Amid the pain Gretchen would originally have had to endure, Faust spoke as calmly as he possibly could.
「You can stop now.」
It was not that the pain failed to reach him as pain.
But the boy was accustomed to suffering.
And Gretchen was someone who should never have had to bear this sort of agony in the first place.
「You can rest now.」
And so the boy whispered with genuine calm, as softly as though he could feel no pain at all.
Before someone who had unjustly endured all of this, speaking of his own suffering was neither something the boy could do nor something he had the right to do.
‘…No. If I rest now, then what was everything I fought for until now?’
「From where I’m standing, you’ve already done enough.」
‘What are you talking about? I didn’t get him. If I didn’t get him, I didn’t do enough.’
No matter how much Faust tried to stop him, however, Gretchen was someone who simply did not know how to give up.
“Hah.”
Rapidly consuming and restoring Mana.
Consuming it again, restoring it again.
As that process repeated, the body, which had begun losing track of what counted as its “normal state,” collapsed yet again.
It was a kind of overload.
Completely regardless of Gretchen’s will, his body staggered.
「…Both eardrums and the organs around them melted.」
‘Yeah.’
Even if they continued fighting like this, would they really achieve the desired result?
Would it not be better for Faust himself to take the front line instead?
Faust was…