PoV: Snow Okiyama - Ion
My tummy hurts.
That may be the greatest understatement of my life. My stomach is on fire. I can feel dozens of little burrows inside it, even as I lay in the bed. The shrapnel dug through my enhanced flesh, carving up protective muscles and puncturing some of my organs. My stomach was cut open and I only saved myself more pain by solidifying some mana over the wound before the acid started spilling out. One of my kidneys also got messed up.
In short, it really sucks. Harry simply looked at me, as Amelie’s strings carried me up the staircase. His face was calm. He didn’t do anything about Vincent. Just set about repairing the broken window after the two-faced jerk jumped out of them.
I sigh, softly, taking care not to move too much.
Despite everything, I’ll live.
That much I’m sure of. Because I’ve spent two minor requests. One on a tonic to help with organ healing, since that seems troublesome and I should get it done sooner rather than later, and another for essence on human anatomy.
The tonic tasted like battery acid going down, but I felt it work. And with my enhanced knowledge of anatomy, I could probably put my stomach back together. Probably. Maybe. Surely.
I smile, thinly, laying in bed. It’s almost… freeing, being hurt. There’s nothing to do about it other than use my skills and ensure I recover as fast as possible. That, and checking my notifications, of course.
[Suppression 18 > 19]
[Selection 17 > 18]
[Solidification 10 > 12]
[Deconstruction 12 > 14]
[Inscription 12 > 13]
[Biological Restoration 9 > 12]
[Class up! Nullmage 8 > 10]
[Job up! Imbuer 6 > 7]
[Level Up! 36 > 39]
Despite the wound on me, every point goes into vessel. The attunement loop, as Harry called it, is still running, keeping my mana surviveable. It doesn’t stay active when I sleep, so I’ll probably wake up with some pain until I figure that bit out, but it shouldn’t give me too much trouble. Hopefully.
Sighing slightly, I open my full status.
Name: Snow Okiyama - Ion
Floor: 3
Class: <Nullmage> - 10 (II)
Job: <Imbuer> - 7 (II)
Lv. 39
Heart: 24
Power: 8
Vessel: 180 - Abiding Apathy
Skills:
Every ability I’ve earned is listed out. I smile faintly at the sight.
I breathe, keeping the second instance of [Suppression] active on the pain. It hurts, and it’s allowed to hurt, but I don’t want it to distract me from healing. The tonic of the tower is working, but it’s slow.
That’s the trick with it, and why people are willing to pay actual healers. The tower is stingy. When it comes to healing stuff like organs, it’s more helpful than an average healer, but it doesn’t work on its own. It increases natural regeneration, and potency of healing skills, but it takes time.
A few days, probably, for my stomach lining to regenerate properly. Another day or two for my kidney, after that. And that’s with my healing skill to assist it. Getting it to mend normal climbing wounds, like cuts on extremities and veins? It’s too slow, and you’d bleed out before healing fully.
So, in effect, my healing is cheaper than that the tower offers. I’m probably undercutting even the church of Respitia. But I don’t mind that. Healing is a nice thing to do, and I really do try to be kind. Mostly.
Not to Vincent, though.
For now, he’s only hurt me. That’s tolerable. Philia, the darkbreaker, had hurt people in my party. I can forgive people who hurt me, but touching Inu or Thatch? Opal or Sylves? No. That’s too far.
And, somehow, I don’t suspect Vincent will leave it at that. When breaking his magic, I caught glimpses of their patterns, etching them into my mind with the same ethereal construct that held pieces and memories of so many other skills.
I can feel how his magic ticks. How it’s sneaky and deceitful. How he’s a corrupt snake who will lodge his teeth in people and never let go. No, he’ll come after me again. Maybe he’ll even come after Amelie first. Or the others.
That seems like the kind of thing he’d do. Try to bleed me dry by killing off my party one by one. I’ll kill him before that happens.
But, for now, I can’t do too much. He scurried away like the beaten rat he is, and I get to lay in bed and be fed by my friends. I keep my stomach shut with solidified plates of flexible mana, and I keep pouring more energy into healing myself.
Graciously, Harry and Michael help me regenerate by filling the core I still have. By now, it takes emptying it out three or four times to fill my mana pool, but that’s okay. The two of them are strong. Even when more than half their mana is lost in conversion, Harry seems able to almost endlessly refill the thing on his own.
Michael, on the other hand, makes me food. Delicious food that makes me heal faster. He doesn’t even ask anything in exchange. Just brings it to my bedside. Sometimes, he sits with me for a while, the zoof’s fur draping over the stool and down to the floor. He doesn’t say much, but he seems pleased to see me recovering.
“Why do you help me?” I ask him once.
At that, he smiles. Even through all the fur, I can see his lips curl, and the way it creases the skin around his large, spherical eyes. “Because you helped us. Climbers repay their debts.”
Then he leaves. Gets up and shuffles out of the room, tossing a knife up and down in his thin, gangly limbs. He’s a bit of a weirdo, but I don’t think I dislike him. He’s the honest kind of weird, where he wears his quirks on his sleeve.
Not too long later, Opal comes into the room.
“Well, dang,” they say, looking at me. “Can I see the stitches?” they ask.
Shameless idiot. “No,” I say.
“Dang. I’ll take off my shirt too, if you want,” they offer.
At that, I snicker. “Dummy.”
They raise an eyebrow. “That’s not a no…”
“I’m not taking off my shirt,” I say, still smiling.
“Ah, dang,” Opal sighs, shrugging helplessly. “And here I thought I finally had my chance. Foiled again. My tragic fate continues on.”
Smiling lightly, I throw a sphere of mana at their head. “Give me my food, Opal.”
“Gah!” they yelp, rubbing their forehead. “Fine, fine. Gee.” They smile, brightly. “Alright. Here comes the aeroplane~”
“I’ll throw a knife next.”
“... Train?” they ask, hesitantly.
A long, suffering sigh leaves my lips. Why does this charming bastard have to be such a moron?
- - -
I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, letting my body heal. It’s been a few days now, and I’m feeling a lot better. So much so that I’ve largely been able to drop the pain suppression and have more of my mind free on experiments.
Of course, a large chunk of mana still goes to healing, but with Harry supercharging my regeneration, well… I make good use of the extra available power. Most of that manifests in playing around with my new skill, [Intuition].
[Intuition 1 > 2]
And it’s a fun skill.
In a lot of ways, it’s the evolution of that tingle on my skin that I feel. A tiny bit of knowledge about ambient mana and other abilities that doesn’t come from carefully studying them, but from a glance. A glimpse. Like opening a sheet of music, looking at the chord progression, and feeling the tone of the song.
There’s a taste to the ambient mana, brushing against my skin in a way that I cannot describe as anything other than telling. I get it. What it’s telling me, I can parse it a little. I can feel when there’s trouble coming, I can feel when there’s an ability active, even when I can’t see the ability, even when I don’t know what it’s about.
Cutting it short, it’s an excellent companion to [Observation].
And, of course, the other skill I improve is [Solidification].
[Solidification 12 > 14]
Turns out, patching up my stomach is the first time I’m using it to create something generally more flexible. And as it also turns out, after the first two times that a bit of acid leaked out into my wounds, I was very motivated to learn. Now, though, I’m able to give my structures a bit of bend, which lets them much more closely mimic organic tissue, and lets me make something more metal-like.
It’s something new. Solid, apparently, doesn’t necessarily mean brittle crystal. There’s a rather wide span to materials that are considered solid, after all. All kinds of strengths and stretch capabilities. Did I learn a bit from watching Amelie’s string? Absolutely. Did I steal some of her designs? For sure.
Did this improve my skills? Yes.
As always, stealing… I mean, uh, borrowing ideas from my companions’ skills is proving very effective. I take a deep breath, then push myself up from my bed. The wound across my stomach is scabbed over and hurts as I move, but the pain is tolerable. I drink, eat, train, and rest.
The others are slowly taking more expeditions into the undergrowth, levelling with Bile as their guide. And, of course, I take every chance I can get to continue my insidious work, making distant, tiny connections with members of the wayfarer’s guild and chipping away at their powersets.
It’s fun to see the difference. Classes work immediately, jobs usually allow some prep time. Bay, for example, prepares more bombs, experimenting with magic. Meanwhile, Opal can blink and stab stuff anytime. Of course, there is overlap.
Amelie’s class needs preparation, too, since it focuses on her puppets, and she needs to make those. And some classes, like my imbuer, work pretty well pretty quickly. My class benefits a lot from analysis, though, and permanent enchantments do, too.
So that’s what I work on. I train, I enchant, I prepare. Because eventually, the day comes. Eventually, on an expedition, Bile gets found by the guild. Bile, as well as Dar and Opal, locked up.
And that same day, Sylves comes into my room, asking that we free them. My tummy is mostly healed, so I drag myself out of bed, have Kuro wrap my face in darkness, and step out of the inn.
My friends want me to burn down a guild. And so, the guild must burn.
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