Nami and Nojiko [Part Two]

A baby's cry...

As if pricked in the back of her head by a needle, Bell-mère jolted awake. Using her saber as a crutch, she forced herself to her feet and followed the sound. At last, beneath a collapsed shop, she found its source.

It was a baby girl barely a few months old, still swaddled in cloth. Thankfully, the fallen wall had been blocked by debris, forming a triangular shelter that had spared her life.

However.

As the rain grew heavier, that makeshift shelter gradually showed signs of collapsing. Dust sifted down, and the swaddled infant's life hung by a thread.

"Have to hurry, I have to hurry..."

The chestnut-red-haired girl gritted her teeth, grabbed the entrenching shovel again, and began digging with all her strength.

Brick after brick was moved aside, and the distance between her and the baby slowly narrowed. But her strength had been drained to its limit; she simply could not go any faster.

Seeing the wall about to collapse completely, Bell-mère grew more frantic by the second.

She dug desperately... and after finally clearing a passage wide enough for a person to crawl through, her right hand slipped and rusted the reinforcing bars connected beneath the load-bearing wall.

Crash!

Under the pounding rain, half the wall split apart. Rubble and dust came pouring down like floodwaters, burying the crying baby below.

No!

Bell-mère's eyes nearly split apart. Throwing down the shovel, she lunged inward with all her might, but she was ultimately one step too late. All she could do was watch in agony as the infant was buried beneath...

Whoosh!

All of a sudden, a tiny figure darted out from the ruins. She slipped through a narrow passage that no adult could possibly fit through, scooped up the baby from the ground, and