She didn't wait for me to get up.
She didn't offer her hand, and she certainly didn't offer me something like a healing potion. Well, it's not like I was expecting anything anyway. To her, I was just a bloody GPS that happened to have a pulse.
She just stood up straight and grabbed me by my collar, hauling me up like a sack of laundry.
Suddenly, the air around us began to feel biting and sharp. The grass on the ground, which had been completely dry, suddenly began to glisten, soaking up moisture like morning dew forming in a split second.
This is—?
I looked up at Lyra's eyes and noticed they were glowing with a predatory blue light. Faint, snowflake-like patterns were visible in her pupils, spinning slowly.
I thought she was just activating her movement technique to dash forward while dragging me along. But I was wrong.
The cold wasn't there to give her a boost. It was there for me.
The wounds on my face weren't healing—no, that wasn't it. The jagged gashes were being forced shut by a layer of supernatural frost.
It was cauterization, but with ice instead of fire. The screaming pain in my jaw didn't vanish, but it went numb, frozen into a dull, manageable throb.
This was 'Zero Healing' an ability she usually reserved for herself during high-intensity battles to ignore fatal injuries and keep fighting. It was a brutal, efficient way to stay standing when your body should be failing.
But I couldn't understand why she was using it on me. I remembered from the novel that this cost her a massive amount of mana because it wasn't her primary specialty. She was an attacker, not a healer.
So why?
"Don't lose your mind," she said as she finally let go of my collar. I stumbled, my legs feeling like blocks of wood, but I stayed upright. "I just don't want you to die before I find Clara."
That's why.
She wasn't being kind; she was just maintaining her equipment. If I died, the trail would go cold. If I fainted, I was dead weight she'd have to carry. By freezing my wounds, she ensured I could run on my own two feet.
I didn't mind the cold, but I looked at the sky. The violet rift was widening, and the first screeches of the flying scouts were beginning to echo off the academy walls.
I just hoped she had enough mana left to get through the monsters waiting for us between here and the Sunken Garden.
"Now, let's move," she said.
She didn't wait for a response. She simply pivoted and began running. I gritted my teeth, and began running after her.
My legs were sore, my lungs felt like they were filled with crushed glass, and I didn't have much strength left.
But the fear of dying in a place where I didn't belong—of being erased as a "trash" extra before I could even change the script—was far more terrifying than any trivial physical pain.
So I moved with everything I had.
Lyra was fast—monstrously fast. Even with her heavy leather-bound book tucked under one arm, she could have vanished into the distance in seconds. But she was matching my speed, and was just a few paces ahead.
I didn't delude myself into thinking it was out of concern. I knew she wasn't sticking with me because she believed my story.
She was keeping me close so that the moment we arrived at the Sunken Garden and she found it empty, she wouldn't have to waste time searching for me to kill me.
We rounded the corner of the administration wing, and the reality of the "Hero's" world finally hit us.
The air was thick with the smell of blood and the peaceful academy atmosphere was gone. It was now replaced by a cacophony of shattering glass and high-pitched, inhuman shrieks.
"Gah!"
A shadow darted from the roof of the library above us. A Fodder Imp, small, purple-skinned, and grinning with too many teeth, lunged toward my throat.
I didn't even have time to flinch.
Schwing.
A flash of blue-white light flickered past my ear. The Imp didn't even scream; it simply turned into a frozen statue mid-air before shattering against the pavement into a thousand crystalline shards.
"Don't slow down," Lyra hissed. "If we get surrounded, we're dead."
I just nodded because my throat was too dry to speak. I looked at the ticking clock in my head.
Two minutes.
Two minutes until the sky fully opens. If that happens then Lyra's mana would be drained by the sheer volume of monsters, and I'd be nothing more than a snack for a mid-tier demon.
It would have been no problem if she was alone and didn't had to protect me. Without my dead weight, she could simply flash-step across the grounds.
But now, it was going to be difficult even for her. I have to think of a way to get to the garden without encountering the main swarm.
If we stayed on this path, we'd hit the bottleneck at the Great Bridge—the place where, in the novel, thirty students were slaughtered in the first sixty seconds of the break, because of too many monsters being there.
I ran my mind through the digital map of the world in my head, and a way popped up.