Chapter 59. The Missing Blessing
After a brief rest, Necrotize and his team pushed back into the hunt.
Before leaving, they had extracted the demon core from the Inverted Demonic Boar’s carcass. A Rank Three monster’s core was no small thing, valuable enough to be used in alchemy, in weapon forging, in half a dozen other applications that made them highly sought after on the open market. Leaving it behind would have been wasteful.
Then they moved deeper into the forest.
Alana summoned Lucy and Macy back from the Spirit World. Their work wasn’t finished, but the time they’d spent resting in there had done them good. Their conditions had improved noticeably, and Alana was satisfied. She sent Macy ahead again without hesitation, back to scouting monster locations through the underbrush.
The group moved at an easy pace now, but something had shifted.
They weren’t walking in formation anymore. No careful spacing, no structured positioning. They moved loosely, casually, the way people do when the tension has left their shoulders. Defeating the Inverted Demonic Boar had done something to them. Confidence had settled in, warm and comfortable, and they were letting it carry them forward.
Necrotize said nothing about it.
He walked at the back of the group, both hands in his pockets, and watched them. He didn’t disapprove of their confidence exactly, but the overconfidence underneath it sat poorly with him. Beating a powerful opponent doesn’t make the weaker ones less dangerous. Anything can happen in a place like this, and the moment you stop respecting that is usually the moment something finds the gap.
But he didn’t say any of that out loud.
Some lessons don’t take when you hear them. They only take when you live them. So he stayed at the back and let them walk, and noted, with some quiet satisfaction, that they were considerably more comfortable around him than they’d been at the start. That, at least, was progress.
***
It was while they were moving that Dominic’s gaze drifted sideways, and landed on Sarliya.
She walked ahead of him in her white nun’s habit, hands folded in their usual position of quiet prayer. A thin white veil covered her face, but the fabric was sheer enough to suggest the shape beneath, and especially her lips, which were somehow visible through it.
Dominic looked at her face.
For no reason he could immediately explain, his own face went red.
A memory surfaced without asking permission.
Himself, flat on the ground. One arm dislocated. Several ribs cracked. His whole body a map of wounds. And Sarliya kneeling beside him, placing both hands on his chest, pouring everything she had into healing him. Her voice, quiet and certain, just before she pulled back.
"Go finish this."
And the smile she gave him with it.
The memory landed somewhere in his chest, and whatever warmth had reached his face doubled immediately. His heartbeat picked up, sharp and sudden, like it had decided to do something without consulting him. He didn’t understand why his body was behaving like this.
He told himself he didn’t mind.
Carefully, he let his eyes drift back toward Sarliya, who was still walking ahead of him, completely unaware, and then immediately dropped his gaze back to the ground.
From behind, Necrotize watched the whole thing unfold.
Behind his usual expression, something quietly delighted.
Oh my. Butterflies in the air. Now that’s a surprising development. A pause. I wish I could activate my omniscience right now, but alas.
As if on cue, Dominic felt it, a cold prickling at the back of his neck. The kind that makes your whole body go still.
He turned around.
Necrotize was walking with both hands in his pockets, same as always. But there was a smile on his face. A particular kind of smile, one that Dominic didn’t have a name for, and had absolutely no intention of asking about.
He turned back around immediately, fixed his eyes on the path ahead, and said nothing.
Dominic faced forward and walked normally, letting the rhythm of his steps settle him back down.
His mind drifted back over the day, replaying it from the beginning. The hunt. The moment they found the Inverted Demonic Boar. The fight itself, ugly and desperate and somehow, against all reasonable expectation, won. Every time he ran through it again he felt the same quiet disbelief that they had actually pulled it off.
But somewhere around the third replay, something snagged.
A small thing. The kind of detail that doesn’t announce itself. It just sits quietly at the edge of your memory until you happen to brush against it.
During the entire fight with the Inverted Demonic Boar, none of them had received a buff from Sarliya.
Not one.
He turned it over, looking for the explanation, some moment he’d missed, some reason that made obvious sense. But nothing came. The more he examined it, the more it resisted resolution, until finally he stopped trying to answer it himself.
"Lady Sarliya."
Sarliya glanced back over her shoulder. Her expression was warm and unhurried, a quietly calming smile, the kind that seemed to arrive without effort.
"Yes, Lord Dominic? Did you want to say something?"
He formed the question once more in his head before he let it out.
"Ah, yes. I was just replaying our fight from earlier, and I noticed something." A brief pause. "You didn’t give any of us buffs. Not during the whole battle." He met her eyes. "May I ask why?"
The group stopped walking.
Alana and Hana both went still, and then, almost simultaneously, turned the memory over in their own minds. Running through it again, properly this time. They found the same gap. Sarliya hadn’t buffed anyone. Not once, the entire fight.
They hadn’t noticed it in the moment. None of them had.
One by one, they turned to look at Sarliya.
Sarliya looked back at them, all of them watching her, waiting. Then her gaze moved, just briefly, to Necrotize, who stood at the back of the group with his hands in his pockets, listening with what appeared to be mild but genuine interest in where this was going.
Then she looked back at them.
Suddenly, the warm smile on her face faded. Replaced by something else. Something else entirely.