Reborn Healer Chapter 38

This was an awkward time to have a skill evolution force me to make a decision, to put it lightly. Before I could even read what my options were, the adult magma wraith launched itself toward us, each of its steps sinking it up to where a knee would be on a normal humanoid being. Its steps melted the stone surface, and it barreled its way through the rougher parts of the terrain.

I threw up a Shield spell, but it broke through that with ease, black flame briefly wreathing it.

My lifeline had fallen into the river after slicing the four-winged demon, and I realized even as I called it back that I would be fighting this initial part without my spear.

Call Lifeline lvl 7 -> 8

My skill was getting faster as it leveled, though I still didn’t have the level of fine control over it that I would have liked.

Mizuki stepped out in front of me to fend off the magma wraith, leaving me to content with the flying diabolist and his demon.

The monster itself seemed to be fully occupied with balancing Terrence on its back while two of its wings bled ash, so I focused on the magician himself for the time being. I knew he must have had a bunch of other summons elsewhere, assuming he’d been the one spamming out the younger wraiths to use as scouts and bait, so I prepared for more summons.

He must have been at capacity, though, because his method of attack was a lot more direct. Terrence leveled his magical focus atop the back of the winged demon and roared a very familiar command word.

“Fireball!”

It was a wide enough range to encompass all three of us on the ground, but I didn’t have a defensive spell strong enough to negate it. I’d neglected to learn better shielding spells after hitting Adept, focusing instead on training so we’d be better suited for this.

That suited me just fine, though. I met fire with fire, summoning a Fireball of my own from my hands and sending it right back at Terrence. The two spells met closer to us than to him, detonating in a blast of force that knocked me on my ass but didn’t do much more. Mizuki’s footing wavered, but she didn’t even flinch in her ongoing game of cat and mouse with the larger magma wraith.

That thing was controlling too much space. Mizuki had to flicker away from it every time it flared its black-flame aura, a shimmering haze of protection forming from her elven-made clothes each time she near-missed. Her equipment seemed to be on cooldown. There was only so much time she could spend near it, baiting it away from me, before she had to retreat.

Terrence didn’t let up, firing again and again. I responded similarly, but it was clearly a losing situation. He was much better at offensive spellcasting than I was. Apart from Fireball, he also cast a spell whose name I interpreted as Withering Bolt. That one I dealt with via multiple layers of Shield. Fireball’s patterns I knew. This new one was different enough that I didn’t know what it did, nor did I want to find out.

Having to cast multiple layers of one spell meant that he had the tempo advantage. I couldn’t attack back, and the surprise factor of a healer being able to attack was gone now. My lifeline was still on its way, fighting the current of the river, and fire spells were pretty much useless on top of this.

The magma wraith was making steady, relentless progress on Mizuki on top of all of that. Before long, it was going to reduce the amount of usable space we had to almost none. We needed a change of pace, and we needed it fast.

“Get out over the water!” I called out to Mizuki. “We can’t fight all of them at once!”

As I defended her retreat, I eyed the new skills with what little focus I could spare.

Empathic Insight has two possible evolutions. Select the skill it will become:

> Whispers from Within [Adept]

Type: Surveillance/Soul 

And as there is no day without night and no Way without the Waste, those who seek to pierce the heart of man will find nightmare and dreams both.

Provides significantly greater intuition about a target’s current mental state at a significantly greater range. Drawing deeper on this skill can allow you to locate a prominent whisper within.

> Nightmare’s Call [Adept]

Type: Soul/Surveillance

There is no interference with the Way, only a twisting of it. To instill one’s Way within another’s is not perversion but a new understanding of the natural order.

Provides more refined intuition about a target’s current mental state. Drawing deeper on this skill can allow you to instill a command in the target. This can be resisted.

A sharp boost to my ability to use the current form of Empathic Insight as well as make it a much more powerful scouting tool versus an entirely different direction for its evolution.

It also as good as confirmed a suspicion I’d had in the back of my mind. Since connecting with the Nightmare, my skills had subtly changed, possibly thanks to its influence.

I cleared my mind, forcing myself into a semi-flow state as I managed my mana to protect us and start on a bridge at the same time. For the bridge I used horizontal Barriers over the Shield spells I’d cast on our way across. They were Beginner-tier and thus had significantly less staying power to them, but they would hold our weight and I could cast many more of them at a time.

I held five at a time, defending myself and my makeshift bridge against Terrence’s ongoing assault. He realized what I was doing pretty quickly, and he switched to a machine-gun of spells, lowering their power to Initiate-tier but prodding at my personal defenses and destroying pieces of the bridge at the same time.

Two could play at that game, though, and I created a flickering grid of Barriers, turning them on and off at random. I lost more mana and concentration if a defensive spell got actively broken instead of me choosing to turn it off, so the flickering helped a lot in order to keep Terrence’s offensive spells from hitting them and breaking them.

It also made it much harder to actually walk atop them, but that was mostly for Mizuki. Since I was controlling them, I just had to keep concentration on the position of the magma wraith, Terrence, his flying demon, all of my active spells and their timing and position, and of course Mizuki’s current state. With Harmonic Awareness, managing all of that went from an impossibility to one task among many.

Harmonic Awareness lvl 1 -> 2

My vision slid out of my body, awareness expanding in a sphere around me, and I danced through a hail of energy spears and dark magic and fire without missing a beat.

Mizuki stumbled as she retreated, the magma wraith nicking her with the dark fire. She winced in pain, her arm rapidly charring.

I shouted out a command word as I saw that, casting the Initiate-tier Basic Quick Heal. It was significantly cruder than even a normal Basic Heal would be since I could barely shape the revitalizing energy before it entered her body, but it would keep the damage from getting too much worse for the time being.

Mizuki jumped away from the magma wraith, pumping more power into her legs to make a running leap that would have been pro athlete tier on Earth.

Terrence took advantage of the moment where she was defenseless, whip dangling uselessly by her side, and cast another Withering Bolt. Still unsure of what that spell did, I caught the blast of dark energy with a triple layer of Shield spells.

It was a trap.

Terrence, knowing that I would defend Mizuki, changed up the style of his attack. Rather than fire at me, he simply touched a hand on the winged demon he was riding. Flying as it was a good fifty feet from me, it was far enough that I hadn’t been able to catch the fact that even with its wings bleeding ash and barely keeping it afloat, the demon had been gathering mana at four feathered tips.

As it fired another dark burst of energy at me, I realized that my initial impression was wrong. The magic carried the same feeling that all of Terrence’s spells had come with so far.

His demon hadn’t cast a spell. Terrence had been building a spell through it the entire time and had cast it just now using it as a secondary spell focus.

I dodged, but the additional variable of covering for Mizuki meant that I was ever so slightly out of sync. The beam was large enough that even diving to the side wasn’t entirely enough.

It clipped me in the leg, and I immediately lost sensation there, the force of it enough to send me spiraling out over the edge of my Barrier and into the water, destroying the forcefield I’d been standing on in the process. I managed to keep my spells intact, but the sheer force it sent rattling through my body was enough that I couldn’t catch my fall.

Mizuki did instead, snapping her whip out to a greater distance than I’d seen it go before and lashing it around me before freezing it in place. It dug into my skin deep enough to bleed me, but it stopped my momentum. I started healing myself as she yanked me back onto a platform separate from the one I was on.

I created more for her to jump to as Terrence pushed his advantage, barraging us with spells again. Those I could still fend off, so I tried to get to my feet and recover our position.

That proved to be a mistake. I collapsed, my entire right leg failing to support my weight. I still had no sensation in it from the thigh down, and as I focused on it further with my Harmonic Awareness, I realized that it had necrotized substantially, blackening and completely deadening it to me.

Even as I processed that, more of my leg disappeared from my physical body’s perception.

I must have been hit by an upgraded version of the Withering Blast spell. I dropped to the floor limblessly, pushing as much power as I could into a Heal aimed at the border where the spell was advancing. Though I couldn’t counterspell an ongoing magical effect, I was pretty sure that the type of mana present in Withering Blast was the kind that would struggle to deal with revitalizing energy.

Sure enough, as another Fireball sailed over my collapsed body, the necrosis stopped growing. A second Heal didn’t do anything to bring sensation back into the leg, though. I checked on the status of it separately with a spell.

Body Scan lvl 6 -> 7

It registered all black. I’d only seen that on dying people before. My leg was beyond saving with my abilities.

I didn’t let that faze me, instead canceling the Barrier under me and creating a second one to catch me.

My lifeline finally burst out of the water just as I heard steam hissing from our left. As I caught my spear, grateful for the momentary distraction it provided to the winged demon, I rolled onto my one functional knee to look.

I double-took. The adult magma wraith had walked directly into the river. I had figured that its weakness to water would mean that it would discourage it from messing with us any further, and it had to some extent. It had apparently now realized that it was simply hot enough to flash-boil any of the water rushing at it and was now walking at us.

Shit. I couldn’t move nearly as well as I had been able to just moments before, and I wasn’t going to be able to manage subsequent distractions nearly as well now.

I wasted mana on several thick shields to protect myself from the next wave of spell attacks instead of trying to dodge at all, then considered my options again.

With how this fight had started with the scales weighed against us and was only getting worse, I needed this to count. That made the decision obvious. We were deep enough in the fight now that a choice insight wouldn’t made the difference between victory and death.

I made my choice.

Empathic Insight -> Nightmare’s Call [Adept]

Even as the skill evolved, I could feel the other branch still swirling around within my body. I noted that down for later, but in the moment I was focused on the new power I’d gained.

I reached out for Terrence’s emotions again. They no longer came as flashes of my own memories, actualizing themselves as actual parseable feelings. There was some loss of depth there, but it was much more specific in what I could detect.

His earlier panic had largely died out, but there was still a surprising amount of wariness. Mizuki and I had proved to be hardier opponents than he’d expected, and he probably thought he would have easily won by now. A sense of accomplishment was steadily spreading to become the foremost feeling, but it was tempered with a clear fear of failure.

At a guess, he’d realized he probably had the most important rule in the broad ambush. He was winning, but there was never surety when it came to magical fights.

I could work with that. I dug into that sensation, pulling deep onto and into that thread as I worked up Nightmare’s Call for the first time.

The wording was vague, but my intrinsic understanding of the skills I gained alongside its description was enough for me to gauge the usage of it. I needed to find and exploit a weak point.

Judging from what I’d gleaned so far, I had an idea.

Relying on Harmonic Awareness, I slowly got to my feet again. My leg was visibly damaged, and Terrence knew what his spell did. He looked at me with a smirk, his sense of victory apparent both physically and in his emotions, but that faded as I stood straight up, using my harmonized body to make it appear as if I was balancing on both legs even though I wasn’t.

The Grancrest diabolist sent another spell hurtling my way, and I didn’t attempt to dodge, knowing it would be futile. Instead, I slashed at it with my lifeline, imbuing it with Nightmare Forged. I timed it just right to invest the most mana into my spear as I slashed at the next Withering Bolt.

Shadow magic met death, and both fizzled, my lifeline vibrating hard enough in my hands to hurt but deflecting the spell nonetheless.

That steady assurance Terrence had been building throughout the course of the fight cracked.

“Hey, dumbass!” I called out, cupping a hand to amplify my voice as I stirred up my remaining mana to invoke Nightmare’s Call. “Fall.”

Terrence stared blankly at me for a second as the threads of his thoughts connected with mine. This was the furthest I’d stretched my core outside my body in any capacity. The sensation was strange.

Still, I was no stranger by now to my soul, and I adapted significantly more quickly to my skill than Terrence could.

His blank stare continued as he unhitched himself from the winged demon and stepped off it. Terrence snapped back to reality right as he walked straight into open air.

His yelp was decidedly the least confident thing he’d uttered so far. Terrence dropped like a brick, calling his winged demon after him. I lost sight of him in the rushing water, but I heard the sickening impact of flesh falling onto stone.

My attention turned to the increasing heat on my flesh and the one magma wraith still approaching us. It was a good ways under us, but well within dropping range.

“I got it,” Mizuki said, palming her whip. “Since we’re all revealing new skills and all…”

She squeezed the handle so hard that blood welled from her palm. Said blood immediately sank into the whip and traveled upwards, infusing the length of chain with a dark crimson shimmer.

Mizuki had mentioned that she’d been “of the Blood.”

The whip lengthened even longer than I’d seen it earlier, then froze in the shape of an overlong spear that shot forward from the handle, connected by a thin strand of blood. The wraith batted the spear away, but it turned into a whip again, wrapping around its torso. Mizuki pulled, and though she didn’t split the monster in half, she spilled a whole lot of ash.

The damage was enough to get it to lose concentration on its black flame aura, though, and the rushing water it had been boiling off surged on it at once, entombing it. It was hard to see through the steam, but from the fast-moving red heat moving underneath the water, the river began to boil pretty quickly.

That came to an end when the redness faded further down, though, red-black dust polluting a spot further downstream before vanishing out of site.

“Still one active,” Mizuki told me. She winced. “And I need healing.”

Bruised and battered, we nonetheless still had to keep enough of our wits about us to sight the winged demon flapping brutalized wings and nearly dropping back into the river, carrying a sopping wet and bloodied unconscious body with it. It set Terrence down on the side of the river just in time to take my lifeline to its eye. It didn’t last much longer after that.

I healed Mizuki as we slowly made our way to the rough, crater-pocked shore. She’d suffered minor necrosis throughout almost her entire body, which was impressive.

“I have a bit of blood magic in some of my skills,” she explained when I asked about it. “You remember the binding vow we’re under, of course. Just like that, when I infuse my weapon with my blood, the relationship goes both ways. Harm to it carries over to me.”

“I can see why you don’t spam that shit, then,” I said. “It’d be powerful as all hell otherwise.”

Mizuki shrugged. “Everything comes with a cost.”

We half-collapsed next to Terrence’s unconscious body. I Body Scanned him.

“Alive, but in bad shape,” I reported. “What do we do with him?”

He was an enemy, but he was down now. I was of more than half a mind to heal him to stability and get the hell out of here before any backup could arrive.

Instead of replying, Mizuki knelt down next to him, checking his bloodied neck for a pulse.

I could not have expected what she did next in a thousand years. She got down further, lowering her mouth next to his ear, and tore his carotid artery apart with her teeth.

I blinked, watching a fountain of blood spray the half-elf in the face.

“What the fuck?”