Ever since he’d escaped his roots in nobility, Feather had come across the smell of the sick very often. It’d never really scared him, because no matter how bad the plague, he wouldn’t die from it. After all, he could do anything, and that included curing the incurable with his concept. But he didn’t like the idea of being sick, either. Feather had never been truly sick in his life, and had always had a strong tolerance to disease, but the idea of it still frightened him. The feeling of being trapped inside your own body while it decayed and betrayed you was a concept he did not like, which was why whenever he heard about plagues, he always made sure to come over and get rid of them. It made him feel like he was doing the world a service. But in order to properly remove a plague… you first needed to find the seed it was all growing from, and that wasn’t always easy.

“Mmmmmmm,” he hummed behind a closed mouth, hands on his hips as he looked around the grieving town. They really were all so pitiful. On this specific planet, it was early spring and still rather cold out, so it would’ve seemed like the town was completely abandoned if it weren’t for the smell of disease. And when he used his concept to enhance his hearing, he could detect raspy breathing and people picking at enlarged and pussy blisters on their skin. It wasn’t a very pretty thing to listen to. Though there was no time to dwell on it, and Feather wasn’t about to let some silly, insignificant plague ruin his good day, so he turned back to Kya and Leocadies with orders in mind. “Kya, please use your pendulum to try and find where the seed is located. Me and Leo will go handle it once you do.”

“Oh wow, boss! You mean I finally get to do something?!” Leocadies grinned from ear to ear, Feather smiling at him with an encouraging nod. Leo always liked to diminish himself and act like he was useless in Feather’s comparison, and maybe that was true to an extent, but he personally didn’t think so. Because when Leocadies tagged along, things were always much more fun.

And Kya obediently pulled out her pendulum from her small leather satchel wrapped around her waist, carefully taking it by the small bead at the top of its chain with a pointed black crystal hooked to its opposite end, Feather watching as it stabilized itself in midair. He liked watching this process, he found it very interesting. He’d tried using the pendulum before as well, but much to his dismay, it had never worked for him. Kya said it was because he was too attached to his desires and preferences, so the pendulum would get distracted by his desired answer and default into giving him just that, regardless of its accuracy. Apparently, you needed your mind to be perfectly clear with only the question itself echoing throughout and within, and you needed to erase your desires completely so that the pendulum could be honest without distraction. It did sound rather complicated, didn’t it?

Feather and Leocadies watched as Kya must be asking the pendulum several different things, observing it closely as the crystal on its chain moved with its answer. First, it went in a circle… then it started moving west… then it went in another circle… then a straight line… before it started moving east… yeah, Feather didn’t really understand pendulums at all, but at least they were interesting.

“We need to go west, to the next town over. That’s where the seed lies,” Kya announced after another short moment, folding the chain back into the violet satin pouch where she kept it before turning to Feather with clear red eyes. “This isn’t the only town affected by plague in this area, apparently. But the pendulum says it hasn’t traveled overseas yet, so the seed will still be over here, meaning if we can get rid of it, we can eradicate this plague for good.”

“Yay, sounds easy!” he cheered, Leo only laughing at him while resting a hand on his thin shoulder.

“You’re the only person I’ve ever heard say that finding a plague seed is easy, boss. All the other healers out there must envy you!”

“Hahah, well of course they do! I can do anything after all, so of course I’d surpass their feeble efforts,” Feather grinned with arrogance dripping off him in waves, Leo continuing to laugh with him as Kya scoffed.

“You’re so haughty… if you weren’t able to back it up, you’d be the most annoying man in the Udimeia,” she retorted, but Feather was still shining beneath her backwards praise, clearly taking the word annoying as a compliment, since annoying the everliving life out of people had always been his absolute favorite hobby.

“Well, doesn’t matter! I’ll go ahead and make sure to pause the illness from spreading further so that nobody dies before we can find the plague seed,” her leader cheerfully announced, proudly lifting his finger and using his concept to, of course, do anything he wanted. A wide, circular frame the color of mint leaves began expanding on the tip of his nail, moving forward and spreading all over the land as far as the trained eye could see… it passed through all the sickly villages across the continent, causing time to stop moving for their weakened bodies so that they could hopefully keep whatever strength they had left. After all, he didn’t want anyone to die here. It was just that if he healed them all at this point before the plague seed had been properly dealt with, they would likely just get sick all over again, and nothing would be solved. In the end, this was the best way to preserve their lives.

Though Leo was watching him with those wide, cat-like orange eyes of his, ginger lashes blinking every once in a while as he stayed focused on Feather’s face instead of the effortless show of power that not many people got to see, much less remember. Well, Leo was one of the lucky few who got to see it daily, and it was something else that was catching his attention anyway. “You better be careful, boss. You might have to kill yourself sooner than expected if you keep pulling stunts like this. Curing the seed is gonna take a lot out of you as well, so remember to pace yourself.”

“Didn’t ask, don’t care! Dying is exhilarating anyway, I dare it to come at me! Me and the grim reaper can have some more fun,” Feather grinned and cracked his knuckles, as if that somehow made him more intimidating… before he came to a quick realization, and frowned. “Ah, but… I really don’t like just letting myself die out naturally. You’re right, if I do all that, I’ll have to keep a close eye on my reserves, and dying that way really hurts…” he grumbled childishly, before turning to his companions with pleading eyes and the type of look he’d been giving them whenever he wanted something ever since he was a child. “Kya, kill me later, pretty please? You always make it super painless, so I wanna die that way next if I get to choose!”

“Alright boss, you got it,” she agreed without batting an eye, not fazed when Feather beamed at her with a smile that could cure the depressed. She really wasn’t fazed by this anymore. The first time this man had asked her to kill him, she’d been shaken to her very core, but after so many centuries of serving him, she’d long been forced to get used to it… and now it didn’t mean much to her anymore either.

Leocadies was perhaps the only one out of the two who still knew how to value Feather’s life. He was the only one in their ragtag group of three who tried to help the miraculous man die as little as possible. He was always checking in and making sure their leader wasn’t recklessly wasting his mana, and would always communicate his thoughts with Feather and remind him when his life force would be running thin so that he could be aware of his capabilities. Leocadies was used to the constant deaths too, of course, as he had no choice but to be… the three of them were all much too comfortable with death. But what other choice did they have? It wasn’t like Feather could stop dying now. If he wanted to live, he had no choice but to die. That was how it had always been, no matter how Kya or Leocadies may have tried to prevent it. And after traveling with someone like that for over four centuries, things that might’ve once felt deranged or inhumane now felt all too normal.

Though, suddenly, Feather found himself frozen. He had sensed the man before he’d seen him, but the moment he locked eyes on a tall, blurry figure approaching the town from the horizon, his expression became almost shaken. That aura… it was a familiar one that he’d be able to tell apart from others no matter how many miles away it was. It was just as unnerving as the last time he’d been in that weak man’s presence, and it had to have been the last thing he’d expected to feel all the way out here, nearly on the opposite side of the Udimeia. What… what was that embarrassing and pathetic pushover doing here?!

He immediately raised a hand in front of Kya and Leocadies’ faces, their existences blurring into the fabric of reality to make all three of them invisible to the naked eye. There was no hesitation in his movements, and his urgency seemed to shock them both, Leo beginning to jump forward as if he were preparing for a fight. “Huh? Boss, everything okay—?” he asked in a rush, only to make a tiny little yelp when Feather took his shorter subordinate by his collar and pulled him back behind him, raising a slender finger to his lips before pointing to the man who had gotten his attention.

There he was in all his regal glory… Cirrus Aixon, the crown prince of the planet Lilino and future named leader of the Central Domain Alliance. He was a very tall man, almost impressively so, being nearly a head taller than Feather himself when the blond wasn’t short by any normal standards. He had a firm chest and broad shoulders along with a very upright and practiced stance, his figure lean and defined as if he’d been sculpted with the intent of grace and elegance. His skin was a warm brown with an almost sunset-colored hue to it, his velvety black hair that was nearly as long as he was tall wrapped into a neat braid over his left shoulder along with bangs that only covered the left side of his face, completely obscuring one of his eyes for reasons Feather didn’t care about. The eye that was visible, though, was a very bright, captivating amber covered with long lashes fluttering open and closed, and by all counts, most people considered Cirrus to be the most beautiful man of his generation.

Feather didn’t really see the hype, though. After all, it didn’t matter how good someone looked when their personality was absolute trash. The prince wasn’t ugly, sure, he’d give him that… but he didn’t have the most impressive physical appearance Feather had ever seen, either… honestly, he was just way too overrated, so at least someone needed to hate the guy. Feather would gladly be that person.

Though, little did he know that the man he found more annoying than anybody else was searching for him in particular, the miracle man for whom legends were made. And as Cirrus walked closer, Feather quickly honed in with his hearing to catch a grasp of the man’s conversation, attempting to figure out just what the hell he was doing here.

“Wow, this town really is sick,” chimed a small, white-haired girl with concerned ice-blue eyes. Feather had never seen her before, but based on her demeanor and reaction to feeling disease in the air, she most likely wielded a healing concept. After all, it was common knowledge that healers often had empathetic bodies that reacted just to the smell of disease, and it could make the concept wielder feel overwhelmed or anxious if they endured too much prolonged contact. Of course, the same could go for anyone, as being around the sick wasn’t exactly a fun thing or a hobby, but healers’ concepts grew specifically from their intense empathy and strong compassion for others, which would thus intensify those feelings, making it far more draining for them. It was one of the biggest obstacles all healers had to face eventually, but it didn’t look to him as if this young woman had yet been able to overcome that weakness.

“Should we go around it, the two of us? It’s okay if it’s a bit too much,” offered the great warrior, Achitha Washema, wielder of the poison and illness concepts. Feather had only ever seen her from afar, with the closest he’d ever been to her having been sitting on opposite sides of a courtroom. He’d never talked to her either, but… he’d imagined her to be a little more gruff, for some reason.

But the snowy white girl shook her head with a heart full of determination, clearly working hard to shake off her concept’s drawbacks as she pushed forward. “No way! I’m fine! If you guys get sick, you’ll need me! I especially can’t let Cirrus fall ill while I’m the one here!”

“Ahah, don’t worry about it, it would take me a little bit anyway before I started showing any symptoms for you to treat,” her prince countered kindly, and Feather’s eyes watched him from narrowed slits behind his invisibility, all while Cirrus and his group walked right past him, none the wiser. “It’s fine if you want to go around. Me and Jayce will be just fine on our own.”

“Yeah, you go ahead and take a break. If one of us really does get sick, we’ll need you to be able to handle it,” Jayce pointed out rather roughly, Cirrus nodding in agreement with that kind, practiced smile he always wore. It’d been centuries since Feather had last seen him, though it still looked like he hadn’t changed much at all. He wasn’t the only one who thought so, because it wasn’t long before Leocadies was also saying the very same thing out loud.

“...Cirrus doesn’t look like he’s changed that much,” the ginger man commented as the group walked further past them, having not noticed they were being watched even slightly.

“What do you think he’s doing here?” Kya whispered, her curious eyes pinned on the back of Cirrus’ dark head as Feather continued to quietly observe. “Not only is he one of the highest-ranking royals in the Udimeia, he’s also a prophesied hero on top of that. What are they doing, letting him come down to a plagued site like this? The rookie healer was right, him getting sick won’t reflect well on the monarchy at all.”

“I wanna know what brought him to this planet in the first place,” Leo chirped, leaning like a cat against Kya’s shoulder as he grasped her arm with strong hands that were surprisingly dainty when they held onto her. “What’s so interesting about this place that would catch his attention? You’d think royal prodigies would have better things to do…”

The words spoken so carelessly out loud, however, suddenly triggered the same thought in both their heads, and nearly in sync, they turned their gazes to Feather, who flinched at the heated stares before scrunching up his nose in confusion. “What? What is it?”