Reborn Healer Chapter 55

In a secluded, heavily restricted section of the Federation underground, Sebastian and a handful of mages specially picked for this task unleashed devastation on the Grancrest guild’s village.

The process was simple, but simple didn’t mean easy. It required a good deal of precision to get the timing right without also letting the plague spread to themselves.

From the Kane clinic, Sebastian’s contact had identified and stolen a box loaded with the amputated body parts of mercenaries had only been grazed by the plague. While Sebastian had a much harder time foreseeing or working around events when that boy was involved, sellswords were a different story. With Ren out of the picture, he’d formed a more complete understanding of the situation.

With these tools and very careful usage of very expensive equipment, the Federation had ground the pieces of plague down into powder, which they had then re-packed into small capsules.

There was precious little known about the mysterious new strain of plague that had started impacting adventurers and military expeditions in the south, but a few points had become clear through thorough investigation.

Like many magical plagues, it differed from a typical disease. Rather than spread silently, incubating in its hosts and potentially bringing a population to its knees, this one was used more like an area-of-effect weapon. It spread violently at first, but after its initial spread, it typically only continued to affect new people through magical means. Many plagues compensated for that with sheer devastating power.

This one was no exception. Though there were a number of mechanisms through which it could be spread quickly, especially during its initial activation, there was one insidious one that practically guaranteed an explosive outburst. It was sensitive to healing magic and would not only spread but reproduce itself by infecting the mana itself. If someone was directly struck by the plague, they were almost certainly dead. Only those who suffered the splash effects of someone else dying could get a strain mild enough to survive the experience.

Even those seemingly mild pieces of the plague could be cultivated, though, and that was precisely what Sebastian was doing now.

Every capsule of crushed skin and bone and plague residue that went through the portal was followed shortly after by a potent healing brew packed into a multi-gallon container, which one mage accelerated before Sebastian himself detonated triggers he had placed within them to both widen the area the fluid—and, thereafter, the plague—would cover as well as activate the healing mana in the potion, drawing the Nightmare to it.

It was a tricky balance to strike, doing that in a manner where it would spread properly without risking the integrity of the portal, but the Federation only accepted the exceptional.

Soon, the Lord Prince would arrive. Gerald Halcyon would not be able to tolerate such an event occuring on his land, but by then the portal would long be closed. Scouts from the Federation had just so happened to be making an aggressive patrol today on Sebastian’s direct recommendation, and strike teams were already mobilizing for what was sure to be a decisive battle.

With how the timing worked out, the Lord Prince would see a plague-infested Grancrest guild, likely assuming some kind of experiment had gone wrong. Then, the Federation would show up, Sebastian himself in tow, providing support to the military right when they needed it. Things would go wrong in just the right way, and the Federation would inevitably come out on top.

“Initial deployments are done, sir,” the mage accelerating the potions said. “We have—“

“Full coverage, yes,” Sebastian finished, nodding. “Good work, everyone.”

He snapped his fingers, and the portal snapped shut.

Time to get to work.

#

“Oh, fuck me,” I groaned.

From the shouts of alarm around me, I could guess that the sentiment was pretty similar across the board. There was were a few quick exchanges of confused, hostile glances between each side, everyone trying to figure out who the source of this was, but that quickly morphed into straight-up panic.

The plague billowed out through the scattered potions, forming clouds so dark they blocked out the sun, casting a broad shadow over all of us.

They didn’t stay that shape for long, though. Those weren’t real clouds. Though the plague had spread through the potion liquid in instants, it hadn’t changed their composition so much that the droplets wouldn’t still fall on us the same way.

Its effect on the battlefield was immediate. The constant exchange of arrows and spells had completely stopped, everyone instead trying to find a spot of cover for themselves.

Well, not quite. The Grancrest people and a handful of the mercenaries were trying to create cover with spells and shields and other, more esoteric methods, but the bulk of the latter, Cale’s group included in its entirety, were just booking it, throwing caution to the winds as they sprinted away.

Beside me, Locke’s dark aura had lessened until the unnaturally pale boy’s face was visible again.

Bright blue eyes shone with a sharp, unforgiving light as he considered me.

“You’re on your own,” he said. “I have done what I can.”

I was about to ask what that meant when he did the exact same thing he’d done during our reunion, dissolving into a living mess of electricity.

Locke had been restricted by the indoors space last time, I realized. I was still concentrating on my Doubletime, and even then, he literally bolted off into the distance faster than I could follow, a blue bolt of lightning streaking sideways beneath a plague-infested sky.

Cale’s entire group immediately ditching their objective to run away had already been fear-inspiring, since I knew for a fact that his group had come into direct contact with the plague, but Locke was a different story.

I didn’t know if the kid who was almost certainly a demon had any direct connections to the Nightmare, but my mother had implied that they ran in the same circles. For something to scare him enough to immediately cut loose and run away at maximum speed was pretty terrible news.

I made to follow as quickly as I could, but I knew I wasn’t going to be fast enough. In terms of position, Cale’s group had a massive head start, and Locke’s spell made him move far faster than I could dream of. All I had was Doubletime and Dash, which was an admittedly potent combo but not nearly enough for me to clear the quarter mile gap between us and then more.

In that case, it was better for me not to waste my energy on trying to avoid it. Given Cale’s group’s reaction, I had my doubts on how effective shielding myself against this would be, but any kind of mitigation was definitively better than doing nothing at all. I had been capable of taking a hit of some plague without suffering too bad when I’d been healing mercenaries who’d been affected by it, but that was a very clearly different amount of infection from what was falling on me now.

In lieu of any real idea of how to defend against the black rain, I surrounded myself with multiple layers of Shield.

“I have got to get a better set of defensive spells,” I muttered to myself. “If I make it out of this alive, I’m stealing from the library.”

Assuming I even returned to the Federation. Information I’d gotten during my interrogation had led me to the conclusion that Sebastian, who’d been so apparently willing to accommodate us and welcome us into his guild, had intentionally leaked information about who Mizuki was. I already hadn’t been planning on staying for long, but that was the kind of thing I couldn’t let go by. I doubted she would, either.

Focus.

I needed to keep Doubletime up while I held those Shields. In the past, the spell’s effect to induce exhaustion upon me corresponding to the amount of action I took during the period it was active had rarely been relevant, since combats had usually ended before it could kick in too badly.

Now, though, I couldn’t risk the lapse in focus that letting the spell end would inevitably bring, so I kept it as active.

My Danger Sense popped in a dozen more delicate ways as the black rain made contact with my protective spells.

If I had been a higher tier, I might have been able to weave through it. I could picture Iryn or my mother dancing through the rain, moving at an inhuman pace and dodging an unavoidable attack.

Unfortunately, I had nowhere near their level of agility. I could avoid the worst patches of it, but there was nothing I could do to no-sell the falling plague itself.

The liquid that made contact with my defenses acted more like a thick acid than water, burning a hole through the first layer with ease. The second one didn’t last much longer, and the third faltered but held.

That was just the first large drop. It was not unaccompanied. The plague rain sizzled through my outer shield, swiss-cheesing it and rendering it completely useless within moments. My second and third layers of protection slowed it by some, but it really was just some. All the spells could do was slow the inevitable.

I could delay it further by just using more magic, though. Every time one Shield went down, I could replace it with another. It was still a losing battle, but it would at least let me stall a little longer.

The others around me were experiencing similar issues and were doing the same spell layering tactic, but not everyone had been lucky enough to have someone with the capacity to cast protective spells. Bodies littered the ground, nearly unrecognizable from how much of them had been properly melted through.

Armor didn’t seem like a great source of protection from the plague, either. It wasn’t burning through plated steel nearly as effectively as it did through flesh or magic, but even now, I could see a fully armored man writhing and screaming in pain on the ground, his armor pocked with a bevy of holes large enough to put a fist through.

At least I didn’t have to listen to dying screams for too long. Each one was horrifically loud, undercut by incredible agony, but they lasted for only moments before the plague-infested person died.

The plague killed fast. Seeing it actually work made me wonder how any of the mercenaries had managed to survive this, but my answer came shortly after when one of the bodies abruptly seemed to deflate, too run through by the plague. A thin cloud of dark dust puffed out of the corpse, spore-like pieces of the Nightmare bursting outwards.

That secondary effect didn’t have the same potency as the actual primary weapon, I assumed. It was still kind of nasty that it could spread like that.

Who was even using this? Given the portal, I had guessed that it was the Federation acting on us, but it was possible that someone else had the same technology. Leyeril was the source of the weapon, but they wouldn’t just randomly attack a guild here. The elves? I felt like that had the same problem.

Maybe it was the Federation who’d dropped this on us, in which case my question became how the hell did they get this? Had someone preserved a piece of the plague?

My shields were failing even as I mulled that over, and I did my best to push the thoughts aside as I tossed another layer up.

Like I’d realized earlier, though, I just didn’t have the capability to keep myself fully protected. I was a fantastic healer, but I was only a pretty good defensive mage. I couldn’t juggle all my spells at a rate good enough to prevent anything from leaking through, and a few drops sizzled through my dome shield while I was trying to cycle a new layer in.

I did my best to dodge what I could, but it wasn’t just the direct impact I needed to worry about. Everything that missed me hit the ground and billowed out into an oily black cloud of the same sort that I’d seen in the dream capsules. While it didn’t have the same oomph as a direct hit, I knew from experience that getting caught up in that would have roughly the same effects.

I also couldn’t dodge everything. The drops started hitting me, sizzling as they burned into my flesh. The pain was… not as bad as I had feared it would be. If I had to liken it to any of the myriad ways I had injured myself before, I would probably think of it as similar to being burnt.

What was worrying was the way that burning sensation proceeded through my blood, coursing through me and tearing through my body from the inside out.

I resisted the urge to immediately shoot a Heal through my internals, knowing that doing so would only exacerbate the effects of the plague. All I could do was wait and see where it settled, hoping that it didn’t go anywhere too bad.

My heart pumped blood through my body, sending the plague throughout it. Looking down as I continued cycling Shield spells, I could see the trademark dark lines where the weapon was running through my body.

I didn’t experience a sudden shock of increased pain, though, which I suspected was thanks to my own affinity with the Nightmare. This was the kind of situation where I really wanted to check myself with Body Scan, but my defensive spell cycle was too important for me to do anything but continue devoting as much of my focus as possible to it.

The pain didn’t get any worse, at least, even though more of it was clearly getting onto me. I stopped trying to dodge the drops as they burned past my shields, just letting them accumulate on me. Preventing myself from being overwhelmed by the thickening clouds of plague now blotting out visibility all around me was a higher priority than keeping myself dry from plague drops that weren’t proving to be all that lethal against me.

Even then, the ones that were missing were kicking up a notable cloud of their own now, rising steadily. Soon enough, it was going to get to the point where I couldn’t not inhale it.

I doubted anyone other than those with perfect shielding was alive around me anymore. I couldn’t see anything, but Nightmare’s Call was steadily picking up on fewer and fewer notes of sudden distress. Since I hadn’t picked the upgrade option that would have made my Empathic Insight a much better surveillance skill, I could barely get more than the direction of those feelings. From the count alone, though, I estimated several dozen people were already dead.

The plague cloud was nearing my chest now. After a few more seconds, I was going to have to inhale it.

It had already affected me to some degree, but I really didn’t want to see what would happen if it got into my lungs. I couldn’t hold my breath forever, though. Even though I could survive while oxygen wasn’t making it to my brain, I couldn’t suppress the biological reflex to inhale. Briefly, I considered intentionally drowning myself so I would choke on water instead of plague, but the healing required to keep myself alive in that case would bring that plague soaring straight at me.

Hm. That gave me an idea. It wasn’t a great idea and quite possibly not even good, but I didn’t like the alternatives any more.

Executing on it required me to let my Shield cycle slip, but I could accept that. Though I’d been hit by a pretty solid number of plague drops now, I wasn’t suffering much beyond the internal burning. A few more making it through was a more appealing prospect than having to breathe this shit in.

Sure enough, as I lowered the pace at which I was defending myself, the pain increased, but it was still tolerable.

The second I had enough mana and focus free, I cast a spell I hadn’t worked on in a while.

“Healing Aura!”

The Initiate-tier spell was supposed to be used in the field, often by non-healers who needed something that could keep them in the battle without too much skill. It provided relatively weak healing even if cast perfectly, but it came with the benefit of being able to heal oneself or anyone within a decent range.

Here, its purpose wasn’t any actual healing. I just needed the healing mana in the air. One significant use case I’d had with Healing Aura was its capability to heal multiple people at the same time by freely manipulating rejuvenating energy in the area around me.

I concentrated a mass of it further from my body, and sure enough, the cloud slowly enveloping me jumped at it, tendrils reaching out and grasping my accumulated mana.

Unfortunately, the moment it chased the thread of healing magic to the “source” and found nothing, it immediately started enveloping me again.

I’d barely even noticed, but the part of the plague cloud that had made contact with me had seeped through my clothes, burning my skin the same way the drops had. Unlike the hard-hitting drops, it didn’t seem to penetrate far past my skin.

The same didn’t seem to hold true for other people, so I counted myself lucky on that count. Still, this wasn’t working the way things were progressing. I really did not want to give this direct access to my lungs.

Thinking fast, I canceled my shields entirely and focused the entirety of the magic within the Healing Aura into my right hand.

Plague drops hit my now-exposed face, sinking into my skin. I shut my eyes and lowered my head, relying on my Harmonic Awareness and Danger Sense to weave my way away from the worst of it. It was too dark to see anything thanks to the plague anyway, so I just relied on my senses.

My readjusted plan worked perfectly, inasmuch as forcing all the plague in my immediate direction to sink into my hand could be quantified as a plan working.

But beyond worsening pain, the Nightmare plague just didn’t seem to have that deep of an effect on me. My hand had taken the worst of it, especially since it had already been affected by plague from my previous patients, but even then it didn’t seem to be too bad.

I took a Body Scan, checking over everything. It registered yellowish-green across most of my body, almost all of which had now been hit at least once by plague, and a deep orange on my right hand.

Okay. I could work with this.

I turned in the direction I remembered to be the way out, then paused.

The entire village had been affected by this weapon. There was always the possibility that someone came in to clean up afterwards, but if it was the Federation, I highly doubted they had a way to proceed before Neferi’s plague cleared up.

I had no idea how many people were still alive around me, but surely everyone was either dead or sheltering.

My lifeline called to me more strongly than ever.

I took a second to think about it, more confident in my survival now that I had a way to redirect the plague away from my breath. On the one hand, it was possible that the defenses had stayed active and that I would encounter any number of problems trying to get back in.

On the other, I had sensed a lot of people die.

“Fuck it,” I said out loud, my voice swallowed by the oddly insulating darkness of the plague. “Here goes nothing.”

I turned around and started sprinting back towards the gallows.