I Reincarnated as the World's Worst Healer

Chapter 129: The Vow of Silence

The boy moved first.

He came at her low and fast, dropping into a sprinter’s launch, and as he closed the distance the magic symbol on his chest flared and the cold gathered around his lead fist — a sheath of frost, jagged and white, crackling the air with it.

{{Warrior Art: Lance of Ice}}

He fired off the ground like a loosed bolt, the iced fist aimed straight for Ebony’s center mass, fast enough that a sane person would have dodged.

Ebony did not dodge.

She took it. The frozen fist drove into her sternum and the impact folded her around it, blood spraying from her mouth — and through the blood, through the shock of cold biting into her chest, she was smiling. That cynical, furious smile that had no warmth in it at all.

"(There you are.)"

Her hand clamped down on his extended arm before he could pull back.

She brought her knee up into his elbow and her own elbow down across the joint at the same instant, and the boy’s arm broke between them with a sound like green wood snapping. He didn’t have time to scream. Her other hand was already in his hair, and she slammed his face down into the dirt hard enough to crater it, pinning his skull against the earth.

Then she lit the fire.

{{Life Magic × Warrior’s Art: Purifying Fire Fists}}

Green flame poured off her hand and into him, and the boy’s whole body seized. He thrashed under her grip, a high thin sound tearing out of his throat — not words, the monks didn’t give words, but pain has its own language — as the purifying fire found the well of his magic and began to burn it dry. His frost guttered out. The symbol on his chest dimmed.

Ebony lifted her hand and let the fire die.

The boy lay in the dirt, nose streaming blood, and tried to push himself up on his one good arm. He got halfway.

She hit him.

She hit him again. And again. The blows came down with the steady, unhurried rhythm of someone who had decided this was going to take a while and had made peace with that. Seconds became a minute. A minute became several. His face came apart under her fists — split lip, broken nose, one eye swelling shut, blood sheeting down over the pale boyish features until they weren’t boyish anymore.

Ebony sat back on her heels, breathing hard, and looked at the wreck of him.

"There," she said. "Now you look your age, old man." She wiped blood off her knuckles onto her thigh. "That little youthful face is the worst part about your kind, you know — pretty children’s faces stretched over whatever you actually are. Disgusting, once you know what’s underneath." She tilted her head. "And if I remember right, you warrior-monks take a vow of silence. So I already know I won’t get a single word out of that mouth the easy way." Her voice flattened. "So make this quick. Where are my friends?"

The boy said nothing.

Instead, he lunged — a desperate clumsy swing of his unbroken arm, aiming for her throat.

Ebony caught his wrist without looking at it, and her eyes went cold and very calm.

"Then let’s find out," she said softly, "whether your mind keeps that vow as well as your mouth does."

{{Life Magic: Healing}}

The green light washed over him, and his face knitted itself back together — the broken nose straightening, the split skin sealing, the swollen eye opening. He stared at her as the pain receded, and the expression that crossed his restored features was no longer defiance.

It was horror. Because he understood, now, exactly what she meant to do.

She broke him again.

And healed him. And broke him. Minutes became an hour. An hour became more. She worked through his body methodically — the arms, the ribs, the hands — breaking and mending, breaking and mending, and the boy held his vow with a discipline that under any other circumstances Ebony might have respected. He held it through the first hour. He held it through the second.

He broke at the fifth.

"Stop!" The voice that tore out of him was ragged, barely a voice at all, a thing scraped raw from screaming. "Please — please stop! I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you where they are! Please — just stop —"

Ebony did not stop.

She kept going, and the boy tried to crawl away, dragging himself across the scorched ground on his elbows, and she took his legs out from under him — felt the bones give — and pulled him back.

"Crazy bitch, what are you doing!" He was sobbing now, the vow forgotten entirely. "I told you I’d talk! I’ll talk, you lunatic —"

"Don’t be stupid." Ebony’s voice didn’t change. "I know exactly what you’d do. You’d send me to a trap, or to some empty place miles from where they really are, and you’d buy your people time." She set her hand against his ruined leg.

"The first answer is never the truth. Not yet. It only becomes the truth once your bones are screaming loud enough that lying costs more than honesty."

She wrenched, and the leg came away from his body entirely.

The sound he made then was not human in any register that had a name.

.

.

.

By nightfall, the boy was alive.

His body was alive, anyway — healed enough to keep breathing, pinned upright against a tree with the same black iron through the same raised hands, exactly the way Kanary had been left. But whatever lived behind his eyes had not survived the day. He stared at nothing, and nothing was all there was in his face. Just horror, set into the features like something poured and left to harden.

Ebony sat by the fire she’d built and went through her pack.

"(Three potions left.)" She turned the small vials over in the firelight. "(I burned two on Kanary already. And my healing through a potion is crude — it closes the wound but it doesn’t close it clean.)"

Kanary lay beside her, unconscious but stable, the bandages gone now, the worst of the wounds sealed. But the seals had left their mark.

Faint scar lines traced her arms, her collar, the line of her jaw — places that should have healed to nothing and hadn’t, because potion-fueled healing didn’t have the finesse Ebony’s mana did, and Ebony’s mana had run dry hours ago.

"(Scars,)" she thought, looking at her friend’s face. "(On a face that pretty. She didn’t deserve to come out of this marked. None of this. And I can’t even fix it right.)"

She looked away, ashamed of it, toward the dragon.

Stor was asleep against her hip, curled into a tight warm coil, a small pile of cracked bones beside him — a deer Ebony had hunted and let him gorge on. He’d wanted the monk’s severed leg instead. She’d stopped him before he could get to it, fast and firm.

"(If he tastes human flesh even once, he’ll start seeing me as prey too. Not yet. Maybe not ever, if I do this right.)"

She fed the fire and turned the day over in her mind.

The monk, before she’d broken his vow and his mind both, had given it up in pieces. The Liberators of the Eclipse.

That was the name. An organization — and they’d come for her group out of revenge, furious that their plans at the tower near Kanary’s homeland had been ruined. "(I didn’t think they’d move this fast. I didn’t think they’d come at all.)" And it was her fault, when she traced it back honestly. She’d been the one who insisted on entering that tower in the first place.

She let out a long breath and accepted it, because there was nothing else to do with it.

They’d left Kanary behind, the monk had said, for one cold and practical reason: she wouldn’t have survived the journey to Frost Mountain.

That was where the Liberators kept their seat — a fortress in the far peaks — and that was where they were taking Lucian and Daniel and Veronica. An organization that conquered nations by taking towers, that built war-points across the map to destabilize the entire world, one captured spire at a time.

Frost Mountain was days of travel. And Ebony could not move at travel pace with Kanary in this condition.

She pulled out her knife.

She picked up a long, thick branch — nearly a young trunk — and set the blade to it, carving the end down to a wicked point. When it was sharp enough, she tossed it onto the pile beside her: a growing heap of branches she’d already shaped into spears and stakes through the long evening.

"(They declared war,)" she thought, shaving a fresh point. "(They declared war on the wrong group.)"

Stor’s head came up.

"Something’s coming," the little dragon said, suddenly alert, eyes brightening in the dark.

Ebony was on her feet at once, knife reversed in her grip, fire ready at her free hand.

The trees parted — and a dragon stepped out. Larger than Stor, red-scaled, a few years older by the look of it, moving with the wary half-starved caution of an animal that had been caged. "(One of the trafficked ones,)"

she realized. "(Got loose in the blast and wandered. Now what — kill it for clean meat, or let it go?)"

"It’s not him," Stor corrected, before she could decide. "That’s not what I felt."

From behind the red dragon, a second figure limped into the firelight.

The dwarf. Hrazfel — battered, bloodied, his fine bravado from that morning entirely gone — dragging one leg, glaring at Ebony with the specific hatred of a man who had nowhere else to put it.

"You." He jabbed a finger at her. "This is your fault, Visitor. Those child-faced monks ambushed us not an hour after I left you — because of the noise you made, because of the dragon you loosed — and they took everything. Every beast. Every man I had left." His voice cracked. "They took all of them."

"That’s a shame," Ebony said, flat. "Genuinely. But it’s not my problem. So I’d suggest you limp off the way you came, old man, before I decide to finish what the egg started."

"That option died hours ago." Hrazfel’s jaw worked. "My boys are gone. You don’t understand what that means — those monks don’t kill prisoners.

They do worse. They scrub them. Wipe the minds clean and pour in loyalty instead, until there’s nothing left of who they were — just faithful little pawns for the Eclipse. A fate worse than dying." He spat. "I came to make you pay. But mostly I came because I’ve got nowhere else to go and no one else who knows where they took them."

Ebony went still.

"(Mind-wiped.)" The word landed hard. "(If that’s what’s waiting for Lucian and Daniel and Veronica, then I don’t have days. I don’t have time to wait for Kanary to heal. I have to go now.)" She looked down at Stor, small and warm and barely a day old. "(And I can’t do it with a hatchling that can’t fly straight yet.)"

She looked back at Hrazfel.

"Then why not go get them yourself?" she said. "They’re your men."

The dwarf’s face twisted, and the wounded pride in it was almost worse than the wounds. He slammed a fist to the ground and his body began to swell — the storm-blue spreading across his skin, the lightning waking in his eyes, the giant’s form rising out of the broken old dwarf even as he favored his bad leg.

"Because no one takes a fortress like that alone, girl!" he roared. "Not me. Not you. Not the strongest fool who ever lived! A base of that size, with that many of them — I’d die at the gate and accomplish nothing!"

Ebony looked up at the four-meter giant of crackling thunder, and slowly, deliberately, she smiled.

It was the cynical one again. The one with no warmth in it. The one she saved for the worst ideas she’d ever had.

"Well, old man," she said. "In that case — how about you hire an expert at bringing mountains down?"