F Grade Healer Becomes Strongest Biomancer-Chapter 70: Zero Hesitation

Mio

"Well?" Mori shook the boy like a stray. "Kill the core."

Mio stepped forward. The boy’s eyes found hers—brown, wet, wide enough to see the whites all the way around.

She was reaching for him. Her left arm extended, fingers spread, the gauntlet leading.

When did I start doing that?

Her left hand was already around his throat. The white pearl surface caught the arena’s dim light—marble finish, faint golden geometric lines running through material she’d never seen before today.

The boy clawed at the gauntlet. His nails scraped against the surface and found nothing to grip. Brown eyes shaking. Nana’s age exactly.

She was squeezing. The fingers tightened on their own, the gauntlet’s warmth spreading up her forearm, and the boy’s kicks weakened by a fraction.

Stop.

The fingers pressed harder.

Why can’t I stop?

[Trait: Lotus Heritage — Zero Hesitation]

The boy wheezed. The sound came from somewhere smaller than his chest.

Mio grabbed her left forearm with the obsidian arm. The right hand locked around the left wrist and pulled, straining to pry the gauntlet open. One finger at a time. The golden lines pulsed, resisting, and she pulled until the tendons in her right shoulder screamed.

The boy dropped.

He hit the dirt gasping, both hands at his throat, and rolled onto his side coughing.

"Mio." Kaito stood ten paces behind her. "It’s the core. Same as the grey daemon. You didn’t hesitate then."

"I know."

"It’s not a kid, Mio-san." Mori hadn’t moved from where she’d dropped the boy.

"You shut up."

Mori wiped her nose with the back of her wrist. Didn’t argue. Didn’t need to—she’d already won the point by making it.

The gauntlet twitched. The boy was three meters away, still coughing, and her left arm wanted to close the distance. It would do it for her if she let it. That was the problem.

[Unequip]

The gauntlet retreated. White sludge pulling back down her forearm, pooling at the wrist, and Jii materialized on her shoulder in dormant form with her yellow eyes fixed on the dirt.

The boy scrambled backward. One hand still at his throat. Brown eyes locked on her.

Mio looked at her left hand. Pale and bare, the skin underneath damp with sweat. She flexed the fingers once to make sure they were hers.

She glanced up at Mori and Kaito. They were waiting. Mori’s arms crossed, weight on one hip. Kaito thumping the sheathed sword against his calf. The arena walls were still standing. The incursion hadn’t closed.

It wouldn’t.

Not until the core was gone.

She walked toward the boy. He flinched backward, heels digging into the dirt, but there was nowhere left to go. The stone tier behind him stopped his crawl.

Ten steps. She counted them. The drums had stopped when the last orc fell and what was left was a stadium full of dust and a boy with finger marks on his throat.

He looked at her the way the convoy girl hadn’t.

She grabbed him with her right hand. The obsidian was warm from the incursion’s heat, and the boy flinched when it touched his skin.

The obsidian fingers closed around his throat. He kicked once, twice, and the kicks slowed the way everything slowed when she squeezed hard enough.

"Sorry." She looked at its green skin, skinnier than Nana. "I have obligations."

His hands went slack on her wrist. She let go and the boy fell like a leaf onto dirt.

Mio never looked him in the eye. She wouldn’t dare have its face on her mind. She’d had enough of those already. That was the lie she could sit with.

[Incursion Cleared]

The dimensional walls began to peel away. Dirt, dead bodies, all of it—degrading into nothing. The stone tiers went last, dissolving upward into the stadium’s real ceiling.

Her right hand was still closed. She had to look at it to make it open.

In her pocket, Jii’s weight shifted. Six inches of chibi curled against the fabric, daggers sheathed, not looking up.

Mori doubled over coughing beside her. One hand braced on her knee, the other pulling her mask back up. When the fit passed she straightened, wiped her eyes, and took her phone out.

The corridor back was the same one she’d walked in through. Twenty meters of shadow. It had felt longer on the way in, when the drums were still going and the obsidian arm was the only company she had.

Bureau flashlights at the far end, sweeping the exit. Someone in a yellow vest waved them through.

The officer looked at the three of them. Then past them at the empty corridor.

"All clear?"

"All clear," Kaito said.

The officer checked something on a tablet. Over a thousand hostiles, and all he needed was two words and a checkmark.

Kaito held the exit door open with his shoulder and checked his phone with his free hand.

"We’re running behind. The other squads are already waiting for us."

The van was where they’d left it. Bureau plates, engine idling, blockade officers waving them through. Mori climbed into the back, slumped against the window, and closed her eyes before the door shut. Mio took the passenger seat.

Kaito was the driver. Always was.

He pulled out without a word. GPS already locked on the next destination.

Kokubunji. The B-grade. Forty minutes west on the Chūō line if traffic held, longer if it didn’t.

Mori’s breathing evened out before they hit the first intersection. Fever sweat on the window where her forehead pressed against it. Even unconscious she still had her phone in her hand. The airpods were in both ears.

Kaito drove with the sword propped between the seat and the center console. He hadn’t drawn it once today. Seven years left to live and the blade stayed sheathed because Mio told him not to use it.

She wondered if he resented that.

Outside, Tōkyō traffic crawled past like a Tuesday. Delivery trucks. A woman on a bicycle with groceries in the basket. A billboard advertising summer enrollment at a cram school Nana’s age would attend. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

Mio put her arm out.

The one that was once Can.

It wouldn’t leave her mind—the way the little orc’s throat gave way so easily. Jii found her way into her palm.

It almost smiled.