Reborn Healer Chapter 56

The path was easier than I thought it would be. The only problem was avoiding the bodies.

On some level, I had wondered if I was going to need to deal with other people who had successfully managed to deal with the plague who were trying to keep an eye out, but that turned out to be a needless worry.

A good number of the buildings that had been present in the village had been outright crushed by the Nightmare rain. I hadn’t seen enough of the courier’s memories to tell the details of what Neferi’s plague did to people and structures, but it was pretty clear now that cover alone was nowhere near enough. The plague-infested liquid had come down like acid rain on steroids, piercing through thatched roofs and brick walls alike. Few if any people were alive inside.

My memory wasn’t perfect enough to remember every detail of the village, but I had a general enough sense of direction to get back to the building that held the gallows and my weapon, guided in large part by my ongoing connection to my lifeline. I had to rely on Harmonic Awareness in order to keep myself from walking into walls, since I was now completely blind thanks to how thick the Nightmare fog was around me.

A few buildings had collapsed, making the path significantly more treacherous. Anyone within them was dead, and there were bodies on the street as well. I stepped in one by accident when I had to dodge a store’s facade as it collapsed, its supports too damaged by the Nightmare that it could no longer hold itself up.

I did mean in the body. My hyper-awareness of the area around me made it impossible not to notice as my boot went straight through some poor dude’s chest. It barely resisted, crumpling inwards like a rotten piece of fruit.

I wondered if this boy was one of the Grancrest adventurers who would have been tasked to kill me or if he’d just happened to live here. He couldn’t have been that old judging from his size, though any details were lost to the plague.

The guild who had executed me was still decidedly my enemy, but I couldn’t call whoever had done this my ally, either. The enemy of my enemy was not my friend if they were committing war crimes that included a ton of innocents and me in them.

I was faintly reminded of the horror stories I’d heard about mustard gas in World War I back on Earth. This “plague” was closer to that terrifying, gruesome death than any sort of real disease I’d known about.

I shuddered to imagine having to deal with this if it could spread like the flu. A few years before my fatal plane incident and subsequent rebirth, the world had gone into lockdown because of a disease, and we’d handled that awfully, to say the least. What would a Nightmare plague unleashed upon Earth be like?

Playing that scenario out in my head helped nobody, but it was a decent enough distraction for me as I waded my way through the carnage, ultimately finding myself next to a familiar enough tower.

Unlike much of the rest of the village, the central tower was actually still reasonably intact. That came as a surprise given how thick the plague-infested fog was here. This had clearly been the primary target of the attack, and there was enough in the air that not only was visibility completely gone, I also couldn’t force all of it into my hand.

I was still able to by and large keep myself from breathing it in by blasting healing mana all over the rest of my body. That did come with the unfortunate side effect of saddling me with a truly ridiculous amount of the plague, but it wasn’t killing me yet.

Enough of it had built up within me that I was starting to feel an actual change in how it was affecting my body. A familiar sense of pressure had begun to accumulate within me. As I blindly navigated my way around the tower, the creeping accumulation of Neferi’s weapon inside me started to be strangely comforting. It reminded me of my mother, and even though I logically knew Aria wasn’t here, one point of familiarity in a sea of unknowns was nice to have.

It was also something I couldn’t allow to set in further. For now, it only hurt, but I was well aware that my situation could abruptly worsen at any moment. Was there anything I could do?

I tried to call on my connection with the Nightmare, invoking the otherworldly frame of mind I’d managed to achieve when forming or upgrading my lifeline as well as when I’d been in that endlessly looping flight of stairs underneath our house. Mana rumbled within me, resonating on a deeper level than the physical, but nothing changed.

There was something there, but it was just out of reach. The power I was trying to interface with was a bit further displaced from me, and my gut told me that said distance was in the same direction as my lifeline. Rather than physical distance, I needed to get my soul closer to the lifeline and the connection it would grant me to the Nightmare.

Which of course meant that I needed to progress forward. I hadn’t been conscious when I’d been brought into the building in which I was to be interrogated, held, and eventually executed, so I had no idea where the entrances were supposed to be, but my perception skills were good enough that it didn’t take long to locate a door.

Problem: the door was extremely locked. It wasn’t a main entrance, I was pretty sure, since it was just a regular door instead of the grand gates that I would generally associate with something like this, but it still wouldn’t budge. Despite this area being as plague-infested as the rest of the village, the integrity of the door, its lock, and its handle seemed to be entirely unaffected.

This was awkward but nowhere near insurmountable. I pressed the most infected part of my fist against the door and drew on Split the Shadows.

Power flooded through me, the surge of strength taking me off guard with its intensity. I had grown used to an Adept ability drawing mana from my still Initiate-tier core, which also meant that I had acclimated to the aspects in which my power was still lacking. The setup I had was like trying to run a sports car on a nearly-empty tank of the cheapest brand of gas. It worked, but there were obvious points where the skill just wasn’t operating at full strength.

That was not the case now. Midnight black claws darker than even the air around me shot forth from my balled fist, extending from my knuckles and splitting off into tendril-like appendages that sliced through enchanted wood and metal like a hot knife through butter.

The surge still boosting my skill, I dragged my fist across the entirety of the door, tearing a big enough a chunk out of it that Harmonic Awareness caught mana sparking and fritzing as enchantments failed.

Inside me, the raging veins of plague had started to settle down, the burning pain cooling into something more concentrated and focused.

Power, I realized. It wasn’t pure mana, not the kind where I would be able to just circulate it through my body and use it as fuel, but it was definitely working towards empowering Split the Shadows.

It must have been something to do with the fact that my skill drew on the same well of power that the plague did. Somewhere in there, my magic had piggybacked on the plague, and it had strengthened it enough that it could tear straight through the protection.

Nightmare’s Call didn’t seem to have gotten the same boost. I wondered what the difference was. Maybe because one of them was about connecting to souls, while the other actualized the Nightmare? Hard to tell.

With the enchantment gone, I took a few steps back and placed a Fireball right in the crevice I’d made, widening the gap with prejudice.

The flames didn’t last for long, smothered by the plague around it, but the sheer force of the Adept-tier spell, even dampened by the curses in the air, was enough to splinter open a hole large enough for me to crawl through.

I did just that, grunting as splinters dragged at my exposed, plague-touched skin. They drew blood, but not enough to be concerned.

And then I was inside, laying eyes on an unfortunately familiar hallway. Though I hadn’t been in this part of the tower yet, the entire building had been created in the same easily recognizable style that had characterized the parts I’d walked through on my way to my execution.

The plague followed me in through the hole I’d made, but not in great amounts. It seemed to be struggling to progress the further it made it into untarnished air, presumably because of some enchantment or another.

The tower had stayed intact through the plague rain, which was interesting. That meant that they’d reinforced the tower with enough power to keep it from getting destroyed but hadn’t done the same for the village around them.

There were any number of reasons for that, of course. Ultimately, it had resulted in the death of most everyone outside. Those who had managed to make it to the tower or had decided to reinforce positions there had stayed alive.

My first reaction was to immediately think of how inhuman it was for them to leave so many of their own to die, but just a second of thinking was all it took for me to remember that it was not, in fact, Grancrest who had dropped a magical chemical weapon on their own village.

At any rate, I could sense my lifeline now. The closer I got to it, the fewer barriers there were between us, and the better I could intuit its position. Rather than just a general direction, a comforting thread connected me to my weapon.

I started navigating the guild building. Fortunately, although the construction was just as complicated and difficult to navigate as it had been on my way to my hanging, the combination of Nightmare's Call giving me an idea of where people were and my connection to my lifeline gave me a significantly better basis to search from.

There were definitely a good number of people here. I didn't have any way to sense how strong they were or if they were combatants at all, but the notes of uncertainty and fear were nearly universal. With most of them, it also came with a quiet sense of determination.

Avoiding everyone was impossible. There were more people in here now than there had been an hour ago, to the point where a number of people seemed to just be sitting in the halls. I also wasn't the only one with the perception ability, and soon enough, people started taking note. The emotions I felt with Nightmare's Call started including a few bits of alarm, and people began moving toward me.

Well, this was annoying. I had kind of counted on the Tower being less intact than this. Hadn’t Locke just been fighting Lanaeus near here? Surely that should have at least blown up part of it.

Speculation didn't matter. I needed to figure out my next move. The safest thing to do was definitely to go back out into the plague rain, which I doubted anyone in here would chase after me in. That would mean I had no access to my lifeline, though, and it meant I would still be outside when the follow-up for this came.

And I was sure there would be a follow-up. Assuming this was the Federation, I had seen enough of them now to understand that Sebastian, that unreadable bastard, would have plans upon plans upon plans.

The more I thought about it, the more sure I was that he was the one who had unleashed this weapon. There was still a possibility it was somebody else, but out of the players in Liaren that I knew, he was the only one it could be.

Ostensibly, he was on my side, but the fact that he had this ready at this timing made me very suspicious. Mizuki had even mentioned that he had some kind of divination or pathing specialty, which made a whole lot of coincidences that had started since I had been allowed to leave the Federation’s lockdown significantly more suspicious.

In essence, I assumed I was going to continue to be a piece on his board if I stepped back outside. If that was going to be true either way, I would rather take the necessary risk to at least have my lifeline.

I wasn't defenseless. I still had my admittedly weak offensive spells as well as a knife the size of my forearm that I'd taken off of some poor dead guy. Neither of those were my forte, but I had enough tools that I was pretty confident I could at least take on any Adept in a one-on-one.

Most of the people here were Adepts, which was good, but it didn't look like I was going to be approached by only one person.

I did have one other tool. My Healing Aura and Doubletime were both still active, constantly sapping at my mana and my focus. I had to keep the latter up lest I screw myself over with exhaustion here, but the former served a different purpose.

Most of the plague had been cleared by whatever ward was protecting the entrance. I had split some of that open using my skill, but it had filled in shortly after. It looked like, for the time being, my Adept-tier Split the Shadows could break through intangible magic barriers but not necessarily completely eliminate them. As such, I had not accidentally doomed everyone in here to a messy, soul-rending death.

That didn't mean that the plague had completely avoided me, though. In fact, a good chunk of it had made it through the barrier while it had been at its most devastated right after I had torn through it. I was familiar enough with shielding spells to conclude that the ward was probably a “skin-deep” type where anything that made it past the shield was able to continue afterward. All of my defensive spells were like that too.

That meant that there was still a thin cloud of plague swirling around me. Interestingly enough, while parts of it continued to infect me, it seemed like I had enough of it already in my body that a good amount was just trailing me, prioritizing my healing magic at about the same rate that it did my body, which meant that I could just manipulate the position of the plague with my Healing Aura.

That did come at the price of being thoroughly infected by plague to the point where most of my skin and blood registered orange while my hand registered a light crimson when I Body Scanned myself, but I felt surprisingly fine. Compared to the other pain that had gone through, the amount that I was affected now was pretty light, all things considered.

It didn't take long for the first person to find me. It was a woman in mage’s robes, clearly following some kind of scouting spell he’d cast. Judging by the surprise she felt when she rounded the corner and saw me standing there, though, I would wager that it was just dumb luck she'd found me as fast as she had. She hadn't thought I would be here.

I was about to pull for a spell in case he tried to do something, but her reaction was not what I expected it would be.

She turned tail and took off at full speed, leaving my effective range before I could figure out what I wanted to do.

“That was awkward,” I said aloud.

I had a sneaking suspicion of where he was going.

#

Two minutes ago, Lanaeus had stumbled from one hell into another.

The Highmaster had admittedly taken too long to deal with the Federation boy. Having fulfilled his ritual duty, Lanaeus had wanted to capture the boy while also forcing him to reveal more of his tricks. It wasn’t the first time he’d done that during the process of strong-arming a recruit into Grancrest or his personal experiments, but past instances of it had been in simpler situations, ones where he had been a hunter rather than someone responsible for the lives of hundreds.

Lanaeus regretted letting his people die, and he only regretted it all the more because he hadn’t managed to achieve his own goal.

Instead, just before he’d been about to get serious about bringing the boy in, another, significantly more irritating mage utilizing similarly forbidden magic had hurled death magic at the Highmaster’s head.

To be more precise, that other mage had shot several Master-tier lightning bolts at Lanaeus before encircling him in a web of death magic. The spell had been eerily similar to what the Highmaster himself tended to use when it came to a fight, and he had been able to dispel it with his own works.

That had just been a distraction, though, and he found himself hit by a spell he had never experienced before, throwing him into a deep, dark void that had set off every instinct he’d ever relied on. Then there had been pain and confusion and memories of lives he had neither lived nor seen.

Lanaeus hadn't made it to Highmaster without a fair share of abnormal attempts on his life, and he managed to keep himself mostly safe at the expense of much of his mana, eventually stumbling out of the demi-plane-like existence he'd been thrown into.

On the outside, there had been more darkness, but this time it was raging, chomping at the bit and trying to drag anyone it could find into that same abyss.

He wouldn't have been able to tell that beforehand, but something about that spell the young, pale boy had cast on him had altered Lanaeus on a fundamental level. There was something deeply wrong with that space and that power, the kind that changed a person just coming into contact with it.

And it had snuffed out the lives of many of the people he had been entrusted with. He regretted that, but what was done was done. He had reinforced what he could and decided to weather it out until a full-out attack inevitably came.

He had just gotten up to speed with the situation when one of his aides came sprinting into the room, huffing and puffing.

“Camellia,” he said. “What did you see? Talk to me.”

“Defenses breached,” she said between gasps, delivering every word as efficiently as possible. “Heretic. Hall 7. Plague.”

That was all he needed to hear. Lanaeus took off, Camellia leading the way despite her obvious exhaustion. Others were already on their way, but they cleared the path for him. A Highmaster was worth dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands, of adepts combined. He was by far the most qualified in this building to take care of this problem.

Finding the boy who had been hanged that morning took little effort. He wasn't trying to hide himself. In fact, by the time the Highmaster arrived, his target was standing entirely still.

Seeing the boy again was a disquieting sight up close. The clothes he’d been captured in had been run ragged by both Grancrest’s hospitality and the effects of the plague that he must have walked through. Blackened veins ran through his skin, and even that wasn’t enough to distract from the prominent purple around his neck. A noose’s bruise.

“Red,” Lanaeus said. “Interesting idea to come here of all places.”

He wanted to initiate immediately, but one thing was keeping him from beginning to cast. It had taken most of his remaining mana to establish defensive spells powerful enough to keep him from getting affected by the plague himself. Though he could recover quickly, Lanaeus just hadn’t had enough time to replenish his mana.

That meant that when there was a cloud of the same hateful, nightmarish plague wafting around the pseudonym-using Federation member, he had to reconsider whether he could chance moving further.

“Didn’t think that would be the first thing you would ask,” the adventurer said, spreading his hands. The knife in his left was actively rusting but coated in blood. “I assume you noticed the more significant part, though. Would’ve attacked otherwise, right?”

The boy was controlling the plague. From the hasty explanations his people had given him, Lanaeus knew that he hadn’t been the origin point of it, but one could be forgiven for thinking he was with how deftly he wove it around his body. Outside, it had constantly been assailing the Highmaster, chasing after him and giving him no mercy.

Yet here, a twelve-year-old boy with no weapon had marched straight into the heart of the Grancrest village not an hour after he had been hanged by the neck until dead. The only magic he had on him was a healing spell of all things.

And he was doing that without a magical focus, Lanaeus noted idly.

Of course, on top of everything else, he was walking and talking without issue when everyone else touched by this plague had been met with an unkind death.

As a Highmaster, he had seen a great many terrors in his life. Many of them had not survived his attention.

This, however, sent a chill up his spine that he’d never felt before.

Who was Lanaeus facing?

“I have a whole load of problems with you, but none of them are relevant right now,” said the plague-ridden boy. “Let’s talk.”

The ink-black cloud swirled outwards.