Wonderful Insane World

Elisa fixed him with an unreadable expression. Her fingers tightened around the gem in her hand. She understood the trap perfectly. To refute his version would be to force her to give the real one, which was infinitely worse. She was cornered.

Zirel had outmaneuvered her. He had placed both her and Maggie in a position of debt to him, having shouldered the "blame" for "forcing their hand." He had created a lever for the future. By "confessing" that Elisa was part of the Guild of the Wind Flower, he made her beholden to him. He could now apply pressure later, threaten to expose this fabricated truth to his own guild to force her compliance.

"The team's survival outweighs any regulation," Elisa said finally, her voice neutral, accepting the lie without fully endorsing it. It was a masterful non-answer, acknowledging the situation without confirming his specific fiction.

Zirel offered a small smile, tight with pain, a flash of triumph in his eyes. The trap had snapped shut. He had lost the battle against the creature, but he had just won a crucial victory. He had captured a treasure far more valuable than a third-rank Awakened beast's anima gem. He had captured a secret, and with it, a powerful weapon. The cost had been their blood and broken bones, but for a man like Zirel, it was a price he seemed all too willing to have paid.

From his place against the wall, Armin watched the exchange, the cold in his gut solidifying into a hard, heavy dread. The immediate terror was over, but a new, more insidious fear had taken its place. They had survived the monster in the cavern, but he wondered if they had just let a far more dangerous one walk out with them, wearing Zirel's smiling, pained face.

——

The silence that followed Elisa's words was thicker than the cavern's darkness, heavy with unspoken truths and alliances forged by force. Armin watched, breathless, as that tacit accord descended upon the group like a shroud.

Two surviving soldiers, mere boys with wide, terrified eyes, looked back and forth between Zirel's authoritative, wounded figure and Elisa's resigned neutrality, and they accepted the lie. They had neither the influence nor the courage to distinguish truth from falsehood.

Inès, pale and bleeding, her gaze clouded by pain, groaned faintly—too far gone to care about the politics of guilds.

But Armin cared.

The lie burned inside him, a coal of indignation beside the searing agony of his broken arm. He saw the calculation behind Zirel's triumph, the cold joy that betrayed his words of apology and responsibility. He was not sorry. He was victorious. They were all nothing more than pawns on Zirel's chessboard, and he had just maneuvered his strongest pieces into a position of permanent vulnerability.

Maggie was the first to break the deadlock. With a growl that was more the release of pent-up fury than an effort of strength, she wrenched her halberd from the rocky ground. The screech of metal against stone was brutally loud. She did not look at Zirel. Her blazing gaze swept across the cavern, taking stock of the wounded, the dead, the remains of the beast.

"We need to move," she declared, her low voice admitting no contest. "This place is a tomb, and the stench will draw more than scavengers." Her eyes finally landed on Zirel, and within them lay a warning, a silent promise that his leverage had limits. "Can you walk?"

Zirel's triumphant smile did not falter, though it became forced. "I'll manage. The priority is the wounded. Armin…" He turned his gaze toward the giant, and Armin saw the order forming—the command to keep fulfilling his duty, to smother his pain for the sake of a group Zirel had willingly sacrificed.

Before Zirel could speak, Elisa moved. She knelt beside Inès, her motions efficient despite her obvious exhaustion. She drew a field dressing from her pack, her hands suddenly gentle as she began to stem the bleeding from the crossbow wound. "The bone is broken," she murmured, eyes down, her voice meant only for Inès and perhaps Maggie. "I can… stabilize it. For now. But she can't walk."

Then her golden eyes—now merely weary, human once more—lifted to Armin.

"Your arm."

It wasn't a question. It was a statement, and in it Armin detected a flicker of something—not apology, but perhaps acknowledgment. An acknowledgment of the price that had been paid to keep their secret.

He gave a stiff nod, sweat beading on his brow.

Elisa left Inès to Maggie's care and came to him. Her fingers, surprisingly cold, traced the grotesque angle of his forearm. He grimaced, stars bursting in his vision.

"It's bad," she said calmly, for his ears alone. Her voice was stripped of its earlier supernatural power, but held a different intensity. "I can fuse the bone. Enough to get you out of here. It'll hold for a day, maybe two. After that…" She let the words trail, their meaning clear. After that, they would need a true healer, and questions would be asked about the nature of such a precise, temporary repair.

He gave another sharp nod, jaw clenched. "Do it."

Her hands began to glow—not with the violent green light from before, but with a softer golden shimmer. The agony in his arm didn't vanish, but it ebbed, shifting from a raging fire to a deep, throbbing ache. He felt the bone fragments shift and grind, not with the brutality of a fresh fracture, but with the unsettling sensation of being pulled and bound together by an unseen force.

When she withdrew her hands, his arm was still useless, but it was straight, held fast by an invisible, rigid plaster of her will.

"Don't use it," she warned, her gaze grave. "The fusion is fragile."

The march out of the cavern was a grim procession of the broken and the damned. Maggie half-carried Inès, her strength seemingly intact. The two shaken but able soldiers supported Zirel, who leaned heavily on them, his performance as the wounded leader impeccable. Armin walked alone, cradling his magically mended arm—a silent sentinel to the lie they all now bore.

He watched Elisa walking ahead, the amber gem clenched in her hand. She had claimed her price. Zirel had claimed his. They had all survived.

But as they emerged from the oppressive dark into the dim light outside, Armin felt no relief. He felt the weight of Zirel's gaze on his back—and on Elisa's.

And he wondered what would become of the group after today's incident.