Unexpected Healer Book 2 -- Chapter 44

Chapter 44

As he picked through the remains of the newest Contenders that had shown up at some point after he’d originally left, Thaden looked closer at Martin’s body.  He’d ended up killing the Level 20 again using his Wild Health Leach spell again, though it took him two spells this time as he tried out a couple of other ones besides Healing Burst just to see the difference in the amount of Health that was leached. 

The Fighter had pleaded for his life even as Thaden killed him, which made the Shaman feel like some sort of masked villain from a movie, as he ignored all the entreaties for mercy.  He still felt justified in his actions, even if they were taken during a moment of extreme anger, but he couldn’t help but feel the slightest bit bad about killing the man again.  Thoughts of Resurrecting him again floated through his head; not to kill him a third time, but to have the man send a warning to his Guild – and probably all the other Guilds – not to mess with him anymore. 

But that just sounded like a sure-fire way to make them target him even further.  In addition, anyone he came into contact with from this point on would be in danger, as although there were some penalties for killing other Contenders now, they weren’t so extreme that he thought it would stop all of them.  All it would take was a way to hide out for 72 hours for the black aura to disappear, and then they’d be able to go out and kill again.  Still, it was progress, and he no longer feared that he might be caught somewhere without a way to fight back; this demonstration of his new power as a Solitary Shaman was proof enough of that.  But the same couldn’t be said for those unlucky enough to be acquainted with him; Gregory and the others in the cage nearby was evidence that some people would do anything to get the so-called “secrets” that they thought Thaden could give them. 

Little did they know that there wasn’t anything he could tell them.  Extort him for gold or gear, maybe, but as far as any secret information – there really wasn’t much that would benefit them.

The solution, as horrible as it might be, was for Thaden to avoid people for the time being and concentrate on his own problems.  Any thought of trying to join a party was gone, and not only because his new Class seemed to encourage him to go it alone.  There was just too much danger in getting close to anyone, even if he wasn’t intentionally trying to be friends – like what happened with Gregory and the others.  Heck, even Katelynn and the other two women he’d Resurrected and didn’t even speak to suffered from interacting with him; he could only assume they had been tracked down and made to reveal who it was that brought them back.  How they connected Thaden to a figure dressed all in black with no nametag, he had no idea, nor did he know how everyone had been tracked down in the first place, but he guessed it didn’t really matter all that much.

In the end, he decided to just leave the Guild man as a corpse instead of bringing him back, as he thought it would probably be better to have all these deaths stay as a mystery instead of connecting it to him. 

Shaking his head to clear it of those thoughts, he got back to what he had come back to the sight for.  There was something that he’d unconsciously noticed about all the corpses before he left, but he’d been in such a confused state of mind when he had left that it hadn’t really coalesced into a full realization until he’d been running for about 20 minutes.  Sure enough, when he looked at all the bodies of those he’d killed, there was an odd feeling of incompleteness about them. 

As if he had forgotten to do something. 

Kneeling next to a corpse that was completely unrecognizable as a person, as it was missing a head and two of its limbs, he gingerly reached out his hand and touched it, before saying, “Extract”.  Thaden fully expected nothing to happen, as it was common knowledge – so common that even the Solitary Shaman knew about it – that killing another person didn’t give any the killer any PICK and anything the dead had on them was un-lootable.  Even the weapons and armor they were carrying was unable to be picked up even if they were lying on the ground, so there was no benefit of killing other people other than as a means of eliminating them from the Rankings.

Therefore, Thaden was shocked when he felt the extraction complete, and the body quickly broke down and disappeared, just as if it was a monster he’d killed and looted. 

Extraction complete!

Loot obtained:

52 Silver, 18 Copper coins

4 Weak Health Potions

2 Weak Mana Potions

The extraction of loot from a dead Contender took him aback, and he tried to figure out what was going on.  After about of minute of thinking about it, he could only assume that what he had taken had been what was in their Inventory when they died; it was much less than what was in his own, but he supposed it made sense for them not to carry around piles of crafting materials and extra gear when all they were doing was threatening some mysterious person to learn their secrets.  He could only assume that, as a Guild, they probably pooled their crafting resources together; or, they simply sold it to some the Charee merchants immediately upon returning to the city. 

As for why he didn’t get any of the Contender’s armor or weapon they were equipped with, that seemed obvious enough – they had been destroyed along with their bodies.  There wasn’t anything left to loot.

I guess I did go a little overboard here.  If this ever happens again, which I hope it doesn’t, I should probably be a little less destructive. 

Shrugging, since there wasn’t much he could do about it now, he went around and extracted the loot from all the rest of the mangled and destroyed bodies, all of which were too far gone to be Resurrected by him.  He found that to be an important distinction, as when he attempted to loot Martin, nothing happened; since the man still had a timer with which he could be brought back to life, he assumed that looting would only work on someone that was well and truly dead.

Thaden also found, after a brief bout of indecision to even try, that he couldn’t extract anything from Gregory and the others.  If it was truly the fact that only Contenders with black auras could be looted, then this made sense because none of them had killed others – or so he assumed.  They never actually told him that they hadn’t killed any other Contenders, but given their background, he figured that they hadn’t.

In all, he accumulated enough coinage from the bodies to give him over 900 gold, with over half of it coming from the higher-Level party that had resurrected Martin and was asking him questions.  From the authoritative tone the woman had used on the lower-Level Guild member, it was more than likely that she and her party were leaders of some kind in the Guild; if they were charging new members so much to join, and likely taxing some of the loot that was acquired by those members, it made sense that they had so much money on them.

There were also a few random crafting resources mixed into the loot, all Common in rarity, along with hundreds of Health and Mana potions.  He wasn’t sure what he’d do with all of them, as he didn’t need Mana potions at all, and he was a good enough of a healer that he doubted he’d ever need a Health potion, but they fit into his Inventory easily enough since they didn’t take much room. 

It was a bit of a macabre process looting the dead like he did, but he figured they wouldn’t need it anymore, so he might as well take it.  Thankfully, his utter annihilation of them destroyed heads and faces to the point where there was no chance that he’d recognize any of them, so by the end of his looting spree they were more just hunks of unappetizing meat than anything else. 

He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

Rather than wait around for the timer on Martin to expire, or blow him up with another use of Sacrifice once the cooldown was up by sacrificing his own protections (which was something he’d rather avoid since it meant that he couldn’t heal or protect himself for 10 minutes), Thaden left again, debating in his head about where to go.  After such an ordeal, he was tempted to go back to Rageharbor to relax in his room one more time and to see what kind of chaos had erupted after the announcement of the black auras occurred.  He felt like he was in less danger now than ever before if people decided to attack him, and there weren’t any others – besides than the Charee that he’d interacted with in the city – that he would have to worry about being used to lure him into a trap.  More than that, he even planned to wear what he was currently wearing, because he didn’t care all that much who saw him with his face and nametag hidden. 

The time for extreme caution about his identity had passed… though that didn’t mean he wanted to announce himself to the world.  He just wasn’t going to let something like what Camille tried to do in Forgestone stop him from doing what he needed to do. 

After some contemplation, he decided to forgo heading back to Rageharbor at the moment, as the anger that he’d felt from the whole situation with the Guild and his dead acquaintances still simmered underneath the surface of his emotions.  He wasn’t sure how he’d react if he saw dozens or hundreds of Contenders with black auras, as the temptation to kill them might be too much to deny.  While he wouldn’t hesitate to kill someone who was attacking him, or who had wronged someone he knew, he didn’t have the energy or desire to go into the city and start slaughtering people left and right.  Plus, it was against the rules to harm another Contender in the city, so he’d end up clashing with the Charee if he tried it.

When he considered what would happen when the word got out that those with black auras could be extracted for loot once they were dead, which he was likely to happen sooner rather than later, then he figured that many of those with the black aura would likely be hunted down anyway.  There was no need for Thaden to get involved at this time.

And if he was being honest with himself, the deaths of the Contenders that he’d killed already weighed on him.  Taking another person’s life, even if they more than deserved it for killing innocent people and attacking him with the same intent to kill, wasn’t something that he could or should take lightly.  He didn’t believe that he’d be torturing himself with their deaths by seeing visions of them every night when he tried to fall asleep, but it wasn’t something he wanted to repeat if he could help it.  Killing monsters, even those that were humanoid in appearance, was just different from killing his fellow Contenders; he didn’t want to get in the habit of it – or else he might just be one of the psychopathic individuals that the system was designed to identify and eliminate in the first place.

So, with his decision not to return to Rageharbor, Thaden resumed his journey toward The Devil’s Nail to the north.  Although the detour that led to him killing nearly 100 Contenders had temporarily delayed him, his overall objective hadn’t changed. 

Ever since the disaster at Forgestone, he’d had a tenuous goal to complete the SPECIAL Quests so that more people didn’t die.  Just after he left the demolished city, it had seemed like an extremely difficult, near-impossible goal, mainly due to the fact that he wasn’t told where it was he needed to go. 

At first, he’d thought that he was completely unprepared for what it would take to find the next Anchoring dungeon, but the time since then had quickly proven him wrong.  Not only had he managed to get to Level 63, finished a surprise Evolution Assignment, and obtained a new Class, but he’d also acquired nearly everything he needed to challenge the Anchoring dungeons and save many more innocent people from dying when the next disaster struck.  Of course, it hadn’t all been smooth sailing, as evidenced by the piles of bodies he was leaving behind him, but there wasn’t anything he could do to change what had happened.

Would he have done something differently if he knew what would happen?  Of course.

Would he adjust the way he interacted with people in the future to prevent that from happening again?  Absolutely. 

He was already planning on doing everything he could to avoid people, so as not to risk anyone being captured or killed just because they talked to him or simply saw him one time – or some other such ridiculous reason.  Thaden hoped that the new black aura that indicated who were Contender killers would help to alleviate a lot of that; unfortunately, he knew that something like that would stop everyone.  Besides, he’d seen enough movies, read enough books, and played enough games in his life that he was well aware that human nature could think of many different things that didn’t include killing someone in order to get what they wanted.  If what he’d heard from Martin was accurate, there were Contenders already torturing people to get what they wanted, and he had no doubt that it would stop now.

What could he do to ensure that it didn’t happen to people he knew, or worse, himself?  By simply not allowing there to be a chance for someone to be taken advantage of. 

Thaden was a Solitary Shaman, after all; he’d already had practice staying away from people, but now he’d have to do it for more reasons than just anonymity. 

Solo good.  People bad.  He felt like some sort of caveman hermit now, but if that was the only way to avoid running into the situations he seemed to find himself in, then he was going to have to embrace that kind of life and that kind of thinking.

As he ran to the north with his boosted Celerity, eventually passing through the mountain range that surrounded the Ragewater Sea, he discovered that he had to journey through another forest in order to get closer to his destination.  The myriad of tree trunks slowed him down enough that he had to camp in a tree when it got dark, which wasn’t all that comfortable after having slept in the Gold-Ranked room at the Coalition building.

Maybe some people good?  He had to admit, he liked the luxury of sleeping in a bed, a nice soft bed, and being waited on hand-and-foot by a personal concierge.  It was something he never had in his old life back on Earth, and though it wasn’t something he’d ever strived to achieve, the fact of the matter was that he enjoyed the prestige and power that having a high Badge Ranking provided. 

It was that thought that soured the idea of luxury that the Coalition promised.  Hadn’t he just been complaining that some Contenders were committing heinous crimes against humanity just for the sake of power?  Granted, his form of power was different, as it didn’t come at the expense of other people… or did it?  He couldn’t deny that the bulk of his Rank Progress came from completing SPECIAL Quests; while the first hadn’t been at the expense of other Contenders from Earth, instead being the Charee Adventurers who had attempted to complete the Mausoleum and failed, there had been many deaths because of what had happened in Forgestone.  Logically, Thaden knew that he wasn’t 100% responsible for the deaths, as it was mostly due to the Assimilation System and its next development phase being triggered early, but that also didn’t mean he was blameless – even if it had been him that inadvertently triggered it.

On the other hand, he had earned his current Badge Rank, so why not enjoy it when he could?  As long as he didn’t go out and try to obtain his power just for power’s sake or at the deliberate expense of others, then hopefully he wouldn’t fall into the same trap that powerful people seemed to succumb to, especially back on Earth. 

All these thoughts filtered through his mind as he struggled to sleep, the horrific events of the day overcoming his need for rest.  It took him hours to work through what he’d done to all those people, pushing away and accepting mental justifications for his actions one after another, while also confirming what he knew had to be his plan going forward.

Go to The Devil’s Nail or another dungeon with potential for Support Class gear.  Search out potential dungeons to find the next Anchoring one, and then deal with the fallout that it will inevitably cause.  Don’t be afraid to enjoy the luxury that the Coalition provides, but don’t seek out personal power when it could end up hurting or killing innocent people.  Tailor my development over the coming months and years to become the best Support Class the Assimilation System has ever seen, rising to the top of the Rankings so that I can finally get the answers I deserve.

And above all else, avoid every other Contender like the plague.

Waking up late in the morning, having slept in because he got to sleep so late the night before, these few plans cemented themselves in his mind.  However, as he started to untie his hammock-like bed made of rope from the tree branches, he realized that there was one thing that he forgot to add to the list.

Thaden pulled up the message window that the Support Class Representative had sent him when he had first attempted to evolve his Class; adding whatever the Evolution Assignment was for Level 189 – which was still such a distance away that it almost didn’t feel like a real Level – to his plans was important.  He didn’t want to end up achieving such a vaunted Level only to realize he could’ve done something dozens of times during his development, but was harder to do at that stage or something. 

Support Class Evolution Assignments:

Level 21: Cast enough spells to restore 50,000 total Health and prevent 10,000 damage

Level 63: Complete at least 1 dungeon on Minimal difficulty, at least 1 dungeon on Medial difficulty, and at least 1 dungeon on Maximal difficulty while in a complete, 5-member Contender party

Level 189: Participate in a minimum 100-Contender Raid party and complete the Minimal difficulty of an Intermediate dungeon (Level 160+) without a single casualty

Level 567: ??? (Locked)

Thaden could only stare at the Evolution Assignment requirements as he tried to comprehend what it was saying.  An Intermediate dungeon is Level 160?  Does that mean all the dungeons I’ve been doing up until now are… what?  Beginner dungeons?  And Level 567?  How long will it take to achieve something like that? 

What was more important about the Assignment was the first part of his requirements to evolve his Class at Level 189: “Participate in a minimum 100-Contender Raid party”. 

Whelp, there goes my plan to avoid every Contender like the plague.

The End

(It's done! I have the Final Stats that I'll be posting once I get it updated properly, and then I'll be working on edits and revisions over the next few days. Thank you all for reading and I hope you're looking forward to The Fusionist Book 6 starting next week!)