By Zephyria 
We flew a little higher, just in case anyone was following us. It was hard to find a safe place, with things bursting out of the ground like that.
After flying for a while, we landed in what seemed like a suitable spot: a deep, cave-like indentation in the middle of a cliff. Aska’s feet barely touched the ground before he folded his wings away, making them disappear, and grabbed my shoulders.
“Is your arm okay?”
He was more injured than I was, but he didn’t seem to care at all. The hole in my shoulder was still bleeding.
“I almost forgot to mention it, but ever since we were in the Ruins, my wounds have been healing on their own. Look.”
The ice that had crept up to my elbow had melted, and my arm, which had been turning blue-black, was completely healed. However, the sword was still frozen to my palm. I forcibly tore it off and showed it to Aska.
My skin had torn, but it healed quickly, leaving only a little blood.
“Hey, why are you tearing it off so roughly? You could be a little gentler.”
I even showed him to reassure him, but Aska looked even more serious than before. His eyes were filled with a mix of annoyance and worry, so I wiped the blood off my palm and showed it to him again.
“I told you, it’s all healed! It’s just a little blood. See, not much blood came out, right?”
“Who doesn’t know that? That’s not the point! It still hurts when you get hurt!”
Aska shouted, clearly very angry. I deliberately hunched my shoulders to provoke him.
“Why are you yelling? Ow, it’s cold.”
Then I threw the sword I was holding onto the ground. I didn’t know what else to do, but the sword disappeared before it even touched the ground.
I was shocked and pointed at the spot, my eyes wide.
“Did you see that? It just vanished.”
“……”
Even after witnessing such a strange phenomenon, Aska didn’t even blink. Looking at his icy expression, I knew I couldn’t just brush it off. In the end, my attempt to change the subject failed, and I readily admitted my mistake.
“Okay, you’re right. I was wrong. I’m sorry.”
“Will you do it again?”
“No.”
I answered reflexively, sounding dejected, then stopped. Why was I being scolded by him? It was absurd, but I knew it was all out of concern for me, so I didn’t feel particularly bad.
No, it wasn’t just that I didn’t feel bad; I felt great. I had never been scolded before, so I didn’t know, but I guess I’m the kind of person who likes that.
“Okay, I get it, so come here and let me kiss you.”
Suddenly, my lips and tongue tingled, and I reached out to Aska. I wanted to kiss him right away. Heal my wounds and satisfy my desires—a win-win situation.
But Aska sighed.
“I’m not in the mood right now.”
“No, you need to heal your wound.”
It wasn’t like I summoned that Magical creature. We worked together to defeat it, so why was he so angry? Getting hurt is inevitable when you’re fighting… But thinking about it, it was a bit of a stretch to say I got hurt while fighting.
Still, how could there be a time when he wasn’t in the mood? I was even more surprised by that. I felt like I could never not be in the mood, not when I was sleeping, eating, or even in a life-or-death situation.
“Then what are you going to do about that? Are you going to walk around with a gaping hole like that? Bleeding all over the place like a squirrel dropping acorns? The Magical creature will follow your blood trail without getting lost.”
I thought it would be a good idea to bite my tongue or the inside of my cheek to give him blood and get a kiss, but it seemed impossible. I sighed and examined Aska’s forearm.
It looked like he had forcibly removed the thorns instead of letting them fall out on their own. Not only was there a hole, but the surrounding area was torn and ragged, making the wound look gruesome.
I looked up at Aska with a dumbfounded expression.
“You made your arm look like this, and you’re scolding me? You just grabbed it and pulled it out, didn’t you? You probably even shook it because it wouldn’t come out easily.”
Unlike my shoulder, the bleeding from his forearm had stopped. There were traces of black, melted flesh around the wound, as if the thorns contained an acidic substance. I didn’t know whether to be relieved that he wasn’t bleeding or not.
“First, drink some blood.”
Looking at these gruesome wounds made my head throb, so I didn’t hesitate to pull out a dagger from my pocket. Most wounds healed quickly, so I wouldn’t be able to get enough blood for Aska to drink.
I was about to cut my wrist to get a decent amount of blood when Aska stopped me.
“Why the sudden blood?”
“You need to drink blood to heal.”
“……”
Aska looked at me with a puzzled expression. I couldn’t help but tilt my head as well.
“Why?”
“No… just don’t.”
“But why?”
“It’s not that bad, so it’ll heal on its own if I leave it alone.”
What nonsense was he talking about? Why wait when he could heal right away? Who knew when another Magical creature might pop out?
I frowned and looked at Aska’s shoulder. As he said, the bleeding had stopped. But he had already lost so much blood that his entire upper body was soaked.
I shook off Aska’s hand, which was holding my wrist, and said, “Don’t talk nonsense and just drink it. You need to heal quickly so we can find the exit. We don’t even know where we are, so we can’t wander around like that.”
“What does finding the exit have to do with this? And it doesn’t matter whether I heal or not; I’m fine. You saw how well I heal earlier.”
“……?”
Aska was being strangely stubborn. At this point, I was more puzzled than annoyed. This wasn’t even an issue worth arguing about for so long.
Was it not just that he wasn’t in the mood earlier because he was angry? I thought he was just sulking because I wouldn’t listen to him and wouldn’t give him a kiss.
I stared at Aska, who was looking elsewhere without blinking.
The suspicion that had started began to quickly retrace all the actions that had taken place.
First of all, the strangest thing was that Aska wasn’t very surprised by my physical condition. I had just brushed it off because the situation was so urgent, but it definitely wasn’t a normal reaction.
It was impossible for an ordinary human, not a Magical creature, to heal wounds so quickly. Besides, I had been so weak just a few days ago that I had trouble even walking for long…
My body continued to shrink and my reactions became dull, but that had nothing to do with my health; it was simply because the temperature had dropped.
“It seems like we’re underground, like the Ruins, so wouldn’t we be able to escape somehow if we just kept going up?”
“……”
“Then let’s fly up first…”
“……”
Aska, who was looking up and talking, looked at me with a puzzled expression. He seemed to think it was strange that I kept my mouth shut. Then, realizing that my expression was not good, he sighed.
“I’m really okay, you know? You’re making a fuss over nothing.”
It wasn’t just that Aska didn’t want to drink my blood anymore.
“And you seem to have remembered that my wounds heal when I drink your blood, but that’s not true. You can’t heal just by drinking a little bit of someone’s blood. If that were possible, we would have carried blood in bottles for emergencies. Right?”
Seeing Aska speaking so calmly, my suspicion grew stronger. Was he lying that my memories were jumbled? I had been racking my brain so much in the face of death that memories of the past were flooding back.
There was a vast amount of them, too many to count. I remembered the day I first met him when we got married, and even when young Aska hit me, cursed at me, and climbed trees and walls like a monkey.
There were still some gaps here and there, but at least the memories that came back were clear.
My heart, which had stopped when I was kidnapped and fell into the underground water, started beating again, but it didn’t make sense that I couldn’t heal such a small wound.
Didn’t he used to love drinking my blood? I remembered that it wasn’t just because it tasted good, but because of some instinct directly related to survival.
“If I was really struggling, I would have eaten it on my own, even if you didn’t offer it to me.”
I lowered my head at his words. He said the bleeding had stopped now, but the bleeding was still severe when we first set foot here.
There was even a pool of blood on the floor in that short amount of time.
Leaving everything else aside, was the bleeding from that wound really stopped? How could the blood that was flowing so freely stop so suddenly? It was natural for bleeding to gradually stop over time. It didn’t make sense for it to stop as if the blood vessels had suddenly been blocked.
“Kyle.”
Was it because my expression was still not good? Aska called me soothingly. But that gentle voice made me realize that something was very wrong.
I instinctively knew that Aska was hiding even more from me. I didn’t know why, when it started, or what he was hiding, but I was sure of it.
“You asked earlier if you could go too, right?”
Aska tilted his head at my sudden question.
“What?”
“You asked if you could go to heaven or hell too.”
“Ah… why?”
I sighed and approached Aska. As the distance closed, his pale face stiffened. It was a different kind of tension than shyness.
The fleeting change in his expression quickly returned to normal. I put my hand on Aska’s injured shoulder and gently patted it.
“You can’t go to heaven.”
“…Suddenly?”
Liars can’t go to heaven. But I thought saying something like that would only make him more wary, so I just smiled.
“But it doesn’t matter since I can’t go to heaven either.”
I was smiling, but my mouth tasted bitter.