Reborn Healer Chapter 35

Waiting for the group phase of the examination took significantly longer than my similar wait for the one-on-one combat mage segments had been earlier. The guild had planned for this, it seemed, providing a long table stocked with various kinds of local snacks and even proper food and all types of drinks for those of us who’d finished early.

Given what I now knew, I was a bit hesitant to grab any of the food they’d laid out. That said, even if they had somehow laced the food, there were a whole lot of prospective guild members here who were also eating and drinking without problems, and I had spells to cure poisons anyway.

Mizuki had no such reservations. By the time we sat down on an empty bench, she had a plate piled full of cheese, crackers, and various cuts of meat.

“You know we still have a whole ‘nother stage ahead of us, right?” I asked her.

“Mhm,” she said after cramming a full stack of what looked like everything on her plate put together. “I digest fast.”

“I noticed that,” I said. “Listen, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

“Mm?”

“Ran into someone who said they were coming after you earlier,” I said.

“Mmm. Hmm?”

“Do you want to finish chewing first?”

Mizuki swallowed. “I said that that’s odd. Are you sure they were looking for me? What exactly did they say?”

“That is not what you said.” I toyed with my lifeline idly. “And yes. My name was apparently mentioned as well.”

I caught her up to speed with what Thaddeus had given up.

“You beat his ass, right?” she asked.

“Thoroughly.”

“Good.” Mizuki sighed. “The elves must have done this. My identity is paper-thin, but I had hoped it would stall them for longer.”

“That’s the thing,” I said. “I don’t think this is the elves.”

“How so?”

“They didn’t know what you looked like. No physical description, no real name, just the one you registered under with the city.”

“That is interesting.” She understood the implications. While it was very possible that the elven kingdom had done recon and identified her name, it was equally as unlikely that they would put up open offers on quest boards searching for her false identity without any clues for prospective finders. “It’s not how they do things, either.”

“How do they handle this, typically?” I asked. “I’m not very acquainted with them.”

“With violence, blackmail, and a great deal of prejudice.” Mizuki stood. “I finished my plate. I’m going to get another one.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

She did appear to be using slightly more caution now, though I knew she was always on edge thanks to her reconnaissance skills.

Eventually, I also grabbed some snacks which turned out to not, in fact, be poisoned. Slowly, more applicants filtered in, each of them in various states of exhaustion. A good chunk had clearly been healed from some damage, blood staining torn finery and weariness showing on their faces.

When all was said and done, less than a quarter of the people I’d seen in the starting hall had made their way to the meadow where the waiting zone for the final stage of the entrance examination by the time Sebastian appeared and spoke again, once again using a spell of some kind to project his voice to everyone.

“Congratulations on your progress thus far,” he said. “Do not get your hopes up too high. The fact that you are present here means that you meet the absolute bare minimum requirements to be a guild-certified adventurer. It’s a shame that your numbers are still as few as they are, but at ninety-six of you, you represent the largest fundamentally competent class in the last decade. This is an age of progress, I hear. It’s good to see results.

“For the final phase, you will create a party of no less than three and no more than seven individuals. This area contains an entrance to a minor branch of the World Dungeon. We have taken liberties to confine which areas are accessible such that you cannot make your way into the deeper levels, but accidents may occur nonetheless.

“Apart from this, the natural ecosystems of the World Dungeon will remain unchanged. Hidden in this segment of the dungeon are twelve treasure boxes that look like this.”

Sebastian held his hands out, images of differently-colored simple fastened boxes maybe two feet to a side appearing before him.

“Each of these boxes contain a different precious material,” Sebastian continued. “Deep obsidian, Master-tier mana crystals, truesteel, and imperial gold, to name a few.”

That got a reaction out of the gathered applicants. I recognized the materials he mentioned. Deep obsidian, obviously, was what my lifeline and Mizuki’s whip-sword were composed of, but the other materials were also pretty wild. Truesteel was supposed to be literally unbreakable by conventional means and only shapeable by very specialized equipment, while imperial gold was a key component in a number of incredibly powerful ritual spells.

“Whoever obtains the box will be designated a formal group leader and may designate their group members as they wish. You also have the right to whatever is in the box, which you may choose to distribute amongst group members at your discretion.

“Any group who has formalized around a box will automatically pass this phase of the exam. Anyone else, including those who require medical evacuation or perish, will be evaluated on the strength of their performance within the World Dungeon.”

He didn’t specify how exactly that would be measured, but I could guess that since he had tried to use some kind of perception spell on me, he would be doing the same for all of us in the World Dungeon.

Also, the design of the final exam was devious. I could see how the rules for this would test teamwork beyond just the ability to fight with one another.

Fortunately, I had no plans on dealing with the politics of a group who was going to fight over a box.

I looked at Mizuki, who looked right back at me.

“Sure, if I haaaave to,” she said, a corner of her lip quirking up.

Around us, others were similarly forming factions. A good number of them seemed like they’d been preparing for this prior to the exams actually starting, finding others in the crowd and joining up into groups of five or six.

Conversely, there were also a few loners who were struggling to find a group. Some of them were banding together, but they were definitely less organized, with party compositions that just wouldn’t work out. One or two of the luckier ones were accepted into the larger pre-made parties, their skills or spells filling in holes for those who had planned to join this phase but hadn’t made it so far.

Even then, there were a few who didn’t have a group. Of the dozen or so who remained, the majority carried themselves in a different manner from the ones I mentally termed the “prep kids” and the hastily-formed sets. They ignored any attempts at teaming up from the other stragglers and didn’t ask any of the prep kids if they could join.

Thaddeus, I noted, was one of the latter group. That was a touch surprising, given that his family owned one of the more notable Northside magical academies for children and young teenagers. Maybe he had something to prove.

Nobody tried to approach Mizuki nor me. I didn’t blame them, and I was happier for it. We knew now that Mizuki had a massive target on her back, and nobody really wanted to touch it. I wondered if rumors of what had happened to Thaddeus had spread. He was evidently skilled enough to make it to this final stage, but he still had a ton of dried blood covering his midsection and a noticeable tear in his robes from where I’d stabbed him.

Eventually, one way or another, everyone had decided who they’d be moving forward with.

“I see some of you have chosen to go it alone,” Sebastian said disapprovingly. “I feel it prudent to remind you that there is always the individual path. The Federation promotes unity amongst our members. Additionally, do remember that you must be with a party for your acquisition of a box to be considered a box.”

That didn’t change anything. None of the people who had decided to stick it out on their own moved to find a squad.

Sebastian shrugged. “You have been warned. You may now proceed. All entrances to the World Dungeon fragment are accessible within a mile from this location.”

Just like that, he walked off, signaling for the ropes bounding the waiting zone in to be cut.

“That was anticlimactic,” I muttered.

“No point wasting energy when the result’s going to be the same,” Mizuki said. “Shall we go?”

“Yeah. I sure hope you’ve got a way to track those boxes.”

“I can look for them.” She shrugged. “No guarantees. At worst, we just find another group and steal it from them, no?”

“I guess that’s a possibility, too. Aren’t we a little underarmed for that?”

“Did you struggle against anyone?” Mizuki raised both of her eyebrows, looking genuinely surprised.

I shrugged. “I lost once. See that blue-haired girl leading that five-man there? Her name’s Flare. She got me.”

“In a fight?”

“You could call it that.”

“You wouldn’t lose to her in an actual battle, surely,” Mizuki said, watching as Flare’s group marched off in a direction that I was reasonably sure was due north.

“Probably not. Still, I don’t think I could comfortably take her and her entire team.”

“We’ll see. Should we take one of their entrances?”

Mizuki and I walked and talked, vaguely shadowing Flare’s group. We weren’t the only ones doing that—everywhere a pre-made group went, others followed behind at a safe distance. This area was thinly wooded and featured a ton of tall grass, so it would be easy to miss any small entrances into it.

We were trailing further behind than anyone else was. Both of us had skills that allowed for pretty great surveillance. Mizuki had something that I was pretty sure gave her something like a map of her surroundings, while I could identify people and other living beings from a pretty fair distance if they had an emotional spike.

The pre-made groups all had someone acting as their tracker, so following them to an entrance was a pretty natural way to get to one. Thanks to Matias, I knew that there was actual equipment that dungeon divers would typically use in order to map out the World Dungeon and locate fetch quest items within, but we hadn’t been equipped with any of them today.

I didn’t stress it that much. While this was the final exam, it also wasn’t the only thing that would be taken into consideration for guild membership. I wanted to treat this more as a test run for future missions than as a serious part of the exam. Realistically, the fact that we’d already garnered the regional commander’s attention and done well in our individual exams meant that we had good chances at getting in even if we didn’t do well in the final phase.

“Honestly, all I want is the deep obsidian,” I said, twirling my lifeline in my hand. “This is a nice weight, but it’d be nice to have a weapon I’ll still be able to use as I get older.”

“I’d like some truesteel myself,” Mizuki said. “I left my buckler behind when I, uh… fled home.”

“Was it anything like the worm?” I asked. “Speaking of which, why the hell did you even have the worm?”

“It’s useful!” she protested, then corrected herself. “Was useful. You remember watching me go into a burning building and coming out fine, right?”

“I did wonder about that,” I admitted. “Figured it was some kind of protective device. Was I wrong?”

“Do you see what I’m wearing?” she asked, gesturing at herself. “Where would I fit a protective charm here?”

“I dunno. I figured you came from enough money that you would have stuff like that.”

Mizuki shook her head. “I trained a fire resistance skill. The worm, as you call it, did the same thing with poison. Its last burst was a lot more intense than I was prepared for. Under normal circumstances, most common poisons don’t affect me.”

“That would explain why you were so blasé about eating so much earlier.” I tilted my head. “Wait. You can force skills into existence?”

“Yes?” The half-elf looked at me like I’d just said something very stupid. “Isn’t that what you did?”

“Sort of, I guess?” My skills had come out of necessity. I hadn’t done anything as intentional as putting a venomous metal worm in my body. “I don’t think we really went about it the same way, though.”

“You should work on some resistance skills,” she said. “It’s normally ridiculously hard for mages to learn them, but you clearly have a few already.”

I did remember that mages were capable of learning skills from my teachings, just as those with warrior cores could cast magic on occasion. They just weren’t built to do it.

“I’ll consider it,” I said. “If you show me how to, at least.”

“I can try, but even when it was super controlled, a ton of people died trying.”

“So why did you tell me to do it, then?”

“No comment.”

We continued on that way for some time until both of us slowed to a stop, sensing a sudden deviation from the group above. Our eyes met. Neither of us had to explain to the others what we’d sensed, but I decided to just in case. I was not, after all, a mind-reader.

“Flare’s group found an entrance, right?”

Mizuki nodded. “Let’s move.”

We broke out into a run, keeping the pace comfortable and our senses alert. The entrance that Flare’s group had located was an unassuming hole in the side of a hill barely tall enough to squeeze through. It looked like the kind of place where someone would get stuck, die, and have video essays written about their horrific end.

I jumped in head-first, Mizuki shortly behind me. After a bit of a ways of uncomfortable crawling, the small tunnel expanded and dropped into a clearing representative of a typical entrance into the World Dungeon. The path immediately splintered off into three separate directions, each of which then fractured further.

“Follow or go our own way?” I asked. “If we follow them, we’re definitely going to have to fight them for a box.”

“I want to see what being in the dungeon is like,” Mizuki said. “I’ll mark our path. Let’s go a different way until people start finding them.”

I had the feeling that this was going to take a while, so I was more than willing to just explore. Our first and only intentional venture into the World Dungeon so far had been fruitful in some sense, earning us all a pretty solid fee once the city had realized its failure to keep the quests updated and decided that paying us off was easier than trying to fix its system, but it had also been pretty one-dimensional.

We’d followed a path through the dungeon that had been carefully curated by both the city and Matias to minimize the number of non-essential encounters we’d run into. In the end, the bulk of our conflict had come from dealing with other people, and apart from the massive slime, we’d only encountered one or two wandering monsters.

This time, we were a lot freer to just dick around, which we were doing plenty of.

At some point, after our conversation had died down somewhat, Mizuki randomly burst out into song, the words to the lyrics completely unrecognizable.

“Elven song?” I asked her when she seemed to be satisfied with a verse.

“Yeah,” she said. “I didn’t sense anyone nearby, so I figured it was safe. It’s a song of action.”

“It was beautiful,” I complimented.

“Thanks. It’s probably best if you don’t learn it, though. I—“

Both of swiveled at the sound of footsteps behind us.

I reached out with my Empathic Insight, searching for any threads of emotion I could seize on. There were hints of something, but at Initiate-tier, the skill still wasn’t good enough to catch beings that were carefully controlling themselves.

“Five or six of them,” Mizuki said. “Too short to be human, I think. Bipedal. Definitely enemies.”

“How do you want to do this?”

She thought about it for a second. “There’s a chokepoint a bit of a ways back. Hold them there and you can just pick them off from range.”

“How about I do that for one of them?” I suggested. “We can assess how strong they are, and if they’re manageable, we can bring them to this clearing here and fight them properly.”

“Seriously?”

“You’re bored,” I said. “I don’t need my skill to tell me that. Honestly, I kind of am too. I want to fight, not to sit behind cover and cast Fireball until everything is dead.”

“Fair point,” Mizuki conceded, trying and failing to suppress her grin. “But you’re not casting Fireball in these corridors. There are much easier ways to practice fire resistance than blowing yourself up.”

“Noted. I’ll wait until we’re both in the same clearing before I use it.”

“Asshole.”

“That’s not a nice thing to call children.”

“You can’t use that excuse forever.”

“Yeah, but I can for at least three or four more years, so I’m going to.”

As planned, I set myself up just before the choke point, lying flat on my stomach with my lifeline by my side. In lieu of a weapon, I held a spyglass in my hands. Mizuki had lent it to me, telling me I should consider getting one of my own when I could.

She’d used this to determine the tier of the slime we’d faced before. Neither of us had an assessment skill like the trackers likely possessed, and though we both had very good sync with our own souls, we didn’t have the level of soul awareness that people like my parents or Iryn did. They might be able to tell an opponent’s tier at a glance, but for us, we still had to use items like this.

The scuffling pack of creatures was close enough that I could properly sense what they were emitting.

By far the most prominent emotion I received was raw hunger, the kind I’d been lucky enough to never experience. They were starving, and with that came hostility. Apart from those, though, I couldn’t really understand the input I was getting. The best way I could describe what I was getting from my skill was by likening it to a radio station with a crazy amount of interference while it was playing one of my favorite songs. Certain bits were easy to catch, and others I could guess at, but most of it was just meaningless noise.

The first one entered the chokepoint, giving me a good luck of its face through the spyglass. If this worked correctly, then it would compare the mana signature of whatever I saw through it with a database stored in one of its crystals. Mizuki had completely blanked when I compared it to a Pokédex, which was probably for the better.

“What the balls is that thing?” I asked.

“Language,” Mizuki called out flippantly.

“Fuck off,” I replied in kind. “These things look really weird.”

The creature was roughly humanoid and about the size and shape of a child a few years younger than me, but that was where the similarities ended. Its silhouette was almost entirely void-black, broken up by glowing, jagged lines running through its body that reminded me of a documentary I’d seen on active volcanoes as a kid.

Mizuki’s spyglass whirred, returning a result.

Target not found in data from your region.

Target not found in data from the Halcyon Kingdom.

Target identified.

Text scrolled on its surface, integrating with my system to whisper the words softly into my ears.

It erased itself, then continued.

Target Creature: Magma Wraith (Adolescent)

Target Tier: Adept (High)

Natural Habitat: The 1st Hell

Creature Archetype: Demon

Information: Magma Wraiths are very rarely found on the surface but can occasionally be located in deeper levels of the World Dungeon where the connections between worlds are thinner. They are also sometimes summoned by diabolists both legally and illegally. Resists fire. Resists nonmagical melee attacks. Weak to water.

“This thing isn’t supposed to be here,” I realized.

The wraith froze, turning towards me. Its face was featureless apart from the cracked lines running through it, but I got the imperssion it was staring directly into my spyglass.

It screeched.

Even as Mizuki and I scrambled to our feet, weapons at the ready, a thought passed through my mind.

Sebastian had said that the natural ecosystem of the World Dungeon would remain unchanged, but this literally hellish creature had made it in.

That meant one of two things.

Either he was lying… or someone was interfering with the test.