Reborn Healer Chapter 48

I cast Spare the Dying on Watson one more time, taking assessment of my mana. I was at about three-quarters capacity, since mana regeneration slowed down the closer a mage was to full. After using that spell, I had a minute where I could do other things before I had to tend to Watson again lest he go critical.

Overheal. I knew how much offensive power this bastard packed. I didn’t want to waste mana actively casting barriers, so this would do.

Doubletime. I couldn’t give him a chance to get away.

By now, I had cast both of these spells so many times that activating them was pretty much second nature. I didn’t need to incant or even really motion to cast them now, relying instead solely on the mana patterns I had seared into my memory.

On top of those two, I added a third temporary spell. While concentrating on three separate high-tier spells was nearly impossible, I could concentrate on two and use a fire-and-forget spell.

Dash shot me forward, the world slowing down as I hurtled towards Locke, low to the ground.

I called my spear to my hand, drawing on the skill with all the might I could spare. The lifeline moved slower than I would have liked, but it made it to me before I collided with Locke, knocking both of us to the ground, my knee on his chest and both hands pressing the flat of my spear against his throat.

“It’s been a long time,” Locke said, his throat not even straining as he spoke. “I see you are better at combat magic than you used to be.”

“You left me to die in the dungeon when I could barely cast spells,” I hissed. “Then you disappear for six fucking years and have the gall to show up now?”

“You survived,” Locke said matter-of-factly. “And I did try to follow you.”

My Danger Sense flared briefly, and I jumped back as Locke’s entire body dissolved into a a mess of electricity. Even with the enhanced speed my senses got with Doubletime, he moved faster than I could react to, thunderbolting to my right before the lightning reassembled itself into the shape of a boy who looked about fourteen but was definitely a fair bit older than that.

I was already swinging as he appeared, my awareness heightened to insane levels. Locke was moving again, but so was I. He had spells I had never seen before, but I knew the space around me like the back of my hand thanks to my skills. My former tutor bounced from point to point, spamming the same spell, and my out-of-body awareness caught the pattern soon enough. I dropped Overheal to cast a Shield, cutting his path off midway. Locke rematerialized, crashing into the forcefield and splintering it with an electric burst.

Again, I was there to rush him.

I spaced myself, dodging the burst of darkness from his hands as I brought my spear around, hitting him squarely in the side with the flat, accompanied by a very satisfying thwack.

Locke folded in half. While he clearly had powerful combat magic, anyone with warrior skills was almost always going to be favored in a close-range fight against a mage.

As I went to swing on him again, though, he immediately proved my assumption wrong. My Danger Sense sounded the alarms again, and this time it didn’t even specify a direction.

A second later, my heart stopped.

That was no figure of speech. I had a very thorough understanding of my own body thanks to the particular combination of strong healing spells that I often scanned myself with and a warrior awareness of both myself and my surroundings, and I noticed that a certain very important organ had ceased beating.

Somewhat counterintuitively, that wasn’t that big of an issue for me. Via magic, I could manually pump my blood and prevent the damage heart failure would cause, similar to how I could stop myself from drowning while inhaling water or dissolving slime.

Still, it was a major enough disruption that I missed a step, allowing Locke to get to his feet with another use of that quick-transport spell.

“Are you quite finished?” he asked, his voice giving no sign of annoyance. “Vallis has other tasks to attend to, but I was in the area so I am here in his stead.”

“Why the hell are you here?” I asked, my head cooling down some.

My heart started beating normally again.

Pent-up anger that had never found closure still burned in my throat, but I could at least acknowledge that spending a large chunk of my mana on trying to beat Locke up instead of keeping Watson healthy was a bad idea. I’d gotten my licks in, and they had been enough to vent some of that.

The pale mage looked down at my hand, then to the closed box where I had sealed all the plagued appendages. “That much should be obvious.”

“Who is this?” Cale asked. He’d gotten a pair of nasty-looking knives as long as his arm out at some point, though he hadn’t intervened. “Old friend?”

“You could say that,” I grumbled, lowering my spear. “He was my offensive magic tutor for the better part of a year a long time ago.”

“I thought you were a healer.”

As if to prove his point, I made my way back to Watson’s side and cast another Spare the Dying. The full minute hadn’t elapsed yet, but enough offensive power had been thrown around in the last few seconds that I figured it was better safe than sorry.

“I am,” I said. “I have an affinity for them. Mages don’t have to cast to their affinity exclusively.”

“True enough. I’ve just never met a healer who did both.”

“Now you have.” I turned back to Locke. “You want to actually explain yourself? Thanks for the help, Matias, but this is the last person I want to see right now.”

If he even is a person. I left that part unsaid, but now that I saw him again with several years more experience behind my eyes and a good deal more magic, I was increasingly confident that he wasn’t human. Most obvious was the fact that he had seemingly only aged a year or two during the six years we’d been apart, but there were a lot of other, smaller tells that it didn’t look like either of the other two conscious martials were catching.

Maybe it was the mage core reacting, or maybe it was my connection to the Nightmare. Either way, I could tell there was something wrong with him.

“My reasons for being in the area are immaterial, but if you must know, I am counteracting malevolent actors attempting to spread the Nightmare plague,” he said. “As for why I am in your city at this moment, Master Vallis reached out to me when news reached him.”

“So he’s still around,” I said, looking at Matias. “You know what he was up to?”

“Sounds like there’s somethin’ similar up Northside,” he replied. “Not too clear on it.”

“I was told you needed more healers,” Locke said, still in that infuriatingly unbothered voice. “Here I am.”

Come to think of it, he had apprenticed for Vallis for a couple years. I seemed to recall him not being the best at healing or defensive spells by his own admission, though.

I eyed him dubiously. “Can you even heal properly? Last I checked, Vallis hasn’t kept you on as an apprentice.”

“I don’t forget spells,” he said primly. “I see you’re familiar with what the spell does?”

“Kills you, kills you fast, eats healing magic, makes you unhealable,” I replied. “Am I missing anything?”

“The reason you cannot heal it is because the plague affects the soul,” Locke said. “I do not have reparative soul magic, so I cannot fully heal someone who has been affected.”

“You make it sound like you have soul spells,” I said suspiciously. “Do you?”

“That is unimportant. What is important is that reparative soul magic is the single rarest magic on this continent, and therefore mages who are capable of it are in very high demand.” Locke spoke without concern for the bruises forming on his neck and body. “I cannot heal this man back to health, but I can maintain his survival until a mage who is capable of curing him comes.”

I could guess who he was referring to. After my father had indicated that he was willing and able to teach me soul magic and then promptly disappeared despite still apparently being active, I would be more surprised if it turned out he wasn’t involved.

There was still a problem.

“I don’t trust you to heal him,” I said.

“Why? I have no malice against this man.”

“No reason to help him either,” I pointed out. “And even if you did, do I have to remind you that you have a bad track record?”

Locke rolled his too-bright eyes. “I sent you to an opportunity for growth when you were younger, and you grew. Why do you still hold a grudge about it?”

“That’s a funny way to say you lost sight of me and let me get eaten alive by spiders for literal hours,” I hissed.

“That was an opportunity.” Locke looked at me like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I can heal this man. You are tired. Consider this repayment for giving you an opportunity you didn’t want.”

“You’re pissing me off, you know that?” I muttered.

“It’s not very hard to, evidently,” he said. “Watch.”

He laid his hands on Watson, mana glowing brightly at his fingertips. Like me, Locke cast magic with no focus. I followed his spell closely with a Body Scan, examining what he was doing.

It was a Heal. Nothing more, nothing less. The spell was roughly cast, but it wasn’t missing any key components and it got the job done. Locke had invested a much higher amount of mana into this one spell than I had been able to manage up until now.

That wasn’t surprising anymore. The boy was clearly older than he looked, and he had already claimed to be able to use Master-tier spells when I had met him. It came as no shock that he was at least a tier higher than me now.

“Your talents are probably better used out in the field,” I said flatly. “This much mana spent healing one person?”

“You need rest,” Locke said. “The initial skirmishes have largely completed. The mercenary groups and hostile forces have both backed off.”

“You were down there?” Cale asked cautiously.

“Naturally.” The pale, white-haired boy rolled up his sleeves, revealing a mess of scars beneath. “I was thoroughly injured during the process. Being here serves a double purpose in allowing me to recover.”

“Jesus, your healing is sloppy,” I muttered. “Keep Watson alive, will you?”

I kept a pulsing Body Scan on the mercenary as I went over Locke’s scars. Healing magic moved through his body slower than usual, but I was able to fix his mistakes pretty easily. Just to be nice, I fixed the damage I’d done as well.

Shockingly, he kept a steady stream of Heal streaming into Watson.

“…Your combat magic is still hopeless, isn’t it?” Locke said. “You were angry enough to attack me with everything you had, but you didn’t use a single offensive spell. I will admit that your offensive capability in general is better than I had thought it would be.”

“Have you considered that my offensive spells aren’t meant to be used indoors?” I snapped back.

“That just means you haven’t learned enough of them,” he said.

“Oh, if only I had someone who could teach me.” I glared at him.

“Uhh…” Matias said. “Sorry. Should I have not brought him?”

“Well, that depends on whether or not you trust him to heal your guy,” I said to Cale. “I can keep going for a while, but there’s an ongoing guild war in which I’m apparently an involved member. The Federation told me not to stay out too long.”

Cale raised his eyebrows. “You’re guild?”

“Did I not mention?”

“You, in a guild?” Locke said, drawing my attention. He practically spat the words. It was the most emotion I’d seen him demonstrate while speaking since I’d met him. “What a waste of talent.”

“Huh?” Had I heard that right?

“Are you so blind as to not recognize what you are?” Locke asked. “Why would you even join one?”

“Because the people in my life seem to be fond of disappearing instead of giving me answers,” I said. “I wanted information. I got access to it through the guild. I’ll probably break from the contract after this debacle is over, though I might also stay for a while longer. I still want to do a lot of good here, but being in the guild could give me the opportunities to develop my power further.”

Locke shook his head. “Are you serious? Were you listening to a word I said?”

“Hey, I appreciate the compliment,” I replied, “but last I checked, you didn't think I had talent for shit. How many months did it take me to learn Firebolt again? If I recall correctly, you were more than happy to tell me that I wasn't a real mage.”

“Your lack of proficiency in one area does not mean you are overall useless,” Locke said. “Simply because I did not consider you a competent mage in any way, shape, or form when it comes to combat does not mean I consider you incompetent as a whole. Our prior conflict should be proof of that.”

“I'm pretty sure you were winning,” I said. “Stopped my heart, didn't you?”

Cale balked. “He did what to you?”

“You were fine. You were going to continue to be fine. Given how proficient you've grown with that spear, I cannot say for certain that I would have been the victor.”

I was pretty sure he was lying, but I appreciated the sentiment. It was a lot harder to read Locke than most people, so I couldn’t actually tell how honest he was being.

“As I was saying,” he continued, “you have remarkable talent that would be wasted working so that some guild official can mark a higher number on an earnings report this year.”

“And as I was saying,” I countered, “I don't care about what the guild wants to do as long as I can get the information I need. There's a thousand mysteries that I'd love to know the answer to that I just don't have the resources to find on my own.”

“Entirely unsurprising, seeing as you stayed in the same city your entire life.”

I blinked. “Do you expect me not to?”

“If you truly wanted to find your answers, then you would seek them.” Locke reached out to one side, and the air rippled before his fingers. The tip of his hand vanished into thin air and appeared again carrying a small canvas bag, which he handed to me. “Look inside this.”

I emptied its contents.

Inside were a half-dozen small glass vials, each of which carried an insect frozen in amber. Two of them were trapped in darker red-tinted material.

“Progenitors of diseases,” the pale boy explained. “Some artificially engineered, others natural, but all devastating enough to bring nations to their knees if deployed. I have spent much of the last six years searching and thereafter eliminating them. These insects are endlings. The last of their kind. Some of them had their creators die with them.”

That explained the red amber, at least.

“The fuck?” Cale asked. “You can’t be that much older than Ren here.”

“Magic works in wonderful ways,” Locke said, not skipping a beat. “Trust me when I say that I am more than qualified to do what I do.”

“I’ll think on what you said.” I returned the bugs to the bag and handed it back. “That said, I still don’t trust you.”

“Then you can heal him yourself.” Locke shrugged. “I am only here because I was asked to. If you refuse to accept me, then I will leave.”

“Sure,” I said. “I can send a runner back to the guild. Maybe they can send a healer. Or maybe they’d be able to institutionalize him for a while.”

“Dicey,” Cale muttered. “Guilds never enjoy dealing with our ilk.”

Locke clicked his tongue at the mention of guilds again. For the first time, I got a genuinely clear emotion coming from him via Nightmare’s Call.

Annoyance. Anger.

“You really feel strongly about guilds, huh?” I asked.

“I’ve changed my mind,” he decided. “I am going to heal this man.”

“I just said—“

“I know what you said. You will trust me because I am going to give you collateral.” Locke reached into that ripple-space again, replacing the bag of amber-frozen bugs with a chunk of dark rock. “I will permit you to use half of this. I will return for it, as it is precious to me as well.”

My eyes widened. 

I recognized that material so black it barely seemed to have edges with how much it absorbed the light.

Deep obsidian.

Cale and Matias both whistled. Given their respective jobs, they both had to recognize how valuable this was. Though I wasn’t locked into the goings-on of the market, I knew that deep obsidian could go for a great deal of gold. A single deposit could be worth a year’s salary, and this was a lot more in one place than people usually saw.

“The condition, as it is, is that you will quit your guild as soon as humanly possible,” he continued. “I imagine your inane conflict with one of the other moronic organizations will take some time in which you cannot leave for various reasons. When that is resolved, you will quit.”

“And do what, exactly?”

“Find your answers your own way.” Locke shook his head. “I refuse to let your potential be wasted in a guild.”

“I’ll take it,” I said immediately.

“I’d take that deal,” Cale admitted. “That much deep obsidian? You’d be stupid not to.”

“Same,” Matias said, mouth hanging slightly open at the sight.

“I don’t care what you do after,” Locke added. “You can join the Halcyon military for all I care. Become a Revenant. Just anything other than a guild.”

“Revenants?” Matias chuckled. “Those are just a myth.”

“You’d best believe in myths, then,” Cale said. “I’ve seen one with my own eyes, though at a distance. Fucker tore through an entire battalion of Torran elites without slowing down. That was Masters, Highmasters falling like flies.”

“Revenants?” I asked.

“Ask me again later,” Cale said. “It’s getting late, and you’ve been working hard. If your… acquaintance here is willing to wager this much on his word, I trust that he’ll be true to it.”

I nodded, accepting the deep obsidian from Locke. It was light but sturdy, characteristic of the material as I knew from my lifeline. The chunk practically hummed in my hand. My lifeline did the same, reacting to the presence of more similar material near it.

“I’ll accompany you back,” Matias told me as I left, casting one more rearward look towards Cale and Locke, the latter of whom had taken my place by Watson’s side. “City’s not as safe as it used to be.”

“Well, I haven’t been ambushed in six years,” I joked. “We can keep the streak going for the time being.”

“Don’t even joke about that, doc.” Matias grinned sheepishly. “Does bad things to m’heart, y’see.”

“Your heart is perfectly fine, though?”

“Figure of speech, doc.”

Ultimately, we managed to make it back to the guild with shockingly little conflict. After the harrowing day I’d had, I had half-expected someone to be waiting in the shadows for me.

Matias bid me farewell at the gate, which opened to accept me. The nature of a large guild meant that there was still a skeleton crew on duty who processed me and directed me back to my quarters.

Mizuki was still awake when I got back, to my surprise. She was in the common room doing some kind of drill with her whip, moving through positions with hypnotizing speed.

The half-elf stopped in the middle of her routine when I opened the door, breathing hard. A thin sheen of sweat clung to her figure.

“You know there’s a training area, right?”

“It’s good to see you too,” she replied drily. “I didn’t realize you would be out so late. And the training areas are all occupied right now. Besides, I didn’t want to miss you getting back.”

“How sweet.” I mirored her tone. “There were some complications.”

I explained how my day had gone.

“Locke is in the city?” she asked, wiping her brow with a towel. “That’s strange. He was definitely an elven target if the last I saw of him. Unless…”

“Yeah, I was going to suggest that,” I said. “You think the skirmishes down south have something to do with the elves?”

“It’s definitely a possibility,” she said. “Not enough detail to make a firm conclusion, though.”

“Yeah, I figured.” I sighed. “Assuming that is the elven kingdom, that’s definitely going to become a problem soon, isn’t it?”

“If they identify where I am, which is a significant possibility, then yes,” she said. “The guild is going to have its work cut out for them.”

“Couldn’t you, like, claim asylum here?” I asked.

“And get used as a piece on a gameboard I can’t even see?” She shook her head. “I’d much rather not.”

“You say that like the guild won’t do the same thing.”

“They don’t act in the same way. You’ll understand eventually.” Mizuki stretched like a cat, grunting as something cracked. “Okay, that’s enough for the night. You should get to bed too.”

“Yeah, I will,” I said. “Just one more thing before I do.”

I withdrew the chunk of deep obsidian I’d gotten from Locke. It was around the same size if not larger than the chunk I had initially created my lifeline with, though it wasn’t shaped yet.

Just like I had done to create my spear in the first place, I started channeling my mana into both my lifeline and the new chunk of deep obsidian. After figuring out how to do it the first time, it came much more naturally now.

I was prepared for the Nightmare to slide into the conduit this time, but the sheer otherworldly presence of it still caught me off guard.

My mana filled both vessels, providing me with an intimate knowledge of both. I brought them together and began the process of fusing them, segmenting half of the chunk off so I could return it to Locke.

My spear had barely counted as one thanks to how little material I’d had to work with last time. Now, I extended it from three feet to five, adding a bit of a grip in the middle for me to work with.

The balance was still perfect despite the change in weight and size. I supposed it was an extension of my body, after all.

Power surged through me as I finished lengthening my spear, and words crawled across my vision.

You have increased the strength of your lifeline. The Nightmare offers you a boon.

Call Lifeline lvl 8 -> 10

Nightmare Forged has surpassed level 10 and is evolving!

Select one of the following skills to gain: