SSS-Ranked Surgeon In Another World: The Healer Is Actually OP!

"You miscalculated by four days."

"In our favor."

"I know in our favor. I just. Bruce, that’s enormous."

"It’s the alpha cores. The first day we didn’t know they existed. The second day we got one. Today we got a two-core alpha." Bruce shifted the strap of his frame, which was empty now and much lighter. "Once you know what to hunt, the rate compounds. The cores from the alphas are not linearly more valuable than the cores from the normal beasts. They’re exponentially more valuable. So every day we find an alpha, we make a multi-day’s worth of progress in one day."

"And the climb past F-rank?"

"Will get harder. E-rank will pay more, but the beasts will hit harder. The compound rate slows as the climb gets steeper. Right now we’re at the easiest stage of the curve. Enjoy it." He glanced at Kael. "Spatial ring stall."

"Spatial ring stall," Kael agreed.

...

The walk back to the market square felt different in the gold afternoon light.

Bruce had taken this same path three times now. Twice with empty pockets and once with eighty-seven points to his name. Today he walked it knowing he could buy the thing he wanted. The shift in feeling was subtle. He did not feel triumphant. He felt, more accurately, competent. The walk of a man who had done what he set out to do, no more and no less.

He noticed the city differently as they walked.

The market square at this hour was at its busiest. Hunters back from their day, families doing their evening shopping, food stalls turning out the heavier dinner fare. The lanterns between the stalls had brightened slightly to compensate for the slow shift toward evening light. The whole square was washed in a warm golden glow that softened every face and every surface.

Bruce noticed something else, too.

The souls in the market noticed him.

Not all of them. Most paid no attention to the three of them at all, as they had for three days. But a handful, two or three at each section of the market, looked up as they passed. A meat stall keeper glanced at them and then looked again. A soul carrying a basket paused, watched them go by, did not move for a few seconds afterward. An older awakened soul at the edge of a quiet conversation with another looked up and let his eyes track the three of them for the full length of their crossing the square.

The notice was not hostile. It was not even particularly curious. It was recording. Bruce had been a senior surgeon long enough to recognize the look. The look of a person who has just identified someone they want to remember for later.

Word had moved through the city today.

Bruce did not yet know how far it had moved or who knew it. He made his face show nothing. He continued walking at the same pace.

Kael, beside him, had also noticed.

"You’re being watched," the demon said quietly, without turning his head.

"I noticed."

"So has the meat stall keeper. So has the man with the basket. So has the older one at the edge of the conversation we just passed."

"You see well, for a man with no peripheral attention training."

"My old life involved a lot of being watched. I learned to watch back." Kael walked a few more steps. "Is this a problem?"

"It’s a question," Bruce said. "Not yet a problem. The watching is interested, not aggressive. Someone has told the city that there’s a new F-rank party that’s killing alphas. The city is making sure it knows our faces."

"And then?"

"Then we’ll see who reaches out to us first. People with opportunities. People with concerns. People who want to know what we are."

"You’re remarkably calm about this."

"I’m cautious about this. Calm is the surface."

Kael grinned, slightly, in the way that meant he understood. "Spatial ring."

"Spatial ring," Bruce agreed.

...

The spatial ring stall was open.

The tall elegant stall keeper was at her counter, in the same position she had been in three days ago, with the same hands folded on the wood and the same patient expression. The display had shifted slightly. Some of the rings on the velvet cloth had been sold and replaced. Bruce noted that the smallest ring he had picked up three days ago was no longer there.

"That ring is gone," he said, before he could stop himself.

The stall keeper looked at him. She remembered him. He could see it in the small recognition at the corner of her eyes. She did not say so. She simply said, "Sold the day after you looked at it."

"To another hunter?"

"To a young soul who had saved for a month. He needed it for his second-week haul." She made a small gesture with one finger. "But I have a second one, the same model, in the storage cabinet. Same price."

"I’d like to buy it," Bruce said.

"I expected you might be back," she said, and reached under the counter.

She produced the ring in a small velvet-lined box. Bruce paid. Eight hundred F-rank soul points, deducted from his window without ceremony. And the box was slid across the counter to him.

He took it.

He opened it.

Inside, the ring sat on dark velvet, small and pale and faintly luminous. The same light-bone material. The same faint interior depth that the eye could almost see into. One cubic meter of compressed space, the stall keeper had said. Smallest the stall carried. Good for a day’s light hunting.

It was not what Bruce had wanted. What Bruce had wanted was the ring at the end of the row, the one whose price he had not even asked. But that ring was now well within his reach for another week or two of hunting, and the small one was now. The small one was what he could put on his finger this afternoon.

He took it out of the box.

He slid it onto the third finger of his right hand, the same finger he wore his physical-realm spatial ring on, the same finger he had not worn this version of since the descent began.

The ring settled. It fit.

The light interior of the ring connected to his soul, briefly, in a small warm pulse. The binding, he understood. The ring would now respond to him and only to him. Anyone else who tried to access it would find an empty solid object.

He thought "open," in the small inward way that he had thought "bullets" in the mist, and the ring’s interior space presented itself to him.

It was bigger inside than the cubic meter the stall keeper had described. Bigger felt more accurate to him, anyway, because cubic meter was an external measure and what he sensed from the inside was room. A small clean room, soul-stone walled, empty and ready. He could put things in. He could take things out. The act of doing either would be no more difficult than reaching into a coat pocket, with the difference that the coat pocket was, in fact, a small clean room.

It was the most ordinary thing in the world. It was also the first object he had owned in this realm that had not been carved out of his soul-body itself.

He pulled the ring off his finger and looked at it again. Then put it back on.

"Better?" the stall keeper asked.

"Better," Bruce said.

"It is always better."

Kael was already at the counter. He had brought his own slip out and was studying the two-cubic-meter ring on the velvet cloth with the focused attention of a man who had been waiting three days to pay for it. The two-cubic-meter ring was twelve hundred points. Kael had eleven hundred. He sighed and pointed at the next size down, one-and-a-half cubic meters, one thousand points.

"That one," Kael said. "I’ll come back for the bigger one when I’ve earned it."

The stall keeper retrieved it.

Kael paid and put it on the same way Bruce had, on the same finger, with the same small involuntary settling of his shoulders as the binding took. He flexed his hand. He grinned.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, this is much better than carrying frames."

"You’ll still want the carrying frames sometimes," the stall keeper said. "Hauls bigger than your ring’s capacity, hauls that include things you don’t want compressed. But for daily work, yes." She turned to Theron. "And you?"

Theron was looking at the velvet cloth.

He had close to twelve hundred points on his slip, the same as Kael had. He could afford either the small ring or the medium ring. Bruce watched him think.

After a long moment, Theron said, "The smallest one."

Bruce looked at him.

"I’m going to save the rest," Theron said. "I want. There are other things I want to learn. There was a stall I saw on the way here, the one selling instructional materials. Soul-script primers. Talent-development texts." He looked at Bruce, slightly embarrassed. "I want to know more about what my talent is. I think. I think the answers might be in texts somewhere. And texts cost points."

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