Reborn Healer Chapter 29

Mana surged through me, infusing my entire body and bringing nearly as much a shock to my system as the initial contact with the slime had brought. All the fatigue that had built up over the course of my deadly swim through a Master-tier creature’s body washed away in an instant, the revitalizing energy in my body once again increasing my mental alertness instead of clouding it out.

Only one core had advanced, which was a terribly strange sensation. My cores were out of balance, which I suspected was going to lead to my souls starting to split much faster than usual, but nothing hurt at the moment. The last time I had advanced my cores had also been in the World Dungeon. Back then, the specific combination of skills and spells I’d been using had caused both cores to advance at the same time.

Even with only the mage part of my soul advancing, the effects were immediate. Breaking through the barrier of Adept-tier meant a mana and body refresh alongside a massively expanded mana pool.

My momentum had been thrown off by the core advancement, but I slid back into the rhythm with ease. It had been long enough since I’d made an increase in my mana pool via tier advancement instead of just diligent practice that I was legitimately surprised by how much easier it was to keep my cycle going now than it had before.

1, 2, Heal, 3, 4, Dash, 5, 6, Heal. 1, 2…

Heal lvl 3 -> 4

I could afford to use my larger healing spells now that the core responsible for handling spells had expanded in breadth and depth. Unlike how warrior skills automatically leveled or even evolved upon advancing a tier, my spells remained at their current level of proficiency, just becoming much easier to cast.

The bulk of my efforts were targeted at keeping Matias alive. It meant I suffered a lot more pain per increment of progress we made and risked my body even more than I had been, of course, but the results were well worth the price. Matias had been in the slime for longer than I’d been, and he had nothing but a handful of items to restore his health. From the looks of it, he’d been suffering the entire time.

There was a legitimate concern that if I just kept dragging him, his body would literally disintegrate under my grip. Even given the healing I was doing, the slime’s acid seemed to compound its effects the more damage it did. To deal with that, I had gathered him into the net I’d taken off the body of that Southern Star asshole six years ago, dragging Matias behind me and ensuring that if any limbs fell off, I could reattach them. It also gave me an easier target to protect when debris came our way.

I was glad he wasn’t conscious for this. This was not a pleasant way to die.

I’d gotten disoriented during my journey down, and even with the light illuminating the mess around us, it was hard to tell which way was up.

It should have been an impossible task, but my warrior core’s instincts kept me stabilized and moving, orienting me correctly as I gradually tore our way to the top.

Split the Shadows lvl 4 -> 5

Heal lvl 4 -> 5

I had leveled my skills and spells faster in the last five minutes than I had over the course of the last year. The effects of truly needing everything to fire on all cylinders or face immediate death.

Partway through, I sensed a sharp sense of panic from directly under me, followed by a whole lot of pain. I’d healed Matias to the point of him being able to regain awareness.

Empathic Insight lvl 7 -> 8

He didn’t seem to be able to tell what was going on, and he started thrashing almost immediately. From Matias’ perspective, he’d accepted death and crossed the threshold only to be brought back kicking and screaming into a living hell. That couldn’t be good for his mind.

I slowed my cycle, bringing the net closer to me. With an outstretched hand (if you could call a skinless mess of blood and muscle and bone a hand), I made contact with the sack of flesh I was carrying it and cast Anesthesia.

Anesthesia lvl 1 -> 2

Matias’ mind was nowhere near coherent enough to mount a defense against it, and he passed out instantly.

It was another spell I had to keep concentration on, but there was nothing that could break my focus now. The level of flow I’d achieved with these skills made me understand the stories in the history books where a single Saint would take on armies of thousands with nothing more than a sharpened stick or a cane or something like that. As I was right now, even though I was actively dying with every passing second, I felt invincible.

Stick with me, buddy, I thought, passing another Heal into the living corpse that was my friend. We’re making it out of here.

#

The party from the Federation was halfway to the surface on their way out from the supposed deep obsidian deposit before Arthur held a hand up.

“Someone’s coming this way,” he said, visibly trying and failing to reset from the anger and humiliation of the last fifteen minutes. “Right back from the sinkhole.”

“Are you sure?” Marcie asked in a way she wouldn’t have dared to before she’d watched her assigned team leader get mauled by a twelve-year old.

“Yes, I’m sure,” he snapped. Arthur sighed, running a hand over his brow and trying to calm himself. “Just one, judging from the footsteps.”

“Who is it?” Henry asked.

“It’s me!” a female voice shouted from deeper down the tunnels. The girl who had never identified herself. “M—Blue, from the party you ran into earlier!”

Ran into was a generous way of phrasing it.

“What do you want?” Arthur asked grumpily, too irritated by the events of the day to even be suspicious of her presence.

“Your intel’s outdated,” she said, coming into view as she clambered up the side of one of the vertical drops that had led into the tunnel system and ultimately the deep obsidian deposit. “There is one single monster. Master-tier slime of some sort. The warrior with us called it an area boss.”

All four members of the Federation team tensed further with each following word. They hadn’t been partnered together very long, put together only temporarily, but all of them had been with the guild for long enough to understand the implications of everything the girl using an obviously fake name was saying.

“Where’s the rest of your party?” Henry asked.

The girl—Blue, if she was to be believed—had a wild look in her eyes, but she breathed deeply and calmed herself so quickly that it installed a sense of unease in the entire Federation party.

“We were climbing out on the rope when the slime hit the bottom of it. Matias, who is an Adept-tier warrior, cut the rope above him so that we could retreat and fell into the slime. Red, the healer boy, jumped in shortly afterwards.”

“Hold on, he’s Initiate?” Arthur asked. “Gods below, if my day couldn’t get any worse…”

“Arthur!” Lena scolded him. “Time and place.”

“They’re both inside the slime,” Blue said.

“Alive?” Henry asked. “We need to report this immediately.”

“I believe they’re currently alive,” the girl said.

She was the youngest out of the five people here by far. The guild members ranged from their mid twenties to almost forty in Henry’s case. Under normal circumstances, they might have been tempted to deny her words as the delusion of a teenage girl who couldn’t accept that her first party had been brutally torn apart, there was something different about this group.

For one, they could tell that the girl was an Adept, which was already an abnormality for someone of her age. For another, they’d all witnessed the boy, supposedly an Initiate-tier, win a duel against their Adept-tier archer as a mage. There was a strange feeling to this party that stirred the Federation party’s instincts.

That was a major point where guilds differed from the military. Military warriors and mages were instructed to follow commands down to the letter, while Federation adventurers were always, always told to trust their instincts.

“I’m going,” Lena said. “If there’s any chance they’re alive, we have to go.”

“I agree,” Marcie added.

“We’re all going,” Arthur decided. “We don’t have time to waste.”

Marcie looked at him strangely. “Shouldn’t you go to the surface and alert the Federation?”

“No. We’ll have plenty of time after, and reinforcements won’t arrive fast enough for us to save them.” At the strange looks from everyone, Arthur growled out a noise of frustration. “Kid embarrassed me, but he’s a kid. We put aside grudges when our lives are on the line. Let’s go.”

Nobody wanted to argue, so all five of them hurried their way back. No words were exchanged, the only sound present between them the noise of their footfalls.

The urgency and tension in the air was palpable. They’d been operating for first spoils, money, and pride earlier, but all that animosity had faded away. Everyone on the Federation side knew what it was like to lose companions in combat, and none of them wanted that for the girl they didn’t even know, no matter how little they trusted her.

On the exterior, the sinkhole looked exactly like it had before, but the warrior types had sensitive enough ears to notice the sound of something like rushing water under them.

The rope Blue claimed to have climbed up was gone, the only remaining trace of it a short length of cord flapping from a nail in the side of the hole.

“Widen the hole,” Arthur ordered.

“Step back,” Lena said in lieu of a reply. She cast a wide-range Adept-tier spell that slowly sank into the rock and superheated the edges of a circle until the rock face melted, sending everything within the circle crashing downwards.

“Lights.” Arthur’s personality was abrasive and oversure of himself, but there was a reason he’d made it so far. People listened to him.

Lena and Marcie both shone magical lights down inside, illuminating the surging monster beneath.

“Seven hells,” Henry said. “That’s the biggest slime I think I’ve ever seen.”

“I thought that was polluted water,” Marcie said, sounding faintly like she was going to be ill. “That’s one creature?”

“Yes,” Arthur said. “We’re going to kill it. Come on. We’ve trained for this. We have the better position. We can do this.”

#

Mizuki’s heart raced at a rate that it shouldn’t have. Her own upbringing had involved a great deal of inuring herself to the world around her so that she could focus on what was in front of her. Here and now, she was still using those techniques she’d learned to keep herself calm enough to fight.

She wasn’t nearly as good at range, but she had a knack for finding weak points even at a distant range, and she was using that now to direct the barrage the other party was sending down. Arthur shot down specialized arrows to increase the amount of damage that Lena’s fire spells dealt, while Henry’s magical broadsword could apparently return to his hand with a skill, so he was constantly sending it down, triggering an effect from afar, and having it return.

The general way to deal with slimes was to overheat or freeze them. They were strong against piercing and slashing attacks and weak to elemental ones, and therewere enough fire users on the Federation team that they’d decided they were going to melt this monster alive.

The problem with that was that Ren and Matias were still down there. Mizuki personally thought that Matias was a goner, but she held out hope that Ren was still there. That hope was gradually fading, though. She and Marcie were both scanning the area below their killbox for signs of life other than the slime so that they could attempt a rescue before the slime’s internals got too hot for survival.

Left unspoken was the fact that slimes were already known to be acidic enough that it was already extremely rare to survive them.

Mizuki knew rationally that they were likely dead and the mission statement had quietly switched from rescuing them to killing the slime before it could grow any more dangerous and kill more hapless adventurers, but she didn’t want to admit that to herself.

Why am I so upset by that idea? She wondered. The half-elf had seen plenty of death in her time, and she wasn’t even that close to these two. Sure, Ren had been kind and helpful and competent by her side, but she’d barely known him for something like a month and a half. Why did the idea of his death pain her like this?

The longer their bombardment continued with no signs of life, though, the more Mizuki had to try to force herself to grasp that she’d just lost her party.

I’m going to need to tell Vallis, she thought idly, her chest growing oddly tight at the image of that happening.

Still, Mizuki kept her senses peeled. She was helping them kill this slime, and there was still a chance, however slim.

As the barrage continued, parts of the slime started to slough apart, areas of its body boiling as flame superheated it. It would be dead before too long. Lena had increased thea mount of firepower she was laying down, completely unopposed since the slime couldn’t climb up to them.

Mizuki, still watching every point of contact with bated breath, startled when a fireball suddenly detonated in an area she hadn’t designated.

“Did you miss?” she asked Lena.

“Huh? I don’t miss. What are you talking about?”

Hope soared in Mizuki’s heart, and she refocused her senses.

“Two-fifty north, three-ten east!” she called out. “Look!”

The others paused in their attacks, looking to the point on their grid she’d indicated.

There, barely visible even with lights shining down, was a mass of slime-covered material tinged a dark crimson, suspended oddly over the surface. Upon closer inspection, Mizuki realized that it was a spell holding them afloat. It was weak and flickering, but she knew it well.

Barrier.

“It’s him!” she shouted. “Do we have a way to—“

“Already on it,” Arthur said, nocking a gold-tipped arrow. “Watch and learn.”

The arrow flew straight and true, hitting the mass in its center. Mizuki winced at the impact, but she realized it hadn’t penetrated. Instead, it expanded a thin glowing net around the mass, light spreading down the rope it had trailed behind it. Arthur caught the line and handed it to Henry, who started reeling it in hand over hand.

The net-bound mass hit the surface of the slime and the net started to smoke, but Henry’s strength was more than sufficient to keep it from going under as he pulled it all the way up.

Lena and Arthur didn’t immediately return to attacking the slime when the mass had returned. All eyes were on the net as it dissolved, sending the steaming pieces of bloody flesh within tumbling to the ground.

There was so much blood everywhere. With how much slime was still sticking to them and how much viscera and debris covered it, it was hard to tell if it was even a human down there.

“Excuse me,” Marcie said before stepping aside and throwing up violently.

Silence hung in the air, the Federation party joining Mizuki in staring at the remains of her friends.

Lena walked over, putting a hand on her shoulder. Mizuki blinked hard, an odd stinging in her eyes.

And then, before any of them could get a word out, the mass stirred. From beneath all the blood and gore and dissolving slime, a human slowly sat up.

Water manifested above the figure, drenching it and cleansing it. Mizuki stifled a yelp, instinctively reaching for her whip.

Underneath the mess was something that was barely recognizable as human. Skin was forming over flayed flesh, slowly restoring its form. As it stood—not it, Mizuki corrected herself, he—he threw up slime, expunging everything that had been in his body.

“Seven hells,” Henry whispered reverently. “How are you alive?”

By the time Ren Kane got to his feet, he was whole again, deep black spear in one hand.

Looking at him reminded her of stories she’d been told as a child about a creature from the deep, dark depths. In the old elven tongue, its name roughly meant That Which Walks In The Endless Night, but modern texts had a different name for it: the Undying Horror. The myths told of a creature that took the shape of a man and would never, ever stop creeping towards its prey, no matter what injury it suffered.

Mizuki had grown out of being scared by fairytales meant to keep children from wandering outside after dark, but looking at Ren literally grow his skin back on brought back the same chill she remembered from childhood.

I’m glad you’re on my side, she thought. Father always said to stay close to monsters.

“You came back,” Ren said to Mizuki, smiling broadly. “Don’t worry about me. I swear it’s worse than it looks.”

Off to the side, Marcie fainted.

#

Heal lvl 5 -> 8

Anesthesia lvl 2 -> 6

Body Scan lvl 2 -> 5

Doubletime lvl 2 -> 3

Split the Shadows lvl 5 -> 7

Nightmare Forged lvl 6 -> 7

I really did mean what I said. I hadn’t realized just how bad the injuries looked until I was fully out of the slime. Thanks to my constant efforts slamming Heal after Heal after Heal, I’d managed to keep both of our internal organs mostly intact. Blood loss had been a concern, but with how fast skin tore off with the slime, I had focused on just keeping the important parts alive.

I was definitely in better shape than Matias, though.

“He needs better healers than me immediately,” I said. “I did what I could, but I’m very short on mana and don’t have the spells to fully cure him.”

Nobody replied for a moment, and I realized that everyone conscious was staring at me.

“Matias is… alive?” Mizuki asked.

“Yeah,” I said, grinning. “Told you I could do it.”

“Fuck me,” a voice I recognized as Arthur’s said. “You’re the real deal.”

“Real deal?” Lena shot back, offended. “Not one of the guild healers could have done that, mark my words.”

I stumbled suddenly, the toll of everything I’d done to keep us both alive weighing down on my shoulders. Even after reaching Adept in my mage core, it had been a close thing. Our skin had started boiling as well as melting at some point, which was a new and terrifying sensation that I hoped to never repeat.

“We’re going to get you somewhere safe,” Henry said, his voice growing fainter to my ears as I hit the ground on one knee.

Finally, at long last, I could rest. The pure focus I’d been maintaining slipped away.

Sixth Sense has surpassed level 10 and is evolving!

Flowing Harmony has surpassed level 10 and is evolving!

Before I could see the results, I passed out.