I woke up to find myself propped against a tree trunk. I shouldn’t have been out for long, as Hiphus still wasn’t completely down. As expected, my hands were bound behind my back.

Ngh…

My sides were hurting a hell lot, too. It would seem I had been kicked and knocked out of the fight immediately. Well, that was the natural thing to happen when I didn’t have my mana armor active.

Beside me, the two elf sisters were similarly leaning against the big tree, one on either side of me.

Across from us, a blonde girl was talking to a gray-haired man whose ears were… pointy.

… I guess he’s not a man.

That was the third elf I saw in only three days. Maybe I should have played the lottery.

The fact this happened in a post-apocalyptic context made it even more revolting. In the end, this was another hint that the sisters and these two bad people knew each other somehow.

I figured it was fair to consider them bad because Clair had some bruises on her face and Lune was sobbing uncontrollably.

At some point, the girl gazed in my direction and stood up. “Looks like you’re awake. Don’t move.”

She brandished a long device I didn’t recognize and waved it over and around me for a while.

While I had never seen it, it resembled some kind of artifact.

“What does it say?” the guy asked.

"As suspected the mana flow is stagnant, so she hasn't awakened yet."

"I told you, that's a literal child."

H-hey!

For better or worse, the magic cast on me by Clair earlier was making me seem like an early teen who was still magically inactive. It probably had nothing to do with my looks. Definitely not.

"Still," the girl continued, narrowing her eyes. "She’s got a lot of mana in her for a mere commoner child.”

“Is she an Ouronian noble?”

“I think so. What do you say, Lady?”

“I’m not telling you,” I proudly resisted.

“Should we just kill her?” the elf coldly suggested.

Isn’t that a bit disproportionate for a little taunt?!

“It wouldn’t be wise to do that blindly when we don’t know which houses are with us,” the girl said. “Now, will you tell me about that necklace you’re wearing?”

Because her device probably reacted to the traces of mana left in my pendant, she scrutinized it for a while. “It doesn’t seem to be a mere accessory. Is that a fake artifact?”

“It’s not fake,” I retorted. “It’s artisanal.”

It was a reproduction but, as far as I knew, there wasn’t a fundamental difference in the way the regular ones worked.

Not that there is any documentation on how they're supposed to work.

It sounded like I was defending the device itself, but it was more that I didn’t like how it implied that my mentor was a counterfeiter. She never claimed it was some sort of divine artifact, nor did she even tell anyone about her achievement. She only focused on accomplishing her research and creating something that could meet my needs. Though it was in part to force my hand into accepting to give her my mana.

On the other hand, even though its backstory was dear to me, I was starting to resent the pendant itself. It embodied my failure to ration my mana and how I lost control soon after.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have depended on an external pool of mana in the first place. I should have instead stopped to think of ways to use more efficient spells with what I had. I had the ability to develop as many of them as I wanted, and yet I chose to focus on a select few that I had complete control over but were costly.

In a way, I had been the one who made up this need to brute force my way by doubling my mana pool with this artifact. Maybe I should have taken a cue from spells like Rina’s, which worked around this sort of issue with clever strategies.

The girl grabbed the artifact and snapped the chain. “What does it do?”

“... Not much.”

Honestly, the material’s mana-proofing properties had likely been compromised back then by the sheer amount of mana that collided with it in that instant. It was not much more than an accessory, one that wasn’t even that pleasant to the eye.

Likely doubting my statement, she threw my artifact on the ground and stomped on it repeatedly. “There, that should stop whatever it was doing.”

“...”

Then, she serenely walked back to the campfire without even snorting at me, as if nothing happened, leaving the shattered pendant right in front of me.

I take it back…

Since not being able to recover its fragment pissed me off more than I thought, that meant that some part of me did cherish the object itself.

“So,” I murmured to my right, “When do you plan on returning my magic?”

“Now that they’ve measured you too, they won’t expect a counterattack. The seal on you will break as soon as I cast my magic on him. You take care of them.”

I frowned. “What do you mean by that? Kill them…?”

“I know this group,” she started. “Don’t think they’ll keep us both alive for lo— Ah.”

Clair stopped in the middle of our conversation when she saw the elf angrily marching toward us.

“What are you babbling about?” he asked before he grabbed Clair by her hair.

By the standard of this world’s humans, that elf guy didn’t look that strong physically. Well, he probably was as strong as an average guy on Earth, so I wouldn’t call him weak either. At least, he could overpower the three of us.

He grabbed Clair by the collar, pulled her from the tree trunk and roughly threw her farther away from Lune and me. When I looked at him kicking Clair relentlessly in the face, I confirmed that the bruises she had gotten on her face while I was out had been his fault.

“Don’t assume I’ll spare you just because you’re related! You’re an obstacle who cost us dozens of comrades!”

“I… didn’t…”

“... Why won’t you admit it? Why would this divine punishment happen right before we could secure you?! What did you do?!”

Hearing about a somewhat recent event referred to as divine punishment rang a bell, especially in a world where unusual phenomena were often perceived through a religious lens.

Talk about an awful timing.

To my understanding, she was probably being beaten up because the mana burst I caused had manifested at a critical moment.

Sorry.

As if Clair ordered me to take responsibility, a familiar tingle suddenly coursed through my body. My mana was flowing once again at the usual intensity. That was my cue.

Channeling the mana toward my wrists, I sneakily burned through the rope behind my back. Thanks to Clair, who attracted all the attention by getting beaten to a pulp in my stead, even Lune failed to notice the smoke.

Finally free, as I searched left and right for something that wasn’t a leave or a twig, my gaze landed on the remains of my mana pendant. It had been split open but most of the frame still lay in front of me, so I grabbed it and enveloped it in my mana. As I thought, its coating didn’t stop my mana from permeating the object with ease.

“Now, now, It does sound too convenient, but we don’t have proof she’s responsible,” the nameless girl started. “Plus, by keeping her in one piece, we can control—”

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

A thunderous sound erupted, cutting off her sentence.

This… isn’t just about adding kinetic energy, is it?

The spell unmistakenly converted mana into kinetic energy and added it to the pendant, but something felt ever so slightly off. Namely, although I could tell the energy of the projectile had attained a maximum value, I sensed some mana that dissipated on impact, meaning it hadn't been converted. It wasn’t even the thin layer of mana that structured the spell and didn't participate as a result, it was simply a leftover that was purely ignored.

How I had realized in a split second that it had already peaked was hard to say. In any case, if I was right, that subtle inconsistency would imply that what I took for granted wasn’t necessarily so, even for something as trivial as classical mechanics.

“N-no…!” Lune cried out, her voice shaking in terror right next to me.

This jolted me back to reality.

R-right.

Not far from me, both Clair and the guy were splattered in blood and viscera, momentarily frozen in shock.

The guy's face twisted in horror when the girl’s lifeless body collapsed in a gruesome way. He looked right at me, my extended arm giving away that I had been responsible.

As a result, he furiously slashed his hand through the air in a diagonal motion.

—?!

But... nothing happened. I realized only a moment later that, without Clair's interference in this guy’s ability to use magic, I might have died. Just like that.

Ah…

He looked at his arm in disbelief and blanked out for a moment, certainly not getting why his mana wasn’t flowing.

Making use of that second wave of surprise, I managed to freeze the motion of his limbs with my mana before he could unsheath his dagger or whatever weapon he had at his waist. This time, all the kinetic energy from his struggle seemed to be converted as I expected it to, so I saw no particular discrepancy.

Clair slowly but surely stood up and wiped the blood from her face with her sleeve. “Did you…?”

I shivered as I looked at what I had done. “Doesn’t look very salvific, does it?”

“That… certainly wasn’t the kind of intervention that I was expecting. Still, there’s no denying that you saved us just now...”

“... Is my mission completed, then?”

“Not so fast… Can we discuss that later?” Clair asked, her gaze falling on the restrained elf.

“Right… Are you still interfering with this elf’s magic?”

She looked at me like I was an idiot. “Did you have to ask that out loud…?”

I had to agree that revealing such a wild card in front of a bad guy was not very smart of me.

Ah, he’s glaring at her.

“I'd like to question him for a while," she continued. "Do you need to stay here to maintain your magic?”

“I don't,” I replied, openly displaying one of my cards too. “This magic is autonomous and his resistance is in fact powering up the restraint.”

From the confused look in her eyes, I could imagine that Clair was wondering what kind of magic could take the form of a self-perpetuating binding, fire summoning, or a destructive, large-scale mana beam.

“... Alright. Untie Lune and take her away from here. I'll get back to you in a moment.”

“O-okay.”

As I took Lune with me and headed toward the main road, I glanced back. Clair was already kicking the elf in the abdomen while his arms and legs were frozen in place, and she did so repeatedly.

Scary.

***

“Look, it’s over now,” I told Lune. You're safe, okay…?”

Consoling someone was proving surprisingly difficult for me. I wasn’t used to it after all, as the handful of people younger than me that I knew all usually acted just as mature as me, if not more. That was embarrassing to admit, but even my younger brother used to soothe me when I was losing my mind over those dreams in the past.

Unable to approach the carriage I had traveled in, I had made Lune lie down in the guards’ one. Although it seemed a bit harsh to choose the lesser quality carriage for a young girl in distress, that one was still many times better than any carriage that would be considered comfortable by a commoner.

Well, it was probably working because she had stopped sobbing.

Frankly, that contrast between me and her creeped me out a bit.

I was calm, sort of. I had been visually disturbed by the results of that shotgun-like blast, of course, but I had felt much better as soon as I looked away.

Compared to the recent time I had burnt a murderous bandit to a crisp, I felt a lot less distressed now, even though that girl was, from what I saw, more peaceful and was even trying to calm down that violent elf.

At first, it didn’t make much sense to me. Putting it into perspective, however, harming that nameless girl didn’t amount much to my immense death count. This much wouldn’t affect the divine judgment that may be passed down to me one day.

And so, without realizing it, the weight of a random individual’s life had diminished for me. It only felt insufferable when it was the ones close to me or when thousands upon thousands of people were impacted.

This is way too soon to be already desensitized to death.

Cyne had told me that I would eventually need to get used to it, but even he hadn't imagined I would take such a shortcut.

“I’m sorry,” weakly let out Lune.

“... What for?”

“I forced you to dirty your hands for my sake...”

“I merely defended myself,” I corrected her. “I could have resolved the situation without showing you such a graphic scene too, so I wouldn’t say you forced me.”

“I still dragged you into this in the first place! This group was targeting me…”

I paused. “You specifically?”

I did think this was a premeditated abduction just by the fact that an elf was involved, so it didn’t surprise me that much. I doubted it was about a domestic runaway though, especially after hearing something about Clair getting killed.

As if to answer my internal questions, Lune sat up and looked at me intensely. “I... I think I owe to show you what you’re dealing with.”

She started unwrapping the head bandage her sister had forbidden me to touch.

I had thought that Clair was just a maniac and didn’t want me to mess the bandage up and make her redo it but, thinking back, I didn’t recall it being changed even once since we departed from the capital the day before. This was a bit strange given Clair’s insistence on redoing mine regularly.

After a couple of seconds, Lune had said bandage in her hands and she looked at me like a dog expecting to be spanked. “This… is what I am.”

Oh. What did I get involved in?

Instead of a wound, a small curved horn that contrasted with her elven ears was protruding from her forehead.