Reborn Healer Chapter 31

“There is something deeply wrong with that man,” Mizuki muttered.

I couldn’t help but agree. We were on our way out now, having been processed by their receptionists and assured that Matias would be back to normal within a couple of days. It was well after midnight now, and I wasn’t entirely sure how we were going to get home, but we were pretty much done now.

“Maybe don’t say that in his house,” I suggested.

“I’d bet he can tell I’m thinking it,” she replied. “I guess it’ll be better to be on his side than not.”

Despite our impression of Sebastian, we were both even more set on joining the Federation guild now. We’d lucked out in terms of who we’d found in the World Dungeon. While the Federation wasn’t the single largest guild that operated in Liaren, it was pretty up there in terms of international guilds that could serve both of our purposes.

Neither of us actually knew what the exams entailed, but we’d been given a rough breakdown by Henry after Sebastian had handed us a pair of badges meant to indicate our eligibility for the next set of exams despite our age.

They were a combination of practical and theoretical tests, leaning more heavily on the former. We’d be tested on individual combat aptitude, adaptation to unknown scenarios, and ability to work in a group, amongst other things. The challenge was meant for people in those in the high Initiate to Adept tiers, which mean both of us were solidly in the target range.

“We’re going to need to train more heavily in the coming weeks,” Mizuki said, changing the subject. “I don’t know when the elven kingdom is going to make an attempt at me next, but I do know that they’re going to try. I would much rather have protection by then.”

“Fair assessment,” I replied. “Try not to kill me in sparring.”

“Try not to die.”

“By the way, did the guild just decide to let you keep that?”

“Keep what?”

“The dress,” I said. “Also, where’s the rest of your stuff?”

“It’s not the guild’s. Iryn made it. And I have a storage ring.”

“Oh.”

“You know, for someone so educated, it feels like you’re lacking some critical knowledge a lot of the time.”

“Hey, I never went to school.” Not on this planet, at least.

We continued bantering as we exited the guild office, neither of us entirely sure where we were going to go afterwards.

As it turned out, the answer was home.

“Glad to see you made it out okay,” Vallis greeted us from a seat across the street. “I trust you found the Federation welcoming?”

“Father!” I exclaimed, surprised. “Why are you here?”

“I was informed that you were injured,” he said. “I came to see if I could help. As it turns out, you did a good enough job healing yourself that you didn’t need my help, but you can’t fault me for worrying.”

I ran up to Vallis and hugged him. “It’s the thought that counts.”

“Since it was going to be a while, I spoke with some of the leaders here and spent some time attending to business. Shall we head home?”

He looked at Mizuki as he spoke, which startled her.

“Ah, uh, yes,” she said. “Let’s go.”

#

Gerald Halcyon was vexed. He wouldn’t go so far as to say that he was frustrated, but the emotions he was feeling certainly bordered on that.

Since coming to Liaren, he had steadily settled into his role as Lord Prince of the southernmost major city in the kingdom. In the early days, he had looked for anything to occupy his boredom, assuming that a couple of expeditions south would vanquish the problem he’d been sent there to eliminate.

As it turned out, the Halcyon king had not grown senile in his old age. He’d known what he was doing sending Gerald to the south. Despite his rather chaotic, carefree personal life, Gerald was one of the Halcyons who had been born for war, not peace.

There was a good amount of that waiting for him and the kingdom itself in the south. Though the Nightmare and its sect had been though to be entirely eliminated in its purge, he had found that remnants of its power remained: temples containing horrors to be executed, cultists who worshipped a power they could not receive, and dark tidings of a network that plotted against the kingdom.

It hadn’t just been those, either. While Liaren was the last bastion of Halcyon power in the south, there were dozens of smaller cities further into the untamed lands.

War was stirring, yet most of the kingdom was blissfully aware. Gerald had personally lead battalions into drawn-out engagements with elven contingents trying to do more than skirmish, and he’d witnessed more monster outbreaks from the World Dungeon in the last six years than he had in thirty of princeship in the north.

Irritatingly, he had been unable to respond with full force. The neighboring great kingdom of Leyeril was too close to the heart of Halcyon, and they’d worked out enough of an alliance with the elves that any major moves he made against them would constitute attacks from two sides.

The situation was only going to get worse. Recently, it had become clear to him that something major had changed on the elven side. Their tactics had gotten more aggressive, and intelligence recovered from tortured prisoners of war had revealed that some kind of power dispute in their royal families, resulting in disgraced members fleeing and a hard consolidation of military force.

Through a great deal of finesse and carefully placed violence, the Lord Prince had managed a sort of truce with the involved parties, all of it done without any formal notice from any of their kingdoms.

There was only so much time that he could buy before things started kicking back into motion, though, which amplified how much even minor confusions bothered him here in Liaren.

To their credit, his underlings had done a good job of keeping the city running during his increasingly frequent absences. The royal staff in Liaren seemed to be used to a lack of formal leadership, but even given that he had to acknowledge their competence in delivering reports to him.

This latest one had gotten him stuck, and he disliked being stuck. It should have been an afterthought, just one more tidbit during his evening dump of city news, but his instincts had told him to look over the matter more, and he had learned to trust those after his time in the field.

Someone had been negligent in the World Dungeon management department and failed to scout out a certain location, resulting in the loss of some seventeen independent dungeon divers. The last group to survive had been notable thanks to how young they were, with one of them a mere twelve years old.

“What did you say their names were, again?” he asked his aide.

“Red and Blue, my lord. They registered on the same day that they entered the dungeon.”

Two people using pseudonyms. They wouldn’t have done that without a reason to hide themselves. Gerald had a guess as to who the younger one was. When he’d first arrived, he’d seen terrible potential slowly growing past the outskirts of the city in one of the smaller villages near Liaren. The child had been awfully young then. If there was a twelve-year-old achieving the exceptional, it was very possible they were one and the same.

That was interesting insofar as it was useful for finding promising youths to enter military service when the time to enforce the draft came—and he knew damn well that it was going to come. Still, that wasn’t what had caused the off feeling. Gerald was a different man now. He didn’t care for toying around with someone’s life just because they had promise. Not anymore, at least.

If not the boy, then the girl. “Blue.” Picked up by the Federation.

“And their ages, if you would,” he said.

“Twelve for the boy, fifteen for the girl,” his aide, an Adept-tier woman training under a Master of logistics said.

Fifteen. Old enough to fight in many kingdoms, though barely too young in the Halcyon. Old enough to undergo any number of rituals, or even to become a Revenant.

Where was fifteen significant? It scratched a corner of his mind. Something important, something he’d picked up during his last few years of constant fighting. The number of villages lost this year—no, that was coincidental. The major schools of magic—also not the right direction, and they were debated anyway.

Elves, Gerald realized. That number mattered to them a great deal. For the knife-teethed, it was when one was no longer a child. It played a prominent role in their mythology.

And it was when someone could succeed the throne.

It had been a mere couple of months since the elven tactics had changed thanks to a great power struggle. Multiple elves had fled.

“She can’t be an elf, though,” he muttered to himself. “She would have been noticed…”

“My lord?” Gerald’s aide asked.

“Quiet. I’m thinking.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Unless, the Halcyon prince thought, unless she was using disguise magic of some kind. Unless she was using elven technology to hide her elven traits. Soul magics, surgeries, even a well-placed cloak could hide it.

He couldn’t dismiss it out of hand. If his hunch was correct, he had a game changer in his hands. If this girl was elven royalty. If he could use her to navigate the precarious political situation in the wilds. If, if, if… it had been a long since he had been sure of anything.

Gerald could afford to be wrong on this, but he absolutely couldn’t afford to miss this chance if she truly was of the royal bloodline.

“Make the girl who calls herself Blue a target,” he said. “Delivery to the royal palace, alive. Keep tabs on the Red child as well.”

“My lord?” The aide looked a little uncomfortable. “If you seek carnal pleasures, I might advise…”

“I am not my brothers,” Gerald growled. “Banish those thoughts. I have a suspicion, and I need it confirmed or denied. Make obtaining her a priority. Get the guild leaders in on it. I will manage the guard.”

“Yes, my lord,” his aide said, sounding relieved. “Right away, my lord.”

“And for the Emperor’s sake, do it quietly,” he ordered. “If the people know, then other cities will know, and then Leyeril will know. Do not let us be implicated in this.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Gerald settled into his desk, submerged in deep thought.

Where are you, Blue? He wondered. What are you thinking right now?

#

“Too slow,” Mizuki taunted. “You’re not ever going to beat me like that, you know?”

“It’s not my fault you can see me coming before I even know where you are,” I grumbled. “This isn’t fair in any sense of the word.”

One-on-one sparring wasn’t the only exercise we trained with. Knowing how to fight in a duel setting was very useful. Not knowing anything else was a death sentence.

Today, we were doing a technically supervised activity that I likened to some crossover between hide-and-seek and tag but Iryn just called a death game. It was a two-way activity where the “hunter” practiced detection and chasing targets through cover while the “prey” drilled camouflage and getting the drop on an attacker.

So far, I had not won a single round as the hunter. I’d gotten a couple of cheeky wins as prey, but it turned out that I had significantly better perception skills for a defensive battle than an offensive one.

“I dunno, it kind of is your fault,” she said. “If you were faster, you might have knocked me down.”

“Yeah, and then you’d start wrestling me,” I said. “I’m not keen on repeating that anytime soon.”

We were running all of this on skills and physicality alone, neither of us using weapons and me refraining from using spells. It was meant for mental preparedness and physical training than it was an actual simulation of how to fight in a situation like this, but it was serving that purpose well.

Danger Sense lvl 1 -> 2

That made the second level-up of Danger Sense during our training. The first level had come during sparring a couple days ago during a particularly nasty bout where I had been genuinely convinced that Mizuki had gone insane and was trying to put me six feet under.

Lesson learned: don’t take the last dessert if Mizuki is in the same building as you.

“We’re going to call it here,” Iryn called out from elsewhere in the forest. “Your body needs rest to grow.”

Despite not even actively taking part in the exercise, she was always the hardest to find. Though I didn’t know much about Iryn’s history with the Nightmare sect, it was clear that she’d accumulated quite her fair share of skills in her time.

“Good bout,” Mizuki said, extending a hand.

“I’m not taking that,” I said. “I can feel you wanting to flip me over.”

“Aw, you’re no fun,” she pouted, deliberately exaggerating the motion.

“Hasn’t anyone ever told you that you should be a good example for people younger than you?”

“You have an older spirit,” she said. “I’m just treating you like an equal. Surely you’d prefer that?”

I did, actually. Her statement about my spirit didn’t faze me. I had no real fear of people discovering I was from another world. Through my studies, I’d learned that there were all kinds of “soul fuckery,” as Iryn had so succinctly put it. Having a core split apart into two distinct ones was extremely rare, but it turned out I wasn’t the only person to ever have two cores. Also, there were souls who actually were older than their bodies, souls that absorbed memories from other sources, and all kinds of other natural weirdness.

After a lunch, we spent some time playing board games, including a game very closely resembling chess that was popular across of most of the continent.

“You’re actually decent at this,” Mizuki said, pondering the board state.

“Decent?” I replied. “I win in four moves.”

“There’s no way,” she said, moving a piece. “Third column scout forward three to row six.”

“There was one way out of it,” I said, moving a piece myself.

“And that wasn’t it,” Iryn said, watching over our game from the couch. “Sorry, Mizuki. Game’s over.”

“How do you know?”

“She spends a lot of time in the house,” I said. “Turns out that means you can practice a bunch of useless skills.”

“Teitia isn’t a useless skill,” Iryn countered. “You’d be surprised how far you can get in politics by just being a good player.”

“It’s useless if you don’t leave the house,” I replied. “That’s game, by the way.”

“What the shit,” Mizuki said flatly, looking at the board in disbelief.

“Hey, I also spent a lot of time not leaving the house.”

Our training progressed like that, day in and day out. We practiced hard, but we didn’t push ourselves beyond breaking. Judging from what we’d heard of the guild tests, they would be challenging but not to the point where we had to push ourselves to total failure just to have a hope at completing them.

Our spars grew more complicated, too. Though we’d started working with just skills, Mizuki had acknowledged her superior position and had kept some of them off or tuned down. As we got more familiar with each other, though, I started incorporating spells into our fights. Dash and Doubletime were the most obviously useful for close-quarters combat, but well-placed Barriers and Shields as well as a usage of my tiny offensive spell pool or even dropping a bunch of water mid-fight could be game-changing.

Mizuki usually still ended up wiping the floor with me. Though my mage core was at Adept, my warrior one was still lagging behind at Initiate. I suspected that even if we were equalized, her warrior core would pound-for-pound be more effective than mine. Mizuki was bastard royalty but royal by blood nonetheless, and the glimpses I saw of her past the surface had well and truly convinced me that she was a cold-blooded killer inside.

Sparring with her was refreshing. While both Iryn and Aria were great trainers, they were clearly holding back in order to teach me specific lessons. Mizuki, on the other hand, fought at nearly her full capacity and often went far enough to actually injure me, which was good for grinding out skills and spells alike.

It hurt like a bitch, though.

Doubletime lvl lvl 3 -> 4

Body Scan lvl 5 -> 6

Heal lvl 8 -> 9

Fireball lvl 1 -> 2

Empathic Insight lvl 8 -> 9

Over the course of the twenty days, we rarely went into town. I reduced the number of times I went to the clinic to just one a week, stocking every visitor with tons of extra treatments so they could handle themselves during my absence. Mizuki didn’t go into town at all, citing a worry about being spotted.

“I’ve been wondering,” I said when she brought that up, “Why don’t you just lie low in a village or something?”

“Inquisitions,” she said. “While your family has my utmost gratitude for harboring me, I know the people who I grew up around. They will send hunters after me.”

“They can’t track you, can they? We still have that worm thing in a jar somewhere.”

“As long as my tracker isn’t in my blood, it won’t be able to find me,” she confirmed. “But they know the limits of where I can go, and they will come eventually. When the hunters come and sweep the countryside, they won’t limit themselves to the only major city in that area.”

“I feel like the elven kingdom sending an inquisition into Halcyon kingdom territory would trigger an incident of the variety that a lot of people don’t walk away from,” I said.

“They have methods beyond brute force,” Mizuki said. “I would much rather innocents not suffer for the crime of existing in the same region as me. I want them to know where I am without being able to get to me. That’s all.”

It was an unintuitive logic, but it sort of made sense. As powerful as my parents and Iryn were, they didn’t have anywhere near the kind of organizational influence that an international guild like the Federation could manage.

Eventually, the day of the exams arrived.

We were up bright and early, joining Vallis as was our usual for this kind of day.

The purple coats were still in charge of the walls. Typically, they would just wave Vallis through the checkpoint. I’d come to know one or two of the guards who were on rotation. Sometimes, they’d even hand me a small candy or something.

Today, suspiciously, seemed to be different.

“Apologies, Lord Healer,” the lead guard said, “but we need to search your carriage.”

I didn’t look back, but my Empathic Insight picked up the spike of panic from the back, where Mizuki was silently hidden under a blanket alongside our healer toolkits.

Uh oh.