He woke up in a bed that wasn't his own.
On the first attempt at movement, pain radiated from his chest. Brennan sucked in a breath through his teeth, waiting out the tight ache instead of straining himself more.
Better to just use his eyes first. Looking around, the high, smoothly plastered white ceiling lined with wooden support beams caught his attention. He’d woken at night, judging by the darkness pervading the room, but the color contrast made the use of different materials in the room's design stand out in spite of that.
Ray of moonlight shining in from the window also supported his estimation of the time. He tried to look up, hoping to get a glimpse of the outside world, only to see the glass hadn't been placed low enough for him to see anything besides the stars peeking out between the clouds.
Their light fell on a small stand next to his bed with ointment and bandages on its surface. Intended for him? Peering down at his body, he could see that the part of his leg poking out underneath his blanket was in some kind of cast, while his shoulder and the right half of his chest had been wrapped in gauze.
This must have been the infirmary. He'd never had to come here in the past, hence his unfamiliarity.
A shallow exhale drew Brennan’s attention to the other side of his bed, where he spotted an athletic man sitting with his arms crossed on a chair, lids closed in slumber. His father.
It’s over.
His brain didn't react with a huge kick of adrenaline to keep the fight going. No, he knew down to his core how outmatched he had been before he ended up here, and it seemed even his body knew better than to keep fighting. Like he had been defeated on an instinctive, physical and intellectual level all in one go.
The knowledge of his loss flooded his mind in tiny drops like autumn rain. Not because he had trouble recalling—the opposite. Lucid Integration forced onto his mind the minute details of his confrontation with Oswald Gaerden in humiliating clarity. Every mistake remembered, every half-baked plan to win, every time he came up short, they made it weigh more heavily on his thoughts.
Agnes…
She’d be gone now, that much he could say for sure. Her kidnapper had made no secret of his intention to waste no time vacating the village with her in tow. No one in Craswidge possessed the strength to stop him.
True power. Brennan had witnessed it there. Prior to that fight—if he could generously call it that—the demonstrations of superhuman capability he'd seen were practical and often subtle, integrated with daily life more than anything. This? This went many steps beyond that. It had been an overwhelming force, plain and simple. The magic he had sought, only he’d seen it used for the sake of making other people smaller. Beating them down for daring to resist.
And he’d lost his best friend as a result.
He didn’t know if it was his fault. He imagined it wasn’t, but that was all this feeling amounted to; imagination. Reality had shown the outcome his current attitude led to, and he would always be wondering if any decision would have had an impact on what happened.
The chances of that were exceedingly small, he wasn’t delusional enough to think he could have won with time to prepare or anything. He just had to question that “what if” for the rest of time. Even assuming Agnes appeared in the room within the next second, that fact would remain.
It would have sounded nice to say he’d tried his best, but he hadn’t, not in the years prior. Sometimes recent events didn’t indicate historical trends. In the moment, Brennan had gone above and beyond to keep her, yes. Before that, he'd spent his time delaying his skills acquisition for a build that in retrospect was obviously never going to happen. These choices ended up giving him less power to fall back on in emergencies.
Despite all his training, he had no clue how to actually fight.
For the entire duration of his second life so far, he’d allowed himself to float around in a haze of potential without becoming anything, too prone to keeping his options open and banking on the future to deal with what could happen in the present. Now he was reaping the consequences of making a blind investment without having an accurate assessment of his innate weaknesses.
A null.
The term rang in his mind, echoing the struggles of years spent figuring out how to wield supernatural energy he didn’t have talent for. Affinities wouldn’t increase through training, meaning he’d always remain unable to cast a fireball under his own power. He’d discovered the real answer from a brush with death, and it looked nothing like he had pictured.
Mana trickled out of his heart on command, akin to twisting a valve that aimlessly expelled water. With a thought, he bid it to stop completely. The blue motes dissolved the second they left his body and exited his influence. At long last, he had magic. Not the magic he wanted, but still magic.
Attributes increased.
STR + 1
AGI + 1
CON + 1
PER + 1
INT + 2
SPI + 1
Brennan read through the notifications without the usual rush of elation, just dismissing them with a blink and resting his eyes.
Readers may find the author's chapter at NovelPhoenix.com; this version was taken without permission, and reading there supports the writer.
Clearly, the fight had netted him some insane gains, the equivalent of months of effort acquired in the span of a few minutes. He took it in silence, going over the fight beat by beat as if that would help anyone.
There was a sort of irony in how the first time he'd used Surging Dash in real combat, it had been to charge into the fight instead of away from it as specified in his previous justification for keeping the skill to begin with. He wasn’t in the mood to acknowledge it, though.
His one physical skill hadn’t proven useless, at least not more so than any of the others. It had merely served as the introduction to a world of unprecedented pain. But his injuries would heal. He needed to give it time, and his body would take care of it. Other problems wouldn’t solve themselves if he waited them out.
I took her for granted.
He tried to swallow down the tightness in his throat, failed, and sniffled. When had he gotten so attached? Why? Concrete answers escaped him, obscured by memories of a childhood he came to enjoy over time. Somehow, someway, Agnes had gone from a curiosity to a fixture in his life.
The pillow grew wet with tear stains. In a stupid fit of pathetic resignation, he searched the last days they’d spent together for a decent endpoint, a time that would have been appropriate to give a proper goodbye. He preferred the idea over having Agnes abruptly wrenched out of her home.
Not that he could have seen this coming. He’d been too caught up in the possibilities of his own future to ever consider that clear-cut genetic differences might make somebody else more eligible than him for high society wizardry.
The door opened, interrupting his bout of self-pity. Brennan hurriedly wiped both eyes as he raised his neck to look at the person standing there.
Illuminated in the lantern light from the crook of an elbow, a blonde girl in her early teens carried a bucket of steaming liquid. She wore a knee-length leather apron studded with pockets over a pale linen tunic and trousers. Around her waist, several vials and pouches clung to the same cloth sash. Filled with herbs and poultices, he guessed.
“Mellie?” he spoke, then coughed. His voice came out raw.
“Oho, you did wake up then. I figured it’d take till morning,” she responded, approaching his bed.
“Son, you’re awake!” George exclaimed at the same time, Mellie’s entrance rousing him from his sleep. He got up from his chair to hug Brennan, but Mellie stopped him.
“Maybe sit back down, yeah? He’ll be in pain right now, and his bandages need replacin’,” she said while putting the bucket and lantern on the nightstand.
Mellie got started on Brennan’s bandages, untying them with careful precision. “Mighty good, pulling on the same rope here. We’ll be done before you know it.”
Brennan winced, fighting not to make a sound against the agitated sting of his wound.
She had slightly lifted his upper body, each twirl of her tanned wrist well-practiced. She didn’t flinch at the exposed stitches. After a year and a half of working in this place, her Class would have advanced considerably. All in all, the process didn’t feel as uncomfortable as it could have, and she finished soon like she promised.
Though her coming to his room at this time did stand out as an odd choice of staff scheduling. “Should you be working night shifts at thirteen?” he remarked.
“Should you be scrappin’ with royal mages at seven?” she countered instantly.
“...Got me there.” He didn’t quite have it in him to laugh.
To his surprise, Mellie did give an explanation to his comment in the following pause. “Apothecaries needa’ stay up late if they go on a long Zone run with a guard squad. My turn’s when I hit fifteen, me and some other new blood walkin’ into a big dome. They kill squirrels and deer, I patch them up. Gotta prepare for that since I don’t have an anti-sleep formula.”
Honestly, Brennan hadn’t considered that at all. The guards from the watch post would need medics accompanying them if they planned on delving zones, and where would they get those in Craswidge if not from the place that specialized in medicine and recovery? He fell quiet as he learned someone he had written off as a “hospital girl” turned out to have an actual plan to go Zone delving, contrary to him.
“You’re not afraid of getting killed?” he asked bluntly.
Rather than responding right away, Mellie regarded him, ointment on her fingers just short of touching his skin. Her expression morphed into a puzzled look, or a discerning one, it was hard to tell even with the additional lighting. Both?
Another second passed, and she shrugged. “I wouldn’t let that stop me from findin’ more plant life to toss into my mixtures. Besides, I got people around me doing all the fighting. My job is important when they get scratched or worse. No one’s biting the dust if we keep our heads on straight, yeah?” To punctuate her statement, she smeared the cream on his sutured stab wound in a “take that” manner. He grimaced at the prickling sensation, breaths coming roughly.
Oftentimes in the past, he had looked down on people for taking skills to improve quality of life and wasting their opportunity to have a max efficiency build, but at this point he could make a serious case to his younger self about Pain Resistance.
Thankfully, the pain faded. Mellie got done dipping his new bandages in the green liquid inside the bucket and wrapped them around him. They hurt a lot less compared to what he’d feared, spreading a soft, cleansing calm across his body. He didn’t know how to parse it. What kind of plants did they grow to make all these medicinal salves?
He didn’t voice the question out loud, and therefore didn’t receive an answer. Once he was under the covers again, Mellie gathered her supplies before getting up to leave.
Best time to ask, he supposed. “How long was I out?”
“Three days,” Mellie answered.
“Three and a half days, counting the surgery,” George clarified. His father had been quiet until now, content to sit and watch her work. Brennan assumed he had spoken up because they were arriving at the elephant in the room.
“What about my leg?” he went on. Mellie had barely looked at it since entering the room.
“Shattered and dislocated kneecap, torn ligaments, fractured shin, muscle contusions, swelling,” she rattled off. “The head surgeon used a bone-setting paste to keep the fragments of your knee in the right places. Give it two months and you’ll be kickin’ around like nothing happened.”
George didn’t seem surprised at the diagnosis, having likely heard it days before already. Brennan couldn’t say the same—he was shocked that a town with no mana use that had looked otherwise medieval would have the ability to cure a shattered knee with no lingering effects.
“Thank you,” he found himself saying, unsure where it came from.
“Don’t thank me, I did none o’ the hard work. Thank the surgeons for fixing you up, or your family for getting you out,” Mellie said with a smirk. Then her hand rested on the door handle, her voice becoming somber. “If they didn’t do their best, we’d’ve gone and lost two kids by now.”
And on that note, she left him alone with his dad.