The hot air burned my lungs with every breath.
My nose and mouth were buried in the sands of the arena, already limiting how much oxygen I could inhale without choking on this damn sand.
I was spent.
My muscles were exhausted beyond their limits. The wounds that noble casually inflicted on me caught up with me, filling my mind with mind-numbing pain.
'This isn't how I imagined my first adventure in a full dive world,' I thought, releasing a pained groan as I struggled to turn over on my back.
"Haaa…"
All the air that I'd managed to gather escaped my mouth the second I lay with my back on the hot sand.
For the first time since the noble's first attack, I managed to get a somewhat proper breath in.
'It's over…'
With the irony of my real self succumbing to the torture, only the mentality of my host remained.
The mentality of a Legion mercenary, an orphan who went through fifteen years of hellish training to become who he was today.
'It's over, but what now?'
I took another breath, using it to slowly gather scraps of strength my muscles slowly regained. I jerked up, hoping to somehow get to my feet…
"Lay down," a soft, soothing voice coaxed my consciousnesses.
All the strength that I'd gathered vanished just like that. My body fell down half an inch that I managed to raise it…
And somehow, this half an inch of distance was sufficient for someone to sneak their soft knees below my head.
My head didn't strike the hot sands as I expected, landing in a warm and soothing embrace instead.
"Everything will be fine now. Just relax and let me heal you," the same, soothing voice from before entered my ears and filled my entire self. Like a wave of relaxing pulse, it spread through my flesh, decompressing all of my strained muscles.
'It feels… weird…' I only managed to think before my mind fell into the sweet, warm trap.
'Huh?' I thought a moment or an eternity later, forcing my eyelids open to assess my situation.
I opened my eyes… only to look right into a white mask that covered the entire face of whoever was currently lending me their lap for a pillow.
The mask was all white, with the exception of a complicated marking that decorated its entire surface like some sort of a complex rune. There were only two holes in the entire, cloth-based mask, that revealed a pair of huge, emerald eyes.
'It's so… comfortable…' my conscious self-thought, only for my body to jerk up in discomfort.
Even though it was my first time seeing it, my body could recognize the marking on the woman's mask.
'A damned saint…'
This was one hell of a huge tournament, fitting the prestige requirements designed to let a ninth-rank noble advance his rank.
Regardless of which novel of mine the concept of saints as healers or church members was taken from, this was a presence that one could only expect in an event of this magnitude.
Still, staring deep into this pair of two, emerald eyes, I couldn't help but feel a sense of disgust welling deep from within my soul.
My host was a member of the mercenary Legion of Karkuz, one of the three ancient powerhouses that the empire of Melion subdued. Contrary to the fragmented princedoms of the southern plain, Karkuz kept a huge chunk of its ancient power, currently serving as the major element of the empire's military.
Yet, just like in the scattered princedoms to the south, Legion couldn't avoid border conflicts with its neighbors within the imperial sphere of influence.
And it just so had to happen, the Reikan Theocracy that heralded the church of Hvelism, the state religion of the empire and most of its subjects, was the only state that Legion had an active border conflict with.
The fact that Karkuz blatantly refused to convert away from its ancestral faith only served to add fuel to the fire of the conflict…
And now, a Hvelism saint was lending me her lap while casting some sort of healing spell upon my drained body!
A shudder moved down my soul.
After a solid portion of exposition that the host's memories feed directly into the stream of my consciousness, I was served a dessert of memories ranging to when, on my way to my assignment, I passed through the theocracy lands.
My body jerked again as if refusing even the gentlest touch from the saint of the new faith.
Those memories were quite… awful, making my body react to the saintess touch the way it did.
"I'm sorry, it will be over in a moment…" the saintess panicked a little. Still, just like she promised, a warm mist suddenly covered my entire body. It had a strange color somewhere between green and golden. And before I could even blink my eyes, this weird mist started to seep through my skin, filling my flesh with a weird sense of near-omnipotence.
"Don't strain yourself now. This feeling, it's just an illusion," the saintess explained in her gentle, soothing voice. "Euphory is a necessary side-effect, so please, bear with it for a while."
'It's hard to hold a grudge over someone that gentle and innocent,' I thought, my strained mind refusing to further cooperate with my hostile attitude.
I was too tired to still care.
Weirdly enough, a state that I should take weeks to recuperate from, vanished without a trace in a matter of mere seconds.
Thanks to the extensive training of my host body, I could tell when the euphoric state the saintess mentioned had passed, leaving me still tired but at least alive.
"Haaa…" I heaved a long sigh. Then, with a single jerk of my body, I rolled forward and up to my feet.
I closed my eyes and took a deep, long breath.
Even with my head out of the sand, the air continued to be as hot as before, a testimony of the scale of the thermal explosion I caused.
With some oxygen caressing the insides of my lungs, I forced my eyelids open and took a look around.
I was near the middle of the arena, surrounded by nothing but silence.
'Right, it was the two of us who were supposed…' I thought, only for the realization to strike me like lightning.
I hurriedly turned around on my heel, only to rest my eyes on the face of the lone remaining member of my mercenary company.
And below him… laid the corpse of a pretty important noble for whose victory I could already see all sorts of celebratory decorations prepared over the tribunes.
The festivity aimed at the grand ceremony of advancing the noble's rank ended up with a stray mercenary from outside of the imperial borders somehow snatching the victory, taking the life of the important noble while at it.
'Shit,' I thought, stealing a glance at the saint who now gracefully stood up and stood by my side.
For some weird reason, even though she belonged to a state pretty much hostile to the one my host body hailed from…
The sense of her presence brought me a tiny bit of peace of mind.
Still, that didn't change the situation.
I raised my eyes up and looked at the most decorated part of the tribunes.
There, I could see quite a lot of shocked, pained, and furious faces. But that was also where the judge of the tournament resided on a slightly elevated platform.
'Then…' I thought, gulping my saliva down. 'What now?'