Chapter 416: Horse Doctor

Finally, one of the elders couldn’t hold back her curiosity any longer. She chirped up like an excited filly, an amusing sight for a woman in her seventies.

"So! How exactly are you going to do it?"

"Surgery?" Another asked, her voice tinged with nervousness. "Is it surgery? Because I have to admit, I’m a bit scared of surgery. I don’t know if I can go through with it."

"Oh, don’t be such a baby." A third elder scoffed. "If surgery is what it takes, then surgery is what we’ll do."

"It’s not surgery." Luca said, cutting through the bickering.

Everyone turned to him.

"Then what?" Someone asked. "Magic? Some kind of magical device? Will we fly instead of running?"

"I don’t want to fly." Another centaur said firmly. "I want to run. Running is the best. That’swhen my hooves hit the ground and my muscles burn and the world blurs past me. That’s what I’ve been missing!"

Luca laughed. "You won’t have to fly. And there’s no surgery involved." His eyes gleamed. "I have a much better solution. One that’s been in the making for a couple of decades now."

Sigrid glanced back at him, her brow furrowed.

A couple of decades? What exactly was he talking about?

But before she could ask, Luca patted her back—the silent signal for her to stand. She rose immediately, almost without thinking, and then realized with a flush of embarrassment that she had responded to his touch like a trained horse.

The other centaurs noticed too, their eyebrows rising in unison.

"Before I can do anything." Luca said, addressing the room. "I need leg measurements and details about each injury. Like how many years ago it happened, where the pain is worst, how it affects your daily movement. Basically, as much information as you can give me."

"Oh, we have that already." Sigrid said, and she moved to one of the cupboards along the wall.

"Whenever we visited the dryads for treatment, they gave us comprehensive reports on every elder. Even though they couldn’t fix the problem entirely, they documented everything—what helped, what didn’t, what made the pain worse."

She pulled out a thick ledger and handed it to him.

"This should have most of what you need."

Luca opened the ledger and was immediately impressed.

The pages were filled with elegant handwriting in the common script. Each elder had her own section—name, age, medical history, the nature of her injury, when it occurred, what caused it.

There were diagrams showing which bones had been affected, which muscles had atrophied, where the pain radiated.

Technical terms like "blood pressure" and "tendon elasticity" were annotated in careful detail.

"The dryads did all of this?" He murmured, genuinely impressed. "These read like actual medical charts. They have diagnostic capabilities I wasn’t expecting from this world."

"The dryads are remarkably skilled." Agnes said. "They’ve always been the healers of this continent. Even with the decline of mana, their knowledge hasn’t diminished."

Luca snapped the ledger shut and smiled.

"Well, with this, most of the work is already done! But I still need to check for any changes since these reports were made. And—" He hesitated, suddenly looking almost embarrassed. "I’ll need to examine your legs personally. That would be ideal."

He glanced at Sigrid. "But I think it might be better if Sigrid does it herself. Since I don’t want to—"

"Absolutely not." Agnes said flatly.

"What?"

"Sir Luca, Sigrid may be skilled at leadership and swordsmanship, but she knows nothing about medical analysis. She would be useless." She gave him a pointed look. "You need to do it yourself."

"But—"

"Sir Luca." Filda’s voice was gentle but insistent. "We are old women. We have been through childbirth, battle, and decades of life. Modesty is a luxury we stopped caring about long ago."

"Shame can go into a dustbin if it means I get to walk again." Another elder added.

"Besides." One sneaky elder said with a sly smile. "You’re rather easy on the eyes. If an old woman like me gets to have a handsome young man examine her leg, well—" She winked— "that’s not exactly a hardship, is it?"

The other elders burst into laughter. Luca, for once, was the one caught off guard.

Sigrid, however, was not having it.

"You all shouldn’t be so casual about this." She protested, her face flushed. "You are elders of the village. You have an image to uphold. You can’t just—"

"Oh, hush, Sigrid." One of the older centaurs waved a hand dismissively. "You’re more traditional than all of us put together. Loosen up a little."

"Besides." Another elder added with a knowing smirk. "You seem perfectly comfortable letting him sit on your back all afternoon. Seems rather hypocritical to lecture us about modesty, doesn’t it?"

Sigrid’s mouth opened and closed. No sound came out.

"Right then." Agnes said, before Sigrid could spontaneously combust. She looked at Luca. "Do whatever measurements you need to do, Hero."

And before Luca could protest further, the elders began pulling up their robes.

They didn’t strip completely, they retained enough fabric to preserve a reasonable degree of modest.

But they exposed their legs fully. Injured legs, bandaged legs, legs wrapped in leather braces and crude splints. Each one a testament to years of pain and stubborn endurance.

Luca took a breath. Then he got to work.

He moved first to Agnes, who had pulled up the fabric covering her hind leg.

This was, he realized, the first time he was seeing a centaur’s actual hind leg without any covering at all. It was genuinely like a horse’s leg—powerful and graceful, covered in soft, fluffy brown fur that gleamed with a silky sheen.

Her hoof was slightly weathered with age, but still beautiful. The kind of leg that horse ranchers back in his world would pay enormous sums to acquire.

He felt a sudden, irrational urge to pet it. Just to see if the fur was as silky as it looked.

But he had a job to do. He wasn’t going to break their trust for the sake of satisfying his curiosity.

He pulled gloves from his spatial portal and knelt beside Agnes.

"Tell me how this happened." He said, his gloved fingers gently probing the affected area. "And where exactly the pain is worst."

Agnes nodded, her voice steady as she recounted the story.

"It was about twelve years ago. We were escorting Lady Poppy through the eastern highlands as there had been reports of cursed emergy near the barrier. I didn’t see the loose stone. One wrong step, and..."

She gestured at her leg.

"The pain is mostly here, along the tendon. When it gets cold, especially at night in the winter months, it aches all the way up to here."

She touched a spot higher on her leg.

Luca nodded, pressing gently. "Does this hurt?"

"A little. A dull ache, mostly."

"And here?"

"That’s sharper."

Luca listened and he continued asking follow-up questions—where exactly the pain radiated, what positions made it worse, whether certain muscles had atrophied more than others.

His gloved fingers moved gently over the injured area, palpating, assessing.

He also used medical terms that none of the elders fully understood—something about "connective tissue degradation" and "localized inflammation patterns."

But the sheer depth of his knowledge was reassuring.

"Sigrid." He said, without looking up. "Note this down."

Sigrid, who was holding the ledger, grabbed the pen Luca tossed her.

She stared at it for a moment, a strange, sleek writing instrument unlike any quill she’d ever used.

She eventually figured out how to press the tip to paper, and she began writing down everything Luca dictated: which muscles were affected, the nature of the injury, the specific medical terminology that went over her head but seemed very important.

He moved on to the next elder. Then the next. One by one, he examined each of them—unwrapping old bandages, feeling for damage, asking about their histories. Each time, his demeanor was the same: calm, professional, utterly focused.

The elders, who had seen him joking and laughing earlier, were struck by the change.

Here was a man who took his work seriously. A man who, despite all his teasing and mischief, understood when something truly mattered.

Their respect for him deepened with every careful question, every gentle touch.

"This one’s more severe." He murmured, examining an elder whose front leg bore the marks of an old fracture. "The bone healed, but it didn’t heal straight. That’s why you can’t put weight on it."

The elder nodded sadly. "The dryads tried to realign it, but..."

"But without the right tools, it’s nearly impossible." Luca straightened, his expression thoughtful. "Don’t worry. This is all fixable."

When he had examined the last elder, he took the ledger from Sigrid and reviewed her notes, his eyes scanning the pages rapidly.

"Alright." He said finally, snapping the book shut. "Here’s the situation. About half of you have severe injuries that require assistance from others just to move around."

"The other half don’t have broken bones, but you’re suffering from old injuries that make running painful—arthritis, chronic inflammation, muscle deterioration. Different problems, but all of them treatable."

"But it’s alright." He gave them a reassuring smile. "By the time I’m done, every single one of you will be the same beautiful centaurs you were in your prime. Strong legs. No pain. Full mobility!"

The elders clutched each other’s hands. Some had tears streaming down their faces. Others looked like they were trying very hard not to cry and failing utterly.

Sigrid, who had been holding herself together through sheer willpower, finally allowed herself to feel the full force of her excitement.

Her tail swished back and forth with such vigor that it created a small breeze.

"What do we need to do, Sir Luca!? What can I help with?! Should I gather supplies? Prepare a space? Is there anything—"

"Right now?" Luca shook his head. "Right now, it’s all on me. I need to go back to my own world and meet with someone who can help with this."

Sigrid’s tail stopped swishing. "Your...your own world?"

"Just for a little while. I can’t bring anyone from this world with me, unfortunately."

He paused, then added with a teasing grin:

"Why, Sigrid? Disappointed you can’t come along? I didn’t realize you enjoyed having me on your back quite that much."

"I—that’s not—" Sigrid’s face went bright red. "I simply wanted to assist! That’s all! Don’t read anything into it."

"Of course. Of course." Luca’s grin didn’t waver.

He reached out and patted her horse back, an intimate gesture, casual yet familiar. Sigrid stiffened, but she didn’t pull away.

The elders, watching this exchange, exchanged glances that spoke volumes.

Whoosh!

A portal shimmered into existence before Luca, its edges crackling with energy. He stepped toward it, then paused and looked back.

"I’ll be back soon...Try not to miss me too much."

And then he was gone.