Once the chemicals flooding my brain in that life-or-death extreme situation finally subsided, the grim reality hit me all the harder.
Now it was time to deal with the aftermath of the battle.
With the harpoon dangling from her, Green Shark hoisted Marmotte up as if it were nothing and carried her into the shelter.
"Put me down more gently!"
Marmotte, with two arrows sticking out of her body, snapped at Green Shark.
According to her calculations, she had twice as many stuck in her as Green Shark did, so she was in twice as much pain.
"Is that so?"
And Green Shark believed her without question.
It was not a particularly funny joke.
"All right, Polaris."
"Yeah."
We still had some medical supplies left: disinfectant, painkillers, bandages, and ointment.
...Sutures too, with a needle and dissolvable thread.
"Have you ever done surgery before?"
"Of course not."
The problem was that I had no experience whatsoever.
I had only ever received implants and other operations after being anesthetized, so how would I know anything about them?
Marmotte slightly furrowed her brow as she spoke.
"I can manage Green Shark somehow... but unfortunately, I can’t stitch up my own shoulder, can I?"
"Unless my arm could bend around like a tentacle," Marmotte added with a muffled laugh.
It was a creepy thought, but what I had to do now was just as horrifying.
"You need to do it quickly."
"Mmm. I’m hungry, and it hurts."
"..."
Maybe from blood loss, Green Shark was beginning to lose it. Marmotte presented her shoulder.
The pressure had apparently stabilized the wound somewhat, but blood was still slowly seeping out.
When I cut away the clothing around the wound with scissors, she let out a sigh.
"What a shame. Cloth is hard to come by."
"Is that really what you should be saying right now?"
"...If I don’t say something, I’ll be even more scared."
Her voice was trembling, and so were my hands. I did not need to ask which of us was afraid.
I steeled myself and gripped the arrow.
"Ngh..."
A faint moan escaped Marmotte’s lips.
Weren’t all these wounds ultimately because of me?
"Do it quickly... but don’t pull it crooked."
The slightly sickening sensation of the arrowhead tearing through flesh, followed by a thin scream.
Fortunately, its tip was narrow, so extracting it did not worsen the wound.
"Nnngh...!"
As I disinfected the wound, Marmotte ground her teeth and endured the pain.
Once I was done disinfecting it, I brought the suture needle and thread close.
Marmotte nodded, her eyes trembling.
.
"What if it leaves a scar..."
"We can buy artificial skin later, I guess."
Why was the person doing the stitching breaking out in a colder sweat than the person being stitched?
Brushing back my soaking-wet hair, I watched Marmotte carefully tend to her own leg.
"...I’m sorry."
"For what?"
"Because of me..."
If I had not used the comms, none of this would have happened.
Oddly, once I made up my mind to apologize, I felt lighter.
Clatter.
"Polaris."
"..."
"Could you help me?"
Marmotte firmly cut off the confession I had been about to make.
She pointed to Green Shark, who was sitting propped up because the protruding harpoon kept her from lying down.
"You just did it, so it’ll be easy, right? Straight out. Pull it straight."
With a pale face, Marmotte examined Green Shark, whose complexion was even paler than hers.
A harpoon thicker than the arrows I had pulled out of Marmotte was embedded in her abdomen.
"Green Shark..."
"Yeah."
Creak—
Even Green Shark, who was accustomed to pain, had apparently found this worse than expected. Veins bulged across her face.
Unlike fixing a machine, a living body was terribly slick and hot.
Blood sprayed from Green Shark’s stomach onto my face, just as it had when she saved me.
My vision was horribly blurred. Something kept running into my eyes too, as though blood had splashed into them.
"Polaris. Don’t cry."
"Sniff..."
She neither screamed nor blamed me.
"I turned on the comms... I sent the distress signal..."
With shaking hands, Marmotte stitched up Green Shark’s wound.
Unlike the rough job I had done on her shoulder, her hands were trembling but calm and quick.
Before I knew it, the hole that had been pumping out blood was closed, and Green Shark’s face looked far more comfortable than before.
"It’s because of me. Those bastards came because of me..."
I had not known I was such a crybaby.
We had only known each other for around a month. At first, they had even attacked me in much the same way, so I had not opened up to them.
I thought they saw me as silver, and I had wanted to run away at any moment.
"Polaris."
Marmotte took my hand with her pale face.
Meeting my eyes, she gazed at me for a moment, then ran a slender finger across my wet cheek.
"You really are an idiot, Polaris."
Then she lowered her head and pressed her forehead against my chest.
"That comms console. You hadn’t turned it on even once since the first day, had you? Did you think I wouldn’t notice?"
"..."
"Yes. Maybe you did call those cats here."
There was no vague comfort in her words.
Marmotte simply continued, calmly and logically.
"But so what? This is the frontier system. Even if you hadn’t sent a distress signal, some other hungry beasts would have come by tomorrow or the day after."
She refuted every one of my self-recriminations point by point.
"We got shot with arrows not because of your mistake, but because of our choice. We’re not... at least I’m not stupid enough to just hand over a treasure worth seventy thousand silver."
Even then, she made sure to draw a firm line between herself and the Neanderthal.
That was so like Marmotte.
"That’s right. No matter where you go... nobody will value you more highly than I do."
"Seven... a hundred of them. Didn’t you say there were a hundred more?"
Green Shark added in a fading voice.
A monster who smashed rock traps barehanded and crushed people with a club.
But she was not a monster incapable of feeling pain, and the wounded beast comforted me with eyes clearer than ever.
"A treasure left inside a box is only a stone."
Her thick hand stroked my face as usual, wiping away my tears.
The hand that had always given me chills when I thought of it butchering meat was, somehow—strangely gentle.
"I took a treasure out of its box. You are my treasure."
Green Shark had not stopped me when I offered to help her during the raid.
Perhaps she understood that I was not merely an ornamented gift.
Unfortunately, because I was smarter than her, I failed to understand that it was her own way of acknowledging me.
.
.
Seventy thousand silver.
A great deal of money, if you thought it was; not very much, if you did not.
But there was no denying that it was an enormous price to put on one person.
Crackle, crackle.
I stared blankly into the burning campfire.
Perhaps because they had lost so much blood, Marmotte and Green Shark were sleeping like the dead, taking the rare opportunity to use their own bed.
For some reason, the sleeping place that had once felt narrow and stifling now felt lonely and cold, so I came out to warm myself by the fire.
"Sigh."
I looked around. Arrows stuck here and there, spent casings, and, as a bonus, several corpses still remained all around the shelter.
When was I going to clean all that up?
Corpses near the house. It was pretty bleak.
"...Ah."
A house, huh.
I looked up at the sky. The glittering stars of the frontier system, invisible through the pollution of the Middle Realm.
Was one of those stars my home? Could I return if I boarded a spaceship?
"Let’s go back."
I rose from my seat and went back home.
"Come to think of it, I still had this."
I took a small chip from my pocket.
A communications chip containing the secret frequency entrusted to me by Lumi, the traveling merchant.
A key which, if I simply plugged it into the console, would bring the Rabbies fleet at once and carry me away to those stars.
"Yeah, right."
Whoosh.
The smell of burning plastic joined the scent of blood and gunpowder that still had not faded from the grassland.
That smell would not reach the stars.
-----
Today’s frontier system average.
Saving me +15 helps establish a relationship more than you would think.
But if you’re ugly, a full -20 gets deducted.
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