Reborn Healer Chapter 45

Because Vallis had already been through here earlier during the same day, I didn’t have much actual healing to do in the medical bay. More time had passed when I’d been in the memory capsules than I’d thought, so I ended up just heading to my lodgings for the time being.

Mizuki was still awake when I got back. She must have made her way to the library as well, because she had a stack of books next to her, one of which she was reading.

“Took you long enough,” she said as I entered the common room, not looking up. “How’d it go?”

“I got some answers,” I said. “But not nearly enough.”

I kept on thinking back to Neferi’s last words. I should have written them down earlier when it’d been fresher in my memory, but I still recalled it well enough to record now.

The language wasn’t any one I recognized, so I phoneticized it as well as I could within the context of the common one I had learned for this world. Den boyo nape thano et see, voytheese te— the last word had been cut off, presumably, the incantation not complete.

“You recognize what this says?” I asked Mizuki.

She glanced up from her book and peered at it for a while before shaking her head. “I can tell you it’s not common, elven, or arcane. I don’t think it’s a dialect of the first two, either. I don’t know enough about magic to tell you if this is somehow a type of arcane.”

“Yeah, that’s about as far as I got,” I said. “I’m probably going to be trying to figure out what this means for a while.”

“Get a letter or something?”

“Not quite.” I explained what I’d just done, up to and including Sebastian finding me.

Mizuki snorted. “You have a nasty habit of getting in places you shouldn’t be.”

“I’m good at making the most out of being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I said, grinning. “I think I made it pretty clear already that this is what I want out of the guild, right?”

“You have,” Mizuki said, re-opening her book.

“Actually, I do have a question for you,” I interrupted.

“Go ahead. I’m not busy.”

“What do you plan on doing from here on out?” Since she’d come to the door of the Kane clinic, we’d been working together to get the half-elf the security she needed so that the next group of people coming after her would have to contend with a lot more than just me or my family, but we were here now. “Or for the future, I guess.”

“That’s a serious question,” she said.

I shrugged. “I’m curious, and I’m not entirely sure myself. I know what I want to do in the immediate future, but after I figure out that mystery, I’m not really sure what I want to do.”

“I’d say you’re a bit young to be thinking that far ahead, but you’ve heard that a few too many times by now.” Mizuki blew a lock of hair away from her face. “I’ve given a bit of thought to it. I don’t want to live a quiet life, but I’d rather stay out of the mess that politics can make. Your parents ever tell you stories about the adventurers who could kill godspawn? Some of them were even said to be able to affect gods themselves.”

“I’ve read the stories,” I said. “From the era where the gods still walked the earth. They don’t really make legends like that anymore, I’ve been told.”

“They don’t. Still, that’s something like what I’d like to achieve,” she said wistfully. “Power for power’s sake. Finding secret treasures, slaying great monsters… if all of this is over, I just want to become the very best. I’d be fine diving the World Dungeon full time. The Cataclysms exist. Maybe I’ll try to kill one someday.”

That was a simpler motivation than I would have assumed, but I could sympathize. That said, that definitely wasn’t what drove me. I wanted to get stronger because being able to do more with my spells and skills rocked, but I didn’t feel the same fire for it that I could feel in Mizuki.

“But don’t quote me on that,” she added. “We still have full lives ahead of us. Very long ones, if our progress allows. A lot of things can change. I know that I’ve had everything I knew upended more than once. You don’t need to worry about this yet.”

“Am I that transparent?” I asked, chuckling sheepishly. “Or are you using a skill on me right now?”

“I don’t need a skill to tell you’re conflicted about this,” she said. “You can worry about it all you like, but I can tell you that you’re probably not going to be aiming for the same thing in five years that you are now.”

I could vouch for that. I had been nearly completely aimless in my previous life. This time around, I had established a greater sense of purpose, but I still didn’t feell ike I’d established myself well enough.

“If I had to say, though,” Mizuki continued, heedless of my internal monologue, “I would say that you probably find your calling in helping people.”

I furrowed my brow. “You think so?”

“You’re trying to get out of one of the safest places in the city so you can risk getting yourself killed just so you can reach your patients at the clinic on the day your dad is off,” she said drily. “You leapt into almost certain death to save Matias.”

I shuddered. “Don’t remind me. I swear I can still taste that slime when I cough.”

“You get the idea,” she said. “I haven’t known you for very long, all things considered, but you have a shocking lack of self-preservation when it comes to helping other people.”

“It just looks that way because I can preserve myself really well,” I shot back.

“Say what you want to say,” she said, suppressing a smile. “And do what you want to do. You don’t need to listen to me or anyone else. I know I’d hate having someone tell me what I am. Feel free to become a bloodthirsty battle maniac if that’s what you want to do.”

“I’ll think on that.”

“Think on it with your spear pointed away from me, please.”

#

It took a couple days to work out exactly how the process for me trading off healing hours would work. With how busy the senior guild members were running a shadow war, logistics took a while.

The first day of healing for the guild was pretty easy. I wasn’t the highest-tiered healer that they had by a pretty long shot, so I only dealt with cases that were honestly pretty underwhelming given the abilities I did have. The worst thing I had to deal with were a few broken bones, which was pretty easy.

By the end of it, I was itching to get out of here. While it was admittedly nice to help people, I knew how fast I could work and how fast a better healer should be able to. Add that to the number of healers present in the Federation medbay and the number of injuries they were receiving and I could easily conclude that our energy was being wasted when it could have gone to others who needed it.

Eventually, a uniformed warrior whose face I couldn’t be bothered to remember came with instructions from Sebastian to let me out. I had initially thought that he would require me to go around with a babysitter, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that other than leading me through a secret exit, they let me go on my own.

Since the guild healing duty had been pretty easy, I was able to get to the clinic well before lunchtime. The horse-drawn cab driver I flagged down wasn’t willing to go far into Southside, but I could walk after I was south of the bridge.

The clinic was predictably jammed with people. Vallis, as he usually did when neither of us could make it into town, had a pay-what-you-can system with a good chunk of our medicines available for purchase along with simple labels describing what they were used for. Though it was the type of thing that could easily go wrong, especially Southside, but the clinic was such a staple of the community that theft from Vallis was a good way to get a beating from someone else who might’ve needed the medicine.

There were more than usual, though, and it wasn’t just regular faces here today. I definitely hadn’t seen a good number of these people before.

Matias was among their number, but he was acting more like a moderator to keep people from swarming the building. From how clean his leathers were, he actually hadn’t gone into the World Dungeon yesterday.

“Ren!” he called out, spotting me and waving. “Everyone! Clear a path!”

When people didn’t immediately obey, he repeated himself much more forcefully, and they parted, giving me a pathway into the clinic.

“Thanks, man,” I said, jumping up to pat him on the shoulder as I passed him by. I needed to  get the clinic sorted so I could start processing patients. It was going to be a busy day.

“I should be thanking you for showing up, doc,” he said. “Vallis hasn’t been in a couple days.”

I stopped in my tracks. “He hasn’t? He didn’t mention anything to me about it.”

“Not to me, either. Just didn’t show up during his normal day yesterday. I don’t know why.”

Hm. That was concerning, but I filed that under concerns to deal with afterwards. If he hadn’t shown up for a day, I could just contact him later. I doubted a couple hours of healing people who clearly needed it would change anything with where he was. Most likely some noble had gotten into a dire accident on one of his normal off days.

“Well, I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it,” I said.

“That’s a new ‘un,” Matias said. “You’re full of ‘em, aren’t ya?”

“Have I really not used this one before?” I asked, pulling on my favored set of gloves. As I had learned over the years, it was nice to have something to keep gore from spilling all over my hands.

“Nope. G’luck with today.”

“Of course. Do you need any healing?”

“Haven’t been in the dungeon in a bit, ‘specially with all that coin we got from the city. Sounds like I made th’right choice.”

“Yeah, probably,” I muttered. “Alright. Well, I’ll get to everyone I can. Open the gate, if you would?”

The regulars had come first, so naturally they were also the first who entered the clinic. They were normal issues, mostly, just ones that Northside people generally didn’t have to work around. 

Other than active adventurers, most of whom either had healer support or spent most of their time training, there were few of the wealthy who risked their bodies during their work, while many down Southside could sustain career-ending injuries regularly. I handled them with my usual mediocre bedside manner, urging them to stay safe next time and still charging the same twenty silver price we had six years ago.

Past that, I started reaching people I hadn’t seen before. Those were a touch more annoying to deal with.

“I was told there was a doctor here,” the first man I was to heal growled. He definitely looked like he was from out of town judging from his furs. It wasn’t that cold here yet, but he was dressed for significantly worse weather. “Don’t tell me it’s you.”

After a quick once-over, I hit him with a Body Scan, targeting scars and the areas hidden by his furs.

“Poison?” I asked, ignoring his scathing insult. “It’s either not that serious or you have a nasty metabolism. How long ago did you get hit by the weapon that did this? Was it an arrow? Something still stuck in your body, but you’re not bleeding. Oh, did someone heal over it already?”

I had to admit, seeing the look of shock on the barbarian-looking guy’s face was almost worth the wasted mana.

“You new in town?” I asked.

“Yes,” he admitted, looking chagrined. “I shouldn’t have judged. My apologies.”

“No worries,” I said. “There’s a lot of you guys. Are you all new?”

“Traveling mercenaries. Sellswords.” Sure enough, there was a slight twang to his voice that indicated that he was from elsewhere in the kingdom. “Some of them’ll tell you they’re ‘wandering adventurers.’ That’s a load of shit. We do violence and we get coin. Contacts in the area said this was a good place to go to if we got into a spot of trouble.”

“It is,” I said. “Mind sitting down so I can get this out. This, uh… arrowhead?”

“Arrowhead,” he confirmed, sitting. “Got shot at. Lost a couple of my guys on an easy mission, but… maybe that’s not for you to hear.”

“No, actually,” I said, extracting my favorite scalpel from my toolkit. “I’ve seen worse. Don’t worry about scaring me. I’m sure I can handle it.”

The mercenary considered me, looking into my eyes like he could determine some meaning from there.

Whatever he found, he seemed satisfied with it. “Go ahead.”

“Mind removing your furs?” I asked. “It’s that or I cut them off, which I don’t think you’d like.”

He moved his coat, giving me access to his scars. I applied a milkweed cream to the surrounding area, temporarily anesthetizing the area. The injury was minor enough that I didn’t think a full Adept-tier Anesthesia was necessary for this.

I’d done this kind of operation a thousand times. From slicing through the flesh to locating the foreign object with a slightly more invasive Body Scan to removing it with metal tweezers, then neutralizing the poison and healing over the wound I’d reopened, the entire process only needed a couple minutes even if I was paying the utmost attention to it.

“So,” I said, examining the arrowhead I pulled out. After washing it, I saw that it was a shape I wasn’t used to seeing, slimmer and more jagged than the thick, uniform broadheads I usually saw in our bows. “A spot of trouble, you said?”

The poison ultimately proved to be the trickiest part. The reason it hadn’t progressed to a point where my patient was suffering more lethal symptoms was because of his metabolism—or, more likely, a skill of some kind. Dealing with it took a few applications of Cure Poison, but I was a deft enough hand at using it that it wasn’t much effort to do so, especially now that I was a tier higher than the spell level and was thus able to cast it with almost no effort at all.

My patient mulled over his reply while I was treating him. “Yeah. Barely even saw what we were getting shot at by. Bunch of dicks in a trench. I don’t think they even saw us.”

“Where were you?” I asked, curious. “It must have been close to Liaren. Bandits of some kind?”

I’d heard that the major roads were becoming increasingly dangerous the further one got from the cities thanks to increasing numbers of desperate opportunists who couldn’t make a living in the current economic climate and were turning to robbing convoys and private citizens.

“Don’t think so,” he said. “Bandits usually don’t go south of Liaren, no?”

That piqued my interest hard enough that I almost messed up patching his flesh back together. “South, you said. I heard that’s gone to complete shit.”

“I’m new around these parts,” the warrior admitted. “I’m not sure what we were fighting. Just know we got paid to go scout out a few locations, do what damage we could, and report back. I knew the pay was too good for it to be that simple.”

“I mean, it looks simple enough,” I said. “Not to cast any aspersions, but you don’t look that hurt.”

“I got lucky,” he replied. “Some of the other guys after me, they didn’t get as lucky. And some of them just died right then and there. I know these men. They’re like me. If it was just poison they were getting hit with, they should have lived.”

And now I was growing even more curious. “There are other people with worse symptoms out there?”

“Nobody critical,” he said grimly enough that I could guess what had happened to everyone who’d needed immediate treatment. “But yes. No witch doctor we went to would even try to help us with it.”

“Show me,” I demanded. “You’re done, by the way. Sorry about the blood.”

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “How much do I owe you?”

“Twenty silver.” That we charged the same for dealing with minor sicknesses and life-threatening injuries was sometimes a bit odd to my mind, but I had gotten used to the idea that things worked differently around here, especially when someone on the order of Vallis Kane was involved.

The warrior’s eyebrows raised so far I was worried they might escape his face. “Pretty cheap for something this good. You sure?”

“I’m young, not stupid,” I said. “I know my worth. Yes, I’m sure. The price is the same for everyone.”

The warrior considered me again, shrugged, and retrieved a storage band from his wrist, riffling inside for coin.

He paused. “If your going rate is twenty, what say I pay you forty a head and you treat my guys before anyone else?”

“Is anyone at risk of dying immediately?” I asked.

“Yes?” he tried.

“I wouldn’t try lying to the guy who’s going to put a knife inside your comrades before too long,” I said. “Want to try again?”

“Is that a threat?”

“Only if you make it one.”

He pressed his lips together and nodded, a noise escaping his lips. “You got me there, kid. What’d you say your name was?”

“Ren Kane,” I said. “But ‘doctor’ is fine. I’ll treat the most severe cases first. Anything that won’t kill or cripple a patient soon is something that can wait its turn. Understand me?”

“I understand you, doc,” he said. “Pleasure doing business with you. I hope I don’t have to see you again. No offense, of course.”

“I get it,” I replied. “Good luck out there.”

People continued to trickle in, and I tried to step up the pace. Thanks to the sheer number of patients, I had to go a bit faster than usual. Many of the issues were of the everyday type and manageable in quick bursts. Typically, I might have spent longer ensuring that my work was absolutely perfect and made conversation with the patients, but there were too many people here today.

That first mercenary wasn’t the only one I had to deal with. There was more than one company of them judging them by the way they dressed. I termed them fur- and iron-clad respectively in my head based on what they had on. The former had a number of mages, while the latter was entirely warriors, since mages were generally not able to properly cast while wearing thick armor, especially metal.

The fur-clad mostly had similar injuries to the first guy—poisoned arrows and festering wounds. Meanwhile, the ones wearing iron tended towards broken bones, though there were a couple with acid burn-like symptoms that were a little weirder to deal with.

Things came to a head when I heard a minor commotion outside, and the first fur-clad warrior came back in, this time supporting another one of his men on his shoulder.

“Back so soon?” I asked.

“Unfortunately,” he replied. “I know you said that everyone needs to wait their turn, but this seemed important. Watson! Stay with me.”

The shorter, gaunt man leaning on his shoulder—Watson—coughed in a manner that indicated he was brutally sick. I didn't have any spell that could let me detect if bacteria were in the air, but healing magic had been useful to get myself through diseases, although it was much less effective at dealing with other people. I wasn't too worried about him infecting me.

His pupils were dilated, and the cursory Body Scan revealed that there were quite a few things wrong with him. At Adept-tier, that spell was capable of at least giving me a general idea of where problems were located, as well as an indication of whether they were truly severe or not. Typically, I had to cast a second one because the first wide-range one wouldn't be effective enough to show me the exact symptoms, but even my initial spell cast brought back worrying results.

The body scan showed a color gradient from green to yellow to orange to red and eventually black. The tail end of it basically meant something was dead. From the amount of black I was seeing now, it was a miracle that Watson was still conscious and walking, even if it was assisted.

“You were right,” I said, urgency slipping into my tone. “Get him onto the operation bed. Do it fast.”

He didn't need to be told twice, dragging Watson into the clinic proper and setting him up on the bed.

“Get his clothes off,” I said. “It'll be faster if you do it. I need to get my tools. This is serious.”

A good number of the other mercenaries who hadn't been accustomed to being treated by a twelve-year-old had also had some level of resistance to being told what to do by a doctor of my size and age, but this first one had displayed a higher-than-average amount of understanding for someone who I assumed would be an asshole.

It was a bit hypocritical of me to make assumptions based on first impressions, I knew, but oh well. The point was, he got to stripping Watson right away, leaving him just enough for some basic decency.

The problem was immediately apparent. He must have been struck in the leg or something because, even to the naked eye, dark lines had spiderwebbed throughout his veins and arteries, necrotizing some of the flesh—no, not quite. It was doing something else to it, something I couldn't quite understand with the level of knowledge I had about healing right now.

Yet it was familiar. Where had I seen this before?

The memory surfaced to mind. My stomach sank.

The reason why it seemed so familiar was that I had seen it not two days ago.

Many of the details had been blurry, but like hell was I going to forget the image of an entire courthouse being torn apart by a wave of shadow.

Watson had been hit by Neferi’s weapon.