Reborn Healer Chapter 58

A full-body chill shivered through me, urging me to move as fast as I could, but my legs stayed put.

My instincts hadn’t failed me yet, but I couldn’t listen to them now. Judging from what they were processing as danger to me, there was nowhere safe to run. This was an entirely different level of threat from what Highmaster Lanaeus had presented.

Lord Prince Gerald Halcyon was the same tier as the Grancrest official, if I recalled correctly, but he had no interest in playing with his food. If I did something he didn’t want me to, there was going to be be no warning, no set of spells designed to corner me and force me to make hasty decisions.

If he acted, I was dead. If I ran, I was dead. If I didn’t speak, I was dead.

Great. No pressure.

“I have the plague because I got hit by it,” I said. “You see the entire cloud back there.”

“Yet you survive,” Gerald replied. His voice still managed to sound regal through his obvious fatigue, a sharp edge remaining in every word. “In my experience, surviving carriers of the plague have been enemies.”

“People can survive it without trying to spread it,” I said. “I’m a healer. I’ve seen a few mercenaries who have taken an incidental blow—“

“Which would be a relevant point if you weren’t infested with it from head to toe.” The Lord Prince pointed a hand towards me. 

Suddenly, he was holding a long, straight knife glimmering with a spell formation. There had been no intermediate step where an invisibility spell had dematerialized. He’d summoned his weapon or magical focus faster than I could track.

“Twenty seconds. You should start being honest, Red. I would rather not obliterate a boy from this planet, but I will do what I must.”

My Danger Sense was verging on panic. It was only thanks to Harmonic Awareness and my own training that I was able to keep something approaching a level head.

I couldn’t trust the Lord Prince with everything, not when the city had been so involved in dealing with the entire mess featuring Mizuki, but this was removed enough that I could at least be a little honest.

Maybe more than a little. Even if I gave him a ton of information, I could always figure out how to respond later when I was out of here. I would not be able to do that if my constituent atoms had been sprayed across half of Liaren.

“My name is Ren Kane,” I began. “I’m sure that if you know my alias, you have enough of a brain to know it is an alias. I currently belong to the Federation guild, which is in active conflict with the Grancrest guild. I am also an independent healer with my father—“

“—Vallis Kane,” the Lord Prince mused, raising his eyebrows. “The Lord Healer has a child?”

Despite the gravity of the situation, I couldn’t help but frown at that. “He never mentioned me?”

It was no surprise that Gerald was familiar with my father because of what Vallis’ job description was, but Vallis seemed like the kind of person who would at least talk about his family.

“He rarely speaks about his personal life at all,” Gerald said. “I had believed you to be a ward of his, not a bloodline.”

There was something in the way he said that line that set my teeth on edge. There were dangerous implications here, and I got the impression that I was wading into the sea completely unaware of the drop into the wide open abyss just past the shallows.

“You knew I worked with him?”

“I know a lot of things, Ren. Continue. Your time is running out.”

“Right. Do you mind lowering the knife? I can’t run fast enough that it’ll make a difference, and you’re making a whole lot of my magic really jumpy right now.”

To my surprise, Gerald actually did. It… didn’t really help with how much my Danger Sense said I was absolutely boned, which was probably why he did it in the first place. I’d been right. It didn’t make that much of a difference.

“Anyway,” I continued, gathering my composure, “I was working at a clinic and servicing people who weren’t getting accepted by regular healing houses.”

“A licensed clinic, I hope?” A hint of what might have been humor slipped into Gerald’s voice. “Apologies. Continue.”

“I did what I could to heal people with the plague, but one day I got captured by Highmaster Lanaeus of Grancrest on my way back to the Federation. Normal guild war stuff, as far as I was led to believe. They interrogated me and attempted to execute me, at which point a portal opened and vomited out bits of plague and what I think were health potions.”

Gerald nodded once, and I got the uncomfortable impression that he had something sizing up my words the same way I would use Nightmare’s Call to try to determine if someone was lying to my face. I could hardly read him at all, though, and I couldn’t quite tell if he was using a spell on me.

That made talking a good bit more stressful, but I did my best to ignore it.

“You mentioned that you were treating patients with plague,” the Lord Prince said, leaning forward. “Elaborate.”

I raised my eyebrows. I hadn’t expected that to be the point he’d want further information on. “I’m only an Adept-tier healer, so I mostly just did what I could, which meant amputations. Trying to regrow any part of the body that I amputated seemed to be impossible. I believe it is because the plague affects the soul.”

“You are correct.” Gerald sighed. “It speaks ill of the times we live in that a child like you finds himself in a position like this… if you are truly a child.”

“Huh?”

“You have still yet to explain why you continue to survive the effects of the Nightmare.” His gaze was steel, dangerous intelligence glaring at me behind a tired visage. “There are not many who can sustain that effect.”

“You’re checking my replies with some kind of spell or skill or something, aren’t you?” I asked. “I am twelve years old, I was born to Vallis and Aria Kane, and I had nothing to do with this plague.”

“There is no such thing as a spell that ensures someone is telling truths and only the truth. There are ways to lie without lying, and I am sure someone of your skill knows that.” The words were impassive, but they carried a grave warning with them. “Broad statements can hide the devils in the details.”

“I can’t summon the plague,” I said. “I didn’t create it, either. I don’t know who activated this instance, but I have a guess. Does any of that sound like a lie to you?”

“No, but you stink of the Nightmare.” Gerald stepped forward, and that instinct screamed again.

Shut up, I told the part of me that had kept me alive so many times over the years. I have more important things to deal with.

“I would imagine that the plague running through me has something to do with that,” I said. “This whole place does, doesn’t it?”

“I did not say your body, Ren Kane.” The Lord Prince sounded like he was rapidly running out of patience, which was bad news. “I meant you. Your soul, young healer.”

Oh.

He could see into my soul?

That was… not good. It was quite bad, in fact. I had no idea what mechanism he was using to identify me, but he had. Based on the conversation so far, I was fairly certain that a snowball had a better chance in hell than I did at trying to fool him.

For the time being, I delayed.

“Soul magic?” I tried. “Isn’t that—“

“It is not as forbidden as you might think,” he said, cutting me off. “Unlike the Nightmare, a form of magic that is outright excluded.”

Excluded. Iryn had mentioned it to me in passing when we’d been talking about forbidden magic. It hadn’t seemed relevant at the time, but it definitely did now.

Not all forbidden magic was the same. Much was banned the conventional way by churches and kingdoms and humans, but there were some magics that had violated the fundamental laws of reality so much that they excluded themselves from existence. They could not be recorded, only passed down by verbal tradition or artifact. Trying to replicate them would result in libraries burned down, books disintegrating to ash even as the print was being set in them. People who tried to get around it to record their dark arts found themselves losing their minds, becoming beings of mindless destruction no better than the demons in the southern isles or just simply killing themselves.

All in all, fun stuff. I hadn’t considered that the Nightmare skills would fall under that, though I had been well aware that they were traditionally banned.

Ah, fuck it. I hadn’t been much of an orator in my last life, and the same was true here. If I tried to dance around the elephant in the room, I’d just make things worse for myself.

“I have a connection to the Nightmare, yes,” I said. “But I have no part in this plague spreading. I would much rather not be anywhere near this, actually.”

I could practically see the calculations running behind the Lord Prince’s eyes as he sized me up. There were deeper levels to this than just the aspects immediately associated with me, I knew, but I couldn’t tell much more than that. I imagined the Highmaster ruler of Liaren had a lot of variables on his plate.

“You are coming with us,” he said. “This is not a suggestion.”

Grimacing internally, I nodded. I had expected as much. “Can you answer this question real quick, though? I just want to know if I’m going to be executed for the second time today.”

“You have not committed an offense grave enough for death,” he replied. “Especially not in this new era.”

New era. I’d heard that mentioned once or twice now, though not in a conversation that involved me. Most recently, someone had spoken of it in one of the memories from Leyeril.

There were new threats awakening, and there were great mages rising up against it. I wondered if I would qualify to be one of the latter.

“Now, let’s not waste any more time,” Gerald said. “This is unstable. We will contain what Grancrest has done here, but you should not be present for that. I will have one of my aides—“

“Hold on, hold on,” I interrupted, wincing as not only Gerald but his entire entourage leveled glares at me. “Grancrest? Grancrest kidnapped me and hanged me, but they didn’t drop a plague bomb on their own village.”

“There was hard evidence that this guild was experimenting with the Nightmare,” the Lord Prince said. “Are you claiming the kingdom’s intelligence is incorrect?”

Earlier, a number of pieces had fallen into place with regards to this whole clusterfuck. Grancrest knowing who Mizuki’s real identity was but not having a clue about me despite perfectly arranging to capture me had been too suspicious.

What was that saying again? One coincidence was luck, two was a pattern, and three enemy action?

Something like that.

Here it was again. Someone had supposedly hard evidence that my own two eyes had disputed earlier. Who could have gotten involved with this?

The entire situation was too convenient for one person. Who benefited the most from Grancrest’s actions? Who benefited from the plague hitting this village? From the kingdom following up?

“I know your information is wrong,” I said. “Or, at least, if not wrong, incomplete. There were portals used to deliver this plague. Grancrest doesn’t use them, at least as far as I saw. The formation is exactly the same as the ones used by my guild. Liaren’s Federation.”

Gerald paused for a long second, clasping his hands together under his chin, the knife disappearing.

“A bold accusation,” he said finally. “And of your own guild, as well?”

“I’m a new hire,” I said lamely.

He didn’t believe me. I could tell that much just from looking at him, no people-reading skill needed. Who would? There was every reason to distrust a strange twelve-year-old who had wandered out of an extremely lethal plague with a spear humming with the same magic.

Before I could try to make my case again, someone else in the entourage raised her hand, calling out a report as she did.

“Magical formations, two hundred twenty feet,” she said. “South-southwest. Something is forming in the plague.”

“Your information may be lacking as well,” Gerald said to me. “Stand back. It would be best if you don’t get caught in the area of effect. Shield your eyes.”

He held his hand out, and suddenly his knife was in his palm again, pointed forward. My Danger Sense reacted to that like it had before, but much of it died down when it realized that I wasn’t the target for this.

I frowned. There was more magic inside the plague? That would mean I wasn’t the only survivor. That wasn’t impossible, especially since I’d seen that there was at least some merit in using defensive spells against the weapon, but shouldn’t I have run into them earlier?

“Cycled spell,” the same analyst from earlier said, her spell working further through the darkness. “Looks like it might be a gadget of some kind. I can’t make everything out properly through the black, but I think it just got there. Assume that it will continue activating and assume that there can be more.”

“Thank you very much, Ravyn,” the Lord Prince called out. “Shields up. Resonance three, please.”

At his words, a wave of powerful forcefields splintered into existence in front of the entire group, creating an interlocking semi-transparent golden wall stretching off a fair distance in either side.

A small hole opened in the center of it not far from where Gerald was standing, and he released the spell he’d been holding in his knife.

Radiant white spilled forth from the tip of his blade in a thin, straight line that pierced right through that hole and out into the darkness.

The appearance was deceiving. In the half-second before it reached the Nightmare cloud, my Harmonic Awareness picked it up just from proximity. The amount of mana condensed into that pencil-thin beam was frightening. Even a tiny cross-section of that beam had more magic power in it than I could muster if I squeezed every last drop of my reserves out into a single spell.

A chill ran up my spine. This was the true power of a Highmaster. This was the kind of person who could bring a city to its knees on his own.

“Sunburst,” Gerald incanted.

His words, cold and clear, reached me the same instant his spell made contact with the plague.

The strongest spell I had seen a human cast smashed straight into a cloud made of material from another, more hostile dimension, and my vision briefly whited out as colors not of this world overflowed from the collision.

A wave of force exploded outwards as those colors resolved into a light so bright it made the daytime sun seem dim as it shot up and out, scattering the plague to the winds.

Some of it seemed to have been destroyed, even, but it was hard to tell with how little I could see. I shot a Heal into my eyes and squeezed them shut, and even then the light was still near-blinding.

When it faded, a massive swathe of the black clouds before us had been swept away, Gerald’s spell having cleared it and much of the rubble that had been there. Even the path the spell had followed along the meadow had carved a new ditch through it. The area that he’d cleared the plague out of had been leveled entirely, leveled for hundreds of feet around. If there had been anything left living in there, there wasn’t anymore.

Soon after the dust cleared, the cloud started closing in on itself. It was thinner than it had been, but it persisted nonetheless.

“Continue clearing the area,” Gerald ordered. “Until further notice, this is now a containment mission. We cannot allow the plague to spread any further than this guild.”

I frowned, unsure what I was supposed to do.

The Lord Prince barely glanced at me. “There are greater issues at hand, young healer. Return with one of my aides, and you will be debriefed at the castle.”

That was a better result than I had been fearing, so I made to follow his orders, looking for whoever was supposed to deal with me.

As we were getting logistics sorted out, however, something pinged again.

“Heads up!” I called out. “Something north!”

My voice overlapped with someone else's. The same scout as before, I realized.

“Three hundred feet, due north!” she cried out.

We looked at each other in brief confusion. Her eyes narrowed, and I could tell she was assessing me as a threat rather than just an anomaly she had happened to come across.

The moment passed, mostly because the action both of us had noticed was still happening.

“Conjuration!” the scout relayed. “I think it's—”

“Portal!” I interrupted.

I had seen those sparks before. Of the people here, I was the only one with access to the inner workings of the Federation. Given their lack of familiarity with it, they evidently hadn't seen the Federation’s portals much, if at all.

“Portal,” the scout echoed, confirming my call. She looked at me strangely.

They were coming. The Federation was coming.

I didn't know if they thought I was alive or not. Had they planned around me? Did they know what they were getting into?

I turned to look at Gerald only to see that he was already looking in my direction.

“It's them,” I said, trying not to stumble over my words as I spoke. “You know I'm telling the truth when I say I saw the same portal appear earlier, right?”

He didn't speak, but the chagrin on his face said enough.

He was putting the pieces together.

#

Sebastian was not the first to the portal, but he was close behind. The strike teams who had been in the area and had noticed the ongoing catastrophe at the Grancrest guild had notified him, and he had immediately started arranging for transport.

The transport had been arranged long ago, of course, but the timing worked out just right for him to show up now.

He had added an extra variable to the combat, using the unique attributes of the measures of the Liaren branch from the Federation to create a temporary portal network underneath Grancrest, enabling them to detonate bursts of plague at will.

The plan was complex, which was usually a death sentence for any plot, but Sebastian had grown very, very good at what he did. There was a reason he had chosen to take over the Liaren branch about six years ago. Most people still thought he was a master, possibly a high master at most, but not a single person in the city, not even the Lord Prince, knew his true identity.

And that had allowed him to build a perfect web of intrigue and coincidences, most recently leading him to this moment.

All he had to do now was execute. A burst of plague in the right spot and healing to exacerbate it would disable the Lord Prince in just the right way. He would back off from his position in order to recover and act as he should in his capacity as the greatest combat Mage in southern Halcyon, and the path would be clear for Sebastian, leader of the greatest remaining Guild in Liaren, to formally assume the regent’s position, all the while currying favor with the very man he sought to cripple.

Everything was in place. Everything was ready. There had been too much preparation, too many failsafes for this to go wrong. Everything had gone perfectly so far.

And yet, as he stepped into Tall Grass at the edge of the city, his eyes settling on the storm of play he created, Sebastian realized he had failed to account for a single variable.

Splintering cracks fractaled out from a single being, a brick thrown straight through the spider's silk web. Probability collapsed around him, every path Sebastian had seen veering off into the void.

Ren Kane was somehow still alive.

Gerald had a strange expression on his face. Sebastian was yet able to read him even if he could no longer path through his immediate surroundings, and he deduced that the Lord Prince was nowhere near the emotional state he was supposed to be. He was too calm, too willing to doubt his own eyes.

And the boy was right next to him. It didn't take a genius to figure out what had happened.

Sebastian clicked his tongue, but he did not panic. He had failsafes for a reason.

“Lord Prince!” he declared, his cloak fluttering ever so slightly in the wind, “My people noticed a problem while they were scouting. We're here to help.”

Gerald could not have doubted him more obviously, but his attention was held, and that was all that was important.

“This barbaric guild is using the nightmare plague as a weapon,” Sebastian said. “They could even—”

Cutting off his own sentence, he silently sent the magical signal for the plague bombs he had designed to trigger.

After all, the first one he had sent was a decoy, designed to be the first of a pattern which he would have helped decode. Others had been significantly stealthier.

Ten feet to the left of the Lord Prince, enough plague to wipe out his entire unit detonated with the help of a master-tier healing solvent worth over 10,000 gold.

This was cruder than he had wanted, but the mechanisms were well worth the price. He could adjust based on how this shook out afterwards.

As it went off, however, the impossible happened.

Many people had noticed that something was about to happen, instincts and warning skills triggering left and right, but there was only so much they could do to protect themselves.

One person, however, decided to make a completely useless sacrifice play. Sebastian knew it would be useless. His hyper-accelerated mind watched in slow motion as an idiot child leapt towards the source of the explosion even as plague began to spill outwards.

The worst of the worst. Someone he couldn’t plan for and couldn’t even predict as a human. The most likely situation, what he should have been seeing, was for the force of the plague to rip through the boy and bring him the most ignoble of deaths.

But despite his complete inability to predict Ren Kane, Sebastian suddenly had a very bad feeling about what was about to happen.

The healer who should have been dead three times over threw his body down on the ground, shining with the very mana the Nightmare fed on.

Darkness exploded directly under him.