Reborn Healer Chapter 44

Sebastian had just about finished with the issues of the day. It had been a narrow thing, but he had always specialized at threading the needle. Guild wars were a tough trick. While they operated on the land of a kingdom, there were certain expectations and exceptions that could be made for them so long as those expectations met.

Case in point: a war could be completely legally waged on kingdom ground without the Halcyon military intervening so long as it was done quietly and didn’t disturb the peace too much. Guild wars were handled through assassinations, kidnappings, and subterfuge. Every quest from Grancrest or the Federation that headed into the World Dungeon around Liaren would have to watch their backs lest saboteurs from the other guild find and kill them or worse.

Normally, this would be further complicated by the competing guilds in the city as well as alliances made by Grancrest, but with the leverage of the planned tragedy, he had been able to strong-arm the other guilds into nonaction.

If all went well, by year’s end and the oncoming issues in the south, Liaren’s underbelly would be entirely controlled by the Federation.

There had been some slight wrenches thrown into the plan, but everything had been going well.

Problems had only come when he had turned his eye onto managing his new recruits. With his divination and surveillance spells, it was usually easy enough, but this year there was at least one recruit who outright could not be detected by the former and a handful who were good at avoiding the latter.

Unable to find Ren Kane, he had wandered around a while to check on the defenses. Not finding any gaps, Sebastian had decided that he was definitely still within the headquarters. He simulated going down to talk to his roommate, the young half-elf who he seemed to be generally inseparable from.

Frustratingly, even that interfered with his spells, so he had come down in person, greeted the new guild adventurers, and spoken with Mizuki in private.

She’d directed him to the library, where Rekha the librarian had been wide-eyed to see him and deeply apologetic.

Eventually, he’d found Ren in an area of a library that was strictly off-limits to those without certain authorizations. There were a few dozen people in the guild who could access the memory capsule room, but they were all gold-rank adventurers or above, not entry-rank Adepts like Ren.

That would have been flabbergasting enough on its own, but he found Ren in the middle of a trance. From the blood scattered on the ground and the signs of use of other capsules, Sebastian had deduced that this was his fourth.

People didn’t just do that. Wandering into memories was taxing on the soul and mind, which led to problems with the body. Memory capsuling was a critical method of transporting information that could go through expensive size-limited long-range portals or be sent by bird, transmitting news faster than a normal courier could, but it was specialized.

Consuming just one of them could put a heavy burden on anyone, which meant extensive ritual preparation was almost always necessary even for the mages who specialized in information logistics. Sebastian wouldn’t even trust himself to check memories via capsule-trancing unless he had prepared himself properly.

It was clear that no such preparation had occurred here. In the first place, Ren shouldn’t even have been here, and there was no way he’d had anyone tell him what to do properly.

And he’d gone through four. Sebastian had seen one of his mages get addicted to the rush of experiencing others’ memories. That poor soul had gone through three separate capsules with no preparation, thinking he had built up enough of a tolerance, and he’d been babblingly incoherent for weeks after.

Ren looked like he’d had a rough go of things, but even with the bleeding, he looked healthier than he had coming out of the World Dungeon.

Just to be sure, Sebastian tried casting one of his postcognition spells to determine what the boy had done.

Once again, it failed, swallowed up by spiderwebbing darkness centered on the void in front of him.

Sebastian was certain the boy did not know why or how he was doing this. In fact, based on his previous reactions, Ren very possibly did not even know he was like this.

“How did you get here?” Sebastian asked.

The youngest mage in the history of the Liaren Federation branch froze, looking up at Sebastian guiltily. His expression blanked shortly after, and he finished the recapsulation process for memory 145.

Leyeril, Sebastian recalled. The execution of Neferi Whitefall.

Why had the boy looked for this?

“I asked for information,” Ren said defiantly. “The librarian showed me this.”

Sebastian recalled seeing her. He had only needed his passive abilities to tell that she had been briefly influenced by magic of some kind. It wouldn’t be permanent.

It was ridiculous that he had found himself in his situation. Children never even factored into the Federation commander’s plans except when he was determining acceptable casualties. Now, there was a boy who hadn’t even hit puberty who Sebastian could not ignore breaking rules that the commander had thought were fundamental.

He was a Grandmaster with well more than thrice the experience that this Adept boy had, and somehow, Sebastian found a hint of fear in his own heart.

He needed to give the boy a way out of this if he wanted more information, he suspected. Either Ren would cooperate, or he would find the rope to hang himself with. One way or another, Sebastian needed to ensure the security of his plans.

There were two ways to deal with the boy: get him under the Federation’s control or eliminate him entirely. If the latter, Sebastian preferred not to do it himself. Not only would it taint the guild’s image if it ever got out, which it likely would, it also didn’t provide him many opportunities. There was much that the death of a child could be twisted into fueling.

While he could not predict this boy with magic, he was still a talented politician beneath the magic. He would find a way to get the boy to fall into one or both of his victory conditions.

#

“Did you really just ask?” Sebastian asked me. “I spoke to the librarian.”

Was that supposed to mean anything? I’d gathered by now that Sebastian was one of those mastermind types who was much more effective in the office than he was on the field. Was he implying he knew that I had used Nightmare’s Call on someone?

I shrugged. “Yeah, I asked. Then she led me here. Should I not have?”

“She shouldn’t have,” Sebastian replied evenly. “Leaving that aside, you shouldn’t be consuming these memory capsules. I assume you’ve tried a few now.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Four. Was it not allowed? I didn’t see any signs saying that.”

“You could have killed yourself,” he said mildly. “Memory capsules place a great strain on the soul. Without adequate preparation, you risk insanity, death, or worse fates.”

Huh. Had I really? Danger Sense hadn’t gone off once, and I knew by now that it would trigger off of even indirectly harmful objects.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “Though if me being down here is a concern, I’m just about finished anyway. This seems useful, though. I’d rather it not be restricted.”

“It is useful,” Sebastian said. “Capsule trancing is useful because we can find insights the original taker could not, especially with certain modifying magics, but you must have realized that it comes with risks by now.”

That tracked with my experience. Not all of my skills had worked and none of my spells had, but Danger Sense and Nightmare’s Call had functioned just fine.

Ultimately, I had obtained a lot of information, but I didn’t have enough to conclude anything. I had a few leads and information that was outright concerning about Leyeril, but I had yet to completely determine what our connection was.

That said, I wasn’t sure what I could do to find more. Ideally, going to our neighboring country myself and finding information from the source would lead me to a closer answer, but I was still a bit young to travel internationally on my own. Doing so was expensive, dangerous, and probably inadvisable especially right now when relations between Halcyon and Leyeril were worse than friendly but not quite hostile.

“Ren,” Sebastian said, reminding me that I still had a guild official in front of me. “You still are not permitted to be in here.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “Yeah, sure. I can get out of here. I have a few questions since you’re here, though.”

Sebastian nodded. “You may ask them as we walk.”

As he escorted me out of the capsule room and back into the library, I considered the list of questions I had. I’d generated a few new ones thanks to my experience in the dream capsules, but there were a few pertaining to the ongoing events involving Grancrest that I still held.

“How long until the lockdown ends?” I asked.

“Until we reach an agreement with Grancrest.” I mentally translated that to I have no idea.

“Will we be engaged in guild quests during the lockdown?”

“Normal ones will be reduced, and we will do our best to ensure that initiates are kept safe from the ones involving the guild conflict.” Okay, so that meant no, probably.

“Will we be permitted to leave the guild during that time for personal reasons?”

“For your safety, no. We cannot spare the resources to protect new guild initiates, and due to the possible presence of a leak, we believe that it is likely that Grancrest knows the identities of this year’s initiates. You are too valuable to us to risk.” Another no. That was incredibly annoying, and I had my own suspicions as to what he meant by a suspected leak.

“Are we just going to be training, then?”

“Mostly, yes. There may be some quests within the shallower levels of the World Dungeon, but for the time being, your safety is our number one priority.”

That summed up the bulk of my questions with respect to what was going to be happening during the lockdown. I had a couple more, but given how this was going so far, I doubted that they were going to go anywhere.

“Do you know what’s happening south of Liaren?”

“Skirmishes with elves,” Sebastian said. “They are deeper in Halcyon territory than they have come before, and they are deploying new kinds of weaponry.”

“Does that have anything to do with what on in Leyeril?”

“Not as far as I am aware.”

I couldn’t tell if Sebastian was lying or not. Though there were a number of aspects about this entire affair that made me deeply suspicious, that was just me thinking logically and separating myself from the minor manipulations he had used to convince the bulk of the new initiates. Nightmare’s Call, even at Adept, couldn’t come close to decoding his thoughts. 

The timing was suspicious. Neferi had died on my twelfth birthday, which had been… what, three or four months ago? Closer to four. Sure, Leyeril was a separate country and had no affiliation with the elven kingdom down south at all, but with Neferi having played a part in creating a new magical weapon, I had to wonder.

It was unlikely that I was going to get the answer here, though.

“Are you aware of the new magic created in Leyeril?”

“I am. It is being managed. The Federation has agents in many countries, including the courier whose memories you saw.”

I had figured as much.

“Can we make an exception for personal reasons?” I asked. “I run a clinic that deals with hundreds of patients a week. There are other doctors present, but the primary one can only be there a few days a week.”

I figured he would probably say no, but it was worth asking.

Sure enough, it seemed like he was going to immediately turn me down, but my Nightmare’s Call caught something. The regional commander opened his mouth, then hesitated. He was weighing the possibilities for something.

I had a bad feeling about this, one that came from instincts both magical and not. Sebastian had a quality to him that always made me feel like I was around a hungry lion that could lunge at me at any time, and my Danger Sense never stopped going off around him. Whatever he was calculating right now, I doubted it was going to be favorable for me. If it was, it would probably also incidentally benefit him.

“An allowance can be made,” Sebastian ultimately decided. “In exchange for certain services.”

“Those being?”

“We both know that even though you qualified as a combat mage, your affinities are not in combat,” he said. “If you could lend your capabilities as a healer to the Federation for a couple of hours a day, we could arrange for you to return to your clinic on certain days of the week.”

Huh. That was a lot more lenient than I had expected it to be. I looked for the catch, but couldn’t immediately find one.

“I see you have a curiosity in using the guild’s resources for intelligence,” Sebastian continued. “If you would like more, it is very possible for us to launch a formal investigation at the request of a higher-ranked guild member. And it is quite possible for you to reach that level.”

Ah. Okay. I could see his angle shoot now. He wanted to tie me to the Federation. I was clearly an anomaly here, and Sebastian probably didn’t understand me as well as he did Mizuki. According to her, he was aware at least on some level of what her status was and was thus trying to use her for political purposes, which she was fine with so long as he maintained the guild duty to protect its members.

I, on the other hand, was a very young healer who had registered as a combat mage while using a spear to fight. Vallis was well-known and Aria was extremely secretive, which added up to a lot of question marks about me.

I could live with him wanting to control me. It was just quid pro quo. I wanted to use his organization, anyway, so it worked out.

“Sure,” I said. “When can I start?”