SSS-Ranked Surgeon In Another World: The Healer Is Actually OP! - Chapter 396 396: Flying 2

Then, without warning, he dipped.

Not a fall. A controlled descent, smooth, deliberate, until the world rushed up to meet them and stopped just short of contact.

They skimmed the river.

Not on it. Not in it.

Just above.

So close the distinction stopped mattering.

The surface stretched beneath them like polished glass, a ribbon of liquid silver under the morning light. Bruce held the altitude with surgical precision, centimeters of separation, nothing more, his control so exact it felt less like flying and more like threading a needle at speed.

The air changed down here. Cooler. Thicker. The river breathed against them in a damp, whispering chill that curled around Bruce’s boots and grazed the backs of Lily’s hands where they gripped his arm.

He accelerated.

The banks dissolved on either side, green smeared into abstraction, motion bleeding the world down to streaks. The only thing that stayed sharp was the water. Every ripple. Every faint current line rushing toward them in an endless, frictionless surge.

It should have felt dangerous.

Somehow it didn’t.

This stretch was calm. One of those long, unhurried reaches where the current lost its urgency and the surface settled into something close to stillness. With the sun at the right angle, it became a mirror, clear, bright, almost impossible.

And in it,

Themselves.

A shadow, clean and unbroken, racing the river in perfect synchronization. A man, upright and still, a small child folded against his side. No blur. No wavering. A second version of them gliding across the water as though it had always been there, waiting.

Bruce never broke the line. The gap held, impossibly thin, impossibly constant, that final fraction of separation preserved with a precision that bordered on something else entirely. Not skill. Not reflex.

Intention.

They flew.

Low and fast, carving through light and reflection, their mirrored selves chasing them below, close enough that Lily might have reached down and touched her own hand.

She didn’t.

But she looked. She then saw it. Their reflection on the body of water

Her whole body lit up. She gasped, the soft delighted intake of a child who has just discovered something the world had been keeping secret, and pointed down with her free hand.

“Brother, brother, look, that’s us,”

“I see it.”

“That’s us, on the water,”

“Mm.”

Lily giggled

She watched the silhouette for a long moment, mesmerized, as Bruce kept them skimming. The shape below moved exactly as they moved. When he banked slightly, the shape banked. When Lily lifted her head to see better, the silhouette’s small head lifted too. She was watching herself fly from the outside, which was a thing very few children ever got to do, and her small face was doing the particular open wonder it did when the world surprised her in a good way.

Then she reached out.

Quick. Unthinking. The way a child reaches for anything beautiful that’s within arm’s length, her free hand stretching down toward the water, fingers spreading, intending to touch the bright moving mirror that had her own reflection in it.

“Don’t.”

Bruce’s hand caught her wrist before her fingers were halfway down.

His voice was sharper than he’d meant. He gentled it immediately, but his grip stayed firm, easy but firm, redirecting her hand back up against his chest before she could try again.

Lily froze.

The brightness in her face dimmed at the edges, the way a candle dims when a door opens nearby. Not extinguished. Just, uncertain. She looked up at him with the sudden small worry of a child who had been having fun and was now unsure if she had done something wrong.

“I just wanted to touch it,” she said, very small.

Bruce’s chest did the thing again.

He slowed them. Not to a stop, the flight was still happening, the river still streaming past beneath them, but down to a gentler pace, the kind of speed where he could speak properly without the wind taking the words away from her ear.

“I know, sprout,” he said. “I know. Listen.”

She listened.

“At this speed,” he said, “the water isn’t soft. If you put your hand in, even just your fingers, it would feel like hitting a stone wall. The water can’t move out of the way fast enough. It would hurt you very badly. You could break your whole hand.” He paused. “I should have told you before I went this fast. That’s my fault. I’m sorry.”

Her small face processed this. She looked down at the water, at her own silhouette still racing along below them, and then at her hand, which was tucked safe against his chest now, and the small worried look on her face was replaced by a slightly larger sad one.

She didn’t say anything.

But Bruce knew that look. It was the look of a child who had just been told that something beautiful was secretly dangerous, and was trying very hard to be a good girl about it, and was also very disappointed.

He almost laughed. He didn’t, because she would have misread it. But the urge was there, fond and warm.

“Hey,” he said.

She looked up.

“Hold still a second.”

He let his aura shift.

It was a small adjustment, barely a thought, the kind of fine-grained Domain-adjacent control that was second nature to him now that he was full SSS.

He pulled a sheath of his aura tight around Lily’s body, layered it through her skin, threaded it down into the small bones of her arm and her wrist and her hand. Reinforced everything.

Wove the protective lattice through her muscles and tendons until her whole small frame was wrapped, gently and invisibly, in something that would have stopped a sword stroke.

She felt it. Her eyes widened a little, children always felt his aura when it touched them, even when adults sometimes didn’t, and she looked at her hand like she had never seen it before.

“Brother, what did you,”

“Try now,” Bruce said.

Her face, her face. The transformation from sad to joy in the space of a single blink. She looked at him, looked at her hand, looked at the river, looked back at him. Disbelieving. Hopeful. Asking permission with her whole small expression.

“I can?”

“Try it.”

She reached down.

Slow this time. Tentative. The way a child reaches for something they have been told not to reach for and are now being told they can. Her small fingers extended out beyond the sheath of warm air around them, down toward the racing surface of the river, and Bruce held the altitude perfectly steady so she could choose her own moment.

Her fingertips touched the water.

She gasped.

A spray of cold bright droplets fountained up from where her fingers met the surface, catching the morning sun and breaking into a hundred small rainbows, and Lily, Lily shrieked* lwith laughter, the high unbroken laugh of a child who has just done something she had completely given up on, and dragged her fingers along the water in a long perfect line that scored a silver wake into the river behind them.

“*Brother, BROTHER, I’M TOUCHING IT,”

“I see it Lily.”

She trailed her fingers in a slow zigzag, watching the spray pattern, then dipped her whole small hand in up to the wrist for a moment and squealed at the cold, then pulled it out and shook the droplets off in a wide spray that caught the light and made her laugh harder.

Bruce watched her out of the corner of his eye and kept his aura layered tight around her hand, feeling each impact distribute through the lattice and dissipate harmlessly, the river slapping uselessly against the protection he’d woven into her.

She was, by any reasonable measure, having the best morning of her short life.

“Do it again,” he said.

“What,”

“Trail your hand. I’ll go faster. Hold on with the other one.”

Her eyes went wide and delighted. “Faster,”

“Faster.”

“YES,”

He picked up speed. Smoothly, gradually, the way you accelerate a small passenger who has just been given a new privilege and shouldn’t be startled out of it.

The river streamed past faster. Her trailing hand carved a deeper wake, the spray rising higher and brighter, and she whooped, actually whooped, a sound he had never heard her make before, the noise of a child discovering she had a louder voice than she’d realized.

“Brother, there’s a, there’s a line, behind us, in the water,”

“I see it.”

“It’s like we’re, like we’re a boat but a flying boat,”

“Mm. A flying boat.”

“BROTHER, GO FASTER,”

He laughed, properly laughed, the second time that morning, which was probably some kind of record, and went faster. The wake widened. The spray became a continuous bright ribbon arcing up beside them.

Lily shrieked and laughed and dragged her hand through the water in long luxurious sweeps, her whole small body alive with the specific joy of a child who has been allowed to do a thing she shouldn’t have been able to do.