Reborn Healer Chapter 62

I was beginning to realize that being important was not a good thing if I wanted to live a peaceful life.

Mizuki had no choice about it, which I understood now more than ever must be an enormous pain in the ass to live with. Unfortunately, it seemed like I had managed to drag myself into the mix, too.

Wasn’t there a curse that went may you live in interesting times? Well, the interesting times were here. I was yet to regret my actions, but I had to admit that I was getting a little too close to death more often than I’d like.

“So,” Gerald explained, “Mizuki is the seventh in line to the royal seat of the elven clan that controls the northernmost part of the elven kingdom. Her relevance is obvious.”

“Less obvious when you remember that they’re trying to kill me,” Mizuki said drily. “I lost track of attempts made on my life this year somewhere around a dozen.”

“Yeah, I was going to say,” I said. “How is she relevant in any matter other than that they want her dead?”

“You think like a footsoldier,” the Lord Prince said. “Understandable, given your age, but if you continue to find yourself crucial to the fate of the world, you should attempt approaching a problem like you are overlooking the battlefield.”

“I figured you’d rather have a footsoldier,” I replied, looking up at him. “You’re a Lord Prince.”

“That I am,” he said, “but I am also the only Halcyon prince at war. My brothers and sister would be more than content to use you and discard you like the chunk of flesh and mana they believe anyone without royal blood to be, but I see potential in you, Ren. We need everyone we can get.”

I tilted my head. “Even if they use forbidden, excluded magic?”

“Especially because you do,” the Lord Prince replied emphatically. “You do not yet know the full scope of the forces we face, but you have tasted their might. The elf kingdom is not the only threat promising to overrun Halcyon.”

I couldn’t say that last sentence was surprising, given the scenes I’d witnessed my mother in. There were dangers aplenty to this world, and it followed that a good chunk of them were aimed at my country.

“Former princess Mizuki of the Blood—“

“Not princess,” Mizuki corrected.

“You are a former Blood royal. The point stands.” Gerald flicked his hand out, a knife manifesting in his open palm. He tapped it to the table, glowing lines remaining in the wood where the tip made contact. “That makes her very valuable to us.”

“I assume you already went over this earlier,” I said, looking at the half-elf.

She crossed her arms. “We did. I didn’t realize your country had so many aggressors. I also appear to have been left in the dark about some of my own homeland’s ties.”

“The elf kingdom has a mutual defense pact with Leyeril,” the Lord Prince explained.

I frowned. “I thought Leyeril’s only alliance was to Selvek to their east.”

“History books do not tell you the story of deals sealed behind closed doors, especially when neither kingdom wants their alliance to be known. The elves prefer not to be associated with humans at all, and the dislike is mutual. As such, it is little more than said pact along with an open trade route.”

“One of them gets attacked, the other comes in to help?” I asked.

“Correct.” Gerald sighed. “And thus comes the problem. I and the military forces that Liaren can spare have been fighting a war in the shadows built from skirmishes and raids and too many bodies for the last five and a half years. Neither of these can be construed as true attacks on each other, but we cannot and will not make proper progress unless the elves make a real reach first.”

“Does the defense pact not hold if they’re the aggressor?” I asked. I was only vaguely familiar with how political deals worked here, and I hadn’t been much better outside of a brief fascination with World War II back on Earth.

“What human kingdom would want to be seen supporting the elves in invading a neighbor?”

“To cut through all the setup, the plan is to use me to goad them into attacking,” Mizuki said. “They’re trying to assassinate me, but Gerald believes that official recognition of me as a valid heir to the Blood clan’s rule would be enough to have them actually invade the city.”

“I seem to recall you not wanting to officially announce your presence for exactly this reason,” I told her. “Also, did you really just use the Lord Prince’s given name?”

“What other choice do I have?” she shot back, ignoring the second question.

“You could have run. You did it once before.”

“I am still present,” the Lord Prince said flatly.

Mizuki ignored him too. “There’s no real love lost between me and my family, if you haven’t noticed. I’d rather have the opportunity to wander free with my worries set to rest than spend every waking second chased by two kingdoms.”

When she said it that way, it made more sense. The network that had once been the Nightmare cult had connections to her, but having all of Halcyon—or, at the very least, Liaren—on her side when it came to getting her family off her back forever sounded like a pretty good deal in terms of peace of mind.

“Point ceded,” I said. “Though what’s stopping them from just keeping you after?”

“Your powers.” The Lord Prince continued drawing on the table like it was a map, forming what I recognized as a rough approximation of Halcyon and the territories further south. “Mizuki of the Blood has incredible potential, and attempting to control the uncontrollable only ever results in disaster. I am a pragmatic man. I have offered a number of paths moving forward that will allow you functional independence.”

I didn’t entirely buy that, but I wasn’t going to debate that now. “And me? I can see why you want her now, but me?”

“Do you know how rare it is to have a healer with a proficiency in the Nightmare?”

I shrugged. “Rare?”

“There is a single case in recorded history. Before she became one of the Cataclysms, she was known as the Reaper Sovereign.”

Now that was interesting. If that was the case, then she—it now, I supposed—was still around causing problems in far-off corners of the world, rendering them entirely uninhabitable. I wondered what my peer was like. Honestly, I kind of wanted to ask it questions, but none of the Cataclysms could be reasoned with on a human level anymore.

“You are also the son of a soul mage,” Gerald Halcyon continued. “You are an Adept at the age of twelve. There is every indication that you will become an asset to Liaren and the kingdom itself.”

“That’s not exactly crucial, though,” I said. “And that’s all stuff I can manage just by training. I don’t know why you need to keep me here.”

“Again, footsoldier,” the Lord Prince said. “I will not lie to you and say that I am keeping you out of the good of my own heart or so that you can be close to your friend. I have a use for you and I intend to get it when the time comes.”

“I appreciate you being direct about it, at least,” I said. “Is there a chance I can hear what that use is?”

“No.”

“Oh.” I blinked, remembering that I was still in the presence of one of the most powerful men in the country. “Of course, my lord. Then in that case, what happens next?”

“What happens next is you train,” he said. “The military will be doing the same. The time we have remaining until we must force the issue is dwindling, and we will be prepared for it.”

“How long?” I asked.

“Two years at most,” Mizuki replied in lieu of the Lord Prince. “He wants us to hit Master by then.”

I blanched. I had already been considered extremely fast-paced for hitting Adept by my age, and he wanted us to go up another tier? That was…

No, it wasn’t unheard of anymore. Neferi had been Master, hadn’t she? That Leyereli girl hadn’t been much older than me. It was factually doable. The question then turned from one of whether he was asking the impossible out of us to whether or not I would be up to the task. Mizuki, who was already fairly advanced as an Adept, likely was, but was I?

“And how are we supposed to achieve that?” I asked.

“There is a limit to the number of military personnel I can bring from other parts of the nation before Leyeril notices, but there are magicians and warriors aplenty throughout Halcyon that we can call upon to teach you,” he said. “You will also be joining the military for their assessments. Access to all other resources will be opened to you.”

“Oh, yeah, on that note,” I said, remembering something, “I have a party that I kind of agreed to heal for in exchange for combat magic lessons. Also a clinic to attend to. What’s going to come of that?”

“The party is from your guild, correct?” At my nod, the Lord Prince let out a brief sigh. “The Federation has been disbanded in Liaren. The central organization has disorganized this section entirely, and as such, its personnel are being conscripted. They will no longer be entering the World Dungeon for guild-related activities and will not need a field healer.”

“Ah. Then…”

“I will see to it that any deals for education are upheld assuming the educator is a sufficiently capable mage and still alive.” The ease with which he said that unnerved me just the slightest bit. “As to the clinic, you may attend that so long as it is either with a guard or an observation device.”

So that was how this was going to be. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse because it was good for me, but it also involved a dubiously trustworthy Lord Prince having some level of supervision over me. I chafed at the idea instinctively, but then again, it didn’t have to be permanent. I was pretty capable at escaping situations where I was supposed to be cornered, anyway. I could work with this.

“Fine then. We can still talk to our former guild members?”

“Yes.”

It was all logistics talk from there on out. The gist of it was simple. We now had a two-year time limit to get significantly stronger, limitations on where we were supposed to conduct our daily lives, and crucially, the same access to resources that upper-level members of the military had. That included an opening to the World Dungeon that was now going to be repurposed.

We would need to wear observation items and be loosely tailed by other personnel if we chose to enter, but other than that we were free to use the dungeon as we saw fit, which I saw as an overall win given the fact that we could just break the items if we ever actually wanted to run away.

From there, the Lord Prince released us, giving us free reign of the palace. Mizuki had already walked around it, and I had little interest in exploring any of it but the library, which I would have plenty of time for later.

For the time being, we both kind of wanted to check in on the people we knew from the Fedreation. The events of the last couple of days had been incredibly jarring. A guild and a half had disintegrated during that—maybe more than half, since I didn’t know how much of Grancrest was still standing after everything had come to pass.

Though I wouldn’t call myself terribly close with anyone from the Federation, there were a number of people who I would prefer to see alive.

To find our former guildmates, one of the Lord Prince’s aides directed us to one side of the palace grounds, where temporary barracks had been erected for the ex-Federation members to stay in.

They were under tight guard, naturally. Said guards took one glance at us and let us through, though not without warning.

“The Lord Prince says you’ve got the right to pass through,” a heavy-set purple-clad woman said, “but don’t go getting any ideas now. Anyone who chooses not to cooperate is headed for an early grave. Just because you have immunity doesn’t mean your friends do.”

“Noted,” I said. “Wasn’t planning on it.”

She glared at me more for that, which I thought was a little unfair.

There were still Federation members coming in at this hour, driven in on long carts I’d seen used for prisoners before with so many protective spells preventing them from escaping that the raw mana was visible to the naked eye.

Not everyone had deployed to Grancrest. In fact, the majority of the Federation had stayed home. I wasn’t entirely sure on the details, but it sounded like the royal guard had set forth an ultimatum to the locked-down Federation outpost, which had instantly caved since Sebastian had departed off to parts unknown. All that had been left was getting people from that location to an area where they could be more closely watched while an investigation ransacked the headquarters.

Fortunately, we found a few of the people we were looking for pretty quickly.

Arthur and his group were together playing cards around an empty campfire pit. They seemed to be a little more comfortable with each other now than they had been the last time I’d seen all four of them in the same place.

“Ren,” Lena said, greeting me with a raised hand. “Mizuki. Did you two just get here?”

I looked at her awkwardly, trying to figure out how to best explain this. Just a couple days ago, we’d had a deal for me to be an active healer for their party in exchange for the fire magic lessons that Lena, a graduate of the Imperial Mage Academy, but not only were they unlikely to go into the dungeon for any non-military purpose from here on out, I doubted they even had their party anymore.

“We arrived earlier,” Mizuki said before I could explain. “They’re figuring out what to do with us.”

Technically the truth, but the four Adept-tier adventurers (well, ex-adventurers now) probably thought that the reasoning behind any confusion around the two of us was because of our age, since that was the main point of differentiation they knew.

“I wasn’t at the headquarters, but I heard general details about what happened,” I continued. “Is everyone alright?”

“Most,” Henry hedged. The big man wasn’t as armored as he typically was, his gear either confiscated or otherwise stored. “There were some bodies. People who didn’t cooperate. One or two who panicked.”

“Anyone I would know?” I asked. “Sorry to be so brusque about it.”

“I don’t think so,” Marcie, the support mage who I remembered was definitively not a healer, said, her voice shaky. “The new initiates were all fine. It was other people who weren’t.”

“Thanks for letting me know,” I said, biting back a that’s good. She and Henry were both particularly shaken, the latter better at hiding it from his expression but not quite able to keep Nightmare’s Call from picking up on it. “Will you be alright?”

“We’re fine for the time being, at least,” Arthur said. “Hells, though. I’d heard about this kind of thing, but I never thought the Federation would get involved.”

“Just our luck,” Lena grumbled. “Gods willing, there’ll still be guilds willing to take us at the end of our stint. Five years, huh…”

I hadn’t actually known that they were being conscripted for a limited amount of time. I supposed that made sense. It gave them something to work towards.

“This is an awkward time to ask,” I said hesitantly, “but, uh, Lena…”

“Hm?” The fire-force affinity-bearing mage looked at me absent-mindedly, shaking her head to clear it. “Right. The arrangement. I don’t mind continuing to teach you for the time being. We can work out the rest later.”

“Really?” I hadn’t expected that. My entire experience as a healer had told me that I could expect people to be much more willing to do things for me if I did something for them first, but I had yet to do more for her or her squad than heal Arthur one time, and that had been after I stabbed him.

“Naturally,” she replied. “Assuming our new schedules work out with it, of course.”

“Thank you. I appreciate that a lot.”

“Just keep yourself out of trouble,” Lena said. “And try not to disappear too many times.”

“What she said,” Arthur added.

I frowned, trying to process what Nightmare’s Call was telling me. The fact that I had chosen the skill evolution that would allow me to influence other people rather than the one that could give me deeper insight into them meant I couldn’t quite understand the exact nuances of what they were feeling, but… had they actually been worried about me?

That was kind of sweet, actually.

After them, we found the initiates. They’d been mostly segregated into a separate area, which despite being significantly worse in terms of lodgings than the ones back at Federation headquarters was still pretty solid for what I had assumed would be more like a prison camp.

I had to remind myself that they were not, in fact, enemies of the state. Conscription didn’t necessarily mean being sent to the front lines. For most of these people, the primary difference in their lives was going to be the name of the organization they were affiliated with.

Some of the faces in the initiate area were familiar, though I couldn’t recall their names because I hadn’t really cared about who I’d been with during the initial trials.

I did find the two I actually recognized, both of them practicing spells at a small range set in the open-air barracks alongside about a half-dozen other mages, all of whom I assumed were initiates.

“Flare,” I said. “Glad to see you made it out okay.”

The mage who’d covered for me and even killed another trial taker defending me and Mizuki during the entrance exam turned, pausing the flurry of spells she’d been savaging a hay bale with.

Her eyebrows raised. At the same time, a surge of panic spiked from another initiate practicing his spellcasting a couple spots over.

“Likewise,” she said. “I thought you were dead.”

“Seems to be a common theme,” I said.

“The fuck happened to your neck?”

“Huh?” Flare was the first to mention anything like this. “I got hanged. Is it still bruised? I thought I healed everything.”

For some reason, Thaddeus Iron’s panic spiked again when I mentioned that. I guessed that getting stabbed by someone did that to a person, but he’d done worse to me, so I didn’t think that was entirely fair.

“You got what?” Flare asked, eyes wide.

I turned to Mizuki. “Don’t tell me you just haven’t been mentioning a bruise. Do I need to do another pass?”

She shook her head. “I would’ve told you. I didn’t notice anything earlier, but it looks like there’s some scarring. Thin black line. Looks like you had your head removed and put back on. I think it suits you.”

“Oh.” I frowned. “Remind me to look into a mirror sometime soon.”

“Trust me, I will.” Mizuki poked my neck. “Doesn’t look like your head is actually about to fall off, at least.”

“Lovely. Nice to see you’re alright, Flare. By the way—Thaddeus! Hey!”

The boy froze up instantly, turning to me so slowly I swore I could hear his joints creak. “Y-yes?”

“If you don’t have a problem with me, I don’t have a problem with you,” I said. I didn’t know why he was so panicked about being around me, but there were edges of guilt to his feelings right now, and that made me suspicious enough to at least make a generalized statement. “I’m watching you.”

“Will do,” he said, voice cracking.

Past the initiates, we found the blacksmiths—or, more accurately, one of them. Quill, the older man who’d been working with the truesteel we’d retrieved during the entrance exams, was the only person present in the sole forge supplying the temporary camp. He’d had a grave expression on his face and had only said that his apprentice Jeremy was being “held up.” We didn’t exchange many words, but he did silently hand us a pair of slim bracers, one for each of us.

“As ordered,” he said. “Gods willing, it’ll bring you better fortune than it did us.”

After thanks and a respectful enough distance to examine the item more closely, I reached for my storage band only to remember that it had been confiscated from me along with the rest of my equipment in the Grancrest guild.

“Aw, fuck,” I said. “I lost the examination stick thing. Do you—“

Mizuki already had it out.

Item: Truesteel Bracer

Tier: Adept/Master

Requires attunement by a highly stable Adept soul or a Master soul.

This bracer is unbreakable by conventional means and dispels force applied to its surface. It will also dispel magic targeted at it. If a spell is small enough to be fully dispelled, the truesteel may reflect it back at the caster.

The designs on both were fairly simple, but they were personalized. Mizuki’s had the simplified silhouette of a nightrose carved into it, while mine featured two crossed staffs with a light between them, which was as far as I was aware fairly similar to the red cross back on Earth in terms of messaging.

My bracer fit perfectly, clasping snugly around my forearm without any give or tightness. The metal was lighter than I expected. Mizuki slipped hers on as well before chancing a glance at me.

“You look ready to murder someone,” she said, nodding approvingly and patting me on the shoulder. “Want to try the bracers out?”

“Gladly.”

The bracers, we quickly learned, were awkward to use but effective. We had to navigate through a situation perfectly to block with it, which was viable against mages who didn’t have combat senses but less so against other warriors or monsters who would be predicting us as we predicted them. If the block made contact, though, it could completely nullify an attack, even one that carried enough force to break an arm.

Despite the chaos of the day, the rest of it proceeded shockingly normally. We ate with the new troops, dining on military rations more sumptuous than any restaurant one could find down Southside, trained, and ultimately retired to the palace itself.

It seemed like I wouldn’t be heading home for some time. Given that everyone in the family was occupied with activities outside of our border village, I worried slightly about the security of our house, but only slightly.

Today was the first day of a new chapter in my life, I knew, but despite everything, I felt like I had already returned to normality.

At least until I settled into a sitting position in my new isolated bedroom and knocked myself out.

Everything changed when I began to Soulwalk.