mind, but rumor had it they were planning to take their children and leave town. Under normal circumstances I would try to stop them, but with things the way they were, I truly didn’t have the right. I couldn’t push the responsibility on someone else at this point.

“Don’t treat me like a child,” I snapped. “That medicine is expensive. If you still insist on sating your curiosity after I’m done saving villagers’ lives, then you can pay me 200,000G!” To tell the truth, though the potions from town were fairly expensive, I made my own out of cheap ingredients I bought myself and rare herbs from the forest. This potion probably wasn’t worth more than 1000G altogether.

“I-I promise I’ll pay you back…f-from my future salary. Pomera seems like she’s in so much pain…”

I covered my mouth with my hand to hide a smile. She was such a sweet girl.

“I can still use it at least one more time,” I said. “I’ll see to Pomera. Why don’t you distribute medicine and bandages to all the houses?”

“Okay! Thank you so much!” Myria bowed her head and ran off.

All right. I promised her, so I figured I should go get my potions. Two bottles in one day would kill me, but another half a bottle shouldn’t pose a problem. My life span was already ridiculously long, so what was shaving a few years off? I wouldn’t regret it. I’d buried so many people precious to me, and the numbers just kept growing. Even Myria would die before me.

Something nagged at me, but it could wait. The Mana Potion had me feeling terrible, so any work I did was a race against time.

I couldn’t leave my biggest task to anyone else, though. I had to go after that Dark Dragon. I had a hunch—a potentially dangerous one.

My true reasons for wanting to go after the dragon were selfish ones. I’d only seen a Plague Dragon long ago, and even then only in a drawing.

I returned home to gulp down some more Mana Potion and then cast white magic on Pomera. After making sure she was recovering properly, I caught up with Myria, who was panicking as she tried to care for several people at once. I relayed some simple instructions, told her I was planning to rest back at home for a while and asked her to take care of things in my absence. Then I slipped out of town.

I cast stealth magic on myself and ran through the forest.

Myria was holding herself together well, despite being nearly killed by that dragon. Clearly she knew to be strong and keep it together for the townsfolk. But I was sure, deep down, she was very upset.

If I looked at the big picture, the truth was that the Plague Dragon showing up was a blessing. It defeated the Little Rock Dragon and left the town intact. If it hadn’t shown up, we would’ve had ten times the casualties.

But that didn’t change the fact that the dragon had killed one of the villagers. Which meant, unavoidably, that Myria would be held liable for bringing the dragon to the village in the first place. I hated to push this off on the dead, but the only way I could see out of this was to swear a few people to secrecy and then tell everyone else that it was Gregory who brought the dragon in.

I suspected it would prove difficult to get Myria to agree, but it was the absolute best course, all things considered. There was just something I had to make sure of first.

Considering the scope of the situation, the number of casualties was incredibly low. One villager was mauled by the mahawolves, one murdered by Doz, and three crushed by the Rock Dragon. And then there was Gregory, who’d been decapitated by the Dark Dragon.

Of course, it was still nothing to celebrate, but the death toll only reaching half a dozen was nothing short of a miracle. I checked Gregory’s body afterwards to be sure. It had signs of crush damage from being pulled into the chasm caused by the Little Rock Dragon’s Tremor attack. Honestly, I had my doubts that he was even still alive by the time the Dark Dragon beheaded him. I went around and questioned survivors, and not one person could tell me they’d seen the Dark Dragon attack Gregory.

Plague Dragons were known for leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake, and yet it had left almost no casualties. I could say the same for when it attacked Myria. It was close enough to kill her with one swipe. It didn’t.

It was also strange that it withdrew from a battle against someone with my level of magic. I did attack with the type of magic it was weakest to, but I only hit the back of its hand.

Maybe it was all nothing more than a coincidence. I’d lived a long time, and I’d seen unrelated events line up to point to a pattern that wasn’t actually there.

But it still nagged at me. I was worried that perhaps we had abused and thrown rocks at the hero who had protected our town.

“Ughh!” Suddenly, a wave of nausea came over me. I paused and pressed my hands to a tree trunk. I must’ve drunk too much Mana Potion after all. I leaned against the tree, deciding to rest until the pain in my head retreated.

The Dark Dragon would be deep into the forest by now. And the farther one went into that forest, the more dangerous it became. My stealth magic wouldn’t be much use after a while.

Maybe I should just come back later. I talked myself into accepting my own excuses and was just about to head back when I heard a loud racket from nearby. It sounded like two giant monsters fighting.

If I got caught up in that, there was no way I’d make it out alive. I took a few steps back towards the village, then paused. There weren’t that many giant monsters in the forest. I turned back around, wondering if one of them could be the Dark Dragon. Then I looked up.

The Dark Dragon flew high into the air. It was holding a shapeshifting monster, a slime.

The dragon looked at me and then quickly averted its gaze. Its expression seemed sad. At least, that was what it looked like to me.

Then it dove straight down into the chasm.

I stood frozen for a few seconds. Then I snapped back to reality and ran to the edge of the cliff, looking down into the abyss.

The Dark Dragon was gone. It must have been caught by the river’s current.

I turned to see a large lizard gazing down at the bottom of the chasm. We made eye contact briefly, but it didn’t seem interested in me. It just continued to stare down at the river.