Reborn Healer Chapter 12

Aria Kane was a force of nature. That was the best conclusion I could draw from her escort of me out from what I slowly realized had been a shallow local branch of the World Dungeon. At first, I thought the exit hadn’t been far away so there weren’t too many other beings that could have come after us, but I realized the truth of things soon enough.

Every time we heard a suspicious sound that might have been footsteps, an animal cry, or something more magical, my mother’s countenance changed. Without so much as a word, the mana surrounding her took on a different note.

I found a surprising solace in that. For some reason, I could perceive its intent more finely than I had been able to with even my own spells. My mother’s enhanced presence was not calming in the slightest. On the contrary, it radiated pure hostility—just not towards me.

That nuance definitely wasn’t something I was used to getting. Part of that must have been thanks to the rank up to Initiate. I had only my time spent coreless and as a Beginner to compare it against, and it was clear that my general mana sense and body perception had improved noticeably, not to mention the progress I’d made by repeatedly burning and healing myself.

Still, that couldn’t explain everything. My mother must have been using magic of some kind, which was strange given that she was doing neither hand motions nor speaking—not to mention the fact that as far as I knew, she didn’t own a spellbook of any kind. Was this a skill, maybe?

Whatever it was, it was damn effective. Nothing bothered us on the way out, even though this place was clearly home to a menagerie of monsters.

From time to time, Aria glanced back at me.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to carry you?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” I said again. “Seriously. I’ll just slow you down anyway.”

That last sentence might not necessarily have been true. The pressure she was exuding had me much more convinced that those dreams I’d had were indeed visions, meaning that she’d actually survived the insane situations I’d seen her in.

Still, I wanted to get out of this on my own two feet. Also, this was my first real view of what I assumed had to be the World Dungeon. I’d been unconscious for my trip down, so the journey back up was enlightening.

There was more variety to the dungeon than I’d thought there would be—the spiders must have dragged me quite a fair distance to get here. My assumption had been that they had just taken me underground right where they’d knocked me out, but we were covering a pretty decent distance horizontally.

Different sections of the dungeons had their own miniature biomes, it seemed. The one constant was the dim light constantly created by the gems embedded throughout the caves.

I also concluded that there was no way in hell that I would have been able to find my way out in any reasonable amount of time. My mother navigated this place like she’d been born for it, never second-guessing herself or turning back, and it still took us nearly an hour to get out.

More time had passed than I’d thought. By the time we reached the surface again, exiting out of a different cave from the one I’d been dragged in through, the sun was already more than halfway set. It had been before noon before Locke had assigned me this asinine test.

Speaking of which…

“That little—Locke, I mean,” I asked my mother, nearly slipping on the expletive I’d meant to throw his way. “Where is he?”

Aria’s expression grew cloudy at that. “That’s… complicated.”

“He left me to the wolves, almost literally,” I said. “Though I suppose that part alone wouldn’t be the worst if he’d actually come back to do anything.”

“He looked for you,” Aria said. “I should not have let him be so free with his instruction. I’m sorry, Ren.”

She hadn’t had anything to do with it, but the acknowledgment that she could’ve done more was unfamiliarly nice. It also felt ever so slightly off—surely a normal parent would have been much more concerned with my state and not spoken to me like I was an adult who could properly understand her.

Okay, I had the memories of an adult who could properly understand her, but still. Did she really recognize that? And why was she so seemingly okay with how things were going?

I didn’t have normal family behavior to compare it against. My parents—my Earth parents, I corrected myself—probably would have shouted at me for getting myself into trouble or something.

Maybe it had something to do with the abilities she was demonstrating. I didn’t know the extent of either of my parents’ powers, and while I at least knew what Vallis’ magic did, I was still unfamiliar with Aria’s game. If she had some way to tell that this experience had taken me to Initiate and that I was actually physically feeling better than ever, it would explain why she wasn’t so worried.

For the time being, I put that aside and asked after Ren. “Where is he now?”

Aria did not reply for a long moment, just leading the way through the underbrush and pulsing that hostile aura every now and again.

“I’ll explain when we return,” she said eventually. “It will make sense when you see.”

At length, we made it back to the village, the sun long since set. Lanterns lit the dirt roads back to our house.

I could kind of see why Aria had said what she did. The house was a bit of a mess right now. I walked gingerly over the front door, which had been blown clean off its hinges and into the pathway leading inwards. The front window had also been smashed open, and it only got worse inside. Blast marks framed the void where the door had been, and the wood in the walls had been marred with holes that looked suspiciously like they could have been made by an axe.

Only Iryn was in the midst of it all, and she looked right in the middle of tired and pissed off. The young woman was working to put the assorted fallen things back in their right place, throwing away what couldn’t be salvaged.

She looked up from her work as she heard us arrive, dashing over to us in an instant.

Iryn wrapped me in a hug, raising me off the ground with surprising strength. Though she’d been suspicious of me when I’d been younger, that had waned with time and her getting used to my strange but certainly not-demon activity.

“Gods above, I’m glad you’re okay,” she said. “Are you hurt at all?”

“No,” I replied, deciding better of explaining the situation to Iryn too. She didn’t seem to be in a very good mood for listening to stories about me setting myself on fire and getting bit half to death by murderous spiders. “A few scuffles, but I’m fine. Where is Vallis?”

Iryn set me down, her gaze hardening. “Elsewhere.”

“Iryn,” Aria said warningly.

I looked up at the two of them. Aria’s presence expanded again, though it didn’t seem to have the same feeling it had come with earlier.

To my surprise, I sensed Iryn do the same thing. The two women stared at each other, unmovingly stoic, but from the interplay of the mana, I got the impression they were having a conversation over my head.

After nearly a minute of steadily more uncomfortable silence, Iryn spoke.

“I apologize,” she said mechanically. “I will take my concerns directly to Vallis when he returns.”

“Uh, if you don’t mind,” I interjected. “Could someone explain to me exactly why it looks like a tornado went through our house?”

“You say the strangest things.” Iryn chuckled, shaking her head. “I started to grow concerned when the stated two hours had passed and you had yet to return, so I ventured out. I could not locate you or the Ai—or Locke.”

What did she just try to say? Had Iryn been trying to say that Locke was an Aiken?

I could see it. His unnaturally pale form and haunted eyes had been a bit of a concern for me, but with my mother assuring me that the Aiken were all banished to the southern regions and nobody ever pointing it out as a problem after years working with him, I hadn’t even thought of it as a possibility until now.

If that was true, why the hell would Vallis hire him as a healer’s assistant? I had scarcely heard about the Aiken other than from my mother and short, reverent myths in some of the books I’d read, but all of it was bad. They possessed bodies, tearing out the original soul within so they could carry out their violent nature.

Hold on, I was definitely being too hasty here. Iryn had accused me of being one of them, and I was pretty sure I was no demon. She was just jumping to conclusions again, wasn’t she?

“Mother said that Locke looked for me,” I said, prompting Iryn out of her own silence.

She shook her head like a dog trying to dry itself. “Yes. I found her shortly after I entered the dungeon. Aria explained the situation.”

“I told her to return,” the woman in question added.

“Why?” I asked. “Iryn is strong, isn’t she?”

“There were other concerns.”

Other concerns? I had my own suspicions. The random monster attack two years ago had raised some too. 

Iryn didn’t give me the opportunity to 

“Like Locke,” she said. “I lost my temper.”

I looked at the blast marks. The devastated furniture. The marks from what had to be multiple weapons in the walls.

“Lost your temper,” I repeated.

“He fought back,” Iryn continued. “As is his right. I do not trust the boy, but I should not have sought to best him in battle. Your father stopped us.”

“And Vallis is currently handling him,” Aria said. “You will grow to understand one day.”

“I would prefer to understand now.”

“There are some things that children are not ready to know.”

I frowned, but I didn't push any further. Though I felt more dynamic and more in control of my movements than I had even as an adult back on Earth, it was true that I was still a mere five years old here.

I still had suspicions about my mother, her relation to this entire thing, and, of course, the mysterious appeal of whatever was in our basement. Those were only heightened by how she was treating this current affair, but I didn't think I was going to get much more out of it.

For the time being, maybe it was the more immediate concerns that I should give my attention to.

“What's going to happen to Locke?” I asked.

“I see the mistake in having him try to teach you,” Aria replied. “He will not be returning.”

That was also strange. I wouldn't say that the boy had tried to get me killed, but he had certainly put me in a situation where I nearly had been. On the other hand, that near-death situation had been the push I had needed to breach the gap from beginner to initiate.

It was hard to say. As mad as I'd been at Locke initially, it was clearer than ever that the rules this world operated on weren't the same as the ones back home. Risk brought reward.

I had spent my entire life on Earth wishing I had the courage to take any risk, to bring myself out of the situations I'd been in. Locke had forcefully shown me that I could be doing more.

It was probably for the best that he wouldn't teach me anymore. It had taken far too long to get even one offensive spell down, and I highly suspected that I just wasn't going to be very good at offensive magic. Maybe things would change once I got access to a textbook, but even with the process memorized, Firebolt still came less naturally than any of my healing or buff spells.

“I do hope Vallis keeps an eye on the boy,” Iryn said, clearly disapproving of my father's choices. “I was so worried that Ren was going to die today.”

“You'd be surprised,” my mother said. “I must speak to you in confidence.”

In confidence? Why would she need to do that? She was clearly intending to talk about me.

Well, I guess it made sense. Parents did hide what they really thought from their children, after all.

At length, enough of the house had been patched up and put back into order that we were able to sit down for a quick, makeshift dinner. Iryn ushered me off to bed shortly after.

I didn’t sleep. After the excitement of the day, there was still a lot I had yet to experiment with. My new core came with new powers, but the system didn't come with a list of explanations for what I should expect. Thanks to my father's textbooks, I had learned some of the basics of what I could expect when it came to initiate tier, but the sensations that had changed were so dramatically different and varied that I was sure the textbook hadn't covered everything.

For instance, that aura I had sensed coming from my mother. At first, I thought that it was an ability exclusive to her, but Iryn had done something similar. If I strained, flexing whatever magical muscle pertained to this sense as if I was squinting or wrinkling my nose, I could feel the hint of that magical energy from before drifting up from below.

I clambered out of my bed and did my best to eavesdrop.

“I sensed him, Iryn,” Aria was saying. She kept her voice quiet enough that I wouldn't overhear in my room, but I was actively eavesdropping, so it wasn't hard to hear. “The warnings came late. They barely came at all, and they should have been screaming at me. I traced the creatures that took him. Hunter spiders.”

“Those aren't local to this part of the dungeon,” Iryn replied. “You think someone brought them here?”

“I do. Someone has been closing in on us. But that's not what I'm talking about. You know Hunter spiders can prove to be a great threat to even trained adventurers, albeit basic tier ones. My son is five years old, and he came out without a scratch on him after being ambushed and imprisoned. He set himself on fire.”

“You've done that before.”

“Not when I was five years old. I had just awakened my core for the first time then.”

“It's a different age, Aria. You've heard the stories about what's happening in the south. The rumblings of what the Empire wants to do.”

“I've been there. I know. I just didn't expect this from a child. My child, no less.”

“Do you see why I thought he was—”

“Yes, yes, I do. Surely you're over that now.”

“I am, my lady. I wonder now if he's already found his lifeline.”

My what? I'd been following the conversation up till now, but that didn't make sense.

“He's too young,” my mother replied. “And I don't want him involved in this. He hasn’t.”

“Aria… you and I both know that what we want has very little to do with what happens.”

Aria sighed. “So it is, but I hope to protect him a while longer. There is enough attention on us as it is. I do not need more.”

Attention? What kind of attention was she talking about? The monsters?

“I don’t disagree with that,” Iryn replied. “What are you planning for Ren, then?”

“I falter on the idea of training him more. He’s already more powerful than most of our initiates, and those don’t start until well after they’ve learned the basics of the blade. ”

“He’s taken to your trainings well. A little too well, if I say so myself. Are you sure he truly is a mage?”

“Careful. There are prying ears in places you might think there are not.” At that, I felt Aria’s presence wash over me, a light pressure exerting itself on my being.

So she knows I’m listening. Did this mean that Aria knew I had a second core? She certainly seemed like she did.

Also, our initiates. That wording was interesting. Alongside my visions and the impressions I was gaining of her, I was pretty quickly coming to the conclusion that Aria Kane was involved in something a lot larger than herself.

The lifeline was the other point of interest for me. All these years, my core had continued pulling me towards that mysterious, locked basement door. I had yet to make any real progress on it, but I had to wonder if whatever was behind that door was that very lifeline.

For the time being though, it seemed like the conversation was done. They turned the topic to other things—discussions of grain harvest discrepancies from the countryside to the nearest city and the like.

I found myself suddenly overwhelmed by exhaustion, the events of the day catching up to me at last, and I stumbled my way into my room and promptly fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

The next morning brought the fruits of my parents’ deliberations. Aria was already gone, leaving Iryn and Vallis in the house.

I woke up to find my father waiting for me.

“I’m sorry for the mess,” he said, stone-faced. “I shouldn’t have tried to mix your talents, nor should I have tried to save time. Locke is not coming back for a long time. Would you be okay learning magic from me instead?”

I blinked in surprise. I had come to realize that my parents weren’t the type of people to blame me for problems beyond my control, but this level of proactive response? I hadn’t expected that at all.

“I would love to,” I said. “When can we start?”

“Today,” he replied. “I’ll take you to the city. There is never any shortage of people in need of our help, and some new scenery might do you some good.”

The city. All my life so far had been spent within the confines of this village with the exception of yesterday’s ill-fated venture into the Ayasi forest. I had learned about this world’s cities from books, but I had yet to properly experience one of them.

I had only healed myself and animals thus far. I wondered how far I would be able to take it from here.

#

Gerald Halcyon, formerly the Lord Prince of the largest district of the Halcyon kingdom, sneered at the sight of the city he now called home.

Yes, his title was still Lord Prince. As a direct descendant of the Heavenly Emperor, it would have been absurd for him to be anything less.

But he should have been enjoying his rule over Ferren with its colorful markets, rich foods, and bountiful women, not rotting away in this peasant backwater down south. In the trade center of the kingdom, he had been free to spend his time focusing on what truly mattered. Liaren, ostensibly the capital of the south, was little better than a frontier town.

Even the castle where the Lord Prince resided was drab compared to the lowest estates he’d overseen back in the true capital.

“I’ll buy a painter or two,” Gerald decided, hands clasped under his chin as he stared out into grey, depressing city. “Redirect one of the land trade routes. Give this place some life. These people need it.”

This place disgusted him. It was beneath him. As third-born son of the Halcyon King and a Highmaster mage even capable of casting Grandmaster-tier spells, it was his Emperor-given right to live his life where and how he wanted to.

If the request hadn’t come from the king himself, Gerald wouldn’t have even entertained the idea.

“The Nightmare,” he scoffed aloud, shaking his head. “What a joke.”

If there was one consolation, it was that this was sure to be a temporary assignment. The gods who were not dead rarely deigned to wake and walk amongst mortals, and the Nightmare was no exception. Its worshippers had been weeded out of every society above the World Dungeon, its influence over mortal affairs erased.

Despite his distaste for the matter, Gerald did not shirk his responsibilities. He inhaled slowly, shaping his ocean of mana.

“All-Seeing Eye,” he chanted, more out of habit than any need to.

Lord Prince Gerald Halcyon’s awareness expanded with his exhale, encompassing Liaren, then beyond, stretching south past the border of the Ayasi forest.

He sensed Initiates, Adepts, the odd Master, everything he’d come to expect from this kind of city.

Except there was an abnormality. Not everything was the same as it had been the last time he’d been in the sticks.

Power. Power and potential. Depths that he hadn’t seen anywhere, much less here.

“Perhaps I spoke too soon,” he muttered, standing from his throne. “The south may yet have something interesting.”