Reborn Healer Chapter 52

Well, shit. That could have gone better.

At least the new room they had me in was more comfortable, though they had been much more thorough in making sure I couldn’t fight back this time. Rather than have my lifeline across from me like it was evidence or something, they had removed it entirely. I could still distantly feel it, but there were too many barriers between me and it to accurately determine where it had gone.

Naturally, they also had my storage band, which meant they had the other half of the deep obsidian I had been supposed to give back to Locke.

Honestly, thinking about it now, I had to wonder if that entire thing had been a setup and I’d just played into it. The lifeline had been awfully conveniently placed, after all. Had they wanted me to do that?

No, the surprise I had detected from everyone ran counter to that. They had been careful, but they hadn’t expected that.

They were letting me walk around the simple room I was in now, but they’d restricted other parts of me, including pinning both of my arms behind my back and sealing them in something cold, heavy, and metal that went from my hands up to my elbows.

Unsatisfied with only removing my access to my supposed magical focus, I had also had a magical seal of some kind over my mouth, rendering me incapable of speaking for as long as it was active.

Of course, I didn’t actually need to speak to cast most of my spells, but it definitely lowered my offensive potential.

There was some good news, though. I wasn’t the only prisoner they were planning on executing, but I had apparently managed to get myself straight to the top of the priority list. The threat I’d shown myself to be had been deemed enough that making me an example had been pushed as a natural result.

To most people, that presumably wouldn’t qualify as good, but I’d learned the method of execution they planned on using: hanging.

Of all the ways to be executed, that was one of the few I was pretty certain I could deal with. As much as my mother had warned me to not let my body be burned in case I died (and what the fuck was up with that, anyway?), I was also reasonably sure I could continually heal myself through being burnt and suffocating just like I had with the Master-tier slime in the World Dungeon.

Hanging wasn’t something I had direct experience with, but it sounded a hell of a lot better than getting my head chopped off like Neferi Whitefall had.

That didn’t mean I could just take it easy, of course. My primary advantage right now was that the people at Grancrest didn’t know I could still cast spells even without my spear, but I still had both of my hands restricted so tightly that any spell originating from them—in other words, all three of my offensive fire ones—wouldn’t go anywhere other than the metal around them. Similarly, there was always the chance that someone noticed that I was still able to cast healing spells and go after me a different way, which I might not have a response to.

And of course, I could just die by the method of execution they had chosen for me.

I wondered what would happen if this did end up going that way. Would there be other people receiving a notification in their own systems? What would it read? Ren Kane was killed by the dumbest guild in Liaren. That had a ring to it.

While I was musing over what the night and possibly next morning would bring, a piercing pain split through my heart.

Not poison. It couldn’t be, since they’d properly healed me after Lanaeus had rebound me. I worried briefly that it was my soul, but observing my cores like I’d learned to told me that I was fine in that respect outside of the normal weirdness.

Then the system message came.

[Fabian Wake] was killed by [Neferi Whitefall]’s plague.

#

Footsteps sounded in the hall not long after I received the message, but I didn’t even raise my head to see who it was. There was only a handful of people who would come by my cell now. Erica hadn’t shown her face at all during the chaos of transferring me here.

“I see it’s finally hit you,” said a voice I recognized as Highmaster Lanaeus’. “Do you understand the gravity of your situation now?”

I looked up. My expression must have slipped after seeing the message.

This was twice now it’d happened. Twelve years of nothing, then the first death on my birthday. Four months later, here was another name, this time accompanied by Neferi’s.

I only had two points of data to go off of, but the names had all been specially designated by the system, presented in a different color and style.

There were multiple people linked to this, then. That was some small comfort. At least it hadn’t been something like Neferi being my soulmate who died before I could ever meet her.

On the other hand, it implied a substantially larger group of people all connected like this. Were we all trying to find answers? How many of us could there be?

“Ah, but of course,” Lanaeus said. “You can’t speak.”

I hadn’t even been paying attention to the Highmaster, but his words reminded me of my reality.

Right. I could plumb the depths of this mystery after I got this resolved.

I shrugged at him.

“Having considered your situation, would you like to rethink working with us?” he asked. “It isn’t too late to change your fate now. I saw the spells you were casting at me, and I saw how flexible you were in that room. You have great potential, Red. Some of the greatest I’ve seen, especially for your age. It would be a waste for you to die before you could develop it.”

He held eye contact with me. Some of what he was saying was certainly true. Lanaeus might have actually considered me as someone with strong potential. I was still surprising people with the amount of power I could pack for my age, after all.

But that didn’t tell the whole story. Lanaeus didn’t just want to save me out of the good of his heart.

“Of course, there are considerations,” he continued. “You did cast magic forbidden in all seven great kingdoms. Still, you could gain Grancrest’s protection. There are sins that can be forgiven, child.”

I rolled my eyes. If he got his hands on me, he would squeeze what use he could out of me politically and magically and then throw me away, very possibly in the same manner.

Even without Aria’s advice, I wouldn’t have entered a relationship like this. The leverage would have been entirely on Grancrest and Lanaeus’ side. Aria claimed that another Revenant had some interest in the Federation-Grancrest guild war, so without her available to intervene, accepting a deal like this just meant that I would be at his mercy far more than I was now.

Lanaeus held up a fist and closed it, and the seal retreated enough for me to speak.

“I don’t know what you expect to hear out of me,” I said.

“An agreement would be nice,” he suggested.

“Do me a favor and hop into a noose next to me,” I replied. “World might be a better place if there was one fewer child predator in it.”

My heart wasn’t in my responses, but I wasn’t surprised when the seal closed over my mouth again.

Even though I’d told myself to focus, I couldn’t help but continue thinking about that notification. That was two now. One more person to look up if I survived this, though it was very possible that this Fabian person was just not someone of relevance. If I had died to the Nightmare plague and someone had gone fishing for a Ren Kane, I doubted they would be able to find me.

“I expected better out of you,” Lanaeus said. “Maybe you will learn respect in your next life.”

With that, he turned and left.

I really should be thinking about how to deal with my execution, I thought. I should focus.

In the end, though, hours passed while I paced around considering the text the system had scrolled past my eyes.

The prison I was being held in had no exposure to the outdoors, so I had no way of knowing if it was late night or early morning when Lanaeus finally came back, a grim finality in his expression.

“Last chance,” he declared.

I stared at him. He looked back and sighed.

“I didn’t want to do this,” he said, snapping his fingers.

The multi-layered, magically reinforced bars clicked open, giving me enough room to walk out of.

Beams of light formed around me, Highmaster Lanaeus’ signature prodding me to move.

That felt unnecessary.

They did know I was only an Adept, right? By the time people hit Master, weren’t they usually supposed to have some kind of soul or mana sense that let them at least somewhat assess the abilities of people they were with? Surely an Adept didn’t warrant this kind of special treatment.

Maybe it was more appropriate to be honored that they considered me this much of a threat. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move my hands, and had had my weapon confiscated so far from me that it would take a while to find it even if I had been free to roam about the place.

I also hadn’t realized just how convoluted the layout of this prison was until Lanaeus led me out. It was on par with the track that the librarian had taken me when I’d gone to the memory capsule room back at the Federation.

Were all guilds just obsessed with this kind of construction? I could swear we were walking around in a loop, but the rooms and layout kept changing. Maybe it was a magical building thing.

Eventually, we were out, emerging into morning sunlight three or four stories above the ground. It had been a hot second since I had seen the sky at this point, and I was surprised how different I felt out here than I did inside. There must have been some kind of dampening enchantment placed in the prison like there had been in the interrogation room, because I could sense the mana in the air flowing far more freely now that we could see the sun. The same went for the mana coursing through my body, which was nice.

Lanaeus guided me onto a platform that extended out over what could have been a small village. I reoriented myself, trying to get a grasp on my surroundings.

We were outside the city walls. I didn’t know at which point the change had been made, but I could see Liaren’s walls maybe a mile from our current position. I’d never been on this side of the city, having always entered through the same direction, and I hadn’t realized that there was a Grancrest facility here.

As I looked closer around me, I revised that impression. Grancrest’s domain over this area wasn’t limited to one building. They’d built an entire miniaturized city just outside Liaren complete with farms, defensive emplacements, and a number of buildings that could have been for administration, storage, or something else entirely.

It was early in the morning yet, but there were dozens of people out and about, all of them wearing Grancrest colors. They couldn’t all be adventurers, I realized. There were children far younger than me and tottering elders who looked like they would fall over if someone sneezed on them.

Family members, I guessed. Maybe auxiliary personnel, since every guild needed a lot of people doing a lot of non-combat roles.

Whoever they were, something of a crowd had gathered around this central building Lanaeus and I had emerged from in order to watch my execution.

Lovely. If I screwed the pooch here, it wouldn’t just be however many people were left in this strange system connection who’d know. Some… thirty or forty people would be graced with the sight of my body.

Idly, I wondered if this was considered normal here. Some people had certainly shown reservations about attacking someone as young as me, but with how involved magic was in daily life and how different certain elements of society seemed, I got the impression that it wasn’t actually that out of the ordinary for people like me to die violently. Hell, all the proof I needed for that was in the Leyeril memory capsules. They had damn near been cheering on a young girl’s execution before she’d exploded into soul-eating plague.

Oh well. Here was a deciding moment for me. I wondered if this qualified as the most dangerous position I’d been in. At least when I’d thrown myself into the slime, I’d had my lifeline and my hands had been free.

“Walk,” Lanaeus urged me.

Something sharp poked me in the back, pushing me forward. Harmonic Awareness ensured that I had perfect awareness of the mana construct the Highmaster was using.

I walked forward as ordered, very wary of the man behind me. There were a handful of other officials around here, all of whom had some kind of titled role in Grancrest and none of whom I actually recognized.

Lanaeus was a high-power member of the guild, it seemed, but not actually the administrator of it. Unlike the Federation, the leadership here seemed to be designated by spiritual or ritual qualities, because the people who were directing the Highmaster definitely hadn’t demonstrated the same kind of power he had, nor had they triggered my Danger Sense nearly as much as Lanaeus.

Idle observations aside, I had no actual interest in how Grancrest worked other than the method in which they were going to attempt to kill me now.

I was a bit worried that Lanaeus was going to be my executioner, but as I was urged further onto the platform towards a wood-and-steel gallows hanging off the edge, someone else took over. This man was an unfamiliar face. To be fair, he wasn’t even showing his face, hidden as it was behind long red-white Grancrest robes and a stiff ceramic mask with the same colors.

Lanaeus, I sensed, was still in the area, but he wasn’t showing himself publicly. The gallows extended off the edge of the platform, and he wasn’t approaching.

“We gather today to witness the end of a Federation adventurer by the alias of Red,” the executioner declared imperiously, using raw volume to project to the crowd rather than magically amplifying his voice. Since he was speaking right next to me, it hurt to listen to. “He has violated laws of land and gods alike, profaning these grounds with dark arts of the soul and shadow. With the hand of the gods above and below, we hereby declare this heretic an enemy of the guild and of the righteousness of man.”

I rolled my eyes. If I had a nickel for each time I heard someone in weird religious garb pronounce an overly wordy death sentence onto a middle-school-age child in the last week…

“Yet his life may yet be saved,” the executioner said. “Through the valiant effort of our own guild members, this mage was stopped before he could commit unforgivable crimes. Let the prisoner’s voice be heard, and give him one last chance at winning his life back.”

Huh. They were still trying to get me on their side?

At this point, I had to wonder if they had actually been interested in me for me and not just my connection to Mizuki. My answer would have still been the same resounding no, of course, but it was kind of nice for my ego.

The seal on my mouth faded again as the executioner guided me to a platform that I could sense protruded past the edge of the building and into open air. A long noose coiled down from the crosspiece above me, which he wrapped around my neck. I didn’t resist. Playing my hand too early here would just result in me getting hit by whatever spells and skills the host of Grancrest officials behind me had.

There was a lot of rope, which was kind of interesting. I didn’t know much about hangings, but the amount coiled up before the noose went around me was enough that I was pretty sure I would fall most of the way to the ground. I supposed they were trying to ensure I broke my neck and died quickly, which was at least somewhat considerate. Either that, or they were trying to display my body to the onlookers more closely, which would be a touch morbid.

Either way, I had the floor now, so to speak. The onlookers looked on expectantly, waiting to see if I would try to save myself by pledging allegiance. A good chunk of them just wanted blood, though. Even from here, Nightmare’s Call made me sure of that.

I turned back to the robed, masked man.

“I have to say, the last executioner I saw was a good bit more eloquent than you,” I said. “I try to make a policy of not joining cults that are killing me, so I’m going to decline your ‘generous’ offer, thank you very much. You can drop me whenever.”

“Very well, then.” The executioner raised his hand, triggering some kind of signal.

The floor fell from under me, and I was in free fall.

I wasn’t used to this sensation, having gotten much more used to being able to break falls with my physical capabilities now, but as my stomach dropped, I recalled a time twelve years and a few months ago where I hadn’t had any control over where I’d been going.

A plane full of screaming voices. The sheer terror of knowing I was about to die. Regret at a life wasted.

Funny, how much difference time, practice, and a metric shitload of mana could change things.

A combination of adrenaline, Harmonic Awareness, and my own mind made the fifty-foot drop feel like an eternity.

Despite that, not a mote of panic passed through me as I fell.

In this life, I was in control of my fate. I had so much I could do in this wide, wide world, and like hell was I going to let someone decide otherwise for me.

I cast Overheal as I dropped, the spell so familiar to me that I could cast it without moving at all. The rope, which I suspected was made out of a much hardier material than regular hemp, had been fastened securely around my neck, but that wasn’t nearly enough to prevent mana from slipping underneath and forming a protective barrier across my whole body.

The rope went taut and I snapped to a sudden stop, my entire body suffering the impact of going from thirty or forty miles an hour to zero. My neck jerked, the Overheal dissipating on impact but protecting me from instantaneous death. It was still painful as hell, but the reinforcement I’d created meant I was nowhere near dead.

There was the first method of death by hanging sorted. Now for number two.

I dangled twenty feet above the ground, swinging with no control over my own trajectory. I tried to call my lifeline, but the connection was weak. Too weak.

Nasty time to learn that skill has range limits.

I began to choke.

#

Erica had made herself watch the execution.

She hadn’t realized how much that boy’s words had gotten under her skin. After escaping the interrogation room and getting her injuries looked after, the poison specialist had figured that the anger and shock from him abruptly escaping his restraints and trying to kill her would be enough to make her rest easy.

Erica had then spent the night tossing and turning, unable to sleep despite bone-deep weariness. She still hadn’t gotten a wink.

It was the soul magic, she told herself. That brat had learned forbidden spells, and that meant the type of power that could manipulate minds. It would wear off. It had to.

Still, even considering her emotions as out of her control, Erica couldn’t help the deep-seated guilt he’d awoken. Eventually, as day had broken and the dire bells that announced a public execution had sounded, she had decided that she would at the very least see it through to the end.

Her heart had dropped alongside Red’s body, a nasty combination of guilt and shock that they’d actually gone through with it piercing through her heart. The offer that Grancrest had given had been tough but fair. On some level, she’d thought that he would take it for sure.

Then he reached the end of the rope, and though there was a sharp crack in the rope itself, his neck didn’t snap.

Erica frowned. There were techniques that could soften a fall like that, but the kind of rope that Grancrest used should have cut them off. How had he survived that?

Even so, Red had only doomed himself to a worse fate. The Federation adventurer still had no way to cast spells, and now he would suffocate.

The boy’s wild movement slowed, his swings stabilizing as he slowly spun around, hanging from the neck at a truly haunting angle.

The initial, short cheer from the crowd had petered off into uneasy conversation. The tension only got worse as the boy started struggling, hacking up choked breaths that got shorter and harsher each time.

It seemed to go on forever. Even a minute of watching and listening to this boy die was agonizing, but Erica made herself watch.

This is what you signed up for, she thought to herself.

Eventually, the boy stopped struggling. The breaths stopped too.

“He’s dead,” she whispered to herself. “Was that worth it?”

Could she live with who she’d become?

Erica looked up as if the corpse as if it could offer her answers.

By chance, Red’s body had turned enough that with its bowed, hanging neck, it seemed to be looking straight at her.

She flinched away, then started.

It—no, he—was looking at Erica. There was still a sharp light in those eyes, and though he was not breathing, his face still moved. He glared, and she nearly fell over in shock.

How was he alive? He was a mage without a focus, which was about as useful as a knife with no blade or Erica without her needles.

Judging from the clock in the Grancrest village center, it had been well over five minutes since he’d dropped. If this had been one of those torturous punishments where he’d been able to claw at his throat and provide himself brief respite, then he might have survived, but his hands had been sealed.

At this stage, he should have at the very minimum experienced severe brain damage. Realistically, there was no way he was still alive.

But there he was. Erica couldn’t even tell herself those were the spasms of a dying body. That glare was with intent, and though the seal on his mouth was still present, his expression made it clear that he wanted to say something.

“How…” she trailed off.

Erica’s vision pulsed, dimming from a combination of sleep deprivation and sheer shock. Footsteps stampeded in her head, trampling on what little sanity she had remaining.

No. She blinked hard, tilting her head as a shout spread through the gathered Grancrest auxiliaries.

Those footsteps were real. There were many of them. Erica’s surveillance skills weren’t the best, but she had been in the game for long enough that it was clear to her that there were at least a couple dozen people within earshot of the town.

From above, Highmaster Lanaeus spoke, his voice transmitting to every person in the crowd with crisp clarity.

“There are unknown armed elements approaching the village. Non-combat personnel, please evacuate immediately. Active duty members report immediately and be ready for defensive measures.”

Erica swiveled her head back and forth from the crowd to the executioner’s platform high above, where the mages and warriors assembled had already retreated into the central tower with the exception of Lanaeus.

The Highmaster was new to Liaren, recently deployed to this branch from the main Grancrest group in the Halcyon capital, Ceylon. She hadn’t quite understood the necessity of that until now.

This was going to be messy no matter who was on the other side, but in a city where Adepts were uncommon and Masters were downright rare, a Highmaster could guarantee victory.

Before Erica could run to her post, though, she chanced one more glance at the hanging boy.

He was smiling, the seal on his voice gone now that Lanaeus was otherwise occupied.

And even though there was no air in his lungs with which to speak, even though his throat was still wrapped by a magically reinforced rope, he gasped out a sentence.

“My name’s… Ren… by the way…” he hissed, his voice fragmented and ghastly. “And you… should’ve executed… someone else.”