I was curious about it too. How did she come to develop this healing-centric training style? I guess Alec and the others didn’t know either, because they leaned forward in their chairs, filled with curiosity.
“Well, alright then,” said Rose. “I was never trying to hide it. Now, as for when I came up with the idea, it would have been when I was about . . . twelve.”
“But that’s the same age as me,” I said.
“Yep. I was just a brat, no different than you.”
The news came as a shock.
“I was a bit bullheaded, admittedly,” said Rose. “I’d knock a person out cold for picking a fight just because I was a healer.”
“Ah, so you were the captain even before you were actually the captain,” muttered Alec.
“Shut your trap. I’m not done.”
Rose went on to tell us that she wasn’t born in Llinger, but in a far-off, remote village. She was stubborn and headstrong from a young age. She beat up all the village ruffians, which made her the biggest ruffian of all. Nothing changed after she discovered her magic type, either. Even kids who used magic were overpowered by her sheer physical strength.
To hear Rose tell it, she was a real piece of work.
Funnily enough, it kind of reminded me of Halpha.
But even though we’d learned about Rose’s past, she had yet to mention using her healing magic.
“I can picture it now . . . a smaller, younger version of the exact same Rose,” said Ururu.
“I’m a lot calmer now compared to then,” said Rose.
“Huh?!” exclaimed the rescue team.
“So just how bad were you back then . . . ?” whispered Ururu out of earshot.
Everyone was suddenly silent with fear, unable to grasp the fact that Rose now saw herself as a calmer person.
“I was the top of the heap in my little village, but it was peaceful. Well, until company arrived.”
“Company?”
“Monsters. And mean ones, at that.”
Rose’s village was attacked by monsters. I figured that when monsters attacked you simply had them exterminated. But I was curious as to what Rose meant when she said “mean.”
“What sort of monsters were they?” asked Orga, intrigued.
“It was a huge deer with white fur. A Grand Horn. A monster just as dangerous as a Grand Grizzly.”
“Wow, that’s one heck of a monster to have to deal with,” said Mill.
Even I knew that anything comparable to a Grand Grizzly was nothing to be trifled with.
“It was smart,” said Rose. “When it attacked the village, it didn’t kill any villagers. It took what it needed from our farms, then it left. Even when the villagers tried to fight it off, it still never killed anyone. It just left people hurt.”
“Aha,” said Mill.
“Yep. We were just livestock as far as the Great Horn was concerned. If we didn’t resist, then we didn’t get hurt. As long as we fed it, it wouldn’t do anything. So the village lived in fear while the Grand Horn essentially bled us dry. That became just a part of life for us.”
Rose spoke of it lightly, while the rest of us waited for her to go on. None of us believed that a twelve-year-old Rose could handle a beast so strong.
“So what did you do?” asked one of the rescue team.
“I was angry. This damned beast was messing up our village however it pleased. All the freaking adults just let it roam free and kept on feeding it.”
She was mad at the adults? That sounds a bit like misdirected rage.
“At the time, that Grand Horn looked at us like we were nothing. But when I saw our villagers quietly and fearfully obeying its will, I was incensed.”
Twelve-year-old Rose is beyond scary! Even Felm can’t believe it!
“I felt like I was going to go crazy with rage, so I used that. I decided to put my anger to use. I decided to strengthen my body.”
I was shocked. That didn’t sound like using your head, unless it was to headbutt things. It was the craziest thing I’d ever heard.
“When I look back on it now, it wasn’t the most sensible or practical way to handle things,” said Rose. “But that doesn’t change the fact that it was the best answer to the problem. After all, if we want to break the awful cycle we were stuck in, we first needed to break that Grand Horn.”
“So what did you do?” asked Alec. “I mean, there’s all sorts of training you could have done.”
Rose chuckled as she reminisced on the past.
“I ran, punched things, and kicked things,” she said. “I did that over and over, from sunup to sundown, then I went home and slept. I just kept on doing it. It was only much later that I realized I was using healing magic. I never noticed it at the time.”
It was, literally, a brute force method.
“Rage doesn’t just cloud your judgment,” said Rose. “It blinds you from pain and what’s around you. For a time, I even felt like I lost myself. All I could think about was beating up that Grand Horn, so I just kept breaking my own body down and building it right back up.”
She went all-out. And then she went beyond it. Rose would have been blind with anger, but that wouldn’t have stopped the pain and exhaustion wracking her body. There was no way I could have done the same thing. It was crazy to even imagine. And most crazy of all was the fact that she didn’t think up the training method. She was just doing it subconsciously.
That was why Usato had made me run while focusing on my healing magic; the whole idea started from Rose being able to use her healing magic without thinking.
“Weren’t your parents worried?” asked Ururu.
“If I was the sort of kid to listen to my parents and do what they told me, then I wouldn’t be here.”
Ururu laughed.
“Good point.”
I was still curious about the Grand Horn though, so I plucked up my courage and spoke up.
“What ended up happening to the Grand Horn?” I asked.
“Oh, that? Well . . .”
Rose flashed a wild grin and pointed to her coat with her thumb. It was a pristine white coat, not sullied in the slightest. It was the same coat as the one Usato wore. When I looked at it, it hit me, and I gasped.
“I skinned the thing and turned it into clothing,” Rose said. “It was almost too easy.”
Rose chuckled at my dumb look of surprise. If my logic held, that meant Usato’s coat was made of the same material. It was made of the Grand Horn that Rose felled, which meant that the coat held a special meaning for her.
The coat was a symbol of her strength. It was also something Usato himself was very proud of. Now I had taken it upon myself to grow stronger under her watchful eye.
Before I was even aware of it, my shoulders were trembling with anticipation.