SSS-Ranked Surgeon In Another World: The Healer Is Actually OP! - Chapter 372: After He Said Yes

Chapter 372: After He Said Yes

“She’s nervous,” Bane said conversationally to Bruce, as though Sophie had not spoken. “She’s been nervous since this morning. Did you notice?”

“Of course,” Bruce said.

Bane chuckled, “Sophie this is a side of you I never knew existed. Don’t worry your marriage will be done in a snap and you’ll be able to spend as much quality time with your husband as you want…”

Sophie looked at the ceiling briefly. Then she reached across the table, picked up the bread, and occupied herself with tearing a piece of it apart with more focus than the task required.

Bruce watched her for a moment, the particular colour in her cheeks, the way she was refusing to acknowledge either of them, and then returned his attention to Bane with the calmness of a man who had decided that this was simply how the evening was going to go and that he was, on balance, fine with it.

Bane’s food arrived. The venison rare, as requested, the center of each slice a deep, vivid rose that gave way to the braise’s outer crust, the reduction thicker than Bruce’s had been, the elderberry sharper and more immediate on first contact. He cut into it without ceremony and tasted it with the quiet attention he’d given the wine, and whatever conclusion he reached he kept to himself, though he didn’t stop eating, which was a review of its own kind.

“The venue,” he said, between cuts. “What are you considering?”

“I haven’t settled on anything yet,” Bruce said. “I wanted this conversation first. But somewhere in Reignland makes sense, it’s Sophie’s home, and I want her to feel that.”

Bane glanced at his daughter. Sophie had abandoned her bread demolition and was now eating properly again, her silverfish broth lifted in both hands, the pale warmth of the mana bloom tea rising from it in a thin, clean curl of steam. She was listening carefully while performing the appearance of simply eating.

“There’s a garden in the northern quarter,” Bane said, his tone shifting into something more considered. “The Aetherveil grounds. It hasn’t been used for a private ceremony in some years, but it’s maintained. Enclosed, which means it can be secured without making the security visible. Large enough for a meaningful gathering. Small enough to feel like a choice rather than an obligation.” He paused. “Your mother was fond of it.”

Sophie’s hands stilled around her bowl. She looked at her father. He was already cutting his next piece of venison, his eyes on the plate, his posture unchanged. But the words had been deliberate, she knew him well enough to know that, and the weight they carried had been offered quietly, without condition.

She said nothing. But the expression on her face was answer enough.

Bruce noted all of this without comment.

“I’d like to see it,” he said simply.

Bane nodded. “I’ll arrange it.” He ate for a moment, then, “Guest list. I assume you want it manageable.”

“I want it honest,” Bruce said. “People who actually belong there. Not attendance as obligation.”

“That will disappoint approximately sixty percent of everyone who expects an invitation.”

“Good.”

Bane looked up from his plate. The smile returned, slower this time, with more behind it. “Good,” he agreed. He leaned back slightly in his chair, the ease in his posture the ease of a man who had been carrying a particular weight for a long time and had, very recently, found a reasonable place to set it down.

His gaze moved between the two of them, Bruce, steady and unhurried, Sophie, who was watching Bruce with the particular expression she wore when she thought no one was paying attention to her face, and he said nothing for a moment. Just looked.

Then he reached for the bread, tore a piece with the casualness of someone who had been sharing tables with people he trusted for decades, and said, “Sophie.”

She looked at him.

“Stop worrying.” His voice was quieter now, the teasing entirely absent from it. “You chose well.”

Sophie held his gaze. The composure she’d been maintaining with careful effort all evening softened at its edges, not breaking, not even close to breaking, but honest in the way things become honest when the person looking at you has known you your whole life and isn’t asking you to pretend.

“I know,” she said softly.

“Then eat your fish,” Bane said, “before it goes cold. Mana bloom broth loses the warmth after fifteen minutes and then it’s just fish soup.”

Sophie laughed, short, surprised out of her, and entirely real. She pressed her fingers briefly to her mouth, then lifted her bowl again, shaking her head slightly.

Bruce picked up his glass. Across the table, Bane caught his eye and raised his own in a brief, unceremonious acknowledgment, not a toast, not a pronouncement, just the quiet gesture of one man to another that said more in its brevity than a longer exchange could have managed.

They drank.

Outside, the pale blossoms drifted in the garden’s quiet, luminescent in the deepening evening. The music from the main room moved through the walls like something half remembered. The venison had gone perfectly cold at the edges and perfectly warm at the center, the way slow braised things do when the kitchen knows what it’s doing, and the elderberry reduction had settled into something almost jamlike against the bread that was left.

The conversation continued, details, logistics, the occasional digression that Bane steered deliberately into lighter territory whenever the weight of the planning threatened to become too much.

.

The planning wound down the way good conversations do, not with a definitive end, but with a natural thinning, the shape of the da gradually becoming complete.

The dishes had long been cleared, the drinks reduced to their last quarter, the details of the next six months sketched into something that felt, if not finished, then at least begun. Dates. The Aetherveil grounds.

A guest list that would disappoint exactly the people it was supposed to disappoint. The broad architecture of something real, built quietly over a table in a private corner of Reignland’s Haven while the rest of the restaurant carried on without knowing any of it was happening.

Bane had settled the final threads with the efficiency of a man who made decisions for a living and saw no reason to perform the process of making them.

Then he had stood, straightened his jacket, exchanged another handshake with Bruce, slightly shorter this time, but no less firm, pressed his hand briefly to the top of Sophie’s head in the unselfconscious way of a father who had been doing it since she was small and had no intention of stopping simply because she was now an adult who commanded rooms, and walked out.

Just like that.

No formal farewell. No lingering. He was simply there, and then he wasn’t, the faint residual weight of his aura the only evidence he’d been in the room at all, and even that was already dissipating.

Sophie stared at the space where he’d been for a moment.

“He does that,” she said, to no one in particular.

“I know,” Bruce said. “He did it the first time I met him too. Suddenly dissapeared after my conversation with him, thought he passed through the door since it was open, but from the looks of it he might have teleported back then.”

She considered this. “That does sound like him.” She reached for the last of her drink, finished it, and set the glass down with a quiet finality that closed the evening’s Chapter as neatly as anything else could have. “I’m glad you didn’t meet the old him…”

Bruce was already straightening in his seat, his hand moving to his coat. “I’ll drop you home first—”

“Actually.” Sophie’s voice carried a small note of something that wasn’t quite mischief but was in the neighbourhood of it. She was already reaching for her own things, her movements unhurried, a particular quality of calm amusement settling across her face. “It’s time to pick up Lily.”

Bruce paused. “I was going to do that after—”

“You can’t instantly teleport us both since that’ll mean leaving the Fenrari here,” Sophie continued, as though he hadn’t spoken, though her tone made it clear she’d heard him perfectly. “We’re using the Fenrari. If you drop me first, then drive to the academy, that’s two legs of a trip that could be one.”

She looked at him with the serene expression of someone presenting an argument they already know has won. “It would be inefficient. We shouldn’t keep Lily waiting.”

Bruce looked at her for a moment.

Then he stood, reached into his coat, and set several gold coins on the table with the clean, unhesitating motion of a man who had made his peace with the conversation’s outcome. The coins caught the amber light of the chamber, heavy, genuine, the kind that servers remembered, and settled against the dark linen with a sound of quiet finality.