Infinity Is My Affinity?!?-Chapter 138: A Cheap Trick

My breath hitched in my throat as the math clicked into place, hitting my brain like a speeding truck.

"If my prayer falters, and an Outsider manages to slip a hallucination into your mind... Garek will not be able to physically stop you from opening the door. You will put him in the dirt, unlock the gates, and every single person inside this camp will die."

"Untrue..." I countered, raising a hand to immediately dismiss the terrifying variable she just introduced. "I didn’t truly beat Garek. On top of severely underestimating me, he wasn’t actually trying to kill me. Had he come at me with everything he had right out of the gate, the results may have turned out differently."

Mizuki simply stared at me, her brown eyes completely devoid of comfort.

"May have..." she emphasized, dropping the two words into the quiet room like a live grenade.

Before I could argue the semantics of my own power scaling, a callused hand suddenly slapped against the wooden frame of the medical cot.

With a sharp crack echoing through the shrine as the solid wood splintered under his grip, Garek pushed his massive frame straight up into a sitting position before hopping off the bed with a resounding thud of his metal-plated boots.

The dark green veins were entirely gone from his thick neck, leaving only flushed, perfectly healthy skin behind, while his jaw muscle actively twitched, but not from the toxins.

He locked his intense, bloodshot eyes directly onto my face before-

"You damn brat!" Garek roared, his voice grating like grinding stones as he took a single, aggressive step toward me, but Mizuki immediately stepped right between us.

She raised a single, slender hand, pressing her palm firmly against his chest to halt his momentum.

"Save your wounded pride for later, Garek," she ordered, her tone cutting through the air with the absolute authority of a head priestess. "We have a much more pressing matter to address."

"I can handle the brat..." Garek spat, glaring daggers right over her shoulder at me. "He caught me off guard with a cheap trick."

"A cheap trick that almost liquidated your nervous system in under two minutes," she corrected without a single shred of hesitation. "... If my prayer falters and the Outsiders breach his mind during the full moon... You will not be able to physically restrain him in time. He is a walking disaster."

Garek’s jaw clamped shut as he glared at me while the sheer reality of her assessment visibly warred with his own bruised ego.

"So now what?" I asked, genuinely wanting to salvage the whole thing and figure something out.

[Maybe I can buy a potion for it... I have more than enough credits...]

"You are an entirely unknown variable possessing the lethal capacity of a Tier 4," Mizuki shot back, her brown eyes completely devoid of compromise. "I will not gamble the lives of this entire camp on the mere assumption that your mind is as resilient as your mana recovery."

"You know what, fine..." I sighed, raising both of my hands in absolute surrender. "I’m not gonna beg you to please reconsider. Just reject the Acceptance Letter, and I’ll walk right out of here, and foot whatever monetary losses you guys incur for not having a proper roster according to your contract."

"It won’t be just a one-time fee..." Garek growled, crossing his arms over his chest. "Our entire five-year contract would probably be canceled. The mine’s manager is an absolute asshole."

"Every manager is..." I countered, already calculating the exact bribe amounts I would need to drop. "I’ll deal with him, somehow."

"You’d have better luck convincing a rock to fly..." Garek scoffed. "He’d exaggerate the entire incident and report it straight to the owner back at Shinkotsu just to get us blacklisted."

"But why?" I asked, genuinely baffled by the sheer hostility over something this simple.

"Because I beat him black and blue once..." Garek stated bluntly with a fierce, unapologetic glint flashing in his eyes. "He tried to make moves on my wife."

I paused. My brain completely stopped processing the tactical situation for a solid three seconds.

"Dude..." I breathed, looking up at the towering, scarred meathead with a genuinely confused chuckle. "Who the hell married you? And more importantly... why?"

His bloodshot eyes narrowed into a glare that promised murder as he took a deep breath to roar right in my face.

And just then-

-Ahem-!

A sharp, pointed cough echoed through the sterile room.

I shifted my gaze past the giant wall of muscle to Mizuki, who stood beside the splintered medical cot with a deep frown etched across her face, and a distinct red flush furiously painted her pale cheeks.

And the gears in my mind instantly clicked into place.

I looked at the delicate, beautiful priestess radiating absolute holy grace in her pristine robes.

Then, I looked right back at the hulking, seven-foot-tall human boulder whose scarred knuckles might as well be dragging across the floorboards.

My gaze slowly drifted back, finally settling permanently on Mizuki.

"Why?" I asked her directly, utterly baffled by the sheer contrast. "What the hell possessed you?"

"You damn brat!" Garek completely lost it, practically steaming from his ears, he took a massive, floor-shaking step toward me. "I swear to the Goddess, I am-"

"Enough!" Mizuki snapped, her authoritative voice instantly freezing him right in his tracks.

She took a calming breath, letting the bright flush fade from her cheeks before her brown eyes locked onto me.

"We cannot afford to lose this contract, and we cannot afford the risk you pose to the rest of us..." she stated firmly, stepping right up to her husband’s side. "So, I will place a divine binding on you."

"A what?" I blinked.

"A curse..." she clarified, her tone leaving absolutely zero room for negotiation. "Should anything happen to me, or should my prayer falter during the night, the curse will instantly activate... It will completely sever your connection to your core, making you unable to access a single drop of mana for exactly thirty seconds."

Mizuki shifted her calm gaze toward her fuming husband. "And in those thirty seconds..."

"I will handle him," Garek finished while a terrifyingly eager grin slowly spread across his face as he cracked his massive knuckles with a sickening series of pops.

He looked back down at me, the murderous intent completely returning to his eyes.

"We do the binding..." he decided, his grin showing far too many teeth. "And we do not breathe a single word about the kid’s abnormal condition to anyone... especially the manager."