Book 3: Chapter 22
I didn’t know how much Lucia was carrying on her shoulders at the time. But I recalled the event every time I held her as she curled up in my arms later on.
Lucia is just a small elf-girl. She’s not a Valkyrie who was trained from a young age like Nier. The training she went through with the imperial guards was much less demanding than the training the Valkyries received. She’s also just an elf. Female elves lack the strength and stamina of male elves by a long margin.
However, Lucia carried me on her back as she struggled forwards. I couldn’t walk at all. I basically felt the same way I felt if I were thrown into water. What was worse was I lost conscious, woke up, lost conscious, and woke up again. My condition got worse and worse. While my mana wasn’t flowing, it was no different to a bowl of water with a hole. What does that mean? It means that the remainder of the water will seep out of that small hole.
The mana dissolving agent in my chest created such a hole, and slowly melted away my mana bit by bit. My body would then automatically replenish its mana, only to be dissolved once again. We were outside. I wasn’t able to eat much since I was weak. As a matter of fact, I struggled to stay awake. The feeling of mana being produced in my body became less and less frequent. When I ran out of mana, I lost conscious.
More recently, I was losing conscious for longer periods of time.
Lucia had no other option. She had to search for a white deer king, search for food and search for a place to stay at night. She had to do all of that while carrying me with her. Lucia couldn’t detect the breathing of that assassin, and consequently couldn’t leave me behind alone somewhere.
Because I couldn’t chew, Lucia chewed berries herself first, then mixed it in with water before feeding it to me mouth to mouth. Our first kiss wasn’t shared under such nice conditions like last time, but instead in a burdensome manner. I couldn’t recover on a diet of just berries, but Lucia couldn’t hunt while carrying me either. Lucia collected all the berries she gathered. She didn’t eat a single berry. When I awoke every now and then, I spotted her eating grass.
Yes, she ripped out grass from the ground and shoved it into her mouth just like an animal, chewed it and finally swallowed it.
Lucia must’ve suffered a lot. I sometimes awoke every now and then at night. I could feel her tightly holding me as she quietly sobbed. She had to carry an unconscious person around and resolutely forge forwards following the tracks of the white deer king. I actually really wanted her to put me down and search for the white deer king on her own, but she never left me. She’s just a girl and yet she carried such a burdensome responsibility.