Reborn Healer Chapter 18

“That’d be me,” I called out, making my way into the waiting room as I spoke.

The owner of the voice and the accompanying aura was its only occupant.

She… did not look like she belonged here. Why that was the first thing that sprang to my mind, I didn’t know, but it was true.

Most of the people in this district were on the poorer end. Even the dungeon divers, who were on the higher end of the tax bracket comparatively, tended to only have basic armor with the odd family heirloom or magical weapon worth much more. Authentic jewelry was rare, though fakes were everywhere, and fine fabrics were also in short supply.

The girl in front of me, on the other hand, looked noble. There was no better word for it. She was taller than me and probably a few years older—mid to late teens, if I had to chalk a guess, though I’d never been good with ages. Her snow-white hair was a rarity around Liaren, and the neat bun-like style she wore it in was just not something commoners around these parts tended to make the effort to do. 

Her clothes, too, were of much finer make than anything here. While they were practical, they also had smooth designs and fine designs that indicated a much better fabric than anyone in the poorer half of Liaren could get access to. They also looked like they were designed for warmer weather than we typically got here. 

There was no real one-to-one comparison with any clothing style I was familiar with from Earth, but if I had to give it a close approximation, I would call it a crop top combined with a short dress and something akin to leggings, all of which appeared to be designed to give her wide freedom of movement. Nobody would wear that in Liaren, where winters regularly saw the river slicing through the city freezing over and even summers didn’t get all that warm.

That wasn’t even getting started on the fact that she had a literal whip coiled in one hand or the way she held herself like she was above everything and everyone around her, the woman’s aura reinforcing that feeling.

She held eye contact with me for a full second before sneering. “You’re not the doctor.”

“I am,” I said. “You’re new around here, I assume. What’s your name?”

“Mizuki of the—Mizuki,” she said haughtily, stumbling over her words halfway through her sentence.

I eyed her suspiciously. Maybe I was reading into it too far, but that was not the kind of answer someone who was here for a routine checkup or sudden issue would give.

This strange girl definitely wasn’t from around here. And judging from her behavior… was she trying to stay hidden from someone?

One strange occurrence was coincidence. Two was suspicious. Three… I was sure someone could fill in the rest.

I’d been worried that she would be someone trying to investigate my father or even me, 

“Okay, Mizuki of the Mizuki,” I said drily. “What is your problem?”

“My problem is that there’s no doctor here, and I need one,” she said.

“There is, but I assume you mean my father, Vallis,” I replied. “He’s not here today or tomorrow. He’ll be back on the first working day of the week.”

“But I need healing today.”

I instantly disliked her. I wasn’t sure how much of that was because of the skin-crawling feeling I got around her that still hadn’t abated and how much was because of her attitude, but it resulted in a general negative feeling.

“Then come into the back and I can get you checked out,” I said. “Or if you’re so keen on getting care, you can go somewhere else. There are other healer’s clinics out here.”

I knew by now that most of said clinics were running on shoddy resources and healers that relied on tinctures and herbs more than their own spells, but they still got the job done.

Mizuki shook her head emphatically. “No. I need Kane.”

“That would be me,” I said. “Ren Kane. Why me—or my father, I suppose—specifically? Surely you’re rich enough that you can afford one of the clinics in the richer district. Or in another city, come to think of it.”

She glared at me, the sense of pressure intensifying. “I was told you don’t ask questions.”

Ah. A few more pieces fell into place with that line. My father didn’t have an official license, I knew, though his existence was usually glossed over because of his location and the fact that none of the city’s own healers operated in this area. My suspicions that she was hiding from someone heightened.

Mizuki took a step forward to get closer to me and stumbled, abruptly tumbling against a wall. I caught her before she could fell any further.

“Oof,” I grunted, casting an Enhance Strength spell. “You are heavy.”

A spike of sensation surged through me, and my heart jumped as her strange aura pressed down harder, but it subsided.

Mizuki got up onto her feet again, glaring at me.

“Okay, something is definitely wrong with you,” I said, meaning it in more than one way. “Come on. You need healing now.”

“You’re a kid,” she said, disbelieving. “Nobody your age in a backwater like this is going to be a real healer.”

“You’re not that much older than me,” I pointed out. “Do you want to take your chances somewhere else?”

Before she could protest again, I cast my Adept-tier Body Scan. I cursed myself for not doing so earlier. Mizuki didn’t look like she had any injuries, but that never meant that I could safely assume a patient was legitimately uninjured.

Sure enough, even with the surface-level scan, I found signs that she’d been hit by something. There were a few parts of her that looked to have been lightly pierced, mostly in the side. In general, she also just looked to be utterly exhausted—I’d seen that more than once, with a patient coming in knowing that they’d just worked far too long but needing to be at full power to work a second shift. I could make that work with some revitalizing energy.

That was theoretically enough to start with, but the other injuries were suspicious. Given how strange this day was already shaping up to be, I was not going to discount this as being something more.

“You know what?” Mizuki grimaced, stumbling down and using me for support. “I’ll see what you can do.”

I escorted her to the patient bed, which she was able to lay herself down on.

It was times like this that made me very glad for the shopping I’d done over the years. The supermajority of what I’d bought had just been mana batteries. Unlike Vallis, I didn’t have a Master-tier mana pool to draw from, which meant that full days were much harder to manage without the bevy of extra mana resources I had. On days where I primarily trained my body core, I would spend my spare time charging all these batteries.

Now, that meant that using Adept-tier spells wasn’t out of the question when it came to healing. I burned another battery on a more focused Body Scan targeting the areas where Mizuki had been injured, checking more deeply there.

I clicked my tongue. “The good news is I think I found your problem. Tell me, were you recently injected with something?”

“Do you always… ask this many questions?”

“When I’m trying to identify why my spell is telling me that you have a serious worm-shaped problem poisoning you under your fifth rib.”

Mizuki froze. “Here?”

She pointed at the spot on her midriff roughly where my Body Scan had identified the problem.

“Yep. That’s the one.”

“Shit,” she said. “That’s not good.”

“I agree!” I said cheerfully. “So do you mind telling me what this is?”

“If I thought the one smartass kid was too much…” Mizuki muttered under her breath.

The one smartass kid? I decided to ignore that for the time being. “So? Anything I should know?”

“It’s my marker,” she said through gritted teeth. “It must have been corrupted.”

I could only guess as to what that meant. My deep scan had revealed that there was a foreign body in her system spitting out poison. While I could and already was neutralizing the poison with my Initiate-tier Cure Poison spell, that was a temporary fix and could only hold for so long before object embedded inside her skin continued doing its job. The information she’d given me wasn’t concrete enough to make any assumptions.

“I’m going to attempt to remove it,” I said. “I need you to hold still. Give me a second.”

Mizuki didn’t protect about me removing it, so I decided that was good enough. I reached into the bag of stuff I’d brought with me. Included in there was an item I’d made frequent use of over the last six years.

The net I’d liberated from the dead body of one of the Southern Star Guild ambushers still rested with me today. The guild had never asked for it back—around a year and a half after the ambush, they had dissolved entirely, most of their members swallowed up by others in the area.

It was designed for Adept-tiers, as far as I could tell. The net needed to be charged, but it could be activated on a number of settings at will once it was charged. Different variants did different things, but all I needed it to do for the time being was hold her still.

I arranged the net so that it would fall over her bare midriff, then activated its lowest setting, adhering it to Mizuki’s body as well as the table.

She immediately started struggling.

“Hey!” I shouted. “I’m trying to help you here. You need to stay still for me to get it out. I can’t dissolve it inside your bloodstream with my magic yet, and I wouldn’t want to risk doing that. Vallis might, but I suspect he’d do the same thing too. Your hands are free. If I make a wrong move, you’ll be able to grab me anyway.”

Mizuki calmed, looking towards me. “Apologies. I wasn’t ready for that to be your operation tool of choice. It brings on bad memories.”

What kind of life have you been living? I didn’t ask the question. I had more important things to do.

From my toolkit, I retrieved a scalpel, which I applied a low-power Heat Ray to in order to rapidly disinfect it. In addition to that, I grabbed a stoppered bottle filled with the paste of a certain plant from one of the shelves. One of the reasons Vallis liked me training in the Ayasi forest was that it was a good source of milkweed, whose flowers produced a fairly strong local anesthetic.

Careful to use gloves so as not to get it on myself, I rubbed it into the area I would be making an incision. The net’s gaps were wide enough that I didn’t need to rearrange it at all for this.

“Tingles,” Mizuki said. “What is that? Numbing potion?”

“Just a local weed,” I said. “Should do something similar, though.”

Her hands went to the side of the bed, gripping them in preparation. I assumed that she had correctly guessed that this plant wasn’t going to do a perfect job.

I couldn’t waste any more time. Another tight Body Scan revealed that the poison was rapidly increasing in volume even though I was continually pumping her with Cure Poison spells, so I placed a gloved hand on the table to stabilize myself and cut into her body.

By now, I had gotten very used to the sight of blood. I’d almost thrown up the first time I’d cut someone else, but tons of training, hunting, and medical practice had shaken that out of me. Ignoring the blood, I cut further inward, using steady but deliberate strokes like Vallis had taught me to pierce towards my target. I used my other hand to spread the wound wider, giving me more access.

Mizuki winced, her grip tightening on the bedframe, but she didn’t move.

Casting the inferior version of Body Scan every couple of seconds, I opened the incision deep enough to get to my target.

When the tip of the scalpel made contact with something hard and scaly and decidedly not organlike, the thing started moving wildly. Mizuki hissed out a sound of pain.

I acted quickly, slashing at it with the scalpel. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing, but it worked.

Apparently identifying me as a threat instead of the inside of her body, it skittered up the length of my scalpel and outside Mizuki in a burst of blood like a much less lethal chestburster.

It was the length of my hand from the base of my palm to the tip of my middle finger. The creature, if it was one, was metallic, covered in blood, and moved fast. My Sixth Sense pinged on it as it jumped outwards towards me, and I pulled the scalpel out just quick enough to avoid slashing Mizuki as it tried to crawl its way onto my arm.

I dodged it, and it clattered to the floor, then leaped again.

Thinking fast, I dumped everything else out of my toolkit, narrowly avoiding it again before trying to seize on something, anything with Harmonic Empathy.

This had to be a living creature, right? There had to be something in there. I reached out as I tried to predict its movements, and… there. I found something.

Harmonic Empathy is evolving!

Harmonic Empathy -> Empathic Insight [Initiate]

It’s about time. I had passively been training this skill for years, but I hadn’t had many opportunities to use it in the situations where skills thrived—that was to say, combat.

This barely qualified, but this thing was literally spitting poison. I found that out pretty quickly. It spat something at me while I was grabbing the toolbox and trying to resonate with it, and it landed on my legs. The acid or poison or whatever it was landed on my bare shin, and it burned.

I didn’t bother healing myself, instead focusing on the little creature. Its emotions weren’t immediately apparent, but I found a thread I could pull on. While my brief insight into its mind was confused and mostly incomprehensible, it was enough to give me some impression as to where it would move next. 

With Flowing Harmony ensuring I had perfect control over my body, it was easy enough to make the moves necessary to dive where the creature was going and slam the toolkit down on it, trapping it between the upside-down box and the ground.

Only then did I finally cast Cure Poison on myself. Its poison had some acid component to it, making it pierce through my skin enough to start doing some damage, but I was able to clear it out effectively enough.

I limped over to Mizuki’s side, wincing, and started tending to her as well. The violent the metallic worm-like thing had messed up her insides. Her skin shone with a layer of sweat, her breaths rattling as she controlled them, but a brief scan told me that she wasn’t in immediate danger of death.

From there, it was routine. I cured the last of the poison before patching her up, directing a Heal spell targeted at the flesh. As it knitted itself together, I used some of my remaining hot water to wet a rag, then used it to wipe the dried blood and sweat off of her. The net came off right after that.

“How do you feel?” I asked her.

“Like shit,” Mizuki croaked. “But… better.”

“Some water,” I said, handing her a glass and conjuring some. “Drink. It’ll help a little, but healing fatigue is going to have to go away on its own. Just try to relax for a bit.”

“Thank you. How old did you say you were?”

“Twelve,” I said.

She whistled. “Better than half the healers back home, and those were all adults.”

“Home,” I repeated.

Mizuki downed the rest of her water in one gulp and got to her feet, extending a hand. “I forget my manners. The name’s just Mizuki right now, but I’ve had some other names in my time. Adept-tier unarmed combat specialist, working on my breakthrough to Master. I just turned fifteen a week ago, so reaching that would put me in the ten youngest Masters in the world. I’m from down south.”

I raised an eyebrow, shaking her hand. “Ren Kane, but you knew that. Initiate-tier healer. I’m from around these parts. I turned twelve today. Also, you owe me twenty silver.”

“Right. Payment.” She dug a coinpouch out from behind her, riffling through it with a hesitancy that betrayed an unfamiliarity with the currency. “Twenty… five. Here we go.”

“The price is twenty.”

“The other five is for not talking about that,” she said, nodding at the box I’d trapped the worm-thing under.

“Price is still twenty,” I said. “I won’t talk about it if you just answer a couple questions about it for my curiosity.”

“You swear?” she asked.

“On my father’s honor,” I said sincerely.

“You’re still getting twenty-five silver.” She handed me the coins, which I decided to take instead of fighting against.

“So about this,” I said, pointing at the box. “Should I try to kill it or something? I still need that box.”

“The first thing you need to know—“ Mizuki started.

My Sixth Sense flared.

“Get down!” we shouted at each other simultaneously.

I was midway through taking my advice when Mizuki tackled me, sending me tumbling to the ground.

The bell at the door rang almost exactly at the same time, followed by an arrow piercing straight through the wall between rooms, screaming right through the space I’d been standing in, and sinking in the wall on the other side to the shaft.

If it hadn’t been for Mizuki knocking me down—well, I probably still would have dodged it, but if it had hit, I would probably have been dead.

This day just keeps getting stranger.