Reborn Healer Chapter 59

In retrospect, this had been a really bad idea. It hadn't really been a good idea in the moment either, but it was much worse now that it was actually happening.

Doubletime was still active—in fact, it was the only concentration spell I still had active. It gave me just enough time to react to the familiar spike of danger, giving me the space to activate a Dash at extremely overloaded capacity. I had put so much power into the spell that I felt something snap within me, but I didn't have the time nor the concentration to spare to look at it.

At the same time, I’d cast Heal, similarly overloading it in order to absorb the bulk of what I assumed was coming.

Danger Sense gave me a very good sense of where a threat was coming from as well as the general details of how I could possibly avoid it.

Just like it had for Gerald not too long ago, my skill had told me that there was no avoiding this. It was a wide-range effect, and it was going to trigger far too quickly for me to get the hell out of dodge.

Time seemed to slow even further than it would with Doubletime, my Harmonic Awareness kicking into overdrive as oily darkness burst from the ground directly under me.

Around me, I caught glimpses of others casting shielding spells, doing their utmost to keep themselves and their Lord Prince alive. Given the degree of the threat we were facing, however, not to mention the lack of coordination that came when a bomb went off directly in their midst, I highly doubted it was going to work.

I didn't even care that much about the Gerald. He hadn't played a role in my life other than being someone I knew existed. My father also presumably had some kind of connection to him given his line of work, but other than that tenuous connection, none of these people around me really mattered to me personally.

But I was going to get hit by this either way. If there was a possibility that I, who had resisted the plague up until this point, could prevent the needless deaths of many others, I was going to take it.

Aria had told me at some point that it was in times of crisis where people found who they truly were. I'd been through a number of crises now, and on some level, it was reassuring to know that in this life, I could step up when it counted.

And maybe, just maybe, if I didn't survive this but managed to pave the way for the others to, Sebastian wouldn't be able to get away with this.

The effect under me finished detonating, and then I could see nothing but black.

My Harmonic Awareness was instantly overwhelmed by a choking cloud of the Nightmare. I couldn't tell how far it spread past me because it permeated every sense, every fiber of existence in the area, fully blocking out my ability to see further. If I had any effect on containing it, I couldn’t tell.

All I could do now was execute on the rest of what could be loosely called a plan and trust that it would do enough.

The healing, at least, did exactly what I intended it to. The Nightmare surged towards me, flooding my body, and my nerves lit up.

I had already experienced the greatest pain I had ever felt in my life. The torture spell had reached beyond what I could physically endure. Jumping into a slime that had actively been dissolving and eating me had also pushed me past my limits over the course of a significant period of time that I had lost track of.

This hurt in a different way. It didn't hurt on the physical level nearly as much as it did elsewhere. I could feel it reaching for my soul, slithering into the gaps between the two cores in a manner that I hadn't known was possible. Thanks to twelve going on thirteen years where my soul had started to shred itself during my birthday, I was more than familiar with the concept of soul pain.

Still, this was definitely new. The soul pain I typically ran into occurred when the two parts of my core tried to rip themselves apart. According to Vallis, it had something to do with the incompatibility of my soul with itself, if that made any sense at all. I had, at the very least, understood that it was a tearing kind of pain, like a giant was trying to pull my legs off my body.

This pain felt like squeezing. Darkness overwhelmed, crushed, slamming into my cores and compressing them until it felt like they would break from the pressure. I was not unfamiliar with seeing my soul nor using it to manipulate mana, but there was nothing I could do to fight back against it, no avenue of resistance I knew how to attempt.

I tried anyway. My soul was malleable, and though I had no idea how to shape it into a shield or sword, I could at least try to roll with the punches, so to speak.

To some extent, I managed to absorb some of the impact, but it was like trying to just go with the flow when the flow was a tidal wave. A willow bent in a strong wind while a tougher tree would simply snap, but in a strong enough wind, any tree would blow away.

The pain shifted into something deeper. An overwhelming force dragged my soul into the abyss, taking me somewhere far, far away from here.

I blinked, suddenly realizing that I could see again. The pain had receded significantly, though it was far from gone entirely. My body was mine again, except… something was wrong. I was taller than I had grown used to being. Neither the air nor my blood and its associated channels hummed with mana, either. After twelve years growing used to how that felt, the lack of it was like losing sensation in my limbs.

As my brain finally caught up to where I was, I realized that the world was less vivid as well. I felt heavy, clumsy. This was what it had been like when I had only been human.

My face had been plunged sideways into a material that should have been soft but was anything but. A thick fog pulled at my consciousness as I took in a sight I’d suppressed for a long time, so long that I’d managed to forget it entirely before I’d even gotten on that plane all those years ago. I hadn’t even thought about it once since I’d been born again.

Thinking I could truly forget something like this, I realized, had been a mistake.

Life before I’d gotten the chance to start over had been pretty bad, to say the least, but it hadn’t always been that way.

Just like I had over two decades ago, I limped out through the shattered, twisted amalgamation of metal that had been a car door.

I only properly regained awareness when I was outside, bare feet on asphalt. I hadn’t felt asphalt in so long. It was rough and hard and scraped my foot bloody.

How old had I been when this happened? Thirteen? Fourteen?

Dimly, I looked back at the crushed vehicle.

My eyes weren’t working right, and there was no mana I could pull from within to heal them, but they saw enough to catch the blood within.

I hadn’t always been an only child. My family had never been anything but cold, but they hadn’t gotten as bad as they eventually did before this.

My older brother had snuck me out on a drive, letting me sit in the front seat on our way to see a movie when a drunk driver in a sports car going a hundred miles and hour had hit the left side of his pickup.

I hadn’t been able to do anything. Later, I would learn that he had bled out in the driver’s seat before expiring on the way to the hospital. He’d still been alive when the paramedics had taken us. I could have helped him, but I hadn’t.

Nothing had been the same afterwards. All I’d had to do was move.

But my body was too weak. Even as I tried to get back to the car, my legs turned to jelly, collapsing under me. If I had a single spell, I could have helped him now, but even after so long practicing every day, after years and years of doing everything I could to be someone who could help, I had nothing. I couldn’t advance.

Tears blurred through my eyes as I sank to the ground, my brother dying only a few steps away. Helplessness gripped my heart and squeezed. The agony that brought couldn’t be replicated by any weapon.

And in the back of it all, the pain from the Nightmare plague remained.

The Nightmare plague. It was still infecting me. Was this how it got to me? Was this what other people felt when they were dying? Was my body screaming in life as my mind collapsed, facing a memory I had never wanted to see again?

Center yourself, I thought, trying to force it to be true. Find your core.

There was no core to find, nor did the breathing exercises I knew help. This body just wasn’t enough. After all this time, there was still…

“Shut the fuck up,” I whispered, quiet enough that I couldn’t even hear myself.

It didn’t matter that I had spent all that time. My brother was dead. He had died over twenty years ago in a completely different world. I could be sorry that I hadn’t been able to help him, but even if I had been able to by some miracle now, he would still be just as dead.

The Nightmare flared more harshly, sending searing pain through my soul, but I paid it no mind. I collapsed to the ground, shutting my eyes and plugging my ears to the world the plague had presented me.

I didn’t need to look back at the past. I couldn’t. What was done was done. No amount of guilt or regret from me would change that.

The Nightmare flowed over me, and I let it. Pain was in the mind and soul. If it didn’t kill me, then it could do no more than slow me down. It hurt badly enough that I couldn’t move, but I didn’t need to.

Slowly, my senses faded out, and I could feel my core again. If I could feel it, I could shape it. If I could shape it, I could start to try to find some way to push back.

Both of my cores had experienced a great deal of abuse from the plague, but neither had come close to breaking. One of them had a connection with the same source, and it was that warrior core that I drew on.

“Come on,” I urged into dead silence. “Some part of you rests inside me already. You know me. Work with me.”

Not expecting an answer, I started manipulating my warrior core.

Before I could get far, though, something shifted within the darkness.

Text scrawled itself into my closed eyelids, a formless voice ringing out inside my head as the words appeared. Archaic text, the kind only used in rituals with ancient history behind them.

THEN PROVE YOURSELF.

Unimaginable pressure poured down upon me. I had thought the force before was like a tidal wave, but this second surge made the first feel like a water pistol in comparison.

I couldn’t endure. Of course I couldn’t. I wasn’t some anime protagonist with an unbreakable force of will who could simply try harder and get angrier and force my soul to simply get better.

I could, however, do what little I could to try and ride it out. There was no chance in hell I could force myself to withstand the force, but I could at least try to hold myself together as it took me to parts unknown.

Memories tore through me, and I shut myself off from them. I recited spell formations to myself, trying to find anything to center myself.

The Nightmare isn’t a god, I told myself, recalling words I’d heard from Iryn and Aria alike. This isn’t an intelligent being. You’re hearing echoes. Seeing patterns screaming when there are none.

It didn’t make it any easier to keep myself from fracturing into a thousand pieces.

The chaos continued, driving me far, far beyond my limits. Threads of something warm and gentle appeared from point to point. Those were alien elements, I could tell, but I couldn’t get close enough to understand what they were. Once or twice, my soul slammed into one, and for a brief moment, surviving became easier. I didn’t know what they were, but I was grateful for them.

At some point—maybe minutes, maybe years later—I could feel myself again. The turbulence had quieted, and I found my feet on ground again, though this was no longer a memory.

The Nightmare coiled around me, silent but present everywhere.

Not just around me, I realized. At some point in the chaos, it had entered my body, wrapping itself into one of my cores.

I couldn’t Body Scan myself right now, but I could feel it swirling in there.

It was too much. Just like when the plague had let itself in earlier, it was empowering me, but there was way more than I could handle now. I suspected there was more than just the Nightmare bomb I’d hit. From the torrential force I’d experienced, I had a hunch that I had managed to fall into the Nightmare itself.

Something solidified, and my soul stabilized.

The Nightmare has granted you multiple boons.

Multiple skills are evolving!

Curse [Initiate] -> Siphoning Hex [Adept]

Call Lifeline [Initiate] -> Control Lifeline [Adept]

A core is evolving!

Warrior core advancing to Adept…

#

Gerald’s heart sank the moment he realized what was happening.

He hadn’t believed the boy even after everything. There was no such thing as a perfect truth-telling spell, and even though the Lord Prince had ways of making people speak honestly, there had been confounding factors about Ren Kane that had made it impossible to tell how much he’d said was real.

For one, he was indisputably a Nightmare wielder. Gerald had wanted to see if he would admit it, but he hadn’t. Try and hide it as he might, the Lord Prince could see through even complex deceptions easily. He was one of a rarefied few who could this far south.

Ren’s unwillingness to disclose his true nature alongside a peculiar resistance to any prediction-based divination spells Gerald had subtly tried on the boy had kept him distrusting those words.

It had been easy enough to see why Vallis Kane’s son might have an issue with the Federation. Said guild had been trying to monopolize every last healer in all of Liaren. Suspicions had added up.

He should have trusted his gut, Gerald concluded as his people picked up far too late that they had been walking atop a minefield.

In the moment before devastation, he triggered a magical item—a ring on his left index that stopped time for his mind and nothing else, giving him time to think but not act.

His conclusion took little time to arrive to.

People were going to die. Good people. Tough soldiers. These were men and women who had made it through hostile elven cities, fighting against the superior magic and technology the knife-eared species wielded and making it out alive. They had been with him through thick and thin. Even including the royal guard he had once fought alongside, even counting the Halcyon king and the Heavenly Emperor above him, there was nobody he trusted more than this group.

And at least half of them weren’t going to make it out of this. The impact was going to be too harsh for them to survive even with the fastest, strongest spells they could use.

Gerald could save himself with certainty, or he could take damage from this—possibly debilitating levels of it—and try to save as many others as he could. Doing the former would involve temporarily erasing his existence from the material plane, while the latter would entail a great deal of shielding and prayers.

There was never a doubt in his mind as to what he was going to do.

The ring’s effects wore off, and he executed.

No plan survived contact with the enemy, though. In this case, it didn’t survive contact with his own allies.

Even as Gerald began to manifest the absolute shielding item he’d found deep in the World Dungeon, a small boy hurtled himself right across the Lord Prince’s field of view.

Ren Kane.

The motion caught him off guard enough that he was a half-step behind in attempting to deploy the item.

That half-step cost him. The bomb detonated, oily darkness exploding outwards at undodgeable speeds, washing over everyone in the area. Gerald grit his teeth as familiar burning pain seared through his skin, his shields finally coming up a moment too late.

How many lives had that fumble just lost? Two? Three?

The Nightmare washed over them, battering the shield that the Lord Prince had to actively reform in an attempt to cover as many people as possible. He could feel people suffering, the plague hitting them through their protective gear. They had countermeasures, so many countermeasures, but a direct hit was still powerful enough to kill even a Master through all of that.

Except he didn’t sense anyone die. He’d linked up with his entire squadron a long time ago, and that spell hadn’t broken. It had never returned a wrong reading before, which should have meant that it wasn’t now.

How? He was surrounded on all sides by the plague. He’d never seen anyone without absolute shielding survive a blast this direct and this big.

Gerald didn’t have to wait long for an answer.

Almost as fast as it had expanded, the darkness began to recede.

He frowned, confused. Had the Federation found a way to control the plague? Nobody he knew had a skill that could change the flow of it. Traditional wind and spatial spells did nothing to dispel the Nightmare, especially not at this speed.

As the entire explosion seemed to invert itself and move in reverse, Gerald realized what—rather, who—was absorbing that.

Ren Kane had cast a massive healing spell, directing all of it at himself.

Gerald’s first instinct was to run. He had to ensure that the proper steps were taken after this, the correct people punished. Though he was sure Sebastian of the Federation would still be able to find some kind of plausible deniability, he was Lord Prince and his word would trump that of a guild commander’s. They would not be permitted to continue past the year—not in Halcyon, at the very least.

On top of that, he needed to get out of here with as many people as possible. Ren’s sacrifice was noble and a shame, but a corpse detonating with all that power was going to be just as bad as the initial blast, if not worse thanks to all the healing mana he had within him.

But something gave him pause.

The boy’s body rose into the air, powered by an invisible force. Darkness roiled around him, every inch of his exposed skin nearly pure obsidian black from how much of the plague he’d taken into his own body. It lashed out from him but did not burst past his body, carrying him further and further up.

Stunned silence ruled the area for a full breath before everyone remembered that there were still others to deal with.

Gerald was the first to face the Federation offensive, ostensibly there to help them against Grancrest.

They likely were there to deal with Grancrest, he reflected. The Federation had long had designs on the other guild, after all. Gerald regretted not meddling.

All of them had stopped in their tracks too, though. Various degrees of confusion and shock were painted on their faces, everyone trying to comprehend what was happening.

Sebastian Ferris was the only exception. He had a sour look on his face, as if he’d just discovered someone had pissed in the keg he’d been drinking from all night.

Gerald looked to him, and their eyes met. The Lord Prince raised his knife—and Sebastian snarled a command word, falling backwards. Sparks formed under him, and a portal swallowed the Federation commander up before he could find a spell that wouldn’t devastate every other living being in the area as well.

He switched tacks, imbuing the knife with a spell exclusive to royalty.

Master-tier mind-type spell, Prince’s Authority.

“CEASE,” he ordered, his voice spreading across the gathered individuals.

It likely wouldn’t have worked with Sebastian around; any sufficient source of leadership with enough power could simply turn the spell away, but without a leader, the disorganized Federation group stopped in their tracks.

Just like before, there was one exception.

A chillingly familiar red thread sliced through the air, slipping right towards him. Gerald activated defenses again. He was familiar enough with this technique that he knew even trying to find the source would be fruitless.

As it turned out, that was unnecessary. The thread pierced straight into Ren Kane’s floating body, which was now glowing with a dark aura, the Nightmare entirely consuming him.

Gerald’s concern was no longer just the plague, though.

That thread was made of lifeblood. That kind of magic was wielded by only a single clan on the continent.

A member of the Blood clan of the elves, the same ones he had been fighting back for years now,   was here right now.