Jude opened his eyes and saw the sky above him. His entire body ached, so he only moved his head to look around instead of trying to get up. Iris was sitting against a tree next to him, and her eyes were closed.

“I-!” he tried calling out. “Cough, cough!”

Iris’ eyes shot open, and she rushed to kneel next to him.

“Don’t try to talk. Drink some water. You lost a lot of fluids,” she said and raised the flask she had given him to his mouth.

Jude was going to protest, but when the liquid hit his chapped lips, the thirst took over. He drank the entire flask.

“I’ll go get some more later. Don’t worry.”

He took a moment to make sure his throat wasn’t dry anymore before asking, “What happened?”

“We won, and you almost died.”

After hearing that from Iris, he started remembering the fight. He remembered losing a leg, being gored by massive claws and losing consciousness. He was breathing now, which told him Iris had managed to heal him. Because his entire body was in pain, he couldn’t tell if what he was feeling on his leg was phantom pain or not.

“My leg?” he asked.

“I managed to reattach it. It wasn’t pretty. I had to reopen the wound I had healed to make sure every nerve, muscle, vein and artery attached appropriately. Honestly, I didn’t know I could do it. My mind was moving at a much faster speed than I ever thought possible, and I’m a fucking genius! It’s probably to do with the stats we have now. Anyway, your leg is fine.”

“Thank you.”

“That’s right! You should! God, I wanna kill you myself! You were so reckless! Why? Why were you so reckless? Don’t ever fight like that again!”

Jude looked at Iris with a soft smile on his face, but he didn’t say anything else.

“It’s almost over,” Iris finally said.

After the fight had ended, when The Devourer finally had fallen dead, Iris had picked herself back up and had run in the direction where Jude’s body had been launched. When she found him, she couldn’t believe he had still been alive. There had been blood everywhere, but he had still been breathing. She had felt like his high strength had had something to do with his superhuman resilience, but it hadn’t been the time to figure that out. She had checked his vitals, and they had been very low, so she had prioritized closing some of the less serious injuries in order to stop the loss of blood before going into healing his torso with its two massive claws stabbing through it.

Jude had been comatose, so she hadn’t bothered attempting to concoct an anesthetic, not that she would have known where even to begin. Instead, when all of the other injuries had been dealt with, she had gone straight into removing the claws. To make sure he wasn’t going to bleed, she had removed one at a time, and before removing a claw, she had run her mana through his injuries and stanched the pouring blood with it, which had allowed her to heal the wounds during the removal process, bypassing any point of possible hemorrhage.

After she had finished, she had laid him down and gone to look for his leg, which she had picked up earlier in the fight and preserved with Purify. When she had decided to join the fight to deal the deciding blow, she had left the leg behind so that it wouldn’t be damaged further by The Devourer or the rot on the battlefield.

Like Iris said, she had had to reopen Jude’s leg, which she had healed close, in order to reattach the other half. The process would’ve been extremely painful, and it definitely wasn’t something she had done before, but everything had gone well.

When she saw that he was stable and was certain he wouldn’t spiral into a septic shock or have any other complications, she had left him to look for food and water. It had taken her almost half of the entire day, but she had found a stream with fish. She had purified everything, drunk some of the water herself, and headed back.

Jude took a day and a half to wake up, which meant they only had hours before their presumed return.

“We’re going back,” he said.

“Can you believe it? This nightmare is finally over,” Iris replied with a bright smile, her first that day.

Seeing that Jude was OK, the strength finally left her body, and she collapsed back against the tree she had been using to sleep. Her hands and arms felt like a thousand ants were biting them, but she closed her eyes and cried happy and relieved tears.

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Jude remained on the ground looking up, giving Iris the space she needed at that moment. He was curious about The Devourer, about why he hadn’t received a system notification after killing the boss. Was there no item dropped or experience gained?

Half an hour later, Iris asked, “You hungry?” She had stopped crying and, instead, was holding a fish up to Jude’s face.

“Yummy… Raw?”

“No, dummy. I’ll cook it. There’s plenty of wood around, if nothing else.”

“Sure, then. Can you help me sit up first?”

“I don’t suggest it, but fine. Your body doesn’t seem to go by human logic anyway.”

She set him up against the tree she had been using and went about starting a fire. While she was cooking, Jude asked, “Did you get anything from the boss?”

She stopped for a second then, trying to think back to the end of the fight, but after a while she said, “Nope. I hadn’t realized that until now. That’s weird.”

“What about that stone we saw?”

“Shit! I didn’t check! I’ll be right back!”

Iris left in a hurry with the fish hung by twigs over the fire.

“I hope they don’t burn,” Jude said, and that’s when he noticed that the corpse of The Devourer wasn’t around where he was.

Iris had shadowstepped away, which meant that she had moved his body away from the battlefield before healing him. Probably to prevent infection, he thought.

It didn’t take her more than five minutes to come back, however. She held a red gem in her hand.

“What is it?” Jude asked.

“No Idea,” she replied. “We don’t have an appraisal skill, and I’m not taking the chance of equipping it and turning into something like that thing.”

“Agreed. Too risky, but you keep it for now.”

“Why me?!”

“You know how to deal with rot. Imagine if I kept it, got infected, and you weren’t around to heal me.”

“Right. I’ll be able to tell if something changes within me. Safer that way.”

“How much longer do we have?”

“A few hours now. We’re really done. I hope the Fae and the birds thrive after this.”

“I wish Rost would’ve lived to see the new forest, but the Anhangas are going to have to deal with the reconstruction.”

“I still have the urge to stab that leader of theirs a few more times,” Iris replied.

“Ha, ha, ha!” Jude laughed out loud. “Ugh!”

“I bet it hurts! Don’t do it again…” Iris said, but she walked up to him, knelt down to his level and kissed his lips. “I don’t wanna do this alone.”

“I’ll be more careful,” Jude replied.

They ate the fish that Iris cooked, but she didn’t go get more water. The stream was far away and they didn’t have much time left in that world. Instead, she laid him down on the ground again and lay down next to him. They stared at the sky above them and talked about what they would do when they got back and the people they hoped to see.

The forest around them was still dead, but the red rot had receded into the soil and vanished. The Devourer had been the catalyst to trigger the stone’s effect, so now that the catalyst was dead, the infection went with it.

The Anhangas would still have to rebuild, replant and rebirth the flora and fauna of that place, but the forest would live. They had succeeded in protecting all of it, but many had died as well, and that was not lost on them. All of those humans had died, and they had simply been lucky not to die with them.

Had they found The Devourer late and allowed it to complete its evolution, not only would they have died, but the rest of those in the forest as well.

“Do we play the lotto when we get back?” Iris asked.

“If only we had a luck stat to know if we’d win,” Jude replied.

“Maybe we do? We don’t know what’ll unlock at level 5.”

“On that note, did we not get any experience because we killed the boss before it had actually spawned?”

“That’s my guess. Maybe the system didn’t treat it as anything because it hadn’t finished creating it. Or something to that effect,” Iris said. “We don’t actually know anything yet.”

“I’m sure we’ll find something out now.”

“Yeah…” she said, but as she remembered that she would have to interact with the red being that had brought her into the room with the basin, a seething rage welled up in her. “We’ll get to you eventually, you bastard,” she whispered.

Jude heard her and knew exactly what she had meant. He also knew that there was something menacing about Iris. From time to time, he felt what he could only describe as a murderous aura coming from her. He didn’t tell her anything about that, however. Queen Millicent had already warned him about the duality of healers, and he was starting to understand what she had meant by that.

Eventually, they both dozed off. Both were exhausted and needed rest, and the dead forest meant that there was nothing that would harm them if they slept.

After a few hours, they received a system notification that made them both bolt up.

[Survival Stage Clear!]

[Congratulations!]