Ch 41: Infirmary Room
Melissa opened her eyes to find herself lying in a bed she did not recognize. She yawned hard as she took in the foreign room around her. There were multiple beds with white bedsheets and duvets, and curtains hung loosely between each one from the ceiling. The ceiling itself was plain white with no design whatsoever, and the room was empty except for Lucien, who sat to her right in a separate chair.
Lucien?
She nearly lost her soul seeing him sitting there as the room darkened under the hue of red and orange bleeding through the window, signaling the end of the day.
She gulped down her saliva as she noticed that Lucien still wore the same impassive expression on his face, with his brows knitted ever so slightly together, so subtle that she might have missed it entirely. But somehow she found it. Whether she had gotten better at reading Lucien or she was simply hallucinating was a matter to be settled later. For now, his back remained as straight as ever, like a pillar, with his arms crossed before his chest. His white shirt and black pants looked as crisp and new as though freshly worn. Had he changed his clothes? Why?
Suddenly her head hurt as she tried to remember what had happened. She squeezed her eyes shut and bit her lip as the pain intensified. Then the memories flooded back all at once. She remembered conjuring a huge sphere of mana and how Lucien had cut it apart with ease. She remembered conjuring multiple spheres after that, thinking that one had not been enough, which turned out to be just as utter a failure as what had come before. And at last she had completely lost her composure, and with every inch of herself she had summoned all of her mana outward at once. "Ouch," she winced, still feeling the pain just from the memory of it. Back then, she had surrendered herself completely to the feeling and had ended up rupturing her manapaths by forcing all of her mana through them at once, and the mana restricting bracelets she wore had tried to hold her back, which had only made the damage to her body even greater.
Melissa opened her eyes with a rush of gratefulness that she was still alive. The pain of what she had put her body through lingered even in memory, and Lucien was still sitting across from her, still and silent. "Thank you," Melissa muttered under her breath, so inaudibly that Lucien almost missed it entirely.
Melissa could not help but imagine what worse fate would have befallen her had Lucien not stepped in to knock her out. She had completely lost herself in the heat of power, power she was still so deeply unfamiliar with, having ranked up so recently and so mysteriously and quickly all at once. She had been at an Apprentice [Upper] rank tier, but due to whatever had happened during the healing of Lucien's mother, something had triggered her to jump a full rank entirely and arrive at Elite [Upper] rank tier. Now she stood just short of the Master rank, and she knew reaching it would take a very long time, for she had to first learn how to wield this new power and grow familiar with the vast amount of mana that now filled her core, mana that simply had not existed at this amount there when she was still in an Apprentice rank. The difference in mana capacity between then and now was like the gap between the sky and the earth. It was, in simple terms, unthinkable.
"No need to thank me," Lucien said, shaking his head. "It was my mistake for not going easy on you." For the first time Melissa saw something close to apology flicker across his face. He continued, "I only wanted to see how powerful you were and find out where your areas of improvement lay."
"Huh?" Melissa blinked several times at his words. Is he telling the truth? And she knew he was, because there was not even the smallest trace of a lie in his voice. What is happening right now? Had he not challenged her to a duel so that he could teach her a lesson, to prove that the weak had no place in this world? That had been what she assumed from the very moment she had heard him taunt the students and Professor Max, declaring that power alone was the supreme force capable of bending the world.
"You did better than I anticipated," Lucien continued, and she found herself utterly unable to keep up with the direction of his words, because he was being unkindly kind, his words carrying the weight of motivation rather than the harshness he always showed the world. Should he not be the villain with the heart that almost resembled black coal? Though she had noticed there were now slight gray blemishes in it, a small improvement since his mother had been healed.
At last he added, "I had initially thought you were nothing more than a girl still wet behind the ears who did not know the first thing about fighting. But you had almost conjured a tier two offensive spell, even though you had only just recently reached Elite rank." He paused, and when he spoke again the words seemed to catch briefly in his throat before coming out. "I am sorry. Make sure to rest well. I have left some healing potion inside your ring. Drink it before you sleep." He rose from the chair and walked toward the door at the centre of the room and stepped out without looking back.
Melissa was shaken to her core by the sincerity and remorse in Lucien's manner, though how dare he call an eighteen year old girl wet behind the ears. But his sincerity had been unmistakable, and the only question that kept circling her mind was what exactly was going on. She felt so utterly paralyzed to witness a person with such a guarded, cold heart being so kind and apologetic over a duel in which, honestly, it had been more her own fault for pushing herself beyond anything she had ever attempted before.
She lay there on the bed, her head turning left and right against the pillow, unable to digest everything that had transpired.
Her eyes drifted to the left side of the bed, landing on a rack that held several empty potion bottles arranged haphazardly. Had all of those been used on me? She stared at them and wondered how dangerously close she had come to ruining her body if nearly seven potion bottles had been emptied on her behalf. And how long had she even been asleep?
There were so many questions piling up with no answers in sight. She lay quietly on the bed and waited for the healer in charge of the infirmary room where she was staying, to arrive so she could begin asking them one by one.
All of a sudden, a beautiful woman entered the room. Despite appearing to be somewhere in her thirties, she carried herself in a way that made age feel entirely irrelevant, for she was nothing short of striking. Her steps were leisurely, her body moving as though she walked to the rhythm of some private, unhurried beat that only she could hear. She wore a beautiful red gown and black heels, dressed as though she was on her way to attend a grand party.
"You must be quite something special to make Professor Lucien stand by your side for an entire day," the woman teased lightly, and Melissa stared at her, utterly dumbfounded by what the woman was implying. Why on earth would he stay beside her the whole day? Wouldn’t he have other classes to teach?
"From the look on your face, I can see you don’t believe me," the woman said, settling herself on the empty bed beside Melissa's and pulling a white pillow into her lap. She rested her right hand at the corner of her lips with an expression of casual amusement and added, "And since no one has come to the infirmary to ask after your wellbeing other than Professor Lucien, who has been here the entire time, I can only assume you do not have any friends to speak of. Is that why he stayed? Was he keeping you company out of pity?" She tilted her head. "So then, what exactly is your relationship with him?"
Melissa wanted nothing more than to slip off the bed and run. The woman's dark gaze seemed to pierce far deeper than Melissa was comfortable with, and her aura was nothing like warmth or kindness. She radiated something seductive and magnetic, unlike anything Melissa had ever encountered up close, and when she read the color of the woman's heart it was a swirl of white and dark mixed together, which meant she was not a kind soul by nature, someone hovering close to the edge of what could be called wicked, though not entirely so.
"Who are you?" Melissa asked, tightening her fist beneath the bedsheet and positioning herself to be ready to bolt at the first sign of danger.
The woman reached up with a leisurely hand and gathered a strand of her black hair, hair that flowed to her waist like a waterfall, and smiled a mischievous smile. "I am the healer in charge of the infirmary," she answered, her tone as casual as though she were explaining something entirely unremarkable. "And you ought to be thanking me rather than looking at me like that. You nearly drained me dry while I was healing you."
Melissa blinked several times, trying to reconcile the image before her. How could such a seductive woman be a healer? Or rather, how could a healer be this seductive, radiating an aura almost like the succubi Melissa had always loved hearing about from other girls back in the village? The stories had always described them exactly this way, and the woman before her matched almost every detail, from her aura to the way her very presence seemed to tug at something inside Melissa that made her attracted to the woman. But succubi were supposed to be just made up stories, were they not?
"Still no thank you?" The woman pouted with a tilted head. Then her expression shifted into something softer, and her cheeks flushed a faint shade of red. "Then just tell me why he was so worried about you," she said, and she began moving her right foot in small circles on the floor like a shy girl working up the courage to confess something. "It is just that, you know... I want to be close to him, and since it seems you already are, perhaps you could help me?"
"What," Melissa blurted out, unable to believe what she was hearing. This woman, who from appearance alone looked well past her thirties and was likely even older than that, was fawning over Lucien, who was only nineteen years old.
Though the woman was a beauty to be reckoned with, and it was not unheard of for men and women alike to court those older or younger so long as both parties had crossed the threshold of eighteen years, the age that marked adulthood, what had truly struck Melissa speechless was the manner in which the woman was doing it. She was behaving exactly like the lovesick girls from her village, the ones who would come to Melissa whining about the boys from the next village over who would not pay them any attention.
Melissa could not help but bury her face in her hands as she quietly wondered what exactly the universe was doing to her today.
***
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