After she was sure she had done as much as she could for the man, she wiped the sweat off her brow with the back of her wrists, for her hands and parts of her dress were covered with his blood. She put the patient's s.h.i.+rt and pants back on. She boxed the used healing items and threw them into her spatial ring to dispose of later. After, she took out a water sac and dumped the contents on his masked face.

Unlike how she expected, he didn't sit up and panic, but simply wiped the water away. His skeletal mask had been cracked along the center, allowing her to see one of his eyes, a brown so dark that, if not for her eyesight, she would have thought it black. His other eye was a blue flame, which ignited as if he had come back to life. "Where am I?" he asked.

"First of all," Elero said as she held up a metal card with the patient's ident.i.ty on it. "Mr. Lich, I a.s.sume this is your name. What happened to you? Is there anyone chasing you or something? I don't know how you people from the Black Market work, and I don't want to drag myself into anything because I saved you. You're welcome by the way."

Mr. Lich's flamed eye flared and shrunk back down as he slowly sat up. "No, you should be fine. I just got into a fight. Thank you for healing me." She couldn't tell if he was lying or not but, by the slow way he moved and talked, he seemed defeated, lost.

He glanced around: "I take it this is your room. It's nice and large, as expected of a n.o.ble. You people get all the good treatment. Just make sure the servant who cleans your room doesn't come in." He stood up from the bed and Elero helped him walk across the gray carpeted room and sit at the large wooden desk to the b.l.o.o.d.y bed.

"There is no cleaning servant," Elero said as she took off the b.l.o.o.d.y sheet from her bed and stored it inside of her spatial ring. "I can keep my room clean by myself. The servants are already overworked dealing with those guys. I don't want to add to their load."

"It's not much effort to keep this place clean. There's just a bed, desk, curtained-covered window, and a dresser after all. The chandelier is a bit much for me though," she said, pointing to the dusty metal chandelier hanging from the wooden ceiling. "And now, my job just became a bit harder." She pointed to the trail of blood leading from the doorway to the bed.

"Sorry," Mr. Lich said. He moved around and then lifted his s.h.i.+rt to inspect the st.i.tches. "These are pretty impressive. Do you know a lot about the human body?"

"I was pretty much forced to," Elero said as she pulled a sheet out of her spatial ring, placed it on the bed, and lay down. "Now, are you feeling lightheaded, or do you think we can go on with the appointment. Sorry if I'm being too sudden, but I do need to sleep." She glanced at the indoor sundial, an artifact which was able to tell the time from anywhere, hanging over the desk. "These things usually take an hour or so, and I would like to be at top shape when I enter the academy tomorrow, or should I say today?" She forced her mouth into a slight smile.

"That's fine," Mr. Lich said as he stood up and moved around.

"Try not to put too much stress on the st.i.tches," Elero warned as Mr. Lich paced in the room. "You can sit on the desk while you go over the drawings. I'll get ready." She pulled up her white dress, spotted with pools of his blood, up to her thighs, exposing the majority of the metallic monstrosities around her legs.

"Right," Mr. Lich coughed as he sat down. "Do you have any writing materials?"

"The drawer under the desk and to your right," Elero said.

"Thank you," Mr. Lich said as he slowly leaned down, holding his ribcage while he did so. "You weren't kidding about the st.i.tches pulling." He groaned as he retrieved the contents from the drawer and put them on the desk. Half of the pages were already full of complex designs and shapes. "What are these?"

"The blueprints to my braces," Elero said. "Other healers, before they failed, drew them to understand how my legs worked. They detail…What are you doing!?" she yelled as Mr. Lich ripped them into pieces.

"If they failed going by these drawings, then why would I use them?" Mr. Lich asked, his dark eye uncaring of her distress. He threw the pieces into his spatial ring, pulled out clean sheets of paper, ink, and a quill. "So, I a.s.sume that these other healers usually ask if you can take your braces off?"

Elero nodded and reached for the first brace. Mr. Lich did a quick sketch of the process. Gear after gear, screw after screw, b.l.o.o.d.y nail after b.l.o.o.d.y nail, Elero pulled her braces apart while Mr. Lich jotted down notes on where each piece was, how her leg changed after each piece was removed, and some other numbers she didn't quite understand the meaning of. Elero sighed as she pulled out the last screw and her leg turned into its mushy state, feeling the pain decrease a bit. She put all the pieces at the foot of the bed along with her other brace.

"You know," Mr. Lich said as he leaned forward. "You seem familiar. Have we met before?"

"I don't think so," Elero shrugged. "I've never met a masked man that goes by the name of Mr. Lich. It seems a little hypocritical that someone by that name is a healer. I used to know a hypocrite like that, but my father killed him."

Mr. Lich leaned back. "What does your father do for a living? I thought you came from a n.o.ble family. Now that I think about it, I saw you fight. Where did you learn how to do that?"

"My father is a merchant" Elero said. "Our family was recently elevated to n.o.ble status. As for learning how to fight, I learned it on my own."

Mr. Lich didn't so much as lift his head as he continued the drawings. "So you didn't have the greatest childhood either huh?" He finished the last sketch and dipped the quill again. "And what was the nature of this injury?"

"Blunt-force trauma," Elero said, her voice cracking a little. "He…he took a hammer to my legs." She looked up at the ceiling, remembering how he smiled as he did it, spouting some bulls.h.i.+t about art and how pretty she looked.

"I was only conscious for the first five hits. My father told me later that, by the time he found where my brother was keeping me, I was barely alive. I clung to life for three weeks before a healer arrived."

"She fixed everything but my legs. She said that, since my bones were essentially a powder, and since my brother had consumed most of them, they couldn't be fixed. Healing magic can repair, but only if there is some shape to repair it into. It would take too much mana, even if my healer was the G.o.ddess of Good herself, to find each bit of bone powder floating around my legs and a.s.semble them back into shape."

"And where did you learn how to fight?" Mr. Lich asked once again, his blue flamed eye flaring for a second.

Elero blinked and she could have sworn that some time had been pa.s.sed. One second, the healer was sitting, and the next, he was stood up, his hand on his forehead and sighing.

"You really learned how to fight like that on your own? How troubling." Mr. Lich paced around the room and sat down. "Let's continue with the session," he grumbled as he stroked his chin, engrossed in his thoughts.

Elero grabbed her braces again and began to align them up. "What are you doing?" Mr. Lich asked.

"Putting them back together," Elero said. "That's usually what healers make me do, over and over again while trying different healing spells at various points. Aren't you going to do the same?"

"And do these healers ever ask," Mr. Lich said as he s.h.i.+fted his position in the chair. "How you handle the pain?" Elero stiffened. "Of every second of every day, even in your sleep, your legs are in constant pain. Those needles and screws and nails all move around as blood flows through your legs. The bits of bone might be small, but they should be sharp. They act as many slow twisting blades. They eat at your muscle only to be repaired by life essence. Is that correct?"

Elero nodded, her eyes watering up and reflecting the lights: "The healers have never asked."

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