Jeanne didn't end up conversing with Kal'tsit for very long. She had come to realize that despite the doctor universally projecting an incredibly frosty, unapproachable external persona, beneath the surface, Kal'tsit was actually remarkably warm-hearted in her own way.
Case in point: whenever the caravan drivers stopped to settle down for a rest interval, Kal'tsit would proactively venture over to evaluate the progression of the Oripathy inside their systems, detailing precisely what specific environmental stressors or physical strains they should aggressively avoid in their daily routines.
Granted, the medical restrictions she advised were almost certainly boundaries these impoverished workers couldn't afford to strictly respect—given that they were constantly toiling under grueling conditions just to secure a basic livelihood. However, that harsh reality didn't deter Kal'tsit from fulfilling her clinical duties, patiently reminding them what to avoid, or at the very least, what habits to minimize. Ultimately, whether a patient chose to actually respect a physician's counsel was entirely their own prerogative; they still had to survive.
Jeanne simply lounged a short distance away, silently tracking Kal'tsit as she meticulously conducted clinical checkups for the Infected workers. Left entirely to her own devices, she felt a distinct wave of boredom wash over her, briefly entertaining a fleeting desire to summon her dragon companion to pass the time. However, the instant she realized that unleashing a creature of that caliber would likely terrify the wits out of the ordinary drivers, she immediately incinerated the thought.
Left with zero alternative activities, she could only plant herself firmly by the hearth, tracking the rhythmic, dancing motion of the flames blankly. The personnel lounging across the perimeter couldn't quite decipher what the Holy Maiden was up to; assuming she was simply locked within a profound state of macro-strategic contemplation, they intentionally maintained their distance so as not to disrupt her internal monologue.
"Um, excuse me, miss... would it be alright if I asked you a few personal questions?"
Snapping back to reality, Jeanne elevated her gaze to find the young grandson of the elderly driver who had navigated their transport transport that morning. He was currently shifting uncomfortably before her, his eyes telegraphing a desperate desire to pitch a few burning inquiries.
The boy had been cautiously evaluating Jeanne's profile from a distance, and when she abruptly—and rather forcefully—snapped her head upward to lock eyes with him in absolute silence, the sheer unexpectedness of the motion startled him completely.
The teenager reacted exactly like a frightened animal; his entire upper torso shuddered violently as he lost his center of gravity, tumbling backward out of control. He was on a direct trajectory to execute a thoroughly ungraceful, face-first encounter with dear Mother Earth.
"Whoa, careful there!"
Tracking the boy as he lost his balance and plummeted backward, Jeanne immediately leaped to her feet, her hand lashing out with explosive precision to seize his wrist, effortlessly hauling his entire frame back into a stable posture.
However, the exact microsecond her fingers clamped around his wrist, a highly peculiar, unnatural texture registered against her palm. It felt remarkably akin to jagged, mineralized stone—a clear indication that this specific section of the boy's limb served as a primary lesion site where active Originium crystals had breached the epidermal layer due to his Oripathy.
"Ah, wait... did I accidentally exert too much physical force just now? Did I hurt you?" Jeanne questioned softly, observing the agonizing, somewhat distorted grimace that had suddenly materialized across the teenager's features.
Jeanne had heard extensive rumors detailing how specific Originium crystallization zones on an Infected individual could become hyper-sensitive to external pressure. Merely brushing against a cluster could trigger a localized neurological shock wave equivalent to dumping concentrated chili oil or raw salt directly into an open laceration, occasionally inducing a level of agony so unmitigated that patients would involuntarily bite through their own tongues.
Consequently, the moment she processed his pain-stricken expression, Jeanne's immediate assumption was that her baseline physical specs had manifested a fraction too aggressively during the rescue. After all, she maintained a highly accurate internal metric regarding exactly how monstrous her raw physical output truly was.
Had she not been listening intently for the distinct, structural snap of fracturing bone, she would have genuinely assumed from his expression that his wrist—which looked as thoroughly fragile and thin as a dried tree branch—had been completely pulverized beneath her grip. Fortunately, it appeared that catastrophic assessment was merely a product of her own overthinking.
"No, I'm completely fine! I'm fine! More importantly, miss, you need to go find Dr. Kal'tsit immediately! My wrist... the situation there is highly irregular! If you contract the infection because of this contact, it will be a disaster!"
The moment the boy realized Jeanne's bare hand had maintained prolonged, direct physical contact with his lesion site, he pulled away as if jolted by a high-voltage electrical current, his voice cracking with urgency. Fearing that speaking too loudly might trigger an aggressive panic across the wider camp regarding active biological hazards, the teenager intentionally dialed down his volume, hissing the frantic warning in an undertone.
As for Jeanne? Hearing his panicked declaration left her momentarily dazed, her cognitive faculties freezing up as if her brain was entirely incapable of parsing the underlying logic of his statement. Noting her blank, expressionless reaction, the teenager's internal anxiety intensified to a visible degree.
"It's... look, it's just... there are active clusters of those black mineral crystals growing directly across my wrist! When you grabbed me just now, your hand pressed right against them! There is a massive risk you could become an Infected because of me! You..."
Before the kid could even finish his frantic spiel, he caught sight of a highly distinct, gentle smile blossoming across Jeanne's somewhat pale and intimidating features. Her expression radiated a level of unbothered warmth that made his life-or-death panic seem entirely comical, as if the existential threat he was losing his mind over possessed zero capacity to register within her universe.
"Direct physical contact of that caliber is fundamentally insufficient to transform me into an Infected," Jeanne spoke, her voice laced with a light, easygoing amusement as she addressed the youth. Though, internally, she briefly questioned whether framing him as a "kid" was structurally appropriate given the reality that she herself was merely nineteen years of age—hardly boasting a monumental age gap over him.
"If a minor interaction like that possessed the biological leverage required to induce an infection, then given the reality that I spent years residing in a rural village packed with Infected personnel, my system would have succumbed to Oripathy a lifetime ago!"
Considering this specific logistics fleet maintained an established relationship with Kal'tsit, Jeanne assumed the personnel would naturally possess a baseline, scientifically accurate comprehension regarding the transmission vectors of Oripathy. Why on earth was this kid still trapped beneath the weight of such primitive misconceptions?
Hearing Jeanne's casual breakdown, the boy slowly lowered his gaze, an expression of profound, sullen dissatisfaction clouding his features as he murmured: "The doctors and the adults all voice those exact same words... but whenever the non-Infected populaces of the cities catch sight of us, the expressions dominating their faces look like they believe even our baseline respiration is enough to contaminate the entire zip code with Originium crystals..."
In his heart, he had long since rejected the clinical explanations provided by the adults. He merely processed his grandfather's repeated assurances as hollow, comforting bedtime stories engineered to pacify a naive child.
"Putting that aside... sister, you aren't an Infected yourself, right? If that's the case, why on earth would you choose to actively reside within a settlement entirely comprised of Infected individuals? Do you truly not harbor a single fraction of fear toward Oripathy?"
The primary objective that had driven him to approach Jeanne finally resurfaced within his consciousness. He desperately desired to comprehend how a non-Infected individual could coexist with the Infected population without exhibiting a single trace of inherent revulsion. Why wouldn't someone of her status choose to migrate to a standard, pristine settlement devoid of the sick?
Because Jeanne represented the absolute first entity he had ever encountered who looked upon the Infected with a gaze entirely clean of deep-seated aversion. Every single non-Infected individual he had crossed paths with historically would inevitably manifest an incredibly violent, hyper-reactive hostility the exact microsecond they discovered his medical status.
"Why on earth should I harbor fear toward Oripathy?" Jeanne countered with a smooth, rhetorical prompt. Naturally, she was perfectly aware of her own unique constitution—a physical template that possessed absolute, structural immunity against any form of environmental or biological contamination—but an anomaly of that magnitude was certainly not something she could easily detail for a kid.
"Oripathy, at the end of the day, is merely a standard disease. As long as one exercises a reasonable degree of baseline caution during daily activities, it is entirely possible to eliminate over ninety percent of accidental transmission vectors."
Jeanne casually gestured with her hands, projecting a posture of absolute, unbothered nonchalance. She certainly didn't harbor any naive expectations that the general populace of Terra would magically embrace this rational worldview overnight, but introducing a young mind to this perspective was an objective necessity for the future.
"But... but everyone else..." The teenager trailed off, the traumatic memories of the cold, venomous glares he had suffered from non-Infected citizens flashing across his mind. Lacking the vocabulary to properly articulate the massive ideological contradiction, he could only sit there, shifting with an aura of intense, localized frustration.
"Perhaps their hostility is birthed from raw, unmitigated terror, or perhaps it stems from a profound lack of structural education. The global populace has maintained a distorted prejudice toward the Infected for centuries, and under the deliberate manipulation of certain entities, that prejudice has systematically mutated into absolute panic."
Jeanne easily deciphered the profound confusion swirling within his eyes, choosing to present her unvarnished sociological perspective to offer him clarity. Though, deep down, she maintained reservations regarding whether a kid of his age possessed the cognitive bandwidth to truly digest the depth of her words.
Predictably, the moment her explanation concluded, a thoroughly bewildered, vacant expression manifested across the boy's features. He looked entirely incapable of processing the abstract concepts Jeanne had just detailed.
"It matters little if the underlying theory eludes your understanding for the present. You merely need to remember one absolute rule: when navigating interactions with non-Infected populaces in the future, you must maintain a heightened state of operational vigilance! The current era has simply not progressed to a point where the two factions can achieve absolute, harmonious mutual understanding."
Jeanne recognized that the socio-political realities she was detailing surpassed his current threshold of comprehension. She reached out, gently ruffling his hair as she delivered the quiet, soft reminder.
It appears that if we truly desire to dismantle this systemic, cross-faction hatred, the operational road map ahead for Talulah and the rest of us remains exceptionally long and exhausting, Jeanne mused.
With those heavy thoughts weighing on her mind, Jeanne extracted herself from the hearth and navigated her way back toward the transport vehicle to turn in for the night. There was literally zero productive work she could execute out here in the dark anyway; prioritizing structural physical rest was far more practical.
As for the youth? He remained seated by the dying embers, his head deeply bowed as he pondered Jeanne's parting words. It remained an absolute mystery whether he had successfully parsed a single shred of her philosophy, or if he had simply classified the Holy Maiden as a thoroughly eccentric, bizarre traveler.
At any rate, the teenager refrained from initiating any further communication with Jeanne for an extended duration over the subsequent transit, spending his days looking intensely preoccupied, as if his mind were entirely consumed by a massive psychological puzzle.
This silent status quo persisted seamlessly until the logistics caravan finally scaled their coordinates close enough to the outer perimeter of Kazdel, at which point the boy suddenly vanished from the forward echelon of the fleet. According to the elderly driver up front, his grandson had voluntarily reassigned himself to a transport vehicle situated toward the absolute rear of the column to assist with heavy loading duties.
The sole reason the kid had possessed the luxury to lounge around the forward transports during the opening leg of the journey was purely because he had been recovering from a sequence of physical injuries. A harsh environment like this possessed zero structural room to tolerate an idle passenger for long.
As the caravan steadily closed the remaining distance toward the borders of Kazdel, the relaxed, easygoing atmosphere that had previously defined the crew evaporated completely. The entire complement of drivers shifted into a state of maximum operational readiness, their eyes scanning the surrounding terrain with intense, paranoid vigilance.
"BOOM!!!!!"
One afternoon, right as Jeanne was drifting within a hazy, half-asleep slumber inside the cabin, an absolute thunderclad explosion detonated along the perimeter. The sheer, kinetic shock wave of the blast jolted her awake instantly, her conscious faculties snapping into a state of maximum adrenaline.
Outside, the ambient soundscape dissolved into a chaotic cacophony of shouting and roaring engines. The precise tactical scenario the crew had spent days dreading had finally manifested!
A roving detachment of Sarkaz mercenaries ambushing the sector had successfully laid down a sequence of hidden traps, moving to aggressively execute a top-down raid on their cargo column!