My Servant Is An Elf-Knight From Another World

Chapter 29

Resilience was never exactly my strongest virtue. Strength even less so. The most I've ever exerted myself in my life before this whole fiasco was for this marathon that I hadn't even bothered training for.

I recalled feeling my soul slip away from my dangling lips, wheezing, and hacking away, as I soldiered on through to the finish line. I told myself never again will I do something that will leave me as sore and hurting.

So anyway, that was a fucking lie.

Blood continued to pour out of every open wound. From my arm, from my chest, face... claw marks and stabs wounds that delved deep. Pure adrenaline was the sole reason I was still breathing, to be able to persevere even in the bleakest of moments.

But now I was out of it and now it was waning. Everything started hurting. Worse and worse.

Yet, fittingly enough, the injury that inflicted the most amount of anguish onto me was the one that was done by the person I least expected it from.

My left foot, grotesquely pointing at a sharp angle sideways, radiated an almost constant throbbing pressure that sent me hunching forward and wincing at every small twitch.

"Big ouch there," Ria said, crouching over me, her fiery eyes glancing at every angle of my twisted foot. "Don't worry, though. Cripples are in the in right now. Girls will be falling all over you before you know it."

This bird girl is seriously something else, I swear.

"Yes, because my sex appeal is what really concerns me at the moment," I said, venting out the pain with a big huff of air. "Actually, I was hoping you could do something to help me out here."

"Like what? Bend over your other leg so they're at least symmetrical again?"

I glared at her but I don't think it had the intended effect, probably because I wasn't able to form any other emotion aside from excruciating pain.

She flashed a smile.

"Kidding."

Ria stood up and walked over to where I laid feebly slumped against a wall. Didn't know what she was up to, but from the way she was staring down at me and puckering her lips, it didn't look like anything good.

I huddled back a bit, opening my mouth to express my concerns. "You know, you look like you're just about to spit onto my - "

She spat at me.

More specifically, it was a direct bullseye right into my wide-open lips. I felt a tingle as it splashed onto my tongue and then because of that tingle, my muscles went ahead and contracted impulsively, causing her saliva to go whooshing down my throat as I swallowed it whole.

A chain of events that spanned across a single bizarre second.

Just... why though?

"You taste that? Not getting any sweeter. It's only been like - what, 50 years since I last brushed? You'll be fine."

You'll be fine. Spoken with such assurance. If anybody else had projectile-spit in my direction and followed it up with that, I'd have been very skeptical - I was very skeptical, and also somewhat annoyed, yet it didn't last long. What I felt for her then, had all but dissipated.

My pain was fading. First was the slice on my cheek, then the gash in my arm, last to go was the burning sting on my chest where the Matriarch had stabbed her fingers in deep. A caressing sensation that dispersed across all my wounds until eventually, when I went ahead to check, had all healed over without a single blemish. Even the cut I made on the palm of my hand had all but vanished.