“Ow ow ow ow, shit, fuck! That bloody hurts!”

Alissa couldn’t help but curse a minute after the fighting ended. Ethan’s [Raging Bellow] had ended by then, and their sense of pain returned all at once, with a vengeance. One moment she was all right, feeling stronger and fitter than ever, helping support Moira whose leg was injured in the last moments of the battle and had to limp, then the next moment, everything hurts.

Her chest felt like one massive bruise, one that made every breath she took an exercise in the various nuances of agony. She felt herself collapsing down as her legs gave out under her, and even her attempt to catch her fall with her arms only caused said limbs to similarly cry out in pain. Similar cries of pain from around her told her that at least she was not alone in that suffering though.

“Bloody hell, I feel like I’ve just been piled on by both teams on the field! At the same fucking time!” complained Ethan as he grimaced and held his left arm gingerly with his right hand. He had taken more than one heavy blow to that limb, so it had not surprised Alissa that he might have taken some more serious injury to it over the fight.

“Lang… guage…” muttered Joshua feebly as he curled over in a fetal position and seemed to struggle not to cry his eyes out from the pain. Ethan and Alissa wore armor that helped them take the brunt of the hits they received, but Joshua had far lighter armor, and even if he had not taken as much punishment, he was definitely feeling it as well.

After all, he was one of those kids that was used to staying comfortable in their homes and had lives almost entirely separate from violence. On the other hand, due to her own more sporty disposition and passions, Alissa was all too used to muscle sores from physical training, as well as the occasional bruises and light injuries when some roughhousing inevitably happened during matches.

As for Ethan, he played football competitively and was all too used to being tackled by other hefty, bulky athletes and even piled on by dozens of them, so he definitely had a good bit more tolerance to pain compared to most.

Even the locals were not that much better off, though.

Moira had collapsed almost on top of Alissa when she fell down, the young woman’s own legs giving out under her weight as she apparently could barely feel the leg she was limping on. Both Gregorius and Bronwen kept their faces stoic but from the way they sweated and grit their teeth, they were both clearly in some notable pain as well.

The Fifth Princess collapsed to her knees and coughed severely for a while, often coughing out some frothy blood out from her mouth in the process. It was fortunate that they were not in that dungeon on their own, and moments later, the rest of their group had reached them as well.

Vesta went over to Joshua and seemed to do something that pacified him, a slight glow from the hands she held over his head. At the same time, Cerilla went over and placed her hand over Alissa’s chest armor. Her hand glowed as she recited some words under her breath, too quick for Alissa to catch on, but before long, the pain she was feeling started to alleviate itself and she found herself able to breathe more normally once more.

At the same time, Cerilla’s other hand hovered over Moira, with similar results. The injuries they suffered from the fighting seemed to knit together, the pain lessened to a dull ache not unlike muscle sores from training too hard. After a while longer, Cerilla gave them a kind nod before she lifted her hands and moved away to where Ethan and the Fifth Princess was.

Alissa was still in the midst of trying to get her sore muscles to cooperate with her so she could get back to her feet when she heard the sound of heavy footsteps nearby. She turned her head over – causing her stressed muscles to yell at her with pain – and saw that it was Sir Inolet who had walked over, standing tall over her with his arms crossed before his chest.

“It is rare for my students to surpass my expectations like this, so allow me to enjoy this moment for a bit more first,” said Sir Inolet as he looked at Alissa with a rare smile on his face. The old knight looked as if he had been rejuvenated somewhat, and the rare praise from his lips made her wonder if she was not hearing wrong at first.

“That just now… was us doing well?” she managed to blurt out after a while. In Alissa’s thought the fight was a rather messy one, edging on disastrous, even if they managed to prevail at the very end. Several times people had almost died during the fight, and the lack of cooperation – for the most part the three of them were sort of off doing their own things rather than working with their guards – was another abysmal point.

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It also made her recall how Joshua looked like he was about to run away at one point of the fighting, something she would need to drag him over to talk about later.

“Yes. You three had exceeded my expectations and done much better than I had expected,” admitted the old knight, still with that slight smile on his lips, half-hidden by his thick, coarse mustache. He even bent down and offered Alissa a hand to help her up, which she took. “Take it easy there, I know how it feels to be healed by magic. Your body ought to be protesting about it by now.”

The process of raising herself to her feet was harder than she expected. While her injuries had been entirely healed, the process still left her feeling as if she had just ran a marathon while doing pumps the entire time, and she was rather wobbly at her feet. A glance to her side showed that none of the others – Cerilla had moved on from Ethan and the Fifth Princess over to Gregorius and Bronwen – likely felt any better either.

“What had you expected out of us in that fight then… if I may ask?” asked Alissa to the old knight after she managed to stabilize herself with the help of a thick and sturdy stalagmite to support herself with.

“Why, I fully expected for the [Winged Scavenger Patriarch] to wipe out your team,” said the old knight without missing a beat, as if he was talking about dinner or other daily things, rather than the life of deaths of people. “It would have been a good lesson not to overestimate yourselves, and also allow you to learn the limitations of what you can and cannot do. Not like it would be of much consequence to you [Heroes] anyway, no?”

“Right… we have the [Respawn] skill… but what of the others?” she managed after a brief period of silence as she was surprised by what the old knight had so nonchalantly revealed to her. After she got over the idea of letting her and her friends die so they could learn from their mistakes, she had to admit that it made some sense to train them that way when they would just return to life later, if rather harsh. “They don’t have the skill like we do.”

“I would have stepped in and brought the Princess out, along with your gear,” said the old knight just as nonchalantly as before, as if he was not discussing life and death matters. “You know I’m a fourth tier. Even with my old injuries, the beast you struggled so much to handle would not be able to stop me for even a brief moment.”

“And the others?” she asked once more.

“What about them? If they’re fortunate, they can make use of the distraction my entry would have caused to get out of there. If they’re unlucky, that’s just their fate,” replied Sir Inolet with a shrug of his shoulders. It was clear from the way he addressed the matter that he cared for none of their lives other than the Princess’. “Either way, as guards of the temple or the royal family, they are just doing their duty. They’re doing something they’d be proud to lay down their lives on.”

“Either way, we’ll camp here for the night. None of you are in any shape to go further, so we’re calling it a day for now,” said the old knight while Alissa was at a loss for words to reply back to what he just said. The old man looked at her conflicted eyes for a brief moment before he shook his head and added a few more words. “If I were you, I’d worry about myself first, rather than others. Much less when you’re still too weak to affect the change you wanted to see.”

After the silence lapsed for a while longer, Sir Inolet walked away to attend to the Fifth Princess, while the rest of the guards had also returned to their respective groups, all of them still limping and in some pain even after the healing. Alissa noted that Joshua was still curled up in a fetal position and seemed to have fallen asleep with his head on Vesta’s lap, while Cerilla gave her a nod before she followed Sir Inolet.

“You okay, Allie?” asked Ethan as he hobbled over to her side. Much like Alissa herself, he looked the worse for wear, with his left arm still hanging limply by his side. If his arm felt much like how her chest felt right at that time, then Alissa understood why he just let it hang limp like that. “Your face looked like your cat just died or something.”

“It’s just what Old Henri said…” replied Alissa as she hugged herself with both arms, her back resting against the sturdy stalagmite she used to support herself. She fought to put the words she had in her mind the right way for a few moments before she finally continued. “He seemed to have… no regard for the lives of everyone else, other than the Princess, and us, I guess. But we can’t die now, can we? So he only really cared for the Princess.”

“Ah. Let me guess, he probably said something along the lines of them probably finding it an honor to die in your service or something like that? That it was their purpose in life?” asked Ethan as he hit the nail right in the head. The way he seemed to almost instantly get what’s going on around them since they were summoned to this world at times made Alissa wish she had read more of those books he liked so much. “Looks like I guessed it right, huh?”

“You did. He said it somewhat differently, but it’s pretty much the same thing,” she admitted.

“That’s something I had sort of expected since we were summoned and then treated so well. They had a whole religion revolving on people getting summoned to serve as [Heroes] for them, Allie. How else did you expect they’d be reacting when the [Heroes] came for real?” he explained. “Rather, think of it this way. How would your mom have reacted if one day she learned that Jesus had just come over for the second time and he’s right in town?”

“Okay, okay, I get your drift,” said Alissa as she gestured for Ethan to stop with the increasingly elaborate explanations. He could really get talkative when it comes to a topic he was passionate about like this, as she had learned the hard way over their many years of friendship. “So… are you suggesting that I just let it be that people are literally willing to sacrifice their whole lives just to train us?”

“As my dad often said, be the change you want to be, girl. Right now we might not have much in terms of actual standing, being pretty much newbie heroes fresh off the summoning and whatnot, but I betcha that’ll change as we grow more powerful,” said Ethan with a smirk on his face. “By then you could likely call for what changes you’d want to see and have them followed.”