"..."
"..."
Vera clutched her right eye. The unrelenting pain had tormented her for an entire day, like frostbite—like some sharp object had plunged into her eye socket and was endlessly stirring it around.
Sweat kept sliding down her face.
Curled up on the ground, she seemed, through her agony, to glimpse starlight flashing across the sky. Then the pain in her eye slowly faded.
"Ha... ha... ptoo." She spat out a mouthful of bloody saliva, used her sword for support, and pulled herself upright against a tree.
I need to rejoin Amos and the others, fast... Where the hell am I?
She looked around, only to suddenly feel dizzy. Her vision split into two halves: one was so clear she could see even the ants on a distant tree, while the other was so blurry that even trees right before her showed only patches of brown, tan, and jungle green.
When she closed her left eye, her vision became clear.
Her right eye, which had just been hurting, seemed to have undergone some bizarre change. Its eyesight had become extraordinarily sharp.
"Does this mean my left eye has to hurt like that too...? Why couldn't both eyes get it over with at once?" The Saintess silently grumbled.
Her mood lightened a little.
The only benefit of that searing pain was that the ordinary pain elsewhere on her body now seemed insignificant. It even left her with a faintly numb, tingling sensation, as if she were soaking in a bath.
When she straightened her back, a tearing pain ripped through her waist. Yet she barely reacted, lightly touching it and feeling something rough beneath her fingers.
Like charred meat.
Lowering her head, she unsurprisingly saw that her scale armor was in a miserable state. A quarter of her waist had