Reborn Healer Chapter 27

Everyone from both sides stood in shocked silence, watching blood trickle out of the gut wound.

Okay, not everyone. Marcie’s scream had tapered off, but she was still making worried noises.

Aren’t you a healer? I thought, more annoyed than anything else. They’d all been keen on making accusations of me being unprepared, but they weren’t really doing anything for their downed teammate.

In the end, it was me who moved first, followed shortly by Mizuki behind me, hitting the ground softly.

I hadn’t meant to throw a lethal attack. Given how confident he’d been in his movements and targeting points on me that would have resulted in potential fatalities if not treated fast, I’d assumed that he was confident enough in both of our abilities to dodge this.

My movement seemed to spur the rest of his party in motion. I didn’t need my skill to realize that they thought I was moving in to finish the job. The mage I’d mentally pegged as a fire specialist had a spell half-formed, armor guy was drawing an enormous broadsword twice my size, and Marcie created a second forcefield in front of the downed body.

I skidded to a halt.

“Hey,” I called out. “Marcie, can you heal him?”

That confused them, which only served to annoy me further.

“No,” she said. “I’m, uh, defense and buff spells, um, I specialize in those. Why would a healer be out here?”

“Why would a—never mind.” I threw my hands up in irritation. “You don’t have a healer?”

“Healers don’t come into the field!” she protested. “I don’t have an affinity for healing spells, and I don’t get them so they never stick in my head, and—“

“Can you heal him?” I asked, pointing at him. “Even if you don’t have an affinity, you should have some written down in your spellbook, right?”

I had a few of those. While I didn’t carry a spellbook around, I did have one back home with a ton of interesting spells recorded in it that I could cast as long as I actually had the spellbook. They hadn’t been added to my system because I wasn’t accustomed to them enough to cast them on command. As far as I understood it, that was roughly how spellcasting worked for most mages. In this case, her being the support should have meant that she should have prepared a few healing spells, right?

She shook her head. “I have some written down, but they’re not very strong…”

“Stop talking to him,” the fire mage hissed, flames whirling around the tip of her staff. “Give me a boost on my mark.”

“Oi!” Matias shouted. “The hells are you talkin’ about? Your boy chose t’fight a stupid duel, and he lost. He was tryin’ to kill Ren jus’ as much as the other way ‘round.”

“I wasn’t trying to kill him,” I said. “Thanks for the support, though.”

The fire mage growled in frustration.

“Can you heal him?” armor guy asked, somehow sounding more nervous than Marcie. “You said you were a healer, right?”

“Yes, I can,” I said, walking forward. “Can you ensure that your party member doesn’t try to blow my head off?”

“Stand down, Lena,” armor guy said.

Ignoring her heated response, I rushed towards Arthur’s side. Marcie’s barrier still blocked me. Judging from the thickness and its semi-dome shape, it was a significantly more advanced barrier spell than I could manage, but that was fine. It was easier to break shit than it was to set it up, anyway.

Drawing my warrior core out through my body and cycling mana with a vengeance, I summoned dark claws as I triggered Split the Shadows. My soul made contact with the adjacent barrier, and I called upon the Nightmare, taking a fragment of its power as my own.

The forcefield gave way like paper under my hands, and I tore a hole through it to reach Arthur. Once the break in the barrier was large enough, the entire spell popped like a soap bubble.

“What in the seven hells,” Lena hissed. She released her spell, a powerful surge of fear and deep, lingering distrust spiking from her.

You dumbass, I had the time to think. Your own teammate is right next to me.

Her Fireball shot forth, sending my Sixth Sense into overdrive. I started casting a Barrier, but it was too little too late.

Movement from behind me triggered my senses again, but it was faster than I could react to. A weapon swung by me, and I caught the impression of a spiked ball before I could be overwhelmed by heat and force.

Except that sensation never came. Matias came to a sliding stop in front of me, one knee on the ground. He’d swung at the spell with his mace like a baseball player, and his mace had come out on top, nullifying it. Embers dripped from the tip of the weapon, which was glowing red with heat.

Damn. For the first time, I found myself respecting him as an actual fighter. I’d never seen him in the dives, just in the aftermath when he was beat up and injured, so I’d assumed he wasn’t very good at what he did. Just now, though, he’d moved faster than I could hope to while carrying way more equipment and armor with a heavier weapon than I used and countered an Adept-tier spell effortlessly.

“Listen to your teammate, young lady,” Matias said. “An’ be careful where you’re pointing that thing.”

“If you do that again I’m stabbing you in the throat,” Mizuki announced. She’d also gotten closer.

“Not helping,” I said, kneeling down next to Arthur. 

Despite the tensions around me, I was pretty sure they’d gotten it under control. Armored guy apologized profusely, getting in front of the other two, giving me the room to heal.

Normally, it was better to keep the offending item in a wound until it was almost fully healed, as I’d learned on multiple cases of people showing up with scaffolding spearing them in the side at the clinic, but my weapon was a special case. I couldn’t just stop the flow of mana through it when I didn’t have it in my hands, and the shadows reinforcing it would only make the injury worse.

Arthur was already looking pretty pale, and his eyes were glazed over. A quick Body Scan revealed that his condition was expectedly terrible and rapidly degrading. I had to work fast.

“Sorry about this,” I told his unconscious body.

He’d fallen backwards, which made this easier. Small mercies. I stood over him, wrapping both hands around the smooth part of my lifeline—the grip seemed to have penetrated into his body—and pulled, using Call Lifeline at the same time.

With the addition of my skill and my still-active Enhance Strength spell, I wrenched it free with ease, leaving a gaping wound in his gut. For the briefest of instants, I could see his entrails within before blood gushed out, hiding the ugliest parts of the damage.

Immediately discarding my lifeline, I knelt down and cast Heal, the Adept-class version of my most fundamental heal spell. Closing the wound was my first priority, and though I was able to accomplish that immediately, he had still lost a lot of blood. Flesh regenerated itself in instants as I concentrated the entirety of the spell on this one spot, but my job wasn’t anywhere near done.

“Told you that you were getting better at this,” Mizuki crowed, watching over my shoulder. “Took him down real good, didn’t you?”

“Time and place, little lady,” Matias said.

Over the course of painstaking minutes, I adjusted the flow of revitalizing energy through another person’s body, repairing organs and restoring blood. Fortunately, this had been a pretty clean hit. The shadow magic I’d imbued the lifeline with made healing the parts it had spread to significantly faster, but after the initial phase was over, this became a task I’d done hundreds if not thousands of times by now.

Arthur’s consciousness returned to him partway through the healing process, but he still seemed dazed by the end of it.

“You’re going to feel pretty off for a while,” I explained. “That’s because of healing fatigue. Did they teach you that in guild class?”

“They did,” the armored guy said. “Like crashing after an overdose on stimulants.”

I nodded. The way revitalizing energy worked let me abuse my healing spells to give myself an extra dose of energy during sparring sometimes, but overdoing it to the point of matching how much was used in actual healing meant exhaustion.

Satisfied with my work, I stepped away from Arthur. I’d helped him enough. He could get up on his own.

None of his teammates made a move to pick him up, which said a lot about either them or him.

I called my lifeline back to me, not looking as it spun off the ground. It was coated in blood and guts, so I used a smaller-scale Create Water to clean off the grip and my hands. Again, I ignored the bloodied Arthur.

“So,” I said, shaking my lifeline so the rest of the blood would drip off of it, “do you mind letting us exercise our contract now?”

Though I couldn’t see behind the armored guy’s mask, I could sense the chagrined look he had to have right now.

“Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “The guild’s not gonna be happy, though.”

“Oh, yeah, by the way,” I added, some of their words from before surfacing in my mind. “Since we’re all adults here, do you mind telling me why you’re here in the first place? Your report of what’s in there is also different from ours.”

An uncomfortable silence descended for a bit. To my surprise, Lena, the fire mage who’d tried to explode me to hell, was the one who spoke up.

“…There’s something wrong with the city contract,” she said. “The Federation noticed that they’ve posted this one five times in a row. It always gets taken and unfulfilled. One of our scouts figured out that they didn’t get the right tier on the creatures guarding the deep obsidian deposit. The city’s been sending Initiates into an Adept-tier threat and losing them.”

“Thanks,” I said, genuinely surprised by how straightforward she was being. “I appreciate the honesty.”

“I’m sorry about insulting you earlier,” she said, eyes downcast. “And for almost blowing you up.”

There was a deeper problem rooted here somewhere, but I didn’t care to probe at it. Instead, I just accepted her apology with a nod.

“Adept-tier,” Matias said. “‘Course the city would mess us little guys over.”

The armored guy craned his head forward, looking at Matias. “Do I know you?”

“No,” he replied flatly.

They definitely knew each other.

“I’m game to take on an Adept,” Mizuki said. “Just means that it’s appropriate for our level, right?”

“Technically, adventurers are supposed to be able to handle monster threats a tier above them,” Lena said. “But solo divers or groups with worse organization…”

“We’ll be fine,” I said. “Unless you still think I won’t be able to handle myself?”

I looked at Matias, affixing him with my best be serious stare. I stopped myself from saying his name, realizing that it was very possible he had history with at least one of these people.

“No,” he relented. “I’ve never seen anyone your age come close to a showin’ like that. Gonna make me rethink my own life at this rate.”

I grinned. Finally, he could look at me as an equal.

“Since you’re taking it,” the armored guy said, “we’ll head back and report to the guild that we didn’t get the clear. Could I get your names, or maybe somewhere we might find you?”

“Why?” Mizuki asked, suspicious.

“In case the guild decides to call you in for evals,” he said. “Nothing harmful. Henry, by the way.”

Oh. This was… actually really good. It was exactly what we’d been looking for. ”It’s almost nice to meet you, Henry. You can find me working some days at Vallis Kane’s clinic down Southside.”

“You work with Lord Healer Kane?” Marcie asked, wide-eyed. “He’s one of the foremost experts in barrier spells in all of Halcyon. I didn’t even know he had a clinic here!”

“You must not be looking very hard. Or very south.”

A hint of suspicion had risen from the three of them, each of them noticing that I hadn’t actually mentioned our names. It was within reasonable bounds, though, so the conversation came to an end soon enough.

“Good luck down there,” Henry said eventually. “We’re rooting for you.”

“Fuck… you…” Arthur said, having regained enough of his facilities to process what was going on around him.

“Don’t mind him,” Lena sighed, facepalming. “You should probably go before we have to explain everything to him.”

We took her advice, edging closer to the sinkhole until we could see where it funneled down. There was another vertical drop, but this one was a good bit deeper and darker than the ones before.

I grabbed a rock from the ground and dropped it, counting in my head. One one thousand, two one thousand—and there was the impact, a soft thud that I had to strain my ears to hear. If I remembered my physics right, distance equaled one half acceleration multiplied by time squared, which meant… twenty-five meters, give or take.

“It’s a long way down,” I said. “Probably too far to just jump.”

“I could probably jump and make it, but it’d hurt,” Mizuki said. “Anyone have a rope?”

“We’ve got one,” Henry said, having stepped aside while Arthur bickered with Lena and Marcie. “Should be long enough for the descent.”

“Worry ‘bout yourself,” Matias snapped, already reaching inside his storage band. “I have rope.”

He also had a hammer and a fat iron nail, which he affixed into the stone floor before tossing the rope down.

Matias was the first down, followed shortly by Mizuki. I went last, waiting to see the other party start to leave before descending. I didn’t sense any ill intent from them, but I wasn’t going to to put full trust in my skills and instinct to assure me that Arthur wasn’t going to come and cut the rope.

I slid down the rope with ease, though it wasn’t quite long enough to make it all the way to the bottom. A ten-foot drop was trivial to negate on the way down, but we were going to have to jump when we wanted to climb out of this.

Under the sinkhole was a significantly wider space than I had been expecting. It was dimmer here than it had been in the rest of the dungeon so far, but we were prepared for that. One of my old purchases came in handy, a cheap mana-powered flashlight that I could strap to my forehead illuminating my immediate area.

It was strangely flat and smooth down here. The ground lacked the kind of rough quality I would have expected out the World Dungeon or even a flat cave. I couldn’t see how far the cavern extended, but it looked equally abnormally uniform as far as my light ignited.

“The deep obsidian deposits are supposed to be around here, right?” I asked.

“Should be,” Matias said uncertainly. “Weird place for it to be.”

“This definitely doesn’t look natural,” I said, kneeling down and rubbing the stone. It was as smooth as it looked, which was incredibly odd. “Do you have a way to look for it?”

“‘Course,” he said, reaching into his storage band again. “You get used to all sorts of gadgets you need t’buy for all these fetch quests.”

“Do you see anything weird?” I asked Mizuki. “You’ve got the best sensory skills here.”

“Don’t call them that,” she said. “And no. I’m looking, but I can’t detect anything.”

“Don’t call them what? Sensory?” I was searching as well, relying heavily on Empathic Insight and looking for anything that might tip me off, but I had no hits.

“Yes,” she replied. “The precise term is surveillance or reconnaissance, depending on the type. My skills are primarily reconnaissance, but I have a dual specialty.”

“If you say so, princess.”

“Don’t call me that either.”

“If you say so, Blue.”

“Or that.”

“Mizuki.”

“…no.”

“I literally just said your name.”

“Hey, you two,” Matias said. “I’m picking something up.”

We paused the banter to turn towards him.

“Point that light somewhere else.”

“Oh, oops.” I re-angled my makeshift headlamp.

Matias had something that vaguely resembled a metal detector in his hands, complete with a bar of crystals on its antenna that started igniting with soft white light from the bottom up like a magical progress bar when he pointed it at a certain direction.

“Weak signal in this direction,” he said. “Probably ‘bout a quarter, half-mile out. Supposin’ we go a little further…”

The lights started growing brighter as we walked, filling the “progress bar” with surprising speed.

Matias stopped frowning. “That’s strange.”

“What is?” I asked.

“It was a bit ways off. Now, I’m seein’ it at a thousand feet.”

More crystals lit up.

“Nine hundred. Eight hundred. How is it getting closer?”

A thrill of adrenaline shot through me at that. Judging from Mizuki’s reaction, she was thinking the same thing.

“I feel movement!” Mizuki called out. “Straight ahead!”

I redirected my light straight forward. When it couldn’t illuminate enough, I sent a juiced-up Firebolt into the distance, focusing my mana for range.

Flame tore through the empty air, soaring straight and true until—

“Holy shit,” I said.

Just before it dissipated harmlessly, the Firebolt shone light on exactly what had been moving.

A massive wall of mud-like slime at least twenty feet tall and so wide I hadn’t been able to see the ends of it was surging towards us.

“Oh, fuck,” Mizuki said. “We should go.”

“I can’t feel any emotions on that thing,” I said. “What is it?”

Matias was already backing away. “It’s a slime, but that can’t be no ordinary slime. It’s an area boss. Has to be.”

“My analysis item caught it when you lit it up,” Mizuki said. “That thing is Master-tier.”