The quiet Bell tapped Cherry on the shoulder, and made a series of strange hand gestures at her, trying to convey some sort of point.
"She says she can heal you," Cherry explained with a proud smile, as though Bell was her own daughter, "she's a priestess, after all."
"A priestess?" Mane repeated. "That's rather rare…" he looked back on the wound on his shoulder. He was a proud man, Mane, that much was easy to tell. He wouldn't ask for help whenever he didn't have to. But that wound of his brought him back down to earth. "If it's no problem, then I will take you up on that offer."
Bell did some strange gesticulating with her fingers combined with eager nods of her head. Ermos didn't have to understand sign language to guess that she was telling him it wasn't a problem at all.
She tentatively wandered over to him and Mane offered her his arm. She blushed as she neared, casting her eyes downward, unable to look him in the eye.
With delicate fingers, she undid the bandage around his wound and gasped when it was revealed fully.
"…Sir Mane, you were fighting with this?" Fer asked, at first horrified, and then, moments later, he seemed impressed. "I have much more work to do…" he muttered to himself.
"Mages," Mane said again. "My biggest weakness."
With the bandage gone, Bell began her healing. She closed her eyes and her hand became shrouded in a purple light. It glowed for a few moments, growing brighter all the while, before little spheres of purple light left her hand and floated towards the wound. When they met it, they popped like bubbles.
A storm of them gathered, until the blackened mess of his injury could no longer be seen, only the bubbles of purple light.
"Hoh… It already feels better," Mane said in delight, though he took care to move his arm.
Ermos briefly considered injuring himself just to be able to test out the magic. It looked incredibly cool.
A minute or two later, Bell opened her eyes and the light faded. Mane's fully healed arm was revealed. "Amazing…" he praised, flexing his fingers to test it. "The pain is completely gone. You have a marvellous gift, Bell. Even the Duke's army struggles to find priestesses of your level."
"She's amazing, isn't she?" Cherry chipped in. "That's why we brought her along, even though she doesn't go to our school. We knew her magic would definitely come in handy."
"And yet, it did nothing to save the one that she truly came for, and Sunne died regardless," Lucifan pointed out grimly.
Bell dipped her head sadly at his words, clenching her tiny little fist.
"Hey… Lucifan, if you keep this up, I'm really going to hit you," Cherry threatened, a vein appeared on her forehead.
"You can try," Lucifan said.
"Boy, you overstep," Mane said, looming over Lucifan intimidatingly. "In-fighting in a place like this can only spell danger. If you seek to raise tensions even further, then I will be forced to take action against you myself."
That was enough to quiet Lucifan. Unable to say anything, he simply turned away, shrugging as he did so.
Ermos was pleased that Pash wasn't so mouthy. If he was, Ermos probably would have pushed him in the river a long time ago. His young apprentice was looking upon Lucifan with disgust, just like the rest of them, with Fingers at his side.
"Now… a way forward," Mane said, changing the subject, returning their attention back to what was in front of them.
There were large stone coffins standing upright against the walls, twelve on both sides of the grand hall. Each of their stone lids had been pushed open and the coffins themselves were left entirely empty. Since there seemed to be nowhere else to go, it was fair to assume that they had dove into that pool of blue-lava just like the rest of them.
Beyond the strangeness of the pool and the towering statue of the cloaked figure, there was a pair of large black iron doors, heavy and sturdy looking, with the face head of an angry bull scorched into the centre of them.
As Mane brooded, he wandered across the room, cautious still, casting an eye past the pillars and towards the coffins, making sure that each one was truly empty. The rest of the party followed him like a flock of ducklings waddling after their mother. Ermos had no choice but to go along with them, though he took note of his surroundings and all the possible locations of treasure, so that he could come back with Pash later on and loot it all.
Towards those hefty iron doors they went, doing their best to ignore the intimidating presence of the nearby station.
With a casual hand, Mane tried to push them open. They did not budge, not even slightly, so he tried even harder, this time using both hands and driving all his weight into it. Still, they stood completely unmoving.
"Damn," he cursed, "there must be some other way to open this."
"…Those look like keyholes," Pash said, pointing at the bull's wide-open mouth and the six finger-sized holes that sat in the middle inside it.
Mane gave it a closer inspection, holding his torch to them to see if he could see inside. "It does look like a keyhole," he agreed.
"Good work, Pash," Ermos said quietly, proud of his clever apprentice. He had absolutely no idea when it came to solving problems like that. He knew that if someone tasked him with it, he would have immediately given up and gone looking for cool things instead.
"So we need keys then?" Fer asked, trying to join in and offer his help. "Should we make some?"
Mane didn't know what to reply and he instead found himself looking towards Pash. "I wouldn't think so. There must be something around here that would serve as keys. Something fairly hidden. Especially when you need six keys. The Bishamons wouldn't have wanted to worry about losing them all the time," Pash said