Reborn Healer Chapter 50

Well, shit.

Highmaster, and on a human at that. With monsters, we were supposedly supposed to be able to fight a tier up as long as we were able to outstrategy them. People, on the other hand…

Nightmare’s Call didn’t pick up that he was lying, either. Unlike Sebastian, Lanaeus didn’t have any kind of barrier hiding his emotions. Peeking into them was almost worse, though.

He was utterly, entirely sure in his victory. There was a kind of arrogance I’d grown used to when it came to people looking down on me, but this was a different matter entirely. A lot of people underestimated me, but I got the sense that he knew damn well how powerful I was and still didn’t give a rat’s ass about it.

In other words, the tier he’d introduced himself as was probably accurate and I stood no chance.

He didn’t seem to be straining to hold his spell up at all, and this was a complex grid covering the entire street from end to end, plastering every possible point I could go to with it. I was standing in a gap in the grid now, just wide enough for me to stay in. My senses warned me not to touch it.

Okay, to be honest, I had no idea what to do.

When in doubt, I told myself, stall for time and hope your dumbass brain can come up with something.

“Not offering a great case for yourself right now,” I said aloud. “Is this how you greet all the twelve-year-olds you talk to?”

I had to get him off balance. That first line clearly didn’t work, though, because his expression and emotions barely shifted.

“I do not often talk to those of your age,” Lanaeus replied serenely. “You should be honored that you warrant my personal attention.”

“Honored is one word for it,” I muttered. “The hell you want with me?”

“You are a valuable member to take off the board,” he said. “You would do well in Grancrest.”

“Couldn’t send a letter?” I asked. “Or maybe tell the guys in the dungeons to not try to kill me on sight?”

“Ah, but you see, that is precisely why we know your talents.” I couldn’t see his expression, but I knew he was grinning. “One survivor bore witness to you and that elf.”

A shiver ran down my spine at that last sentence. Elf.

Lanaeus had deliberately deemphasized that word, but I caught the slight shift in his emotions.

“So that’s what you’re after,” I deduced, trying to keep the conversation going while I figured out what options I had. “You want to pick me up as bait for her?”

“Ah, you noticed we want her?”

MOVE. The sheer insistence of the skill in my brain sent signals to my body before my mind could fully process what danger I was in, and I leapt upwards as the grid suddenly snapped shut under me.

I cast a Barrier mid-air to stand on, then another and another as parts of the grid shot up towards me.

“You have friends in strange places, Red,” Lanaeus said. “An elven princess… do you even know what kind of levers one could pull with that?”

He was toying with me. I could feel that. He still hadn’t moved from the spot where he had started this “fight,” if I could call it that, and he hadn’t swapped the spell he was using yet.

Fuck. This was really bad. I tried to use Dash to get more distance, but a wall of the string-like lights abruptly rose up in front of me, shooting up from the grid.

Okay, if I was going to lose this, I needed to figure out how to minimize the effects of this.

He wanted me to come with him, which likely meant that I was going to the Grancrest guild. I had no way to quickly contact anyone with the power to beat this guy, and even if I could, my mother was down south.

Wait. I did have something, freshly gifted to me. I just needed to be able to access my storage band, which was easier said than done when I was evading a gradually tighter net of hard light lines.

I looked towards Lanaeus again, sensed that infuriating sense of superiority roiling off him again.

I had a shitty idea, but a shitty plan was better than none. Even if this didn’t work out, I would feel a little better at least trying to wipe that stupid smirk off his face.

A quick draw of my mana was all it took to apply a Curse to him. The sensation of using a lifeline skill on someone else was strange. An invisible thread connected the both of us, itching at my mind uncomfortably.

Hopefully, it would do worse for him.

“Hey, asshole,” I growled. “Catch.”

Pointing my spear at him, I cast my newly improved Fireball. Before I was even done with the spell formation, I hurtled the lifeline right behind it, hidden by the magic.

To add to all of that, I unhooked my stolen net from my belt and hurled that too. It shouldn’t have been particularly aerodynamic, but the mana crystals in it made it fly differently than it should have.

Lanaeus literally batted the Fireball away into nonexistence, swatting it with the back of his hand. His eyes widened in slight shock as the spear followed up shortly behind, darkness infusing it and giving it greater striking power. His shielding spell, which was comprised of the same bright light, blocked the spear too, but it flickered just enough for it to not react when the net expanded and settled around him.

“Fall!” I ordered.

For the first time, I felt Nightmare’s Call fail. He had too much mana, too much willpower. All it could do was serve as a distraction.

But that was enough for my purposes. When the shield dissipated, the net caught the mage, tripping him up and sending him sprawling to the floor.

It was too much to hope for the effect to have cancelled out the grid that was trying to catch me, but the momentary slip-up bought me enough time to grab the bone whistle from my storage band.

I blew on it as hard as I could. Mana shivered through the air as an unholy screech keened through the air loudly enough that I thought my eardrums were about to start bleeding.

The windows in the building Lanaeus was standing on cracked, then shattered.

Unfortunately for me, the Grancrest mage was back to casting nearly immediately, albeit from a much less dignified position.

I couldn’t get out of this situation. As fast as I could get, he was way faster. The difference between me and a Master was already nearly insurmountable. Against someone two tiers up?

Well, the sheer surprise he’d felt from me being able to even trip him up told enough of that story.

This whistle was supposed to transmit my position, but it could very easily be confiscated and destroyed.

With no better options quickly coming to mind, I shoved it into my mouth and swallowed it as the grid abruptly reformed itself around me.

I started choking on the thing as the grid moved far faster than it had before, encircling me and trapping me so thoroughly I couldn’t move. My vision blackened around the edges. If choking didn’t make me pass out, the restraints were.

Create Water. With no focus, the parameters of the spell were entirely up to me. I spawned the water inside my own esophagus, partially drowning me but forcing the whistle down.

Shortly afterwards, the golden light began to burn and I lost consciousness.

#

The last few months had been enlightening when it came to the phenomena I’d experienced at intermittent points in my life. When my mind drifted off and sent me visions, I now knew I wasn’t experiencing a strange kind of dream but rather soul wandering. Part of me was genuinely outside of my body right now.

I still didn’t know what exactly caused it, because it didn’t haunt all of my dreams, but I had consistently had it occur in times of crisis. Was that my soul acting? The Nightmare? Even possibly Aria?

Whatever the case, I was definitely able to control it to a greater degree now than I had been before. When I found myself standing in a burnt-down wasteland that had once been a village, fresh bodies lying face-down in charred mud, I had enough wherewithal to move and locate the anchor who had pulled me out from the ether.

Sure enough, my mother was in the area once again. Unlike the many times I’d seen her before, the environment actually looked familiar. Though I couldn’t place the location exactly, especially given how destroyed it had been, the surrounding flora and terrain resembled what I knew of Liaren and the surrounding villages.

She really had gone down south of the city.

Aria looked like she always did on one of these: lethal. A sky-blue cloak trailed behind her, lightly fluttering despite the lack of a breeze, and a pendant of curved, crossed knives hung from her neck. Two knives that I now knew were her lifeline dangled loosely from the tips of her fingers, radiating a dark energy even to me in this incorporeal state.

“Ren,” she said, an uncharacteristic hint of urgency in her voice, “what happened?”

“Got wrapped up in something I shouldn’t have,” I said. “A Highmaster from Grancrest knocked me out. I don’t know what’s happening, but I figure I’m getting taken somewhere.”

She frowned. “A Grancrest Highmaster… Heron? Taroush?”

“Lanaeus, he called himself.” I looked around. “What happened here?”

“I killed someone unprepared to handle the consequences of the devastation they could bring,” she said, looking like she’d just bitten into something rotten. “And a number of others. The details are unimportant. You are in danger.”

“I figured as much,” I said. “There’s something of a guild war going on. I think they’re trying to use me to bait in Mizuki. From the sound of it, people are figuring out what she is.”

Aria cursed. “I feared as much. Ren, I cannot directly help you in this matter.”

“You can’t?” I asked, slightly hurt. “I guess you’re busy, but…”

“No. It’s not that.” She shook her head, disappearing her knives into thin air with a single motion, and held up the pendant. “This is proof that I belonged to… ‘organization’ is an inaccurate term, but you might call it that. Very powerful individuals are involved in it. Ones that I cannot announce my presence to in Liaren.”

“Belonged to,” I repeated. “So you’re not part of them anymore?”

She winced. “It’s complicated.”

I thought it over, trying to figure out what she meant. It couldn’t be a guild, or she would have said that, so—

“Are you a Revenant?” I asked.

Her expression did not change, but her tone of voice shifted ever so slightly. For someone like her, who was so good at controlling herself, she may as well have gaped at me. “You’ve heard of the Revenants?”

“A few times,” I said. “Unsubstantiated stories from sellswords and myths, mostly, but the little bit I hear sounds complicated enough.”

“The short answer is yes,” she said. “But anything approaching a real explanation… that will have to wait for until after you make it out of this.”

That was more of a surprise than I thought it would be. My mother had clearly always been involved in some weird shit. Honestly, I had worried it would be some apocalyptic death cult shit, though I supposed it was very possible the Revenants were one of them.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” I said. “I figure they’re going to try to get me to work for them or something.”

“It is not unlikely that they will try to send a message using you,” Aria said. “Esepcially if they find out what kind of magic you can use. You need to be very careful.”

“You make it sound like they’re going to kill me.”

“They very well might.”

“But you can’t risk coming here?” That didn’t jive with the Aria I had known. Though both of my parents had often been absent, I had never known them to balk from trying to help me when it became necessary, and this certainly qualified.

“I know you better than you think I do,” she said. “And I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to be there for you as much as I could have, but I know that you have the capacity to make it out of this alive on your own. If I come back, you will die, and you won’t be the only one.”

“Because it’ll interfere with this other Revenant?”

“Again, it’s complicated.” She got closer to my invisible soul, reaching out as if she could reach for my shoulders despite my lack of a body. “You don’t have long before you wake, so listen to me carefully.

“Your greatest strength is that they lack a full image of what you are. Search your soul, Ren. Don’t let them pin down what you can do. You are my son as much as you are Vallis’. There is always a way to control your surroundings, even if it seems hopeless. Dictate what they do and make them think it was their idea.”

“Easier said than done,” I said. “I have no idea what it’s going to be like when I wake up.”

“Just remember that your options are not limited by what you think they are,” she said. “You can survive much more than you think you can. And if you have to die, make sure they can’t burn your body.”

I started. I had expected either concrete advice or the kind of general advice she’d given me. That was a complete different direction from even my wildest expectations.

“What?”

“The body is a vessel for the soul,” she said. “Your connection to the Nightmare and the uniqueness of what you are means that your soul is much hardier than you can imagine, but you cannot allow that vessel to be entirely annihilated.”

For the first time, I actually kind of got why so many of the banned magics my family practiced were heretical. Hearing her talk about my soul with this fervor, not to mention the implications I was getting about what I should be able to do with its power, were making even me uncertain.

“You can do this, Ren,” she said. “Fight. Use everything you have and more. You have only lost when you accept defeat.”

As she said that, I felt a sharp tug on my soul.

“I’ll… keep that in mind,” I said. “Avenge me if I die, will you?”

“Try not to stay dead if you do.”

With those cryptic parting words, an invisible force shoved my consciousness back into the dark, empty path that I knew would lead me back to the waking world.

What the fuck was that?

#

I continued wondering about what Aria had told me even as I slowly returned to consciousness. From the sounds of it, she was operating on levels I wasn’t even aware existed. Just like my father, I didn’t actually have a full awareness of how powerful Aria was, but she had heard me talking about Highmasters and treated them like they were an ordinary fact of life.

There were levels to this business, and I had barely begun to plumb the depths of even the most basic part.

I tried to keep her words in mind, though. She had heavily emphasized the soul. All I had that dealt with that so far was Nightmare’s Call and very possibly a couple other of my skills. I still had yet to have the opportunity to start learning the fundamentals of soul magic with Vallis, which she had to know.

As I attempted to rub the cotton-candy thickness out of my brain, I realized I couldn’t move my hands and opened my eyes, deciding to at least take stock of the present before trying to decode what was going on with what Aria had said.

Harmonic Awareness kicked into gear as I did so, sending my perspective out of my body.

While unconscious, I had been transported to a small, barren room that I assumed was used for interrogation. My hands were behind my back, linked together by some kind of rune-engraved cuffs that were also attached to the metal chair I had been placed in. My legs had been treated similarly, bound to the chair with some kind of magical item rather than a spell. 

Across from me was a single table split in half by a forcefield that covered the entire room, my weapon and storage band sitting next to a formally-dressed woman on the other side. I presumed she was an interrogator of some kind, though I couldn’t quite tell. Her face was cloaked in shadow and hidden behind a mask. Something about the emotions bubbling off her seemed familiar, but I couldn’t exactly place that either.

“I’m going to assume you don’t do this often,” I said, looking down. “At least, not to people my age. You really didn’t have a kid-sized chair?”

My legs didn’t even reach the ground here. Honestly, they could have at least given their prison facilities some thought for undersized captives.

“We don’t try to capture children, believe it or not.” The woman’s voice was hoarse and gritty, significantly deeper than I would have expected.

“Jesus, what happened to you?” I asked. “You sick? I have a bunch of medicine for colds and sore throats, if you’d like some, but I left them back at the clinic. I usually charge a discount for these, but I’m down to give you some free samples.”

I couldn’t make out her eyes even with my Harmonic Awareness, but I could feel her stare on me. She was silent for a moment, processing the stupidity of what I’d just said.

“Do you know what kind of situation you’re in right now?” she asked. “I wouldn’t joke at a time like this.”

“I’m not joking,” I said. “Your voice is really rough. I’d be down to offer you some healing if you let me use my focus.”

I thought back to what my mother had said. Though a good chunk of it had barely made sense to me, she’d certainly been correct that I needed to control how they thought if I wanted to have any say in my ultimate fate here. It would probably help if they thought I needed that spear of mine to cast.

That said, I kind of doubted I could fight my way out of here. My Harmonic Awareness stretched a good distance around my body, but the second it hit one of the walls, it stopped. Something about this room seemed to be containing mana and its effects within itself, which I suspected meant that the whistle I’d gone to the great pain of swallowing was doing about jack and shit at the moment.

The woman in front of me took the mask off, revealing a thoroughly scarred face underneath. I winced, taking stock of it. Without casting a Body Scan, mindful of the fact that my mana might have been monitored in here, I tried to visually ascertain what it was. Based on my experience, I would guess burn scars.

“You know, I can help with that, too,” I suggested. It wasn’t a serious offer, of course. I just wanted to see if I could provoke her. “Whoever healed that, if it even ever got healed, did an awful job. I don’t know if I could get you back to perfect now, but it’d probably be better than whatever you’ve got going on now.”

“You really don’t remember, do you?” she asked, still in that quiet, scratchy voice which I now realized must have been thanks to the burns she suffered.

“Remember?” I asked blankly. “Am I supposed to know who you are?”

She leaned over the table, putting one hand on the spear. “Still causing problems all these years later, huh?”

The strange feeling of familiarity was starting to make more sense now. The pieces fell in place steadily.

Someone who’d been burned, who had some kind of beef with me that I barely remembered? Someone in the Federation, who’d absorbed the Southern Star guild?

“I remember you,” I realized, then frowned. “Wait. No, I remember what you did. What was your name again?”

“Erica,” she said, shaking with barely controlled rage. “You ruined my life.”

I stared blankly.

Six years and some change ago, this woman had been one of two people who had ambushed me in a Southside alley. At that point, she had been trying to execute on mysterious orders from some third party—most likely Southern Star—and had resorted to attacking and poisoning a six-year-old in an attempt to kidnap me.

And she had the gall to say I ruined her life?

“Oh, so that’s what we’re working with,” I muttered.

I called my lifeline.