Chapter 282 Mother-daughter bond

Lys drifted closer to Mira during a brief chance he got while fighting.

She was breathing hard, the wind edge on her blade flaring only when she put real effort behind a cut. Between swings, her eyes kept tracking Elara, her own mother.

Lys stepped in to take a golem that had slipped past her guard. After dealing with it, he stepped behind her and stood back to back with her. Their shoulders almost touched for a second.

“You good? You seem to be struggling?” he asked.

Mira finished the creature she was dealing with, kicked the body aside to clear a path, and gave a short, humorless breath.

“No.” Her voice stayed low enough that only he could hear it over the noise. “I’m not good. Look at her.” 

She jerked her chin toward Elara without stopping her next cut. “That woman spent years telling me not to pick fights. Not to run off. Not to put myself in danger. She acted like the most dangerous thing in the world would be holding a sword. And the whole time… what? She could do that?”

Lys followed her gaze for half a second. Elara intercepted a lizard-thing with a clean shoulder turn, and it looked like she just ripped the whole thing into two separate pieces with raw strength. The blue shimmer around her arms flickered, probably from her body-enchantment effect.

Lys didn’t answer immediately. He took the next monster that came at them, killed it almost effortlessly. 

Part of him understood the betrayal Mira was tasting. Another part, the part that had woken up in this world with only fragments of memories, could only watch the shape of it from the outside. He knew enough to recognize that for Mira this wasn’t just a surprise. It was the ground under her childhood shifting in real time.

Before he could find anything useful to say, a sharp sound cut across their side of the line.

Selene had turned for half a second to check the village women on her flank. That half-second was enough. A lean bipedal lizard that had been waiting for exactly that kind of opening lunged through the gap where her attention had left a hole. Its claws had already grabbed one of her legs and were pushing into her flesh.

“Ahh…” She gave a sharp cry. 

Elara was there before the monster could do something worse.

She simply crossed the distance in a low, driving burst, leaving behind only a blue blur image of her. One hand of hers caught the creature’s wrist and twisted, slicing a bit of Selene’s own flesh with it. 

The other hand of Elara drove an elbow into the soft tissue under its jaw with enough force to lift it off its feet. The monster hit the dirt hard. Elara finished it with a short, downward punch and was already turning back toward Selene before the body stopped moving. She literally smashed the thing's head into a smashed potato.

Selene stood frozen for a heartbeat, staff still raised, the last traces of her mana finally finishing.

She tried to heal herself, but there was none left for herself.

Elara came close to her and spoke loudly toward her back, toward Lys and others. 

“All of you, cover me for a while.”

“Got it.” Lys said, as he and Mira slowly started moving toward where Selene and Elara were.

Elara got on her knees, and without saying a word, ripped a strip of clothing from her dress. She started bandaging Selene’s wounded leg without caring for any infection or cleaning, knowing that a simple healing from a divine magic user could solve that in no time. Not letting more blood loss was the sole reason for her bandaging Selene’s wound. 

When Elara was finished, the words left Selene’s mouth without permission.

“Thank you… Mother.”

The title she never used hung in the air between them.

Elara’s eyes widened a fraction. Selene’s own face went pale the moment she heard what she had said herself, without thinking. 

For a second neither of them moved. The fighting continued around them, but the small space between Elara and Selene felt suddenly separate from all of it.

Elara recovered first. She wiped a smear of dark fluid from her forearm with the side of her hand and spoke in a way Selene recognized as Elara, a loving mother.

“You’re welcome. And… you don’t have to force anything. ‘Miss Elara’ is fine if that’s easier for you.”

Selene looked at her. The older woman’s hair had come partly loose. There was blood on the hem of the blue dress and a thin cut along one collarbone that she hadn’t bothered to acknowledge. The incomplete shimmer of body-enchantment still clung to her arms like a half-remembered promise. She looked nothing like the quiet woman she knew who only knew how to handle household chores. 

And yet the word had come out of Selene’s mouth as if it had been waiting there.

Selene’s shoulders loosened a fraction. The panic of the almost-missed attack drained away, replaced by something quieter and more deliberate.

“No,” she said. Her voice was still strained from exhaustion, but it didn’t waver. “I think… Mother is fine. If that’s all right with you.”

Elara held her gaze for a moment longer. Something complicated moved behind her eyes: surprise, caution, and then a careful acceptance.

“I’m good with it, if you are, too,” she said simply.

Selene nodded once, knowing she had finally settled a small but important piece of family business in the middle of a battlefield here. Maintaining a familiar and healthy relationship with Lys’s family was her goal from the get-go, since she decided she will go along with Lys’s agreement with this marriage resolution. 

And Elara is a vital part of his family. So, it was very important to get along with her. Not only that, she herself somehow began to warm up to Elara, knowing how warm and caring she was. 

Having finally been acknowledged by Elara, to get to call her " Mother, " just as it should be, Selene reset her grip on the staff and turned back toward the next cluster of monsters, the line of her back a little straighter than before, even though there was no mana in her left to support the team from now on.

Lys saw the exchange from a few paces away. He didn’t comment. Mira saw it too; her expression flickered through several unreadable shades before she forced her attention back to the creatures in front of her. Whether she was jealous or happy for Selene finally being able to be a part of Lys’s family could not be told by her casual face.

The western gate still poured monsters into the village. The night was nowhere near over. But something in the small circle of people holding this stretch of dirt had shifted, quietly, incompletely, and in ways none of them had time to examine yet.