“Ahaha, wait. It tickles. Wait!”

The beast wagged its tail vigorously and licked her face as if kissing her, and though Olivia tried to discourage this behavior, she burst into genuine laughter for the first time in a while. Thanks to the little ones now telling her they were okay and thanking her, she felt even more moved and emotional.

“Make sure to take the medicine regularly. And change the bandages while applying medicine to the wounds once a day.”

While repeatedly instructing the caretaker brought by the administrator about precautions, Olivia kept anxiously looking back at the little ones in the cage. Though she trusted the caretaker more than the administrator, he was still the administrator’s man, so she couldn’t be completely at ease.

“And absolutely, absolutely no fighting. Strenuous exercise is strictly forbidden until they’re completely healed! Understood?”

She had already talked herself hoarse to the administrator about prohibiting things like dogfighting, but it had no effect. With no other choice, this time she specified a timeframe of “until completely healed,” roughly a few months, and received at least a response that he would consider it.

Of course, to get even that far, she had to vigorously wave carrots and sticks with administrator-tailored nonsense like ‘if they get more injured, even I can’t treat them,’ ‘these little ones are so well-trained, wouldn’t it be a loss if they died and you had to educate new ones?’ The fact that this was the best result she could achieve by coaxing and persuading was nothing short of tragic.

‘I need to buy time at least until they’re fully healed.’

Though she still didn’t have a specific solution in mind, the best she could do was to buy some time. I need to think of some method during that time. If she couldn’t resolve the issue with the administrator, she was even considering the last resort of staging an accident to secretly release the little ones.

After spending several days at the mansion and somewhat resolving the situation, Olivia was finally able to return home. But throughout the carriage ride home, her heart felt heavy as she remembered the faces of the little ones who had seen her off despite their pain.

‘There must be someone I can ask for help.’

Even if she couldn’t punish the administrator, she thought that with her abilities, she might be able to find someone who could help save, or at least help escape, the animals he was arbitrarily tormenting. With this thought, Olivia briefly closed her strained eyes.

After several hours of rough riding toward the cottage, just as she thought they were about to arrive, the carriage suddenly stopped. Barely managing to hold onto the carriage seat through the violent shake, Olivia looked around in a daze with a startled expression. Bang bang bang. Someone urgently knocked on the carriage door.

“What’s happening?”

“Olive! Something terrible has happened!”

When she opened the carriage door, a familiar face urgently called Olivia’s name. It was clearly Kale’s mother, who had recently moved to the village. When someone suddenly jumped in front of the carriage nearly causing an accident, the coachman approached irritably and roughly pushed away the woman clinging to the carriage.

“Are you crazy? Do you want to die?”

“W-wait a moment. I’ll get off here. You can go now.”

Although there was still some distance to the cabin, Olivia hurriedly got off the carriage carrying her large luggage. The coachman, who had been threatening and irritable toward the woman, made a show of dusting off his clothes and moved aside like he’s doing her a great favor when she told him he didn’t need to go all the way to the cabin and could turn back. Like master, like servant. Olivia shook her head as she watched the coachman disappear into the distance.

“Are you alright?”

“I’m fine. That’s not the issue right now!”

“Please calm down and speak slowly.”

After calming down Kale’s sobbing mother, Olivia headed to Kale’s house with her, without even returning to the cabin first. She felt a bit anxious, thinking that if both Kale’s mother and Kale were looking for her so urgently, it must be related to Ricky, and sure enough, when they arrived at Kale’s house, she saw Ricky lying weakly in his nest.

“Ricky?”

Seeing that his condition looked more serious than during his first examination, Olivia rushed to the cage. She carefully took Ricky out of the collapsed nest, placed him on a soft cushion, and examined his condition with care. His feathers were dull and fluffy, and a handful of fallen feathers were scattered randomly on the bottom of the cage. The light in his eyes was dim, and he seemed to struggle even to respond with his wings when Olivia tried to stimulate him.

“Peeeee…… Piyo, ooooo……”

—It hurts so much…… My body is too hot……

Even his usually cheerful chattering voice was barely audible. Ricky recognized Olivia and whimpered to her in a faint voice, breathing precariously. Seeing that he seemed too weak to speak properly, Olivia asked Kale’s mother about the situation instead, as she was pacing anxiously beside her.

“What happened so suddenly…… When did his condition become this serious?”

“When I received your letter, he was still fine. So both Kale and I thought he had recovered. But then the day after next? We gave him the medicine you sent, but somehow we must have fed him wrong because from that day on, Ricky started to waste away like this, oh my……”

“Huh? You say I sent medicine?”

“You know, the day after you sent the letter, someone came with medicine saying you hadn’t been able to send it with the letter? The same person who delivered your letter came and gave it to us……”

Olivia stared blankly at the woman’s face, filled with confusion and bewilderment. Her own expression was probably not much different. After staring vacantly at the half-dying Ricky and the woman’s face in turns, Olivia tightly clenched her trembling fingertips.

‘That terrible person, really!’

She had worried that the person might not deliver her letter because it was troublesome, but she never imagined they would play such a malicious prank.

‘Did they read my letter and then pull this prank?’

Being generous, she could have just been upset and moved on if someone had merely peeked at her letter as a prank, but giving fake medicine that made Ricky’s condition this bad was an act too vicious to be dismissed as a mere mischievous prank. It reminded her of the administrator’s face, smirking while looking at injured animals outside the cage, and it made her nauseous. Olivia lightly patted her cheeks with both hands, barely holding onto her sanity amid the dizzying anger.

‘Get it together. Right now, I need to save Ricky first!’

“Do you happen to have any of the medicine left?”

“They told us to make sure he took it all, so there’s hardly any left……”

The woman hurriedly handed Olivia a small glass bottle. Thinking about how Kale must have fed every last bit of the medicine hoping for Ricky’s recovery made the nearly empty glass bottle feel even more depressing. Olivia scraped and scraped the walls of the glass bottle, which had almost no medicine left, trying to identify this mysterious medicine sent by the administrator.

‘This scent, I’ve definitely smelled it before. And considering that his body is hot and his feathers are falling out weakly like this……’

As she paced around the room anxiously, her memory almost surfacing, Olivia’s steps suddenly stopped. She remembered an ingredient she had glimpsed when treating animals at the mansion. It wasn’t a material she handled, but rather debris that had been piled up in a corner of the room with the cages as if someone had left it there unfinished. Even then, she had wondered why such a dangerous thing was in that room, but that person really!

She had overlooked it because there was no sign it had been used on the sick little ones at the mansion, but it seemed that some concoction using that poisonous herb had been sent to Ricky. Having identified the main ingredient in the medicine, Olivia quickly rummaged through her bag and began making an antidote. The situation was too urgent to return to the cabin. She had never been so grateful for the heavy bag that always burdened her when traveling to and from the mansion.

After making the antidote and struggling to feed it to Ricky, who could barely swallow, she watched for signs of improvement for several hours. When Ricky’s breathing, which had slowed as if he might die at any moment, began to revive a little, and the drooping bird started to drink water and flutter his wings again, Olivia slumped down in front of the desk.

“Haaaa……”

It seemed the immediate crisis had passed. Though she would need to monitor his condition for a few more days and continue with medication, he appeared to have survived the worst. The tension drained from her body, making it difficult to even stand properly.

‘How many little ones have already suffered for days because of that person?’

Olivia heaved what felt like a lifetime’s worth of sighs at the administrator’s actions, which she couldn’t understand how a person could be so cruel. With a groan, she struggled to her feet. After carefully covering the sleeping Ricky with a soft handkerchief, Olivia went to find Kale’s mother.

“He seems stable for now, so could you bring him to the cabin tomorrow? And if his condition changes even in the middle of the night, please come right away.”

“Yes, yes. Whew, I can finally breathe easier now. Kale cherishes him so much, saying he’s a friend his dad brought him, and I was so worried something might happen to him.”

“Oh, by the way, where is Kale?”

Only now realizing that Kale, whom she expected would be glued to Ricky’s side, was nowhere to be seen, Olivia looked around the house. She felt a belated worry that he might have collapsed from crying too much.