In Another World with JUST MONIKA 33 Live or Die! You Decide!

Since Reim was still injured, we had to force the old butler to just sit while we washed up and prepared food. Some sort of soft sausage-based stew, so that we could get some essential salts back into his body and not aggravate his wounds from chewing and swallowing.

The guards somberly took their portions and ate a short distance away.

"Mister Reim… how are you feeling?" asked Linze after the meal.

"… I'm starting to feel all that pain," the butler hissed through grit teeth. "But you're right, I shouldn't give up too easily. Lady Sushie still needs me."

"I do! I really do!" the girl cried.

I rubbed at my chin and stared off at the distance. "Mmm. How far are we from the capital?"

"Mayhaps two days… more one day and a half if we moved fast, but…"

I nodded. "Then… you're not safe. Your wound can still get infected and then you get a fever and you die. We can't move fast or that would bump and cause the wound to bleed out even more, which means it will take longer to get there. Which leads back to the whole inflamed wound causing flesh to rot and poison the blood."

/"The problem with convenient healing magic and magic potions is that they might not have developed the idea of antibiotics."/

"No! That can't happen!" the little girl squeaked.

"Mister Zah, don't be scary," Linze chided me, crossing her arms over her chest. "It doesn't happen that quickly, but it is true that rot is very dangerous."

I nodded. "We still have the same options as before. I really can't guarantee more than six hours without serious problems from the wound.

"The first is to [Heal] over and seal the wound, but once we arrive at the capital the doctors there will have to cut open your chest again and dig out the arrow. This is the simplest and safest however – it will hurt, and traveling will cause it to cut and bleed internally a bit, but you won't die inside of two days."

"I can endure," Reim replied.

"The other option is to do some field surgery. We didn't do this before because we didn't have the proper tools, but now that you're stabilized we can look around to see what we can use. Some sort of tweezers or pieces of metal we can twist into shape. We can beat out some strips of armor for that. Whatever it takes, really.

"And then once the arrow is out, [Heal!]. It's risky… but not as risky as before when the wound was still fresh and pumping blood."

The old man looked down at his chest. "If we do that, we would be able to travel faster to bring the young miss back to safety…"

"No, it's not worth it just for that!" she protested weakly. "It's not, for me!"

"Do you doubt Sir Playa's skill?" he asked her in return.

"… no." She shyly looked up at me. "Light magic… healing… it's not so useless as I thought."

Eh? Light magic, healing magic in particular, is awesome. Why would she ever think that?

Reim turned to me again. "If you believe this is the best cause of action, then I give my consent."

"Linze, what do you think?

She blinked. "Eh? Ehh? Why are you asking me?!"

I raised my hand. "Hands up, all those here who can use Light magic."

Linze followed. Then, hesitantly, so did Sue.

"So that means I'm going to need your help for this operation," I bowed apologetically at Sue, "Sorry, but… if you allow this, it's going to be a bit… gruesome."

"But it will save Grampy Reim's life, right?! He won't die from this?"

/"Just how confident are you about playing surgeon, Player? What's your motivation for doing this?"/

"… I can feel it. It will work. I've been able to regrow limbs, bone and tissue and all. Granted, for mice, and Linze looked like she was ready to murder me in sympathy from mutilating all those cute test mice even if they were unconscious…"

"It… it just didn't seem fair…" the girl mumbled. "But I know it was necessary. Even I had to train my Light magic on something."

"Then some time later I asked Micah to introduce me to a butcher. I've managed to regrow whole organs – missing lungs, removed hearts, large open wounds closed up. Heck, I even managed to reattach a chicken's head!" I said with far more excitement than what was warranted. "It was at that point the butcher threw me out and told me never to come back with my unnatural cravings."

/"He looked really disturbed when Player cut off a chicken leg, regrew it, then declared this was [INFINITE DRUMSTICK WORKS!]"/ Monika helpfully announced.

"But it would work! Infinite meat for crispy chicken legs! Chickenjoy my gift to the world!"

"… why are you so weird, Playa?" Elze sighed. "You… you were thinking about how to make money from that again, didn't you?"

"Well, yes. I have magic power to spare. If I just needed to buy one chicken, like, forever, that is a huge amount of overhead I could cut from my fast food franchise."

Then recognizing that Sue and Reim were looking at me oddly, their confidence in my medical skills fading quickly, I added, "But more seriously, bone and tissue are much more complicated than they first appear. A healing spell that can regrow bones and organs from nothing has a lot of intelligent self-correction going for it, if spells could be said to have intelligent design.

"My theory is that it is automatic, it reverses damage. Perhaps it manifests the being's soul image back into reality," and quite possibly it explained how Monika and I could be alive again in this isekai world after we both died, "and as such as long as I could cast it quickly enough, it is as foolproof as it can be!"

"Could you teach me that spell?" Sue asked.

"It's just… Come forth, Light! Soothing Comfort: [Cure Heal]." A glowing mist of directionless magic flared from my fingertips. I made sure it was aimed nowhere close to Reim.

"I… I've heard of this spell before. It's… it's not as powerful as you make it sound at all. It didn't help my mother when she was sick. And… and now, it can't even fix what's wrong with her."

Linze nodded. "I know this spell too. I really don't think it does as much as you think it does."

I nodded. "I was afraid of that, but I do think there's a reason for that. This sort of magic might be foolproof, but I think it's actually somewhat kinda dumb as much as it's so smart about rebuilding damage. I actually don't think it can deal with illnesses all that well because A LOT of the pain and trauma from illness is the body itself going overboard trying to fight off the infection.

That's why you get a fever when you're sick. Your body is trying to burn it out. You cough and your nose gets all runny, it's your body trying to spit it out. When someone feels cold, that's because blood is warm and that means less blood is near the skin."

I held out my arm and traced from armpit to wrist. "If you know what's going on inside the body, you can order it to direct its efforts at fixing itself more efficiently. Frankly given how [Heal] is so convenient, I'd have thought your doctors would be very familiar with anatomy through experimental vivisection."

"Vivisection?"

"Cutting open live subjects, as opposed to dissection, the cutting open of corpses."

"Scary! That's too scary, Mister Zah!" Linze yelped.

Sue put her hands over her mouth and tried not to gag.

I sighed. "I do hope they didn't actually do that. But in seriousness, medicine is not pretty. It's a lot of disgusting and horrible, and it's where you meet the worst in people… but a doctor must have a strong stomach in order to give confidence to their patients, and the nerve to save their lives no matter what."

Sue sat on her knees, balled fists on her lap, and looked studious and attentive. "If you want to save people, you can't be scared or disgusted by the icky things you see in them! I understand."

"Young miss…"

"Grampy Reim, I won't decide for you! You decide what happens, it's your body after all."

The old butler sighed and stared at each of us with narrow, considering eyes. "In that case, I decide…"

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Chapter end