I Reincarnated as the World's Worst Healer

Chapter 125: Thunder Mountain (1)

"We have to do something." Ebony breathed it more than said it, flat on her stomach in the underbrush, watching the saw rasp across a dragon’s skull. "We can’t just watch that."

"We have four bounties and no reason to start a war with armed traffickers," Lucian whispered back. "Be reasonable."

"I’m being extremely reasonable." Her eyes moved across the cages, counting, weighing. "Look at them. One of those gets us north in a fraction of the time. We’re walking to a tower at the literal end of the world, Lucian. A mount changes everything."

"They’re hatchlings." He shook his head. "Even if we freed one, it couldn’t carry the whole group. It can barely carry itself. The idea’s romantic and useless."

"They’re not hatchlings."

"They’re the size of a large dog — "

"They’re adolescents." Ebony nodded at the nearest cage, where a dragon thrashed against the bars. "Count the branches on the horns. Hatchlings have a single spike. These have three, four forks — that’s a fire dragon in its teens. Underfed, abused, half their growth stunted by these cages. Give one decent food for a few weeks and you’d have a mount that carries all five of us and complains the whole way." She allowed herself a thin, grim satisfaction at his expression. "Don’t look so shocked."

Lucian was shocked, and didn’t bother hiding it. "How do you know that?"

"Because I know things." She gave him a look thick with irony. "I’ve been in this world longer than you think, elf. A lot of nights, a lot of reading, a lot of conversations you weren’t around for." She drew a slow breath and shifted her weight forward. "Doesn’t matter. What matters is we hit them now, while we’ve still got surprise — "

"What surprise?"

The voice came from behind them.

They turned — too slow, both of them, caught flat-footed in the worst possible way — and looked up at a goblin. Not a small one. A slab of muscle with rust-red hair and a hammer the size of a man’s torso already swinging down in a clean killing arc.

They threw themselves apart. The hammer missed flesh by a hand’s width and struck the earth between them, and the impact was wrong — it didn’t thud, it cracked, a burst of white lightning exploding outward from the hammerhead that caught them both mid-leap and flung them through the air like thrown dolls. Ebony hit a tree trunk. Lucian hit two.

By the time the spots cleared from her vision, the clearing had emptied toward them. A dozen traffickers — men and dwarves both — abandoning their saws and tongs, weapons coming up, the firelight catching iron.

And striding through the middle of them came the one who was clearly in charge.

He was a dwarf, white-haired, with a beard like a thornbush and the unhurried walk of a man who had never once needed to rush. "Brazgar," he said to the hammer-wielding goblin, mild as morning, "what in the seven pits is all this noise about?"

"Intruders, Hrazfel." The goblin spat. "Spies in the brush."

Ebony pushed herself up the trunk to her feet, blood at the corner of her mouth, and smiled.

Hrazfel looked her over, and his eyes did a slow, appreciative tour that had nothing to do with threat assessment. "Well now," he said warmly. "Aren’t you a fine thing to find in the dark. Pretty face. Good shape on you. It’s a shame, really — I do hate damaging quality merchandise — "

Ebony reached behind her, wrapped both arms around the tree she’d been thrown into, and tore it out of the ground.

She swung it.

The trunk came around in a flat brutal arc like the world’s largest bat, and it caught Brazgar square across the chest before the goblin could even raise the hammer, and launched him — a hundred-kilo slab of muscle sailing backward over the wagons and into the dark with a sound like a sack of bricks meeting a wall.

The clearing went quiet.

Hrazfel’s eyebrows climbed his forehead. "That," he said, with real delight, "is impressive." Then the delight cooled into something more clinical. "Also deeply unnatural. A girl your size shouldn’t move a tree, let alone bat a goblin with it. That’s the kind of thing the world ought to correct." He raised one hand and gestured lazily at his men. "Correct it."

The traffickers surged.

"Tangle," Lucian said.

{{Forest Magic: Man-Eating Roots}}

A circle of pale green light bloomed beneath the charging bandits, and the ground answered it — thick woody roots erupting from the soil, coiling around legs and torsos and weapon-arms, dragging a dozen men and dwarves to a thrashing, cursing halt in the space of a breath.

Ebony was already moving. She vaulted the nearest tangled trafficker and came down on Hrazfel with her whole weight behind a fist, going for the jaw, going for the one clean second of stun the roots had bought her —

Hrazfel flexed.

The roots around him snapped like wet thread. His hand came up and closed around her fist mid-swing, and the impact of arresting all that force kicked a ring of dust off the ground in every direction. He didn’t budge. He held her punch in one fist like a man catching a thrown apple, and he smiled.

"It’s a sweet thing," he said, "watching a pair stand together in their last bad moment. Truly. Warms an old heart." He tightened his grip until the bones in her hand ground together. "Let me show you something my people are known for."

"Break the bones and devour the storms."

{{Warrior Art × Thunder Magic: Master of the Hundred Fists}}

Hrazfel grew.

His body swelled upward, two meters, three, four — bones lengthening, muscle stacking on muscle, skin darkening to a deep storm-blue, and his eyes lit from within and began to throw arcs of white lightning into the air around his head. The ground beneath his expanding feet cratered under the new weight.

Ebony’s stomach dropped.

"A Thunder Mountain master," she said.

Hrazfel laughed, and now it rolled like weather. "Flattering," he boomed, genuinely pleased. "Truly. It’s rare anyone this far out knows my people on sight. You’ve clearly seen the world, girl." The pleasure didn’t reach the next words at all. "Which is exactly the problem. You’ve seen too much of it. And too much seen means you don’t leave this clearing breathing."

He hit her.

There was no technique to admire, no arc to read — just a fist the size of her chest driven straight down, and the world detonated. Thunder and force together. Ebony went into the earth, and the earth gave way around her, a crater blooming outward with her at the bottom of it, the air torn apart by the crack of it.

She lay in the dirt and coughed blood.

(Organs.) The thought arrived through a wall of white pain, clinical even now, because the clinical part of her was the part that healed. (Crushed. Most of them. Liver’s gone, spleen’s gone, one lung folded.) She held onto consciousness with both hands and refused to let the dark take it. (Stay awake. Stay awake and you can fix it. Pass out and you can’t.)

Above her, Hrazfel sighed like a craftsman regretting a flawed cut.

"Pity," he rumbled, looking down at the crater. "Genuine pity, to ruin a beauty like that. But everyone’s got to learn their place sooner or later. Hers is the ground." He turned away, the lightning crackling lazily off his shoulders, and looked toward the trees.

Lucian stood where the roots had been, perfectly calm, and he had begun to speak.

It was Elvish — the old tongue, the one that didn’t sound like a language at all but like wind finding its way through a high pass, a long low whistling cadence that rose and fell with no edges in it. His hands moved as he spoke. He did not look at the giant dwarf at all.

"Awfully serene," Hrazfel observed, "for a man watching his lover die in a hole." He flicked two fingers, and the traffickers who’d untangled themselves moved to obey — ten humans and three dwarves spreading out in a loose ring around the elf, cutting off every angle of escape. "Surround him. He’s the clever one. Clever ones run."

Hrazfel took a step toward Lucian, raising one storm-blue fist to finish the chant before it finished him —

— and something hit him in the back.

Green fire bloomed across his spine.

It wasn’t an impact he could shrug off, because it wasn’t trying to break him — it was trying to unmake him, the purification flame sinking past the skin and into the well of thunder-magic that fed the transformation, burning the mana itself. Hrazfel roared and lurched forward, and where the fire touched, he shrank — a fraction, a half-meter of stolen size sloughing away in an instant, the lightning around his head stuttering.

He spun.

Ebony stood at the lip of the crater.

She was rolling her neck with both hands, popping the joints one by one, and both of those hands were sheathed in green flame, white at the edges, steady as a forge. The blood was still at her mouth. Her shirt was ruined. But she was standing, and she was smiling, and the smile had nothing pleasant in it.

"The ones who saw too much," she said, "were you." She cracked her knuckles inside the fire. "Now that you know exactly what I can do — well." Her grin widened. "I’m afraid I’ll have to kill all of you. Heh heh heh."