Nine years ago.
The Feeble Soul was just a newly formed party, and they had only been Adventuring for a few months. They were exploring the dark, damp tunnels of a low-level dungeon.
Suddenly, an unexpected swarm of strong monsters poured out from the shadows. The numbers were completely overwhelming. The beasts attacked Brown and Red immediately at the vanguard. Pink and Black were also completely overloaded by the sheer volume of enemies pushing through the narrow stone hall.
Yellow stood at the backline. Celia gripped her wooden staff tightly and keept her eyes on the chaos.
Kian stood at the very rear, hiding directly behind Celia.
Then, a huge beast bypassed the vanguard entirely. It ignored the heavily armored fighters and rushed straight for the squishy backline, coming rapidly toward Kian's left flank.
Celia saw the monster charging. She trembled violently, but she threw her fragile body directly into the path of the beast to act as a meat shield. The monster slammed into her, and the heavy impact threw her to the stone floor. She fell down hard, gasping for air.
The monster simply stepped over her fallen body and rushed toward Kian.
Kian completely froze. The beast raised its heavy claw. Kian screamed internally, his heart practically stopping, but his face remained a blank, empty mask of terror.
The sharp claw reached about five centimeters from his face.
A bright flash of red, orange, and yellow heat illuminated the tunnel. Black fired a huge fireball from the flank. The spell struck the beast in the head, so it dropped dead right beside Kian's boots.
Without stopping, Lumina released a massive barrage of magic spells to eliminate the entire horde of monsters in seconds. Once the dust settled, she rushed immediately toward Celia.
Celia was a Healer. She was not a combat type. She cast a spell to fully heal her bruised body, but she sat on the cold stone and continued to tremble in fear.
Later, the party finally exited the dungeon and stood under the pale afternoon sun.
Kian looked at Black, Red, Brown, and Pink.
"You go ahead," Kian told them flatly.
The four kids nodded and walked ahead down the road. Kian stayed behind. He turned his head and looked at Celia.
Celia forced a heavy swallow. Her hands nervously clutched the fabric of her white robe. She was fully expecting a harsh scolding for the incident earlier. She had failed to hold the line, so she braced herself for Kian's anger.
But what Kian did was actually much worse.
"Yellow, you're fired," Kian stated plainly.
Celia gasped in pure shock.
"I don't need a weak Healer like you," Kian continued. "I don't need you."
Her knees buckled forward and bent sharply against the earth. The sudden fall forced her shins flat into the dust while her feet splayed out awkwardly behind her hips, trapping her in a broken, unnatural sitting posture.
Her wooden staff simply slipped from her numb fingers and clattered loudly against the loose stones. She stared blindly at the ground. Her shoulders caved inward, leaving her completely empty.
Celia looked up into Kian's eyes.
"Please don't do this," Celia begged, her voice cracking. "I'll become a better Healer next time."
"It's over, Yellow. You're fired," Kian said coldly. "I don't need a Healer that cannot fight. You have zero combat ability."
"I'm a Healer," Celia pleaded, tears welling in her eyes. "I'm not a fighter. Healers don't fight."
Kian stared at her.
Of course Healers do not fight, Kian thought internally. But I've been trying to find a good excuse to get rid of these crazy color-coded kids for months. This is my best chance. If I can push this further and blame her clumsiness from earlier, I can make a flawless reason to get rid of her.
Kian pointed a harsh finger directly at her face and lied flawlessly.
"You are wrong. Who told you Healers do not fight?" Kian scolded. "They are fools. In my party, a Healer must fight. I will recruit a Healer who can use a sword."
Of course there is no Healer who can use a sword, Kian chuckled in his mind. Now Yellow, just give up. Be a good girl and leave the party. You are an incredible Healer. You have absolutely no future sticking to a party led by a weakling like me.
Celia's face twisted into an expression of pure terror at the thought of being fired.
Kian saw her terrified face, so he quickly bit his lip to stop his guilt. He needed to be cruel to escape her.
"You're fired, okay?" Kian added. "You failed, you sucked, and you are useless."
He turned around to walk away. Suddenly, he felt a tight pressure grabbing his right leg. He looked down.
Yellow was hugging his right leg incredibly tight. Tears freely flowed down her cheeks, dripping onto his boots.
"Please don't leave me again, Cid," Celia sobbed loudly. "I'll do anything. Stay by my side."
Kian froze.
Oh no, Kian panicked in his head. No crying. It makes my head ache. And who the heck is Cid? Has this old elf hag completely lost her mind?
"Stop crying and let me go," Kian demanded.
"I won't," Celia cried.
She tightened her grip even further. Kian froze as a sharp pain shot up his thigh. Celia was an Adventurer, while Kian was just a normal person entirely without Mana. He lacked the raw physical force to remove Celia's desperate grip. He was trapped.
Kian watched Celia continue crying into his pants.
My head aches so much, Kian complained internally. Why does anyone want to cry? It is so loud.
Kian let out a long, exhausted sigh.
"Alright," Kian finally said. "How about a compromise?"
Celia loosened her grip just a tiny bit. She looked up at Kian with wet, red eyes.
"Compromise?" Celia sniffled.
"Yes," Kian replied. "If you stop crying and let me go, I'll tell you."
Celia immediately let go of his leg. She stood up and quickly cleaned the dirt from her white robe with trembling hands.
"I'll give you a chance," Kian said.
Celia's face brightened instantly. The heavy despair vanished.
"I'll give you a challenge," Kian continued. "If you succeed, I'll let you in my party. If you fail, you'll be fired. There will be no more negotiations afterwards."
Celia swallowed hard, her throat feeling like sand. She wiped the last tear from her cheek and put on a very serious expression.
"What is the challenge?" Celia asked.
She took the bait, Kian thought, smirking deeply in his mind.
"Learn swordsmanship," Kian declared.
Celia's eyes widened in absolute shock. "What? Swordsmanship?"
Kian leaned closer to Celia's face to look intimidating. "Yes. If you want to be the Healer of Feeble Soul, you have to learn swordsmanship."
It is impossible for a Healer to become a Swordsman, Kian reasoned happily. Even if she can memorize Swordsman moves, she is not a melee class. She cannot coat a sword with Aura to actually cut a monster. It is a hopeless challenge. If she agreed to it, it is basically game over. It is guaranteed I can finally get rid of her.
"Is that really my challenge?" Celia asked nervously. "Is there any alternative?"
"This is your only chance," Kian answered coldly. "If you can become a Swordsman, I will accept you as the Party's Healer. If you fail, I want you to promise me that you will leave the party and you will never cry in front of me again. No negotiations."
Celia thought about the cruel demand for a long moment.
"Ki, I am a Healer," Celia finally said, her voice full of confusion. "Healers cannot become a Swordsman. That's a Law of the Universe. Are you messing with me?"
This old hag is really sharp, Kian panicked internally. I have to say something dramatic to convince her to agree to this one-sided challenge.
Kian suddenly remembered a few cool lines from a dusty comic book he read last week.
"Ahem."
He cleared his throat and looked at Celia with a serious, deeply inspiring tone.
"Listen to me," Kian said. "Remember this lesson. Being a Healer is not an excuse for abandoning the sword."
---
Day 7 of Present Day
The seventh day arrived, pushing Team A to the brink of their physical endurance.
The brutal cycle of attrition finally cracked the vanguard. A heavy log shattered the defensive line, crushing a Tanker's right foot completely into the mud. He collapsed backward, bleeding heavily and gasping for air.
Standard healing magic could only close the severed stump, so it was entirely insufficient for a man who needed to stand. Celia stepped forward.
As the only other Level 7 Healer in the raid, she knelt beside the agonizing man and placed her glowing wooden staff over his ruined ankle.
"Close your eyes," Celia instructed softly.
The Tanker obeyed, squeezing his eyes shut as Celia began the formal chant.
Before she could finish the second verse, the Miasma-Titan shifted its massive weight.
It bypassed the standard vertical drop entirely. The towering beast twisted its core, tearing its right arm through the thick fog in a devastating horizontal sweep aimed directly at the left flank.
"Incoming!" a Tanker roared.
The two remaining Tankers instantly planted their boots and locked their iron shields together. They braced hard, quietly confident in their survival math.
A vertical strike relies heavily on the constant acceleration of gravity to generate its crushing weight. Since a horizontal swing lacks that gravitational assist, the Tankers assumed the lateral force would be significantly weaker.
They were entirely, fatally wrong.
While a vertical drop utilizes gravity, a horizontal sweep from a twenty-meter Calamity relies on pure rotational torque. The centrifugal force generated by twisting thousands of tons of petrified timber creates a massive, compounding kinetic multiplier. It acts like a swinging bat, building exponential momentum as it travels.
The log smashed into the yellow Auras. The impact did not just push the Tankers backward; the raw, unmitigated torque violently launched both heavily armored men entirely off their feet, throwing them through the air like discarded ragdolls.
The defensive wall evaporated. The Healers, Mages, Thieves, and Swordsmen scrambled backward in sheer panic, abandoning the flank to avoid getting swept away.
Celia did not move. She remained knelt in the mud, her hands steady as she continued pouring green light into the injured Tanker's ankle.
The huge log swept across the crater. The petrified bark tore through the fog, closing the distance instantly until the rough timber was ten centimeters from the side of Celia's face. The retreating Adventurers watched in absolute horror, entirely convinced the fragile elf was about to be obliterated.
The wood swept violently across the exact spot where she knelt.
A heavy gust of displaced air whipped the mud, but there was no sickening sound of impact. The injured Tanker remained perfectly safe because he was lying flat on his back, and the sweeping log cleared the ground by a mere twenty centimeters.
But Celia was gone.
The battlefield fell into a stunned, breathless silence.
"Up there!" a Swordsman shouted, pointing his blade toward the gray sky.
Every eye darted upward. Ten meters above the muddy swamp, Celia Oakheart was currently at the apex of a flawless backflip. She held her glowing staff comfortably in one hand, her white robes fluttering in the toxic wind.
At first glance, leaping ten meters into the sky just to dodge a two-meter-thick log seems entirely wasteful. A standard novice would simply jump three meters to clear the hazard and conserve precious stamina. But in the brutal calculus of high-level combat, a minimal jump is a fatal trap. If the Titan suddenly twitched and snapped its arm upward mid-sweep, a mere three-meter clearance provides almost zero reaction time.
Because she launched herself a full ten meters high, Celia secured a wide vertical buffer. If the log jerked unexpectedly, she possessed enough distance and airtime to twist her body, brace her staff, or cast a downward deflection. It was not a showy stunt, but a deeply calculated, profound tactical evasion.
She descended rapidly. Her boots touched the muck, and the physical execution of her landing was terrifying in its perfection. There was zero bounce. Her knees bent at the exact microscopic angle required to absorb the fall, so her center of gravity instantly anchored into the earth with the quiet, flawless grace of a seasoned light Swordsman.
Without missing a single beat of her chant, Celia reached into her pocket with her free hand, pulled out a small square of chocolate, and popped it into her mouth. She knelt back down beside the blind Tanker and seamlessly resumed the regeneration spell.
"Go!" Thorne bellowed, violently shattering the collective trance. He pointed his staff toward the two thrown Tankers while firing a fireball at the Titan. "Rebuild the line!"
The Adventurers snapped back to reality and rushed forward to resume the clash. They forced their focus back to the monster, though a single, impossible question echoed loudly in every single one of their minds.
How did she jump that high?
In the Adventurer hierarchy, a ten-meter vertical leap is completely ordinary for a seasoned combatant. Swordsmen and Thieves possess the dense, fast-twitch muscle fibers required to launch their bodies into the air. Mages simply bypass gravity altogether using aerial spells.
Healers, however, are biologically bound by their soft tissue. They possess greater strength than civilians due to their Mana Core, but their leg muscles fundamentally lack the explosive, kinetic coil needed to catapult their body weight ten meters straight up. It is a strict physiological impossibility.
Chris stood on the flank, his daggers hanging loosely in his grip. He blinked twice, his breathing ragged.
Am I hallucinating? Chris thought, a cold sweat breaking out across his neck. I recognize that footwork. She moves exactly like a light swordsman. That backflip was flawless. How does a fragile Healer move like that?
The man saw Celia launch herself into the sky. He was fighting for his life against a swarm of snapping jaws, so he quickly turned back to the battle. That left Chris as the only one who had any idea how she'd done it, though even he could barely believe what he'd just seen.
When the log closed that final ten-centimeter gap, Chris's Tachypsychia triggered. His Thief eyes dragged the chaotic fraction of a second into a slow crawl.
He saw exactly how she defied biology.
In that frozen millisecond before she jumped, Celia's slender legs violently expanded. Without the need for a chant, she forcefully hyper-generated massive muscle fibers beneath her skin, overwriting her fragile Healer anatomy purely to create the explosive kinetic coil needed for the launch.
Did she just enlarge her legs? Chris asked himself, his mind reeling from the sheer absurdity of the tactic.
The other Mages, Swordsmen, and Healers remained deeply confused by the jump, but they lacked the raw visual processing speed to see the muscle expansion. The injured Tanker had kept his eyes firmly closed, while the other two Tankers were too busy flying through the air to witness anything.
Chris was the only person in the entire Team A who saw what actually happened.
The six-hour shift finally ended. Team B arrived to take over the rotation, so the exhausted members of Team A trudged heavily back to the safe camp.
The burning curiosity about Celia's impossible jump gnawed at the back of their minds.
However, the moment their boots touched dry land, the suffocating physical toll of the miasma crashed down on them. Their muscles ached, their lungs burned, and the absolute need for sleep completely overpowered their desire for answers. They collapsed onto their bedrolls, leaving the mystery of the jumping Healer unsolved for another day.