The first test of the adults so-called competence came almost immediately.

While the staff had been panicking, Mika had been observing.

He had noted the injuries among the group—cuts and gashes from falling debris, a few obvious broken bones, one nurse with a deep laceration along her forearm that was still bleeding freely.

These were doctors and nurses. Treating wounds was literally their profession.

But as he watched them attempt to care for one another, his expression grew darker and darker.

"No, no, you’re doing it wrong!"

A young doctor snapped at a nurse who was trying to bandage a colleague’s head wound.

"You need to apply pressure first, then wrap—"

"I know how to bandage a wound!"

"Clearly you don’t, because you’re making it worse!"

The patient, a middle-aged attendant with a gash above his eyebrow winced and pulled away.

"Could you both please stop arguing and just fix it?!"

Even the staff members who seemed to know what they were doing couldn’t execute properly.

Their hands trembled too much to tie clean sutures.

They fumbled the supplies that Mika managed to get from the ruins, dropping bandages and antiseptic wipes onto the dusty stone floor.

One nurse accidentally grabbed the wrong medication and nearly administered a dangerous dose before someone else noticed and stopped her.

It was chaos. It was incompetence. It was, frankly, pathetic.

Mika watched for another minute before sighing heavily and stepping forward.

"Excuse me." He said, approaching the nurse with the bleeding arm. "May I?"

She looked down at him with obvious skepticism—a child, barely five years old, offering to treat her wound.

"That’s...very sweet of you, but I think the adults should handle—"

"I’ve studied field medicine." Mika interrupted calmly. "I know how to clean, suture, and dress a wound."

"Your laceration is approximately four inches long and appears to have missed the major blood vessels, but you’re still losing enough blood to be concerning."

"If you’ll let me, I can have it closed in under a couple of minutes."

The nurse stared at him, mouth agape.

Without waiting for permission, Mika knelt beside her, gathered the scattered medical supplies, and got to work.

His movements were precise, steady, confident. He cleaned the wound with antiseptic, administered a local numbing agent, and began stitching with the practiced ease of someone who had done this a hundred times before.

His small fingers worked the needle and thread with surgical precision.

Within four minutes, the wound was closed, bandaged, and properly dressed.

"There." He said, sitting back. "Keep it clean and change the dressing daily."

"If you notice any signs of infection—redness, swelling, unusual discharge—let me know."

The nurse gaped at her arm, then at him.

"How...How do you know how to do that?"

"My mother taught me."

"Your mother must be quite the physician."

"You could say that." Mika stood up, brushing dust from his clothes.

"Now, who’s next?"

The other staff members, who had been struggling with their own injuries, suddenly took notice.

Within moments, they were crowding around Mika, their earlier disdain replaced by desperate hope.

"Young man—could you look at my leg? I think it might be fractured—"

"My shoulder’s dislocated, can you help—"

"I have glass in my back, please, I can’t reach it—"

Anya stepped forward, positioning herself beside Mika like a small guardian.

"One at a time." She said, her voice firmer than she expected. "He can’t help everyone at once."

She became his filter, his assistant, his organizer.

While Mika worked—cleaning wounds, setting bones, stitching gashes, Anya managed the queue of injured staff, fetched supplies, and offered quiet words of comfort to those waiting.

It was a strange role reversal: the two children doing the adults’ jobs while the adults sat helplessly and watched.

When Mika finally finished treating the last injury, the staff showered him with praise.

"Incredible! Absolutely incredible!"

"What a gifted young man! Where did you learn all this?"

"You’re a lifesaver, truly—a little prodigy!"

Mika accepted their thanks with a polite nod, but his eyes remained cool.

He had seen how they looked at him before—dismissive, condescending, treating him as a nuisance.

Now they were fawning over him because he was useful. The hypocrisy was transparent.

’These adults cannot be relied upon.’ He thought grimly. ’Not for anything that matters.’

The staff seemed to sense his assessment, because they quickly shifted their tone.

"Well." The older doctor said, clearing his throat awkwardly. "Now that we’re all patched up and have had time to collect ourselves, I’m sure things will be much smoother from here on out."

"We were just...initially shaken, you understand. Perfectly natural reaction."

"Absolutely." The administrator agreed. "Now that we’ve got our bearings, we can support each other properly."

"You children just relax and let us handle things."

—

The "handling things" lasted less than a day, as food became the immediate concern.

They had water, the seepage from the walls was clean and plentiful.

But the hospital wing had been a medical facility, not a kitchen.

Still, Mika reasoned, there might be something edible in the rubble. Vending machines. Staff lounge snacks. Emergency rations of some kind.

He gathered the adults and proposed a search.

"The hospital debris."

He said, pointing toward the massive pile of wreckage that had settled at one end of the cavern.

"We need to go through it. Look for food, supplies, anything useful."

The response was immediate and unanimous.

"Absolutely not!" The older doctor said, shaking his head vigorously. "That rubble is completely unstable!"

"Look at it—it’s like a house of cards. One wrong move and the whole thing could come crashing down."

"He’s right." A nurse added. "It’s far too dangerous. We could be crushed."

"Maybe if we wait, the rescue team will bring supplies." Someone else suggested hopefully.

Mika’s lips twitched.

"The rescue team might not arrive for days. Maybe longer. Without food, we won’t last that long."

"Then you go." The fat administrator said, not quite meeting Mika’s eyes. "You’re small and light—you can probably navigate the gaps without disturbing anything. It’s much safer for you than for us."

"Much safer." Another echoed. "And you’re so capable—you handled the medical situation brilliantly. I’m sure you can manage this too."

Anya’s mouth fell open.

"You want him to go alone? He’s five years old!"

"Well, I would go myself." One of the male nurses said. "But I have a bad knee, you see. Old injury. The uneven footing would be agony."

"And I have back problems." The administrator added quickly. "Can’t risk aggravating it."

"My balance isn’t what it used to be—"

"I’m far too heavy, I’d dislodge something for certain—"

The excuses piled up, each more flimsy than the last. They shuffled their feet, avoided eye contact, and pushed the responsibility onto a child without a hint of shame.

Mika said nothing. He simply turned and began walking toward the debris field.

"Mika, wait!" Anya grabbed his arm. "You don’t have to—they should be the ones—"

"Someone has to." He said quietly. "And they won’t."

"But—"

"Stay here. I’ll be back."

She wanted to argue. She wanted to scream at the adults to do their duty, to protect the child they should be protecting instead of sending him into danger.

But she saw the look in Mika’s eyes—resigned, determined, utterly unsurprised and she realized this was exactly what he had expected from them.

So she let him go.

—

The search took two days.

Mika navigated the unstable rubble with painstaking care, testing each foothold before committing his weight, listening for the telltale groan of shifting debris that preceded a collapse.

His body, already weakened by the anti-mana field pressing down on him, screamed in protest with every movement.

But he pushed through it, driven by the knowledge that if he failed, Anya would starve.

The Anti-mana field was a constant, crushing presence.

For a normal mortal like Anya, it caused little more than mild dizziness, an uncomfortable pressure at the base of the skull, easily ignored.

But Mika was not a normal mortal.

His body was composed entirely of mana itself; every cell, every fiber of his being hummed with an energy that the Anti-mana field sought to neutralize.

Walking through this cavern was like wading through molasses while wearing a suit of lead.

Every step was an effort. Every breath was a battle.

The fact that he could stand at all was a testament to the sheer power of his constitution.

But even so, he was deteriorating. His skin had taken on a grayish pallor. Dark circles ringed his eyes.

And in the quiet moments, when he thought Anya wasn’t looking, his hands trembled.

Yet he kept going.

—

On the first day, he found a collapsed vending machine that had somehow survived the fall mostly intact.

Its front panel was cracked, but the contents were still sealed—packages of crackers, granola bars, bags of dried fruit.

On the second day, deeper in the rubble, he located the ruins of a staff break room: more packaged snacks, some instant noodles, even a few cans of preserved food.

Each discovery required hours of careful excavation.

Twice, Mika nearly fell through gaps in the rubble.

Once, a beam of twisted metal gave way beneath his feet, and he only saved himself by grabbing onto a protruding pipe at the last possible second.

But he returned with food.

The moment he emerged from the rubble with the first armful of supplies—

—the staff descended like vultures.

"Oh, you found something! Excellent!"

"Let me help you with that—you must be exhausted—"

"We’ll take it from here, young man. We need to inventory everything and establish a rationing system."

They took the food from his arms with eager hands, their earlier reluctance completely forgotten.

Within minutes, they had gathered all the supplies he had painstakingly retrieved and were arguing amongst themselves about distribution protocols and nutritional requirements and who should be in charge of the stores.

Mika watched them for a moment, then walked away without a word.

He had kept back a small portion—enough for himself and Anya.

The rest he let them take. It wasn’t worth fighting over.

Anya, however, was less restrained. She found him sitting against a crystal, his eyes closed, his breathing shallow.

"Mika!" She dropped to her knees beside him. "Why did you let them take everything? You did all the work! They didn’t do anything!"

"Let them have it." He said, not opening his eyes. "It’ll keep them occupied."

"But it’s not fair!"

"No. It’s not." He finally looked at her. "But fairness isn’t going to keep us alive, Anya. We have to be smart. And right now, being smart means not wasting energy on fights we can’t win."

Despite this, Anya wanted to march over to those selfish, cowardly adults and demand they give back what they hadn’t earned.

But Mika was right. He was always right.

So instead, she sat beside him, took his hand, and gave him all the comfort he needed.