Reborn Healer Chapter 36

I cast Heat Ray as I practically leapt back, calling my lifeline to my hand as I did. The data on the spyglass was useful but incomplete, and I had no clue how the magma wraiths would attack when provoked. I wanted to make the first move.

True to the description, my Heat Ray didn’t seem to have the biggest effect on the foremost wraith. I targeted it directly at the center of its head, but all it seemed to do was aggravate the jagged lines that covered it. It crouched slightly, then started tearing through the narrow chokepoint. A heat haze formed around its body, distorting what I could see behind it, and it tore chunks of the rock out of the wall as it passed by, arms extending out to the side and trailing behind it.

Okay, using a heat attack against a monster explicitly explained to have a fire resistance had been a bad idea, but in my defense, I’d kind of panicked.

I threw up a Shield, trusting that it would hold as I got myself into a better position to fight. It held against the magma wraith’s charge, though its integrity plummeted to almost zero as the burning-hot mass slammed into it.

“Magma wraith,” I told Mizuki, grouping up with her again. “Ever deal with them before?”

I did actually know more about magma wraiths—well, wraiths in general, really—than the description provided. Iryn had given me a basic education on a good chunk of the monsters that I could expect to be present across the seven great kingdoms and even some that I wouldn’t.

If I remembered right, there were kingdoms in which wraiths were legally summoned so that their organs could be harvested and worked into communication items, which their bodies had an affinity for. Some variants of them could also walk through walls, but I was pretty sure the magma ones couldn’t, especially not at Adept-tier.

“No, but that absolutely shouldn’t be here.” Mizuki frowned, then shrugged, cracking her whip and freezing it in sword form. “We can break down why they’re here after we kill them.”

A second wraith joined the first, leaping over it and hurling its own body into my Shield, which wavered so much under the pressure that I decided to just drop it and throw their momentum off.

I wished I had spent more time learning other offensive spells. I just didn’t take very well to most of them, even the ones I’d already learned, so I’d doubled down on healing and buff spells. Against something clearly fire-based, a high-pressure water spell would have been fantastic, but Create Water was more like making a faucet out of my hands with very little range and flexibility.

In its stead, I hurled my spear at the second wraith as it tumbled to the ground, unbalanced by the sudden lack of a forcefield in its way. It reacted with surprising speed, flipping itself upright and batting the lifeline away. My throw had enough force behind it that the redirection still ended up hitting the little bastard, just in an area I might consider its shoulder. Instead of blood, black ash spilled from the wound, coating the already dark ground.

I dropped to one knee pulled the spear back to my hands as Mizuki charged forward, timing it in such a way that it traveled under her as she jumped into a flying leap, our harmonic skills working together to perform a move so perfect it looked choreographed.

Tearing the lifeline out of the injured wraith took its arm off as well. Its stump started leaking ash at the same rate an arterial spurt might jettison blood, though that didn’t end up killing it. That honor went to Mizuki’s whip-sword, which descended straight down on the creature’s neck, decapitating it.

She dashed backwards out of the heat haze as the other magma wraith lunged at her, the lines on its face growing brighter until it was surrounded by flame that burned black.

“Not just fire in that,” the half-elf winced, dropping to one knee and clutching her arm. “Nicked me.”

I laid my hand on her shoulder, scanning for damage. Mizuki’s arm looked a lot more damaged now than any part of her had when she’d entered a burning building to save that one random drunk guy a few months ago. Something necrotic was spreading there, eating away at her flesh, but it fortunately looked to just be a lingering effect that would wear off soon. While I didn’t have the abilities to eliminate an ongoing source of damage like a curse or major non-poison afflictions, I could cure necrosis.

To buy time, I threw up another Shield as I healed Mizuki. This time, I timed dropping the spell to sync exactly with the wraith jumping at it to destroy it, throwing my lifeline as it did.

It should have been an easy kill, but the thing somehow abruptly changed direction mid-air, black flame spilling from its body as it jetted off to the side. Where the not-quite-fire touched rock, it melted and withered away, turning a bright red before blackening and crumbling.

I called my lifeline back to my hand, catching it as I withdrew from Mizuki and sprinted forward myself, casting Overheal on myself as well.

Call Lifeline lvl 6 -> 7

In close-quarters combat, I had a whole lot of experience from my warrior core to rely on, powerful skills working in conjunction so that I could perfectly space myself out from its attacks.

That didn’t quite apply to all aspects of it, though. While I dodged its swings easily and twirled on one foot, practically dancing as I plunged the spear into the area where a face would usually be, the entire surface area of my body burned. Part of my sleeves caught on fire as I withdrew the spear from the dying creature and backed away before the next wraiths could get to us.

Fortunately for my sanity, I had just gone through a substantially more painful experience than this just under a month ago and then another one not two hours ago. Compared to constantly being devoured alive or pain bad enough to blind me, I could deal with a full-body second-degree burn.

I cast Create Water on myself, soothing the pain on my arms and legs as I healed the burns away. A second later, Mizuki slapped me on the shoulder, hard.

“Ow,” I said drily.

“You’re getting too used to getting hurt,” she said. “Your shoulder was on fire.”

“Oh. Thanks. Appreciate it.”

I was back to full health quickly enough. Using Adept-tier spells with a correspondingly powerful mana pool behind them was really quite effective, especially when I healed myself. New patients were always a challenge for a myriad number of reasons, none of which applied when I was passing mana through my own body.

Though I’d put a forcefield up to stop the next wraiths from coming, it hadn’t experienced a single impact yet. Still holding the spell up, I reached out with my senses to try to get a sense for them.

Sure enough, the hunger was still there. There was a tinge of something else in the mess, but it was so hard to tell what exactly had changed when the vast majority of their emotions were so alien.

“They’re still here,” I said. “You think you can find them?”

“Hold on.” Mizuki stood still, closing her eyes and holding her hands apart with her whip hanging loose from her hip.

For a brief second, she achieved a level of tranquility profound enough that I could sense it even without my skills enhancing it, the balance sending a calming ripple through the mana in the area. Iryn had told me about this phenomenon. Battle meditation. A way of achieving oneness with the world around oneself, heightening skills and greatly enhancing prowess in fights. It was something I should be able to do one day on my own, but I’d been told that it was generally only really possible after bridging the gap to Master.

Not that Mizuki particularly seemed to care about that last part.

The sheer presence she exuded was awe-inspiring. In that instant, the same creepy-crawly sensation I’d felt the first time I’d met her washed over me again, magnified ten times for just an instant before leaving like it had never been there in the first place. If I hadn’t known it was her doing, I would have thought that my mind was playing tricks on itself.

Mizuki opened her eyes again. “They’re carving their own path. Three of them are in the walls. The last one is running in a different direction.”

“It could be going back to a summoner,” I said. “Someone put these things here with malicious intent. Let’s wrap this up quickly and follow the last wraith.”

“Agreed. Do you need me to point them out?”

“Please.”

Mizuki pointed to three separate spots on the walls, and I focused more intently there, sifting through the noise to try and get a good read on where they were.

Ultimately, it wasn’t the emotion power but Danger Sense that kicked in, screaming at me about a spot directly in front of me.

I sprinted forward, leveraging a Dash and Enhance Strength to maximize the amount of power I could put into one movement as I stabbed the sharp end of the spear into the rock, drawing as much mana out of my body as possible to reinforce the lifeline.

Nightmare Forged lvl 8 -> 9

It pierced through a layer of hard rock and then abruptly experienced much less resistance, punching through molten cave rock and into the black-flame-covered wraith. Its offenses were a lot tougher than its abilities to defend itself, and it was too focused on melting a tunnel through the rock that it couldn’t try to dodge.

The heat was so intense that it conducted through the air, burning my hands again. The deep obsidian that made up the lifeline proved to be a fantastic insulator—though the backs of my hands burned from the sheer heat of the escaping air, the spear itself stayed cool in my palms.

As the wraith croaked out its dying gasp, I shifted focus to the next point of emergence only to see that Mizuki was already there. She cracked her whip directly into the rock, energy swirling through its length. Impossibly, the whip went straight through the cave wall, carving out a thin diagonal line.

Halfway through the crack, she flexed her mana, and the whip froze in place. With the sword form, she stabbed forward one time, putting her whole body into it. No wasted movements.

Mizuki returned the whip-sword to the whip form and snapped her wrist back, dragging it back out through the stone the same way it had come. She caught all of it in her hand.

“One to go,” she said, already moving towards the last point she’d designated. “It’s trying to pull a runner as well.”

It didn’t manage to. Both of us plunged separate paths through the stone, but we both at least made contact with vital parts of the wraith. These creatures were significantly less durable and wiley than I would have expected from something at Adept-tier, but I figured their offensive prowess made up for it. Even a few moments exposed to them had caused burns that would have been debilitating without a healer on hand.

Speaking of which…

“I notice that you didn’t get burned at all,” I said. “Could’ve warned me.”

“And what?” Mizuki asked, brushing dust off her shoulders. “Would you have not gone in like a moron with no sense of self-preservation?”

“I have a perfectly well-adjusted sense of self preservation. I just know how well I can preserve myself.”

“My point stands.” Before I could come up with a pithy comeback, Mizuki continued. “The last one is getting away. We might be able to track it back to its origin point.”

“Not like we have anything better to do,” I said, gesturing ahead of us. “Lead the way.”

She did, taking off at a dead sprint. I followed her back through the chokepoint we’d come through before veering sharply off, taking a different, significantly steeper path. Multiple times, I was sure that we passed through areas with nests of potentially hostile creatures, but we passed through them at high enough speed that they either didn’t notice us or figured they were better off not trying to deal with us.

It might also have had something to do with the effect Mizuki was emitting. With battle meditation enhancing her abilities, the sensation that she was always had been amplified, which I imagined deterred some of the lesser monsters from jumping out at us.

The wraith was fast. Even at our maximum speed, it was outpacing us, and we often had to loop back to take a different path.

“It’s just making new tunnels,” Mizuki explained as we clawed our way through a narrow pathway, hacking away grasping vines that grew out of the stone. “Cutting through paths. I think it knows the fastest way back.”

“I assume we can’t follow it,” I said.

“How confident are you that you can crawl through magma for a full minute?”

“Decently.”

“You might be a little fucked in the head,” she replied. “That’ll kill you too fast for you to heal from. I wouldn’t even be able to chance it, and I’m immune to most lower-level fire attacks.”

“Noted,” I said, casting a Heat Ray instead of trying to spear my way through the outstretched vines, which had a nasty habit of ducking out of the way when I tried to stab one. “Oh. Oops. Lit that one on fire.”

“You really need to stop doing this,” she said. “Did you burn yourself?”

“Yeah. Keep going, I’ll be fine.”

She kept going. I was fine. My clothes were suffering, though. I made a mental note to buy more fireproof gear for the next time I did one of these. I wasn’t at risk of burning everything off, but the fibers were getting charred enough that I probably wasn’t going to be able to use these as clinic clothes afterwards.

Eventually, the tunnels widened again and we caught sight of the magma wraith tearing its way out of the ground up ahead, the rock reddening and charring before it burst out, all the lines in its body glowing bright and emitting dark flame. It leapt into the air, dashing forward and leaving a trail of heat and smoke behind it.

We followed, but whatever internal magic it was drawing on also allowed it to increase its speed, not to mention the fact that its activation this time came with a lingering effect that left a different kind of heat haze in the air. Judging from the way my Danger Sense shouted at me when I even got close to it, I gave the dark haze a wide berth. Mizuki did the same.

“That’s the same shit it was hitting me with earlier,” she said. “Death mana, I think.”

“Necrotized you real good,” I confirmed. “Not something I’d like to deal with again, thanks.”

The wraith bought more time through its efforts, but it definitely couldn’t keep this up for long. It also couldn’t hide its location the same way it had earlier when it was leaving such a thick trail for us to follow.

As it turned out, it wasn’t trying to anymore. Now that we were out in the open, it didn’t have tunnels or similar side paths it could go into and confuse us with, so it was just burning all its energy to move forward. We increased our speed too, mindful of the jagged rocks present throughout the plain we’d entered but otherwise throwing caution to the wind as we sprinted directly after it.

It was horrifically fast when it was firing on all cylinders, easily outpacing both of us even at our maximum speeds, and the power of the black flame it shot from its body combined with its raw speed was enough for it to leave a round, molten hole straight through the larger boulders. We couldn’t follow directly in its tracks not only because of the haze but also the melting tracks it was leaving in the rock, but we could still keep sight of it.

“Can you hit it from here?” Mizuki asked. “I don’t have a ranged option.”

I paused in my sprint, planting my feet and throwing my lifeline towards it. With the momentum I imparted to it, it flew with a substantially greater speed than usual on a path set to intercept the wraith.

It didn’t come close to hitting, though, the magma wraith abruptly making a ninety-degree turn right to dodge the spear and then continuing onwards.

“Bastard has eyes in the back of its head,” I said, holding my hand out and calling my lifeline back.

“So do we,” Mizuki replied. “Keep going.”

The chase didn’t last much longer. Less than half a minute later, the wraith vanished, dropping out of our field of view and leaving tracers of black flame all the while. We followed shortly after it, continuing after its trail.

The plain we’d chased it through abruptly ended right where it had fallen off. Mizuki and I stopped short of the drop immediately after it, peering down towards where the wraith had gone.

Ahead of us, the landscape resembled a fault line. A good hundred feet or so in front of us, the plain continued at a significantly lower height, but in between that and us was a ravine that dropped deep enough I could barely make out the bottom. What little I could make of it told me that I didn’t want to try jumping down.

“That terrain looks awful,” Mizuki said. “The wraith is light enough that it survived the drop, but I don’t think we want to go down there without a rope.”

“Do you even want to go down there?” I asked. “The wraith is going to be long gone by the time we get a rope.”

It had stopped its ongoing fire aura when it had dropped down, but it was still easy to find thanks to the glowing jagged lines crisscrossing its body. It had alighted on top of a field of deadly-looking stalagmites and was bouncing from stone spike to stone spike, traveling towards the other wall.

Looking closer at its destination, I realized something.

“I think this is the boundary,” I said, pointing. “Do you see that shimmering?”

Mizuki followed my line of sight, squinting. “Huh. You’re right.”

Just before the end of the chasm, a floor-to-ceiling mana field of some kind rippled slightly, barely visible to our eyes.

“You can’t sense it?” I asked.

“No, I feel it now,” she said. “It’s subtle, but it’s there. I didn’t sense it earlier because I can’t look for externalized mana effects and living beings at the same time yet.”

“Limitations of Adept, I guess.” Despite how skilled she was, I did get a reminder every now and again that Mizuki was in fact still in the first set of tiers.

“Why would it be going to the border?” I asked. “Aren’t those meant to keep things from leaving? Restrict our play area and all that?”

“Good question. Spyglass.” Mizuki held her hand out.

I handed it to her, and she looked closer across the ravine. Her breathing hitched slightly, emotions flaring ever so slightly.

“You see something,” I said. “What’d you spot?”

“People-readers have etiquette, you know,” she muttered. “You could stand to learn some.”

“What did you find?” I pressed.

“One of our boxes,” Mizuki said, handing me the spyglass again. “Looks like our little friend is going right for it.”