Moving Forward

"You're really overdoing it."

In Border Town's castle, inside the Lord's chamber was a pair of man and woman, and one was on top of the other.

Anna was clumsily patting on Roland's shoulder and back, sometimes she would instead knead on them or put some pressure with her thumbs. As per Roland's request, she was doing a massage and currently facing Roland's bareback. It was something she was not familiar with, but very earnestly did to the best of her ability.

The reason she gave Roland's massage was quite simple like she said, Roland had been overdoing it in his activity and he was suffering from some muscle pain as a result. While she was not a masseuse and just an amateur, her attempt was still quite effective to elevate some of Roland's ache.

Though he had eaten some nutritious food, things like pain relief patch did not exist. Roland could only helplessly lay back and gritted his teeth. While he was tired, he had yet to feel sleepy. After some consideration, he asked Anna to help him after his daily class where he imparted some of his modern knowledge.

"You don't need to do what the militia did..." Anna whispered, however a faint smile was on her face as she reprimanded Roland.

She felt Roland was quite silly, but such approach of his had made her and the participants touched.

After combing the militia applications for a couple of days and strained the final three hundred people, he made a strict and dense schedule to train the militia. He also came to personally set up and supervised the training regiment. While he had passed the necessary details to the knights, Roland still came to teach them himself just to be sure. From running, muscle exercises and to dig up for the moat, this series of hard works resulting in the prince that rarely even stretching in his daily life got a severe muscle ache.

However, that was not all of it. While he was quite weak, could it be far worse than many young women that participated? One of the main reason he was seen overdoing it by Anna was that he gave the militia and the knights a couple repeats for each of the examples on top of doing what he asked to them himself.

"It's fine, it's only for the first time anyway." Roland felt nothing for his own pain actually, he only bumped out to know his physical body was really pathetic from the lack of training.

While he had walked all over the town for many projects he had, it was far from being able to count as an exercise. Roland noted after the winter was over, he needed to work his body more. He missed his modern body, over there his physical strength was most likely twice as strong considering he had a personal gym in his home that he used almost daily.

His reminiscent didn't last for long, however, because he had plenty of worries to ponder about in his current world. He remembered Nightingale and the others that went to the camp, it's already some days since their departure.

"Around this time, Nightingale and others should already arrive in the camp," Roland muttered. "What do you think they were doing?"

"Probably eating dinner together," Anna replied softly.

"Yes, I hope my gift was enough for the camp to use," Roland spoke as he wondered if Nightingale met any resistance. "If nothing went wrong, she should be telling Airy and Abby to practice their ability to the limit."

Would Nightingale found a way to make them practice without bothering the camp? Some witches were forbidden to use theirs in the camp, but it was similarly not easy to train outside and exposed to the elements in the mountain. More importantly, their trust in her was what matter. He didn't know whether she could persuade them to use their ability to the point they were tired each time.

While she was most likely to fail if she directly and openly said the method and asked them to come with her to Border Town for refuge, individually some people should accept what she said after some reasoning. After all, she had her own experience to serve as the best example.

Attending Airy and Abby was crucial because their day of awakening was close to the early period of months of the demons, but it didn't mean the others were not in danger later on. They were quite unfortunate to die if nothing prevented the story to flow naturally, but it didn't mean others would be safe either.

Although their priority was to save them from Cara's clutch and saved them from the fate of being dead in the mountain, it would be wrong if they ignored the others and didn't make sure their probability to pass increase with his knowledge of the situation. Nightingale was a frank and emotional person, he was quite worried about whether she could stay calm while trying all of that.

He believed she would already probe Wendy in some way or another, perhaps even Cara depending on her state of mind. He just hoped that Tyre could help restrain her possible reckless behavior since she was a professional in that regard. With two of them supplementing each other, they should be able to slowly ingrained the witches in the camp the way to reduce the degree of demonic torture they would face and at the same time making their strategy to unmask Cara.

The confrontation against the snake witch was unavoidable so long they wanted to bring all the witches. He just didn't want them to hurry and to process with extreme caution. It was best to pull some witches to their side first, especially influential witch like Wendy.

Their situation was actually very rigid and any small help for them was good. He didn't want them to slip and put themselves in danger as people they meant to help had yet becoming their allies. Fortunately, the capable chief knight and the bearlike Tigui Pine should already standby nearby and if something bad happened they could quickly become their reinforcement.

However, Roland knew there was not much to say besides worrying and trusting them. He decided to put an end to the discussion by saying his wish that contrary to what he thought in his rational mind, "I hope they will come back soon."

Hopefully, with the witches from the camp following behind her.

The room then descended to silence after Anna saying a similar thing in response and concluded the conversation. For a while, only the faint sound of her massaging his stiff body could be heard. It was a couple of minutes later Roland feeling better and at ease that he stopped Anna.

"Will you be okay? You should rest tomorrow." Anna said, there was a clear hint of concern in her voice.

Roland merely laughed and asked her to not to worry.

"That's better," Roland stretched his body after the session was over, it was no longer as stiff as before. He put some clothes and glanced at Anna who still looked the same as usual. He pondered for a bit and asked, "Do you want a massage too?"

Anna showed a weird expression, but it was neither disgusted nor surprise. She was merely confused and at a loss.

Roland chuckled and said, "It's fine. Now that I think about it, that's rather rude of me."

"No." Anna blurted out and a rare trace of a blush appeared on her cheeks. What Roland said was naturally something she understood, and indeed it what made her thoughts went sideways. However, she didn't follow up and only looked at him with her clear eyes.

Roland believed she would allow him, but he didn't know if there would be any consequences he had to face later. Initially, he was only half-joking. The other serious half was to teach her to impart his superficial knowledge of modern massage so maybe if she still wanted to help him in the future, she could do better. Still, he thought it was indeed improper if she had to strip when they were not in clear relationships, and they can't just playing pretend he was a masseur at this point in time.

In the end, Roland decided to compromise. With a straight face, he said to Anna, "I'm only returning the favor, and what I'm going with is a foot massage."

He felt awkward to go back after Anna's vague answer and after some pondering, he finally remembered that there was a lot of different massages. For most of them, going naked was not really necessary.

Like he thought, Anna didn't refuse and gave a nod, but her face didn't hide her surprise. Seeing her face, Roland felt awkward once more. Why couldn't he say hand massage or something else? It was because he thought if there was any part of her body that needed relaxation, it was her feet that had faithfully followed him everywhere. But looking at Anna, it seemed it was quite a bold decision he declared.

Roland shook his head and dragged a bucket of water under the bed. He asked Anna to dip into it and dry it with her flame. This part made him awkward for the third time. This gave an implication that he didn't want to smell her natural fragrance, but since it was a common procedure, could it be blamed on him? He gritted his teeth and decided to simply thicken his skin to end it as fast as possible.

Perhaps noticing Roland's struggle from his face, Anna's face loosen and she let out a chuckle. She dipped her feet into the water and felt its coldness. Actually, this practice of putting feet to cold water for a period of time was something Roland had passed on to her and some other people in the castle saying it was good for their health, so at least for this, it was not another new experience.

She was not bathing her feet, so after about ten seconds or so she lifted her feet. The water made her pale feet glittered and reflecting the flickering flame from the oil lamp, made them quite mesmerizing. Roland nearly gulped his saliva hard, but quickly noticed and controlled its flow so to not so obvious he was captivated.

Without waiting for his instruction, Anna quickly lit her feet with flame and in a matter of seconds, the water evaporated. Roland normally didn't pay much attention since it was not something not in his usual vision, but her hindfoot was very clean and as clear and soft looking as her tender toes. Her nails were not too long, it seemed she regularly clipped them.

It didn't take long for Roland, in the beginning, to find out that the methods to clip nails around were quite barbaric. They used knife more than scissors which could be very dangerous and even using the latter possessed no small risk. But since he was here with modern knowledge, a small project where he made nail clipper had long been done and spread out to Border Town. Naturally, being his close aide, Anna enjoyed the first batch of product and later, the finalized commercial version.

However, her neatly trimmed nails were not his focus. He didn't know whether it was Anna's original charm or something to do with her being a witch, but her feet and visible calf looked very attractive. It looked unbelievably like a newborn infant, so white and precious.

Roland took a couple of deep breaths to calm himself before bring himself to touch her right delicate midfoot which had a gentle curve. Anna seemed quite affected because there was a stifled sound, which made Roland felt nervous. He felt he was doing something wrong, fortunately, she was not a minor else it would weight down his mind more. Not using any oil seemed a better choice for now.

Actually, he was not at all experienced in massaging someone else, but he had been a long time customer to some quality massage parlors. He had been touched so many times that he remembered which part felt good and relaxing as well the way they were doing it.

He started by holding the foot with both hands. Rubbing the top of the foot using a firm motion with his thumbs, he slowly made his way all the way to the ankle from the tip of each toe. After he reached the ankle, he returned with a similar gesture but softer stroke. He moved his thumbs from the toe to the bottom of the food, about a third way did he rubbed the kidney point.

Alternating it by holding the big toe with his thumb and sliding his index finger underneath, slowly turn and pull the toe one by one which basically amounted to stretching the toes. Turning slightly, he slid his finger towards the base of the toes and back toward the end a couple of time.

He repeated the motions to the other feet, before moving it up again to the calf, two fingers above the ankle. Roland's rubbed it slowly and he did with different varying pressure strength each time.

His work was essentially longer than what Anna did to him by twice as long, but strangely he didn't feel tired. He finished with a satisfaction with his own work since he never heard a groan of pain from Anna. He swept the sweat on his face and stood up, only to find a surprise.

At some point, Anna was already not sitting on his bed but rather laying on her back, looking still and tense. Putting a hand over her face, a faint sound of a deep and increased rate in her respiration entered his ears.