Reborn Healer Chapter 42

I stared at Vallis.

“There’s a catch,” I said. “You wouldn’t be this calm about saying this if you weren’t.”

He cracked a tired smile. “You think like your mother.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment. Am I right?”

“Somewhat. Your soul, you may have realized, is not quite normal.”

Twelve birthdays of mind-rending agony flickered through my memory.

“I noticed,” I said drily. “There’s two of them.”

“It is more complex than that, but a full explanation won’t actually be useful at this time. For the time being, yes. You awakened with two cores trying to rip themselves apart. Not only are the chances one in a billion, it’s a miracle that you survived even with Rebind Soul, and it is even more of one that you successfully trained your way into properly utilizing both.”

“I suppose that has something to do with why I’m going to die in… eight months?” I wasn’t surprised to learn that my survival had been lucky. It had felt so at the time, and it still did now.

Whatever the system had done to me when I was reborn, it had changed me fundamentally. Whether that made me more suited to handle the twin cores, I didn’t know, but I was still alive and still growing, so I took that as a promising sigh.

“It does. One of them is now much larger than the other. You advanced to Initiate simultaneously, if I recall.”

“In the World Dungeon, yep. Only the mage side advanced this time.”

“Yes. Under the exceedingly rare cases of survival throughout Tarn’s history, one core never advanced past Beginner, orbiting around the others. Yours, on the other hand, exist in violent cohabitation. Their harmony is fragile enough that by your birthday, they contest each other.”

“Which I take it they wouldn’t normally do.”

“Correct. Your soul is currently out of balance, and if it remains in this state when you turn thirteen, the larger core will break the smaller one and you with it.”

I frowned. “It’s my soul. Why can’t I control it?”

“Can you control the speed at which blood flows through your body?” Vallis asked. “Or your heart’s beat? The temperature of your kidneys?”

My frown deepened. “I mean… yes? With medicine or magic, those are all very possible.”

Vallis smiled in a manner I hadn’t seen before. He’d mentioned that I thought like Aria, but in this moment, I couldn’t help but feel he was smiling like Mizuki.

“You’re on the right track.”

I shivered. “Then you mean…”

“There are prying ears here,” he said. “But look forward to coming home. I have another spellbook for you.”

The logical leap was simple enough.

Soul magic.

Did my entire family have an obsession with banned schools of magic? Aria and Iryn both had the Nightmare already. Wasn’t this a little over the top?

Then again, like attracted like. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine why the soul mage was okay with the Nightmare-connected warrior and vice versa.

“You do not yet have access to your full Adept soul yet,” Valis continued, steering the conversation away from forbidden powers. “Typically, you would already have access to the changes that come with the tier, but you are yet half an Adept. You have no soul sight or true mana sense yet.”

“That’s what you get when you hit Adept?” I asked, surprised. “Why didn’t I learn that?”

“Because no two souls manifest in the exact same way. Many things can only be learnt by doing, as proper foreknowledge itself can change how a soul reacts.”

“You’re telling me now,” I pointed out.

“You’re a special case,” Vallis replied. “While I can’t be certain how your soul will change, I suspect that one core advancing means that your evolution has already been decided.”

“Suspect.”

He shrugged. “Nothing is ever certain in love, war, or magic.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said drily. “So I assume we’re going to go over a new field of magic when I get home?”

“Yes. There are still many months until your thirteenth birthday, so don’t worry about getting back too quickly. I understand that it may take a while with your new guild’s entrance ceremony and the complications of the incident that I understand took place earlier today.”

I nodded. “I’ll see you soon, then? I don’t want to keep you from the clinic.”

“Of course,” Vallis promised. “Watch your back in the guild. They can defend you better than the legal system can, but there is no organization on this planet that operates out of pure heart.”

“I figured,” I said. “You don’t approve of me joining?”

“I never said that.” Vallis thumbed over the pendant hanging around his neck. The badge that marked his status as a Lord Healer lay within. “We all have to make sacrifices to live.”

With those cryptic words, he was gone.

I wondered if he’d be called in to deal with whatever the burgeoning trouble was down south of Liaren. The odds seemed good, given his apparently close relationship with nobility and even royalty in the city.

After he left, I tested my weight on my newly healed leg. The sensation was a bit weird and tingly, but I was used to the aftereffects of healing by now.

Vallis had undersold just how weak the leg would be to start. Even pumping a strength spell into it, I couldn’t quite walk on it yet. The sensation was all there, though, and it still could support a tiny bit of weight, which was more than what it was at before. I’d take it for the time being.

Mizuki, Arthur, and Lena were back not long after. They seemed to be getting along pretty well, which was probably because Mizuki hadn’t impaled Arthur.

“Hey, Ren,” Mizuki said, an evil glimmer in her eyes. “You know, I was thinking.”

“That’s rare,” I said.

“Shut up. Your offensive magic blows, doesn’t it?” Mizuki smiled, though maybe the more accurate term was bared her teeth. “Don’t think I haven’t been watching. I’m no mage, but I can tell.”

“Yeah? All my offense comes from this thing,” I said, tapping the spear I was still using to support my freshly healed limb. “What about it? My tutor was awful.”

“Would you be open to other coaching?” Lena asked. “Not to brag, but I was top of my cohort when I graduated from the Academy.”

“Liaren’s?”

“No. The Imperial. I came back because sending funds from the capital is a fool’s errand at best, and my mother needs the coin.”

I raised my eyebrows. The official Academies present in every major city had various degrees of prestige. The Imperial Academy in Ceylon, capital of the Halcyon kingdom, was the highest amongst those. I hadn’t gotten to see much of Lena in action, since most of the spells she’d cast in my vicinity had executed while I’d been more than neck-deep in corrosive slime. If what she was saying was true, though, she was an insanely good mage.

“Your mother,” I said. “Is there something wrong?”

“That’s a bit of a direct way to ask,” Mizuki said.

Lena waved it off. “I don’t mind. I shot a Fireball at him the first time we met. He can be rude if he wants to. Mother and father dearest suffered from a nasty bout of plague a couple years back. I still don’t know what exactly it was. Father didn’t make it. Mother survived, but she’s still dealing with the aftereffects. Not to mention she was prone to vices before she lost her husband and started hurting just for existing.”

She mimed a bottle.

“Lena,” Arthur said uncomfortably. “You, uh…”

“It’s a lot, sorry,” she said. “But you did ask. Anyway, as I was saying early. Coaching?”

“What would you want for it in return?” I asked, more than a little suspicious.

“Is it too much to say I want to help a promising young mage?” she asked.

“Yeah. What do you want really?”

She sucked in a deep breath and sighed. “I want you to owe me favors so we can pull you onto quests with us. Whatever you put down on the exam, we all know you’re a healer. The Federation refuses to risk any of their own, but that means that if Marcie messes up once, we have to go home.”

I assessed her, side-eyeing the mage. Nightmare’s Call still had the empathic abilities that the skill had possessed when I’d just used it for detection and the like. She didn’t seem to be overtly lying, at least. It was true that she was self-interested, but that was no surprise. I wanted something out of this, too.

“My fire spells are pretty sloppy,” I admitted. “We can work out terms. I’m down.”

“Excellent!” she said, clapping her hands together. “We can do that later. Your entrance ceremony is beginning soon. You’re probably actually late.”

#

Ninety-six of us had made it to the final stage. Of those, maybe half had progressed to the entrance ceremony.

This definitely wasn’t how they usually handled it. While we had been given the time and facilities to clean up and eat, it was still obvious that most of us were tired and battered from the events of the trials.

Also, though the ceremonial hall we were in looked like it would be used for commencements like this, the bodies laid up front weren’t. There were more than a dozen of them, all under white sheets marked with a single blue and gold stripe.

I counted the bodies as Sebastian took the stage behind them. Sixteen.

“I want more than anything else to congratulate those of you standing before me on entering the Federation,” he said, his voice projecting across the entire room with ease. “Want. But I cannot.”

Sebastian spread his hands, drawing all eyes to the bodies.

“Robert Corvin. Hector Indigo. Victor Arth. Ashley Iron…”

He continued, rattling off more names.

Calling out the dead, I realized. A chill ran up my spine at Victor’s name. He was being classified into the same set of dead. Nobody had noticed Flare’s lie.

“Today, terrible tragedy struck. Unbeknownst to us, saboteurs from a guild we considered a friend and ally infiltrated our exam space and attempted to slaughter an entire year of applicants.”

A murmur rose amongst the new guild initiates. While a good chunk of them had managed to avoid the trouble, I was sure that the bulk of them had run into violence.

“Thanks to the valiant efforts and heroic sacrifices made by each and every one of you, we were able to mount a response and eliminate or capture these murderers, only to find that they all belonged to the Grancrest guild.”

A louder noise came from the crowd this time. Anger.

“We know now that they had intended on killing each and every one of you,” Sebastian continued. “On a normal guild induction day, I would introduce you to your responsibilities here and now, but this is no typical day. Today, we were attacked. Tomorrow, there will be war.”

This time, he evoked a ragged cheer.

I was pretty sure most of the people here had never been in a real fight up until now. The Northside lacked most of the problems that the city south of the river did. With today’s events causing palpable tension, grief, and just plain confusion that I could pull with my skills like puppet strings, they were a uniquely malleable group.

I didn’t particularly care for any of this, and from the looks of it, neither did Mizuki. She was the one who that operation had been launched to target, yet she actively looked bored.

This also didn’t matter to me. I’d been in fights for my life already. This was new, but I assumed it would blow over. All I needed out of this guild was information and next steps. The person who’d attacked me was dead, and if there weren’t more, I could let the matter lie.

“…and as Grancrest must have known that we would respond with equal and opposite force, they will be preparing themselves for our reprisal,” Sebastian was saying. “I cannot in good conscience allow you new initiates to be targets, and as such am placing this facility on temporary lockdown. No guild member is to leave except with an accompaniment of a senior.”

Huh? All of a sudden, I cared again. Lockdown? I had a life outside of this. Vallis couldn’t be at the clinic every day, either.

“Go out there alone, and they will kill you. They will torture you, murder you in cold blood, and use your body as a message to us.”

Another roar of disapproval. The new guild members were getting increasingly worked up.

Other than me and Mizuki, there were other exceptions to the pattern. Flare. Thaddeus. A red-haired boy who looked distinctly uncomfortable.

The rest of the ceremony was decidedly uneventful. Aside from the rhetoric and the announcement of war, we were given formal guild badges, these ones metal instead of lacquered wood.

Interesting. I recalled that Southern Star had used wood. It made sense that they wouldn’t be standardized across guilds, I decided.

It took longer than it should have to get sorted. Too many people wanted to pay their respects or grieve for the dead.

I took a moment to grieve, but I didn’t feel the loss the way others did. Even with the bodies in front of me, it was as if I’d seen a news report about something devastating. I’d grown numb to tales of corpses piling up higher than mountains in the south, and when it wasn’t someone I knew in front of me, I couldn’t muster up the same kind of panic or grief I knew I would have for someone closer.

The impact came in a different, surprising way—regret.

I should have been there. The thought kept running through my head. I was a healer. My job was to prevent exactly this from happening. Though I could hardly grieve these strangers in death, I knew they might have had a chance if I had gotten to them in time. We had prioritized our own survival, and for that, others might have died.

I didn’t touch the sheets like some of the others were, but I did stop for a moment in front of them, whispering a quiet promise.

“Someday, I’ll make sure this can’t happen again.”

Afterwards, we were shown to the living quarters in what I was growing to realize was a significantly larger headquarters than it had even appeared from the outside. The Federation HQ extended underground, and there were enough apartment-style complexes in the living quarters that everyone could have a bedroom to themselves.

Naturally, Mizuki and I selected the same set of rooms. We didn’t have much to set down, especially since her storage ring was so effective, but we had nothing but time now. After quickly freshening up in the attached bathroom, which used a simple Create Water-inscribed runic device in conjunction with heat spells to form an actual bath, I emerged to see Mizuki in the common room.

“So,” she said. “A guild.”

“This is what you wanted, right?” I asked.

“You don’t seem happy.”

“No, I’m fine,” I said. “I’m just finding a way out of here the moment that I can. The clinic needs me, and it’s not like there’s an active manhunt for me anyway.”

“Something is off about the entire situation,” Mizuki said. “I would be careful.”

“I felt the same way, but I really don’t want to get involved in this.” I shrugged. “Now that we have free reign of the place, I’m going to get the information I need and leave.”

Actually, thanks to the events of the day, I had more questions now. While I didn’t have interest in a guild turf war, I did want to know what was so important in the south that people on all sides were being called to it.

Something to ask after I found out whatever the hell Neferi’s deal had been.

“Suit yourself,” Mizuki said. “And, uh… thank you.”

“Hm?” I asked. “What’s that about?”

“In case you didn’t notice, I sort of forced my way into your life,” she said.

“It’s been interesting.” My reply was short but honest. There was something about the dynamics of fighting in real combat that had awakened a part of me that had only been activated a handful of times.

As fucked up as it was to say, I never felt more alive than when death was very, very close. Despite everything, getting swallowed by a slime and ambushed by a demon summoner in the World Dungeon had been exhilarating. I knew people had died, but honestly…

Honestly, I kind of wanted to feel that way again. Any interest I had in the guild war was solely based off that, but even then I didn’t want to get involved.

There was combat, and there was politics. At least you could win at one of those.

For the time being, I looked around. Now that we were formally inducted into the guild, we unlocked all sorts of useful features, like access to a common room where a bunch of hormonal teenagers with nowhere else to go could mingle. Given that option, I preferred the significantly more useful map I found in said common room.

My reputation seemed to have spread some. People pointed at me as I passed through the halls, whispering, but nobody approached me. So many of these people had been talking shit before, but now that they knew I actually had power, they were standing down.

That was the way it went, wasn’t it? It was kind of sad, but I didn’t mind not being harassed.

The library I made my way to was, in a word, massive. Also underground, it spanned something like five separate floors and had enough room for a couple hundred people to walk through the place without bumping into each other. There were quite a few people here already, most of them either reading something—not always a book, sometimes a report or something similar—or moving with purpose.

Even on Earth, I’d never seen this many printed pieces of writing in one place. Here, where printing was much more expensive than it had been on my home planet? I couldn’t imagine how much this collection was worth.

It did present a problem. Not only did I have no idea where to start when it came to looking for when it came to Neferi Whitefall, I wasn’t even sure if she or her family was even relevant enough to be in one of these.

Iryn had told me that joining a guild was one of my best bets for information, though, so I wasn’t going to give up. The library had an information center manned by a single thirties-looking magician who was currently leafing through a thick book titled something like High-level Summoning Rituals, Alternate Planes, and the Hundred Most Common Mistakes that Kill Dimensionalists.

“May I help you?” she asked over thick glasses. She frowned, looking down at me. “How did you get here?”

I showed her my guild badge. “Qualified, ma’am.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Really. I hope you don’t mind me checking that.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, passing it over. “Would you happen to know where I could find information on the Whitefall family? Possibly a Neferi?”

The librarian looked at my guild badge closely. Her eyebrows raised further, and she passed it back.

“You know, nobody usually even comes in here until their third year,” the librarian said. “You’re here seven years earlier than you should be.”

“Well, I was told you can find me information,” I said. “Can you?”

“Whitefall, you said? What are you looking for? A girl? Wait, are you at the age where you’re thinking about girls? Twelve… hmm… yeah, right?”

Okay, this was starting to annoy me.

“I have a request,” I said. “Can you stop gawking about my age and listen? Tell me something useful!”

Force imbued my words, and I realized I had just used Nightmare’s Call without even intending to.

Sweat beaded on the mage’s forehead. “Y-yes. Of course. Whitefall, Whitefall… ah! We have memory capsules with them. Recent. Were you looking for news?”

Finally. Now we’re getting somewhere. “Yes. Memory capsules?”

“Give me a minute. Follow me.”

I did. We took so many twists and turns and secret entrances hidden behind walls that I honestly got pretty lost, winding up in a storage room full of capsules each the size of fists.

“These get replaced a lot, but the recent ones out of Leyeril are still here,” the librarian said. “Instructions are inscribed on the capsules. Should be, uh… 142 through 145, depending on which one you’re looking for. Good luck!”

She bolted out the second she was done directing me. It didn’t take a detection spell to tell she was utterly terrified.

I was surprised by how much force I’d been able to put into that one skill activation, not to mention how effective it had been.

I would need to consult Vallis about that. Nightmare’s Call dealt with the soul, and he’d promised I would be able to learn soul magic.

That was a conversation for after this, though. Now, I finally had access to the information I’d been searching for over the course of the last few months.

The capsules were conveniently numbered, each of them containing swirling solutions of different colors suspended in clear fluid. As the librarian had hurriedly mentioned, there were instructions written on it. They were simple but odd.

First step: unscrew the capsule. Second: drink the contents within without stopping. Third: cycle mana through my own body.

The final steps regarded to returning the liquid to the capsule. As I started to tip the capsule back, I wondered how many other people had swallowed this already. Was it even meant to be reusable?

Whatever. At this point, I didn’t care. I just wanted to understand. I highly doubted I’d immediately understand why Neferi Whitefall had appeared in my system screen or how we were connected, but any context was sorely welcome.

I swallowed it as quickly as I could. The liquid memory was oily but tasteless and easy to get down. The second I emptied the capsule, I cycled mana through my body sharply.

My consciousness went dark for a second, and then, just like my Nightmare-visions, I was somewhere else.

I looked up. Though some details around me were blurry, I could read the words on a crest high above my head.

Whitefall.