Bacorium Legacy (80 page)

Emila wiped her tears with her wrist and looked up at her mother. “A-are you sure?”

“I promise,” Melissa said, winking. “You have nothing to worry about. Everything will be alright.”

Emila smiled and put her head on Melissa's shoulder. “Okay,” she whispered.

She never saw the worry in her mother's eyes.

<> <> <>

A few days later, Emila was on her way through the marketplace, carrying a paper bag full of potatoes and carrots. Melissa had sent her out to get ingredients for dinner, and she was now on her way back.

She was a bit worried. She had overheard some men talking earlier, and it would seem that the Acarian soldiers had arrived already, which was several days earlier than they were supposed to have. She hadn't seen any of them on her way through town, thankfully. But the townspeople seemed worried about them, and that was enough to worry her.

Nobody had told her what it was they were in Sulin for, or what had everyone so worried. She was still just a kid, apparently.

She nearly dropped the paper bag when she heard a small crash, and a shout of someone crying out in pain. Farther down the road, she could see some men in black and red armour, standing by a meat stand. One of them was getting very close to the butcher, an angry glare in his eyes.

Her instincts told her to avoid this confrontation, but she needed to walk right past that stand to get home. Taking a deep breath, and doing her best to look inconspicuous, she continued on her way.

There were three Acarians there. One was the man harassing the owner of the meat stand, and another was standing behind him, his arms crossed as he watched the event with amusement. The third was a man with long, greying hair, who was holding his wrist. Blood was dripping from a deep wound.

“We're well aware that you Saetician yuppies don't like us,” said the Acarian who was intimidating the butcher. He had brown hair, which was slicked back. “We couldn't give a damn about being liked. But we don't tolerate acts of violence like this, especially not on our senior members.”

“It w-was an accident...” the butcher tried to defend himself.

The Acarian scoffed. “Sure it was. You just happened to 'slip' and nearly chop off our friend's hand.” He picked up the butcher's cleaver. “I should use this to take off your hand. It's only fair, right? In fact, I could kill you right here and now. We're foreign guests, and you're nobody. They would sweep your death right under the rug to avoid any conflict between the kingdoms, especially with the Alliance making everything complicated. Nobody would give a damn about you.”

Emila looked around the marketplace. The Acarian was talking loud enough to be heard clearly, but everybody around them was doing their best to look busy, blatantly ignoring what was happening.

“Enough,” said the Acarian with the wounded hand. “Let's just go to the healer and be done with this town. They obviously don't have what we're looking for. Don't go starting trouble on my behalf.”

“I'm not starting anything,” said the other. “This guy's the one who started it when he threw this knife at you.”

“Your hour's almost up!” the wounded man said to the other. “We must get going before-”

“This won't take long,” the man said, running the blade down the butcher's cheek. A drop of blood ran down his bearded face.

“E-excuse me,” Emila spoke in a small voice.

The three Acarians, and the butcher, all looked over at her. The one with the cleaver gave her a dismissive glance, while the one in the back studied her carefully. The wounded man looked down at her. He had kind eyes, but they were filled with sorrow. They seemed to realise something when they saw her.

“What is it, girl?” the wounded Acarian asked her.

“I-I'm the town healer's daughter,” she said. “I can fix your hand for you. You wouldn't have to go all the way to the other side of town.”

He smiled, and presented his hand to her. Emila set her bag of groceries down, took his hand in her own, and gathered up her mana. She focused her magick on it, closing up the long cut in the tissue.

But when she took her hand away, she frowned. “I-I'm sorry. I thought I'd gotten good enough to erase the scars by now.”

He looked at the back of his hand, where there was a white line. “No, no, this is very well done. Thank you very much, miss. This is indeed very helpful. You should get back home now.”

The tension seemed to be diffused now. She smiled, picked up her bag, and started back down the road when a voice stopped her.

“What's your name?”

She turned back around. The third Acarian was addressing her now, the man who had stayed in the back until now.

“E-Emila,” she answered.

“You said you're the daughter of this town's healer,” the third Acarian said, taking a few steps towards her. He had sharp eyes and a trimmed black beard. This one made her nervous. There was something uncomfortable about the way he was looking at her. “How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” she said.

“I take it you're training to be your father's successor?” the Acarian continued. “He must be very proud to have such a beautiful daughter. Do you have any other family?”

“Serpos,” said the man she'd healed in a quiet voice. “We need to get going. We've checked the records already. She isn't here. And Dreevius' hour is nearly up.”

The man named Serpos raised a hand to silence his companion. He continued to talk to Emila. “Surely it's not just you and your father?”

There was something in his gaze that demanded she tell him the truth. “N-no, it's not. There's also my little sister, and my mother.”

“Do they have names?”

“M-my sister's name is Eva,” Emila said. “My mother's name is Melissa.”

Serpos grinned. “Thank you, young lady. You have indeed been very helpful today. Run along home now.”

The Acarian with the grey hair frowned, and gave one last regretful look at her before he and Serpos returned to the meat stand where the third was waiting. “Let's go,” Serpos ordered.

The other Acarian took one last glance at the butcher, and swung the cleaver down into a goblin leg. “You were lucky today.”

The three Acarians marched away. Emila watched them go, wondering why they had asked her those questions.

<> <> <>

Two weeks passed.

Things settled down once the Acarians were gone. Emila never told her parents about the encounter in the market, worrying they would scold her for talking to those soldiers. She was worried for a few days, the uncomfortable look that Acarian had given her lingering in her mind. But nothing bad ended up happening, so her worries soon vanished.

While Eva had become the primary focus of her father's teaching, one day Miniu took her into the sanctum and sat her down.

“For my entire life, I've been working to push new boundaries in the art of healing,” her father told her. “I've seen too many people die in my life, and wished I could have saved them. But not even the greatest healers can save everyone, which is a hard lesson your sister will have to learn one day. I'm going to need you to do your best to protect her when that happens. She's going to be a better healer than anyone who has come before, so when it happens, it will be more devastating to her because of it.”

“I understand,” Emila replied. “I'll do anything I can to help Eva.”

“While you cannot save everyone, if you have the power to save a life, you should,” Miniu continued. “In my many years of research, I've uncovered something incredible. It's a very powerful spell - it may even be one of the ten lost arts.”

Her eyes grew wide as saucers. “What is it?”

“I call it the Soul Tether,” he told her. “It involves you taking the mana emitted by someone's soul, creating a thread of your own mana, and linking their soul to your own. I haven't been able to test the effects in depth, but it may have the power to keep someone alive even after they should have died.”

“That's incredible...”

“It has it's problems, though. By linking their mana to your own, it slows down their rate of mana production. To function, they would have to use your mana in place of their own if they ran out. It also slows down the rate of natural healing, which would create problems with healing the injuries that would have killed them in the first place. If used temporarily, it could allow you to keep someone alive long enough to treat them, but you should not allow yourself to remain linked to a person for too long.”

“Why not?”

“The tether could affect your mind. If you are incompatible with someone - as in, too different in personality - this could lead to insanity in the worst scenario. If you are very compatible with someone, it could result in you growing overly attached to them and even shunning others to be around them. You have to be very careful with this technique. Another name for the Ten Lost Arts is the Ten Forbidden Arts. There's a reason their use was banned all those years ago.”

“W-wait, are you going to teach it to me?” she exclaimed in surprise.

“Would I have brought you here to tell you all this is I wasn't?” Miniu asked with a grin. “Your sister is not mature enough for this. It's bad enough she can bring fish back to life, the last thing we need is her running around town binding the soul of any boy who compliments her.”

Emila rolled her eyes. “No kidding.”

“I'm going to show you the weave, but don't actually use it on anyone, okay? This spell is for emergencies only.”

“I understand, Father.”

A few days of training, and Emila was sure she'd grasped the use of the Soul Tether. It was impossible to know without actually testing it on someone, but her father had commanded her to only use it in emergencies, and she was going to follow that.

She spent her time with her mother after that, helping her around the house. She felt left out, as her father was taking Eva to the sanctum every day for training, but as long as she was helping somehow, she was okay. She continued to practise healing on her own, and made gradual progress. It was funny, actually, that she could make knives out of her ice magick, and shoot a bow fine, but she struggled with something that she actually wanted to do. Why couldn't people have talent in the things they enjoyed, she wondered. It would make life so much simpler.

One day, which was just like any other day, she was sweeping up the hallway when Melissa approached her with a basket.

“What's this?” Emila asked, opening up the wicker. There were a bunch of sweet rolls inside.

“Those are for your father and sister,” her mother said. “Could you take those over to the sanctum for me? If you do, you can have one.”

While Eva was the one who enjoyed sweet things, Emila would be lying if she said she didn't enjoy having one once in a while. “Alright, Mother. I'll be right back.”

“Don't run through the streets! You might trip and fall!”

Emila made it to the sanctum in only a few minutes, largely because she ran most of the way. When she arrived, her father had a dead goblin set up on the table, strapped down for safety, just in case. One of its legs had been sawed off, with the two severed ends placed close to each other, but not touching.

Eva glowed with mana, and Emila watched from the doorway as the amputated leg slid a few millimetres up the table and reattached itself to the stump. The flesh around the cut sewed itself back together, and closed up, everything in the leg - flesh, bone, arteries, and muscle - reattached where it belonged. After only a minute of work, the leg was back on the goblin as though it had never been cut off.

The most impressive part, though, was that Eva hadn't overdrawn on her mana and accidentally brought the goblin back to life. That was the real progress.

“I brought snacks!” Emila said, announcing her presence. Eva turned around and saw her, and practically started jumping in excitement. Miniu tossed a blanket over the goblin corpse, and wiped off his glasses.

“Wash your hands!” he commanded Eva, drawing a groan from her.

They found themselves outside, sitting on the small wall overlooking the city, peacefully eating their sweet rolls. They watched the various people in the market and the streets. It was such a nice day.

“Father's going to see if he can get me an arachne corpse!” Eva told her excitedly. “He has to clear it with the capital first, though.”

“Most girls your age wouldn't be excited about something like that,” Emila replied dryly. “Most girls your age are afraid of tiny spiders, much less ones as tall as a man.”

“They have eight different legs!” Eva continued. “I can take them off and reattach them in different spots!”

“That's gross,” the older sister muttered.

“She's progressing at an impressive rate,” Miniu said. “Her mana is so powerful that the real challenge is teaching her to control it. Believe it or not, it's possible to heal someone too much.”

“It is?” Eva asked.

“It's actually very dangerous,” Miniu told her. “Not only can you get mana fatigue from wearing yourself out, but you can also make someone sick by giving them too much mana when treating their wounds. This can even result in a rare condition that is very hard to treat and is often fatal.”

“Wow, I never knew that,” Eva muttered.

Emila did.

“Healing is one of the hardest arts of magick to master,” Miniu told her. “It takes very fine control of your mana, a lot of mana to use, and knowledge of the human body. Most people can learn how to heal cuts pretty easily, but more complex treatments take years of training. Your magick is powerful enough to force-heal injuries, which could save a life in an emergency, but most people who are going to come to you aren't going to need such intense treatment. Healing them that way would actually create more problems.”

“I see...”

“That's why we're just sticking to animals and monsters until you have more control over your mana.”

Eva started to dig into another sweet roll, and Emila, who was sitting on Miniu's other side, leaned over to her father and whispered to him, “You're not going to tell her about Reverse-Healing, as well?”

Miniu's eyes grew wide in faux-shock. “Let's not give her any ideas.”