From the shoulder down, Leon’s left arm was gone.

For a moment, Leon wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing. There were so many healing spells and painkilling spells attached to his torso that he wasn’t quite able to process what was before his eyes. However, as he gradually shook the fog out of his head from his two-day coma, the horror of his situation began to sink in.

Leon sat up, his sudden spike of adrenaline banishing his fatigue for the time being, and he began to tear at the loose robes he was dressed in, searching in vain for his missing arm. It wasn’t until he had ripped open his clothes and saw the thick bandage wrapped around his entire torso and concentrated around what had once been his left shoulder and saw the true extent of the healing spells that blanketed his chest that he truly accepted that his arm was gone.

Acting purely on instinct, Leon tried to get out of bed, but his legs were weak and couldn’t hold his weight. Consequently, as he swung them out of the bedsheets and tried to stand, all he wound up doing was loudly falling to the ground. As he did so, his flailing right arm swept over the end table and knocked a magic lamp to the ground, causing it to loudly shatter on the tiled floor.

Barely seconds had passed, not even long enough for Leon to struggle back to his feet, when the door burst open and three healers poured in, followed by Elise and Anzu.

“Leon!” Elise shouted in relief at seeing her lover finally awake.

“Sir Leon! You’re awake!” cried the oldest of the healers. He and the other two tried to rush to Leon’s side in the relatively spacious room, but Anzu practically knocked them all over as he rushed over to his human’s side. Anzu was practically wild with glee, bouncing all over chirping and waving his wings in joy at seeing Leon finally awake, but he was getting in the way of the healers, so Leon wrapped his one arm around Anzu’s neck to get him to stop.

“What… happened?” he croaked in a hoarse voice.

“You-“ Elise began as she rushed to Leon’s side, but she was immediately cut off by the lead healer.

“Why don’t we get Sir Leon back into bed before we start getting into these things with him?”

“Right…” Elise replied, though she hardly looked happy about it.

The three healers proceeded to help Leon back into bed, which was high enough for Anzu to rest his head on the mattress right next to Leon’s hand while standing up.

“Where am I?” Leon asked once he was situated back in bed and had some time to compose himself. The fact that he needed help at all was an extreme embarrassment, especially in front of Elise, but complaining would get him nowhere fast, so he held his tongue on that front.

“You’re back in my estate,” Elise quickly informed him. “You spent a day in a Legion hospital, and once you were stable, I asked Prince Trajan to have you moved here, where some Heaven’s Eye healers could see to you. Obviously, he agreed.”

“I see…” Leon said as he absentmindedly stroked Anzu’s feathered head. Elise was sitting in a chair that she pulled up right to the bed on his other side, and if his arm weren’t gone, she’d have been holding his hand.

“Sir Leon, your injuries were found to be quite extensive once you were taken to the Legion hospital,” the lead healer explained. He wasn’t too interested in the hows and whys of Leon’s presence in the estate, so he wanted to get his part done with so he and his two subordinate healers could leave Leon and Elise in peace.

“How bad?” Leon asked.

“The worst was your left arm,” the leader healer said. “All soft tissue had melted away, leaving nothing but charred bones. The extent of the damage was beyond anyone’s capacity to heal, save for maybe an exceptionally skilled healer from Heaven’s Eye’s central headquarters or the Sacred Golden Empire.”

“Prince Trajan said that a healer from the Sacred Golden Empire is here in the capital, but apparently he refused to tend to you,” Elise bitterly said with an expression on her face that said if she ever got her hands on that healer, she’d tear him to pieces.

“In fact, your arm was so badly damaged that it was deemed too difficult to heal by normal means. As a result, the arm was amputated, and we began to make preparations to regenerate it. Now, I don’t want to lie to you, such a thing is an extremely complicated and time-consuming thing, you should probably count on it taking months, perhaps even a few years before your arm has been completely regenerated and strengthened to the point of being ready for battle,” the healer continued.

Leon nodded, accepting the reality as calmly as he was able. This was going to take some getting used to, but he-

“There are better ways, faster ways,” Elise said, interrupting Leon’s thoughts.

“My Lady, perhaps it’s best that we get his current situation explained first before we get around to how to help him recover?” one of the subordinate healers said. She was a rather round woman of about average height, long brown hair, and a perpetual matronly smile on her face.

Despite this slight admonishment, Elise simply smiled back at the healer and said, “Right!”

Leon didn’t know it, but this woman was not only one of Emilie’s personal healers, but she was also Elise’s nanny growing up, and Elise considered her as close as anyone could be outside of her family. Now that Elise was grown up, this woman had been spending her time expanding her knowledge of the healing arts, which was why she hadn’t been around to meet Leon before now.

Introductions would have to wait, though, as the lead healer, not wanting to waste too much time, continued.

“Your arm was not the extent of the damage. You had multiple fractured ribs, and you suffered extreme damage to your internal organs from demonfire. Just about everything within your chest was badly burned. Those injuries, unlike your arm, can be healed using normal means, though it will take a couple more days of rest before you’ll be back to one hundred percent in that respect.”

Here, the healer paused and waited to see if Leon had any questions.

“And my arm?” Leon asked. The healer had said ‘normal means’, and Elise had mentioned something about being able to speed up his recovery. If there was any kind of chance for him to recover his arm in anything resembling a timely manner, he was going to take it. Everything that he wanted to do would be made so much more difficult if he lacked such an important appendage, especially now that he felt mere weeks away from the sixth-tier.

“That… It might be best to get used to it right now, there’s no guarantee that we can help you to regenerate your arm as quickly as you may be thinking,” the lead healer softly warned. “Regeneration takes a long time and it would require a lot of healing potions, plus a substantial amount of time in physical therapy. If we were to be optimistic, then we’d be looking at a six month recovery time. It will probably be closer to a year or two, though.”

“It doesn’t necessarily need to take that long,” Elise said with a glare and an insistent tone. “I have a Meligaent’s Obsession! That herb can help regenerate lost body parts!”

“As I’ve told you several times now, My Lady, your herb isn’t mature, there’s no way we can know if it would work or not!” the lead healer shot back. It was clear to Leon from this short exchange alone that they had been arguing about this for a while. “If the herb hasn’t grown enough, then the best we could hope for is nerve damage that would leave his regenerated arm paralyzed! At worst, Sir Ursus could wind up completely paralyzed, or even dead!”

“It’s mature enough!” Elise retorted. “It will work! We just have to try! Besides, if there any complications, I have faith enough in your skills that they won’t become serious problems.”

The lead healer sighed. After a long moment of silence, he said to Leon, “To use an immature Meligaent’s Obsession is indescribably risky. I urge you not to take this option.”

“What other choice is there?” Leon calmly asked as he looked down at where his shoulder and arm used to be. He was keeping a lid on it, but inside he was freaking out. He’d never once considered the possibility of losing a limb, and the only thing keeping him from losing his mind was the prospect of regenerating his lost arm.

“If you were able to reach the eighth-tier, then it might be possible to regenerate the arm on your own,” the lead healer said, though from his expression it was clear that he didn’t think Leon had great chances, despite the fact that he was already a fifth-tier mage and not yet twenty years old.

“I appreciate your concern, but I can’t wait that long,” Leon replied. He then turned to Elise and said, “I would be willing to take the risk.”

Elise smiled at him, knowing that that’s what he would say, while the lead healer sighed and said, “I understand your decision, Sir Leon. I will do my best to mitigate the risks.”

With that, the three healers left the room, leaving Elise, Leon, and Anzu alone.

A short silence followed, with Leon gently rubbing the left side of his body in an attempt to get used to his current situation. He closed his eyes and his breathing started picking up as the panic really started to set in with the healers gone. Making matters worse was the knowledge that this horrendous injury was self-inflicted. Leon had been the one to invoke Xaphan’s power, and though it was to keep himself from being killed by Lewis, Leon still couldn’t help but wish he hadn’t done it and tried to find some other way.

Noticing Leon’s distress, Elise got out of her chair and climbed into bed next to him. She didn’t say a word, she just snuggled up next to Leon to make sure that he knew that she was there for him. Anzu, picking up on Leon’s current state just as well as Elise was, nuzzled his head against Leon’s hand in an attempt to calm his human down.

It took a while for Leon to regain his composure. He managed to keep his eyes dry, but his panic and fear of the future had been readily apparent, regardless.

“Thank you,” Leon whispered to Elise once his shaking finally stopped.

“No need to thank me, my love,” Elise responded with a glowing smile. “Besides, you’ve gotten me out of work for a few days, at least, that’s always a positive thing...”

After chuckling at her joke, Leon took a deep breath to steady himself. “I know how much care and effort you put into that herb, how expensive it was, I can’t… I don’t like that I fucked up so badly that I now have need of it.”

Leon might have continued on in this vein for a while, but Elise silenced him with a finger on his lips.

“I’m happy that it’s being used well. That it can be used to heal you is worth every silver coin I paid for it and it makes every ounce of effort I exerted in growing it well-spent. I can’t think of a better use for something I have grown than healing someone I love.”

“Thank you,” Leon repeated. “I don’t know how I can ever repay this…”

“You say that like this is meant to be a transaction,” Elise said with a smile that was half-wary and half-amusement. “You don’t owe me anything for this. I just want you to focus on recovering, got it?”

Leon could only nod and say, “I love you,” as he pressed his forehead into hers.

He meant those words, but there was a part of him that hated this helplessness. Logically, he knew that it was all right to rely on Elise like this, but there was also a part of him that knew he lacked the resources to reciprocate if their circumstances were reversed. He could give Elise all that he had to give, and it still wouldn’t equal what she had done and what she was doing for him. She’d even given up having a harem for him.

Leon couldn’t help but feel increasingly insecure about their relationship, about this disparity in what each had done for the other. To an extent, his general willingness to go along with whatever Elise wanted to do, whether that was in bed or otherwise, was due to this insecurity, to this sense that he couldn’t bring the same material things to the table that she could.

He knew that this was an irrational feeling, that the simple fact that Elise wasn’t hesitating to give him things like her rare and expensive Meligaent’s Obsession indicated that he was worth more to her than these things were, but he couldn’t help feeling this way.

This was also something that he felt like he’d have to talk with Elise about. Eventually. For now, he would follow her instruction and get some rest.