MHHC Chapter 131

Fracture

Well enough—if that was the reason, it was understandable to a point. But the sense of wrongness persisted, unresolved and insistent.

Human desires and the body's physical limits. The animal urgencies of hunger and fear. The complex, subtle emotions that surface differently in every conceivable circumstance.

With only memories to draw from—was it truly possible for a wholly different order of being to comprehend a single species?

'Stop it. Stop having useless worries.'

Adelheid lowered her fluttering lashes and forced the anxiety swelling in her chest back down.

Valentin had already, in every way that mattered, relinquished his divine standing.

Which meant, going forward, he had shown the will to live as a human alongside her.

However he chose to adapt to a mortal body—whatever shortcuts he employed—she had no grounds to object.

'But what will become of the body Valentin now inhabits?'

The body. The moment that question surfaced, a faint tightening gripped her throat.

'When he leaves... will my husband—the Grand Duke of Ansgar—come back?'

Her heart lurched.

Was it because she had thought of that man for the first time in so very long? Or was it the promise—the one once made, to return the body that Valentin now wore?

'I didn't know, then. I didn't know it would come to this.'

She was gnawing at her lip, lost in the tangle of it, when Valentin closed his hand around her shoulder and turned her gently to face the mirror.

"I have something to give you."

Adelheid looked at him through his reflection.

His hands had held nothing a moment before—and then, in the space between one breath and the next, a beautifully worked necklace appeared between his fingers. He gathered her hair to one side with practiced ease and settled the chain against her slender neck.

Adelheid stared at him, eyes wide.

"What is this necklace for?"

"Because you can't very well carry a mana stone loose in your hand."

This gem was a mana stone? She tilted the necklace carefully toward the mirror. To the eye, it was indistinguishable from an emerald—but when her fingertips brushed the stone, a subtle, electric tingle moved through them.

"It looks just like an emerald."

"Do you like it?"

The mana stone had been charged with a power to amplify both sacred force and healing ability. One this size, she estimated, would sustain her magic through even a short rest.

"I like it very much. Thank you for thinking of this."

"For something you merely like, your eyes look rather suspect."

"Suspect?"

"The face of someone who is about to do something very dangerous."

He read her with an unsettling precision. Adelheid blinked, then answered with a sheepish lift of her chin.

"I wasn't... thinking that."

"We'll see."

Valentin extended a pair of trousers toward her, the corner of his mouth curving upward—and whatever answer she gave, it was clear he had no intention of withdrawing his suspicion.

Adelheid stepped into the loose trousers with something less than grace. The length was acceptable, but the waistband gaped so freely that without a hand to hold it, it would have slid to the floor immediately.

Valentin crouched before her and gripped her calf, drawing the laces tight with slow, deliberate care. He moved like a man who had done this at least a hundred times—unhurried, certain.

"Does it hurt?"

"I'm fine."

By the time knee-high boots and a heavy cloak had been added, the mirror held a different woman entirely. The noblewoman had vanished; in her place stood something closer to a soldier.

Adelheid reached out as though half-enchanted and ran her palm along the mirror's surface.

Was it the absence of the trailing skirts, the scattered jewels? She felt freer than she could remember feeling—untethered in some essential way. A quiet, improbable confidence rose in her chest, sourceless and unexpected. The timid woman was gone, and the one who looked back from the glass seemed capable of anything.

She traced the mirror's surface with her fingertips and whispered.

"...Strange."

"What is?"

"Just... it doesn't feel like me."

He laughed—lightly, as though she had said something faintly absurd.

"Clothes are settled. You'll need a weapon now."

He swept one hand through empty air, and a silver dagger appeared. Adelheid recognized it instantly.

The dagger with the blue mana stone set in its hilt—the one he had used when first awakening her power. A small, involuntary breath of relief left her.

'I thought I'd lost it entirely. It vanished at some point and I assumed it was gone.'

He had been keeping it for her, then. She had been careful with it—it was the kind of thing that had been spoken of in the same breath as killing a god—and then one day it had simply ceased to appear, and she had resigned herself to the loss.

"Lift your arm."

She obeyed, and Valentin wrapped a long, sturdy leather belt around her waist. He tied the scabbard with careful knots, fixing it firmly so the dagger would always ride at her hip.

Adelheid gave the scabbard a few experimental shakes, then said, with a brightness she meant:

"I'll never let it leave my body again."

"...I gave you the dagger, but you shouldn't need to use it. It shouldn't need to come to that."

He straightened from his crouch as he said it.

She was startled by what she saw then—not a trace of a smile remained on his face. Not even the ghost of one. He watched her in silence for a moment, then spoke again.

"Once the subjugation begins, stay as close to the rear as possible."

"The rear? But healing magic has to be cast immediately when someone is injured—"

"Don't even think about attempting anything dangerous."

"...But you'll be at the front line."

"That I will."

He seemed lost in something intricate and unresolvable.

His eyes carried the look of a man who wished to lock her somewhere safe this very moment—and yet there was a sigh in them too, of someone who had already half-surrendered.

"If you want to stand at the front line, hasten to master your divine authority. Otherwise, there is no compromise."

"I don't have divine authority yet. But I'll be as careful as possible not to get hurt."

"That isn't enough."

"Not enough?"

"Even if humans are hurt before your very eyes—don't risk yourself to save them. There's no need."

He said it lightly. The tone of someone making an offhand remark. But there was no humor in it—not even the faintest residue.

The warmth that had always colored his eyes when they settled on her was gone, replaced by something cold and still, the closed surface of a stone.

Adelheid lowered the hand that had been fidgeting with the scabbard.

"I..."

"Even if I were to fall before you—don't step forward."

"There's no way you would ever fall."

"One never knows with people."

"You're not even really a person yet."

The slight smile remained. But Adelheid thought he looked exhausted—profoundly, quietly exhausted, in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

At whatever she saw in her own expression, Valentin raised his full palm and cupped her right cheek. The roughness of his skin gave a strange, immediate comfort.

"Right. Not yet. Not yet."

The moment he said it—exhaling the words like something being released—Adelheid felt it.

A powerful wrongness. She could not have named its precise shape, but it moved through her like a warning her body had issued before her mind could catch up.

Every hair on her raised at once. She shuddered.

His gaze fixed on her immediately, curious and searching.

"What is it?"

She closed her mouth. She didn't know how to put into words what she was feeling.

For just a moment—as though Valentin, as though everything surrounding her, was about to shatter into—

"Adele."

He said her name softly, a word used to gentle something frightened, and took hold of both her wrists.

And in that touch, the wrongness sharpened.

Fracture.

The word rang through her skull without origin or warning. Adelheid startled badly and wrenched his hands away.

Why had she thought fracture? She pressed the question on herself, but no answer rose to meet it. It was less knowledge than instinct—a perception arriving faster than thought.

A moment ago, and now. She could not identify what had changed in that brief interval.

It was then that something caught in the sweep of her gaze.

'That wound on Valentin's neck. Was it there before, in that same position?'

To call it something she might have missed—it was far too visible for that. Anyone would have noticed immediately. A dark, livid wound running from his nape down beneath his collar, ragged as a knife-slash drawn without care.

The sight of it stopped her breath entirely.

"...Valentin. A moment."

Adelheid took hold of his collar—rougher than she'd meant to. He watched her with puzzled eyes but offered no resistance, allowing her hands to do what they needed.

She undid the shirt buttons hastily and pulled the collar aside.

The pale green eyes that had widened in disbelief crumpled all at once.

'Gone.'

The hands searching his nape and the collarbone beneath were frantic.

But the large wound she had seen clearly, only seconds ago, was gone without a trace.

Beneath her fingertips: nothing but smooth, unbroken skin.

Her mouth went dry.

'I saw it. I saw it clearly.'

Adelheid released the collar she had been gripping, slowly. And it wasn't only the wound.

The wrongness—the wrongness that had chilled her spine moments before—had vanished as entirely as though it had never been.

"Adele. Your expression—what happened? What is it?"

She searched his face. She wondered whether he was hiding something. But he seemed no different from any ordinary moment.

"Just now, on your neck, there was a wound—"

"A wound?"

He glanced toward the mirror with a genuinely perplexed expression. As though he truly, completely, knew nothing of it.

"Where?"

"..."

To see what others could not—that had never been a good sign. And whether she had truly seen it at all remained uncertain.

More than that: if Valentin was hiding something, there was nothing to be gained by letting him know she had noticed. If she asked, he wouldn't answer. She would only be reminding him to hide whatever it was more carefully.

Adelheid swallowed the questions pressing at the base of her throat and shook her head.

"No. It's nothing."

The herbalist Hermann had located after considerable inquiry was a man in his early middle age, his hair just beginning to silver at the temples.

He was an exceptionally capable man—experienced, and thorough.