Not long after Ken crash-lands in the forest, he encounters his quarry: a ferocious white grand grizzly. He finds he can just manage to out run it, but when he’s outnumbered by two blue grizzlies, he exercises the better part of valor and jumps into a waterfall, Fugitive style.
Having met his prey, Ken spends the next ten days observing it, and learns that the bears form a family. He even starts to find them cute. During these ten days he gets sick from river water, meets a cute black bunny that can understand what he’s saying and leads him to potable water. He also encounters something far more lethal than the bears: a bus-sized white snake.
When Ken finally works up the nerve to attack the bears, he finds the two adults have been brutally slaughtered for sport by the snake. The blue baby bear is still alive, and Ken vows to avenge its parents. Operating under the credo that nothing is scarier than Miss Rose, Ken fights valiantly, blinding the snake, getting his arm chomped, enduring and counteracting venom with his healing magic, and finally bringing the beast down with a flurry of dagger strikes to its head.
When even that doesn’t prove adequate to vanquish the beast, Ken is on the ground, just about out of mana and barely able to move. He contemplates his death until the revived snake is finished off … by Rose. Turns out she’s been watching the whole time, and the black bunny is her pet. Thus she knows everything he’s done, and that he did good. That said, she also heard him call her a brute, violent woman, and ogre, so he won’t be sleeping tonight as punishment!
The snake was actually an unexpected relic of the last Demon King war. Rose didn’t expect him to defeat it by himself, as even a whole party would have trouble. The whole point was to learn how it felt to face off against a plainly superior adversary.
And Ken comported himself well enough that Rose declares him qualified to stand with her in battle, an honor two previous healers couldn’t claim. Rose isn’t just being nice, either; she had been hoping Ken is a tough as he is, because the Demon King’s army is on the move. That he passed her test gives her hope they’ll fare okay in the battles to come.
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