Reborn Healer Chapter 16

I’d let the woman cook for a bit longer than I had thought I had. It was hard to see her face through the ash and dirt covering most of her head, but I’d burned or stomped off most of her hair, and there was blood mixed in with the soot dusting her.

A strange sensation stirred in my gut. Bile rose to my throat, the burned woman’s visage etching itself into my memory. The burnt flesh smelled like meat, and I found myself experiencing the peculiar feeling of my stomach churning and my mouth watering at the same time.

But it passed. It didn’t even take long. I had practiced centering myself so many times by now that I barely even noticed that I was forcing myself to relax, to keep negative influence from shaping my ability to handle myself.

By the time I went to check for a pulse, I was already completely calm. Instead of using my hands like I might have back on Earth, I checked the woman's vitals like I'd gotten used to here in Liaren.

Body Scan.

By now, using this spell was second nature to check up on one of the patients that Vallis left to me. This burnt woman here was no clinic visitor, but I wanted to make sure I hadn't killed her. While I was more than happy to defend myself, crossing the line into killing, self-defense or no, was still a step too far for me. I'd barely been violent in my previous life, never doing anything more with my fists other than bruising them against my own walls.

While there were better diagnostic spells out there, the bulk of them were more specific ones. Upgrades to the Inferior Body Scan spell were complex enough and high enough level that even pushing extra mana into it wasn’t enough to forcibly upgrade it to a higher version like I’d managed to do with Cure Minor Poison. The normal Body Scan was an Adept level spell, and I had yet to get that far in my training.

It took a bit of finagling, but I confirmed that her heart was still beating, if weakly. Inferior Body Scan displayed sections of the body in an abstract representation, leaving it up to me to interpret the shapes and colors as diagnoses. There was red everywhere, which I had learned meant severe but not critical damage—that would be black, which I now knew meant well beyond my abilities to save.

“Concussion, burns, cuts, broken third rib,” I muttered to myself. “Treatable. Probably only going to get worse if I leave you here. Death in a few hours, maybe?”

Did I want to treat her? That unspoken question gave me pause. If I didn’t, there was a chance she would die. She'd hurt me, and she'd been trying to knock me out so that they could take me to some secret location that I was certain I was better off never seeing, and there was no chance in hell that I was going to intentionally get an enemy back up to full health so she could just start hitting me again.

At the same time, I didn't know if I could live with myself if I knowingly let someone die in front of me.

In the end, I decided on using a few Mend Wound spells. It was a decent middle ground. At Beginner-tier, they were only strong enough to stabilize her a little. Left alone, her condition would still deteriorate over time, and she was still unconscious, but she'd have a little more time before she was in any real trouble.

Curious as to the identity of my attackers, I rolled the woman over so I could remove the cloak from her body. It had stayed completely unharmed by the firebolt, which told me either my Fireball was still not very strong or that the cloak was reinforced, magically or otherwise.

The cloak was covering otherwise regular street clothes, from which I fished out an amulet of some kind as well as a lacquered wooden badge with a name inscribed on it.

“Erica Wyton, huh…”

She also had a coin pouch with a handful of silver and a generous heaping of bronze coins. I took everything I could find, including two more needles that I assumed had been laced with the same poison, bundled it up in the cloak, and dragged it off. While I didn't like the idea of killing these people, I was more than willing to steal from them. I figured it was my right. Or were they going to do, report me to the police?

What really interested me was the net. I had avoided it at every possible opportunity, and the man that Erica had been with had ended up not throwing it at us, presumably because it had some kind of effect that he hadn't wanted his partner to get caught up in.

I made my way over to where he'd passed out. The man looked like he was in a better state than Erica. While his face was bloodier, that was just because I had hit him in the cheek with the needle, and the wounds hadn't been covered over by the detritus of a Firebolt.

He was extremely unconscious, though. I didn't bother checking him over just yet, since all I'd hit him with was the needle meant for me, and instead went about looting him the same way.

This guy's name was Nathaniel. He wasn't carrying any money on him, but he did have something that looked more valuable. On the middle finger of both of his hands were rings with crystal set into them. One of them was glimmering, while the other was dull and lifeless. I took both, but I was pretty sure the latter was the one I wanted.

I did not have the body size or carrying capacity to also take his cloak, so I threw everything I’d liberated from them into the net, moving to pry it from his fingers.

Said fingers were now surprisingly rigid and cold.

I frowned, that brief sick feeling returning to my gut.

I cast Body Scan on Nathaniel’s face right where I'd hit him with the needle. A lot of orange there, but some red. Even as I watched, that orange rapidly moved towards the worse.

Following the red, which I knew thanks to my experience with my own body, probably tracked the path of the poison, I continued casting Body Scan until I found where it led to—right to the heart. When I scanned there, all I saw was black.

Shit. He must have had some kind of bad reaction to the poison, or maybe it had just been particularly effective on him for some reason.

When I checked his face again, the scan showed only black.

Nathaniel was dead.

For a moment, I just stood there in shock. My perception drifted out of my body in a very literal sense, Flowing Harmony allowing me to center myself and view this objectively.

I had killed a man. He had been the aggressor in this, and it was possibly the clearest case of self-defense I could think of, but the feeling didn’t sit right with me anyway.

It took a few minutes for me to bring myself back to equilibrium. That had been a decidedly unpleasant experience, but I could accept that it was necessary. 

Okay, it hadn’t all been bad. I had even been enjoying myself. The act of killing was the real dampener, but even that, I decided, I could live with.

Was that wrong of me? Should I have spent longer deliberating? Maybe. But looking at the body, a cynical pragmatism took over. There was no point in debating over whether or not I had crossed a moral line or not. It had happened. There was no undoing that. If that was the case, then there was no point making the situation more complicated for myself.

For the time being, I had to get out of here. There was no telling if these two were isolated, and I wasn’t going to be the one to figure it out.

I had used up most of my mana during that fight, but I had enough left to keep one or two spells going at once. I chose Swift Step and Enhance Strength, both of which were necessary to get me to the point where I could actually move with the load I was now carrying.

It didn’t take too long to get back to the main street now that I wasn’t being pursued, but everything had taken on a more dangerous air. Without my Augment Perception up, I didn’t have the level of precision I needed to listen for potential threats like I’d managed earlier, and the very fact that I’d been ambushed made these once familiar streets teem with potential threats.

That old man on the corner—going out for an evening smoke, or concealing a weapon meant for me? Those two teenagers chatting loudly as they ambled down the street—were they distracting me so a third person could take me?

It definitely didn’t help that I was lugging a suspiciously large, full net behind me. While it wasn’t unheard of for children to go shopping for supplies for their family businesses, I attracted a lot of eyes given the particular nature of my cargo.

In the end, I made it back to Vallis’ clinic unmolested.

“Ren,” he said, looking back from the paperwork he’d been studying. “You’re ea—what happened to you?”

My father visibly forced himself to control his panic, shifting to the healer mindset he’d cultivated for so long. Mana washed over me, Vallis casting one of the diagnostic spells I couldn’t even begin to understand. The exhaustion that I hadn’t even realized had settled into my bones lifted immediately, revitalizing energy flowing through my veins as he seamlessly swapped into a second spell.

“It’s a bit of a long story,” I said. “I’ll try to make it short.”

#

“That’s extremely concerning,” Vallis said, peering at Erica Wyton’s badge over the frames of thin-rimmed glasses that I had always suspected were magical. “This is a guild badge.”

“A guild badge,” I repeated.

Most of what I knew about guilds came from Vallis and Matias. From what I’d gleaned, they had their own in-house healers, which was a large part of why they never came to our clinic for routine check-ins.

I also knew enough to guess that whatever they’d been doing had been officially sanctioned by the equivalent of a private military corporation in cahoots with the local government, given the fact that neither of them had seen fit to hide their guild status. That was… bad, to say the least.

“Yes,” Vallis confirmed. “The Southern Star Guild, to be precise. I had my own dealings with them before. They are an unscrupolous one and can only boast the second-highest member casualty rate in the southern district of the Halcyon kingdom.”

“They were after me,” I said. “Why would they want that?”

“Because you are special, Ren,” Vallis said without missing a beat. “Your mother and I have recognized this. We know our responsibility.”

I had been wondering why they had been so comparatively chill with me being what I was. He didn’t even ask questions when it came to rebinding my soul.

“You know that I…” I trailed off. I didn’t know how to approach this.

“I know all that I need to.” Vallis smiled gently. “If Southern Star seeks you Aria and I will dissuade them.”

“Dissuade them how?” I was genuinely curious.

“Don’t you worry about that.” There was a steel in my father’s voice I had never heard before. “Allow me to take you home. You can play with your spoils of war there.”

I laughed. “Spoils of war? That’s one way to call it.”

“Legally, that’s what they’re considered,” Vallis pointed out. “Iryn will have made dinner by now.”

Harmonic Empathy lvl 3 -> 4

There was a note of urgency in his voice, and I found myself instinctively reaching out for it. The impressions I got from my own father were dangerous. Bloody.

I shivered.

“Okay,” I agreed. “Let’s go home.”

#

Erica woke up hurting all over, face burning and ribs aching. Her eyes opened to meet the steadily more familiar sight of the Southern Star Guild’s healing branch. Someone must have recovered her and taken her back.

Memories slowly slipped back into her mind. She cursed at herself. Despite being close enough to Adept that she could taste it, she had lost in a straight-up fight against a child. What guild-certified adventurer could say that with their head held up high?

“You’re finally awake.”

The voice of Benjamin, Adept-tier Southern Star Guild healer and utter pain in the ass, was also unfortunately increasingly familiar.

“I am,” she croaked. “What time is it?”

“You look like shit,” Benjamin said instead of answering her question. “Boss wants to see you. Get your ass up.”

“Love you too, Benja.” With a great deal of effort, Erica managed to get herself to her feet. 

Fuck. She was missing her cloak and badge. This wasn’t going to be a fun conversation.

Some nameless worker came to escort her to the guild leader’s office. She’d only been in this part of Southern Star’s headquarters twice before, and she’d enjoyed it neither time. It was built to instill fear into those who entered it, high columns and massive murals of the guild’s accomplishments framing an “office” that was entirely too large. Enormous double doors clicked shut with an ominous rumble as she entered.

“You wanted to see me, sir?” Erica asked, trying to bow. Her knee buckled, forcing her to stand back up lest she lose her balance.

“Indeed.” A Master-tier swordsman, Wilhelm Everly ran this guild from its Liaren headquarters. “I’m told you and the late Nathaniel found yourself in a position to capture one of the children the Lord Prince Gerald designated.”

“Yes, sir.” It took a moment for Erica to catch up with what she was hearing. She blanched. “Wait—Nathaniel is—“

“Dead, yes. Found in his bloodstream was a particular type of poison that only one of our Initiates use.”

No. It couldn’t be. She hadn’t liked him that much, but they’d reached a kind of understanding. Who else could she even turn to now?

There was something else important in that sentence, though. Her stomach dropped further. They’d found poison in his system.

Mine, Erica realized. She could be executed for turning on one of their own—or worse, removed from the guild. She couldn’t let that happen.

“That—that wasn’t me! It was the kid, he, he took one of my darts—“

“A child?” Wilhelm shouted, slamming a fist into his table so hard Erica swore she felt the room shake. “Are you expecting me to believe you were bested by someone who can’t even run?!”

“He was no child, sir,” Erica replied, eyes turned down to the ground. She shuddered, remembering how he’d fought. 

“Is he not six years old?”

“I misspeak. He… he moved like someone beyond even my years, yet he also had proficiency in magic. If I may be honest, sir… he was a monster.”

Wilhelm stood and Erica flinched, expecting another reaction.

Instead, he only sighed.

“So it’s true, then,” he said. “The Lord Prince’s words were right. A new era, he said.”

Erica stood still, unsure what to do.

As if remembering she was still there, Wilhelm turned back to her. “Dismissed. You will be expected to return tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir.” A mixture of relief, exhaustion, and sheer terror washed through Erica. The thief turned to leave.

Just then, the double doors clicked again, rumbling as they opened inwards.

“Now what?” Wilhelm huffed. He drew his legendary gem-encrusted sword from its resting place atop his desk, brandishing it at the door. “I told you, I was not to be… disturbed…”

Erica saw the reason for his sudden hesitation at the same time he did. Walking through the doors, uncaring of the fact that there was always a heavy guard posted throughout the entire complex and especially in front of Wilhelm’s office, was a single masked woman wearing a blue cloak. Her hands were wreathed in shadow, but Erica thought she could see each of them holding a knife.

“Who are you?” Wilhelm demanded. Energy gathered around him, his skills activating to make him the unstoppable force he was in the dungeons and in war. His sword began to glow. “Answer me!”

Without another word, the woman threw both daggers.

Erica barely even registered it coming towards her. All she saw was a trail of oily shadow tracing itself through the air. Her senses screamed at her, but it was already too late.

The dagger was in her throat for a quarter second before it emerged and buried itself in her sternum instead. Then her eye.

Mercifully, the dark took her.

But it did not stay.

When she woke up again, Erica felt perfect. Not a trace of the day’s injuries were on her. She felt her face, wincing in preparation for the pain, but even the burns were gone now.

Yet she could still feel the dagger stabbing into her again and again as if it had a mind of its own.

A groan from elsewhere in the room alerted her to the fact that Wilhelm was still here. He, too, was picking himself up from the ground.

They were covered in their own blood. The entire room was.

In a daze, they both ended up wandering outside to find more of the same. Blood had been spilled everywhere Erica looked, but everyone had been healed.

From the looks of it, everyone else was as scared and confused as she was.

It was Wilhelm who found it. The message had been delivered to him, left in his own hands as he’d bled out again and again.

Erica only happened to see it by chance, but the emblem she saw struck fear into her heart.

A Revenant.

“What does it say?” she ended up asking.

Wilhelm stared at her listlessly for a moment before answering.

“Stay away from my son.”

#

The Southern Star Guild made no further move on me after that day. I had to wonder how my mother and father had convinced them to leave me alone, but I wasn’t complaining.

It gave me more time and space to practice. I made a point out of training my buff and defensive spells alongside my healing ones, practicing those on my own time and having Iryn take me to the Ayasi forest to practice against wild animals.

I picked up more spells of all kinds, developing my cores. Through time and diligent practice, I maxed out all of my Beginner and Initiate spells. While I couldn’t do the same with all my warrior skills thanks to the way they were used, I managed to progress them too.

Harmonic Empathy lvl 3 -> 10

Sixth Sense lvl 0 -> 10

Flowing Harmony lvl 4 -> 10

Even as news of tragedy and danger on the horizons became more frequent, my life became routine. There were stirrings of war, of monsters, of ancient cults, but none of them were close enough to affect us quite yet. The guilds in town were still making aggressive moves, perhaps spurred on by the new Lord Prince of Liaren, but though I heard more about their recruitment every day, I was careful to avoid getting myself ambushed in the night again.

I trained and I trained and I trained. When I wasn’t training, I was healing. When I wasn’t healing, I was reading, trying to expand my knowledge of this world.

Iryn proved to be willing to tutor me, and I took to it quickly. Her lessons had nothing to do with magic or fighting—instead, we went over everything from history and politics to herbology and scavenging. Theoretical and practical skills both.

As time progressed, I realized just how difficult it was to get myself from Initiate to Adept. When Matias had told me that it had taken nearly a decade to break that barrier himself, I had chalked it up to him just being slow. After all, my one-time tutor Locke had reached Adept himself by the age of thirteen.

I was building very strong foundations now, even shoring up a number of fundamental problems I hadn’t realized I had thanks to my quick advancement to Initiate, but reaching Adept was still going to take a while. 

Life was, to some extent, peaceful. It was enough that I could almost ignore the visions in my dreams, turn my eye to the fact that my core still wanted what was in our impenetrably sealed basement, push away the deep-seated feeling that something was wrong.

On the day I turned twelve, that changed.

I had reached the peak of Initiate and had started learning even basic Adept-tier spells. Vallis had promised to show me some more fields of healing and soul magic that he used—since Adept tier was the first major bottleneck for most, the breadth of spell options expanded vastly.

He was explaining it to me as he rebound my soul for the twelfth time when it happened.

A piercing pain shot through my heart. For a brief, panicked moment, I wondered if I had been poisoned, but it passed.

Then came the system message.

[Neferi Whitefall] was killed by an executioner’s sword.

I frowned. Who the hell was that?

And why did the system want me to know it had happened?

___

Current status below

Name: Ren Kane

Core: Initiate (Mage) / Initiate (Warrior)

Spells:

[Healing]

> Heal lvl 1 [Adept]

The bread and butter of healers and adventurers. Revitalizing energy passes through you or a target. Can be focused to heal a more specific injury.

> Anesthesia lvl 1 [Adept]

Requires concentration. Renders a target you touch unconscious and numbs their senses. Ideal for complex surgeries that require multiple operations.

> Reset Bone lvl 10 [Initiate]

A more efficient way to heal dislocated or broken bones. As with many specifically oriented spells, this is a variant of Basic Heal.

> Basic Quick Heal lvl 10 [Initiate]

Send a burst of revitalizing energy into an ally within a moderate distance.

> Healing Aura lvl 10 [Initiate]

Requires concentration. While this spell is active, targets you designate within a small radius are slightly revitalized per second they spend within that radius.

> Basic Heal lvl 10 [Initiate]

> Mend Wound lvl 10 [Beginner]

> Cure Infection lvl 10 [Initiate]

Cures infections. Cannot cure infections that have already set in deeply enough to cause necrosis or similar degeneration.

>> Cure Minor Infection lvl 10 [Beginner]

> Body Scan lvl 2 [Adept]

Scans a section of the body for specific diseases or injuries. Can also be used to scan the entire body for major issues immediately.

>> Inferior Body Scan lvl 10 [Beginner]

> Identify Illness lvl 10 [Beginner]

> Cure Poison lvl 10 [Initiate]

>> Cure Minor Poison lvl 10 [Beginner]

[Defensive]

> Lock lvl 10 [Initiate]

Magically locks a door or similar surface. This lock cannot be undone by non-magical lockpicks.

> Fortify lvl 10 [Initiate]

> Shield lvl 10 [Initiate]

>> Barrier lvl 10 [Beginner]

[Buff]

> Doubletime lvl 2 [Adept]

Requires concentration. Speeds up the user’s body, perception of time, and reflexes. Leaves the user exhausted after the spell wears off.

> Augment Perception lvl 10 [Initiate]

> Dash lvl 10 [Initiate]

Grants a sudden, sharp burst of speed.

> Overheal lvl 10 [Initiate]

Despite the name, this is not a healing spell. Creates a layer of mana between the user’s skin and their clothes, providing temporary protection.

> Swift Step lvl 10 [Beginner]

> Enlarge lvl 10 [Initiate]

Requires concentration. Increases your size and strength.

> Enhance Strength lvl 10 [Beginner]

[Offensive]

> Fireball [Adept]

A classic, deadly spell that combines heat and force in equal measure. Not recommended for use indoors.

>> Heat Ray lvl 10 [Initiate]

The evolution of Firebolt, this spell is more precise, uses more refined heat, and projects less force.

>>> Firebolt lvl 10 [Beginner]

> Create Water lvl 10 [Initiate]

Creates several gallons of distilled, clean water.

Skills:

> Harmonic Empathy lvl 10 [Beginner]

> Sixth Sense lvl 10 [Initiate]

> Flowing Harmony lvl 10 [Initiate]