It took Arthur an embarrassingly long time to get back to his feet. He couldn't be certain, but he'd compare Iris' less-than-perfect teleport ritual to a mundane soldier struck by a flash grenade. For a few seconds, Arthur had been seeing double and had trouble judging distances accurately. It had been as much blind luck as skill that had allowed him to strike Frankenstein with his aura attack.
As Arthur had feared, the self-inflicted damage he'd suffered due to imperfect technique was akin to soul damage- though he could instinctively feel that it wasn't quite the same. Arthur's exploded eye remained a pool of pulverised flesh, his natural regeneration unable to help him. The stored healing affinity ether he'd prepared before the fight came from a legendary skill capable of healing soul damage. Yet even as the energy able to heal 100,000 points of damage was drained away, he could hardly feel any improvements in his wounds. It turned out that healing pseudo-soul-damage, or whatever this was, took a substantial amount of ether.
In the seconds of the fight he'd missed, chaos had spread on the battlefield. All semblance of the plans they'd made seemed to have disappeared and the goal of survival had been made king. That was all they could do against Frankenstein's furious onslaught. Ursula was bleeding heavily from a stab wound on her stomach and her left arm hung limply, the muscles at her shoulder cut. Arthur's stored healing ether was working its magic but he could tell that his team's wounds were recovering far slower than they should have.
Who'd have guessed infusing your attacks with time and space magic would make healing a chore? Arthur joked sarcastically. The beastkin was the best off amongst them, with her high physical stats, meaning she could keep up with Frankenstein in melee, at least somewhat. No one else was so lucky. Iris was still reeling from the surprise attack she'd taken to the back, except now, she had a nasty gash on her forehead accompanying it.
It was bleeding profusely and ruining her vision but the seer didn't seem to care. She saw the world with more than her mundane eyes, after all. Benjamin looked shell-shocked, and judging by the blood dripping from his ears, it seemed his sound magic had backfired somehow. The powerful scout's balance was blown to hell, and even as he watched, the man took a near-debilitating blow to the throat, saved from being fatal by Ursula's timely intervention.
Farrah was nowhere to be seen of course, which Arthur was infinitely grateful for. Had the dimensional mage been amongst them, the Ghoulish Skinwalker would have stopped at nothing to end her and flee her lockdown. So long as Iris' ritual disks worked their magic, the old elf was relatively safe from retaliation within the comforts of their aircraft. The moment those rituals run out of juice, though, the bastard will go after them, Arthur thought grimly.
Every fight Arthur ended up in, at least the high-stakes battles, always seemed to end up on a timer for one reason or the other. It meant that he could never enter into a battle of attrition, which he was sure to win with his status as a soul mage and incredible reserves of magic, and was instead forced to make rash decisions to eke out a victory. It took ten long seconds on his feet before he felt stable enough to take a step forward, hardly any time at all and yet an eternity during a fight where dozens of blows were exchanged every second.
There was a dull ringing in his ears, loud one moment and then quiet the next. He was in no shape time but reality waited for no one and he'd delayed for long enough. Anymore, and his earlier struggles to save Iris would be for nought; the seer would die anyway. He rushed over to Ursula- though it was more a hobble really- and crouched down to kneel over her. The beastkin had just taken a nasty blow to the head and judging by the glassy look in her eyes, was more than a little concussed. Those kinds of injuries could prove fatal no matter how strong you were. Either that or risk damaging your brain irrevocably.
Besides the head injury, Ursula's shoulder muscles needed reattaching, the puncture in her stomach needed attention and three of her fingers had been cut off. This close to her, Arthur could finally get a proper look at the wounds Frankenstein was inflicting. Just as he'd suspected, every cut and bruise was covered in a purplish-blue light, visible only because of the mutation his eyes had gone through, pulsating ominously. The energy was potent and didn't show any signs of dissipating. In fact, it looked like it was cannibalising Ursula's personal reserves in order to maintain itself.
This must be Frankenstein's time and space affinities. Space to keep the wounds from closing and time to... what? Slow down the healing process and isolate the injury's timeline from the rest of the body's. Something like that. Arthur didn't need to know how the monster accomplished this particular feat, though it would have helped him heal her faster. Probably would have saved me a bunch of Ether too. With no idea how the skinwalker's magic worked Arthur would have to waste an exorbitant amount of energy to force the healing process. He had the reserves to spare, yes, but if everyone on the team needed to be treated like this, even he would find himself running dry.
Arthur was briefly tempted to jump into the fight but held himself back from making impulsive decisions. Lady Sleyca had assembled this team with the express purpose of taking down the Harvester's agent; they were strong enough to get the job done, no matter how things might look on the surface. Iris had told him as much before the battle began, that he should observe how things panned out and learn how professionals handled things. The fae woman was a seer, and if she believed it was in his best interest to work as the healer he'd been contracted as he was inclined to believe her.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Ursula wasn't looking too good either- not everyone was as durable as he was- and it looked like she might actually lose her life if he didn't get to healing her asap. Placing his hands on her temples, Arthur engaged his legendary skill, A Homunculi's Healing. His skill's primary effect was able to heal up to ten individuals at a rate of ten percent of his healthpool every minute. At three thousand ether per minute of use, the cost was exorbitant but still incredibly cheap when you considered how potent its effect was when used by someone with his stats. Against the skinwalker's insidious magic, however, Arthur felt that the skill's secondary effect was better suited.
Secondary Effect: You are capable of healing damage inflicted via poisons, curses, debuffs, disease, illness, concepts (dependant on concept mastery) and soul damage (so long as the soul shell maintains 70% integrity)
In reality, the skill's secondary effect was simply a description of the passive ability the skill held to heal certain types of damage. That being said, Arthur could feel a component of the skill's matrix dedicated solely to that particular facet of the ability, a little much to simply describe a passive effect. The fact that it was separated into its own quadrant and not simply integrated with everything else told Arthur there was much more to the skill. Or he could be wrong and this would be a massive waste of time.
Arthur trusted his instincts though, and they told him he was onto something. Instincts weren't enough for him to go and risk a patient's life, however. The conclusions he had come to were based as much on logical deduction and an analysis of the skill's weave. If Arthur went with the brute force method to heal Ursula and continued with that approach on the rest of his teammates, he'd run out of energy long before he finished healing everyone. Arthur needed to be efficient and that meant that he had to take risks. Still, he gave himself a forty-five-second timer. Either he figured something out by then, or he'd give up and just dump ether into the skill until Ursula was healed. He hoped it wouldn't come to that, though, as it meant he would be forced to choose between who to help and who to leave out to dry. Depending on the severity of people's wounds, someone might actually die.
Arthur poured some ether into the skill, a tenth of what he'd need to use its active component. Instead, he directed the energy down the twisting pathways that described its passive secondary effect. The weave here was a twisting, winding path that fed back into itself. There was no place for the energy to output; it was a self-perpetuating loop that did nothing with the energy that he fed into it. At least that's what it looked like on the surface. Arthur knew there was more to the skill than met the eye. With class abilities, all he had to do was pour some ether into it and let the energy flow down established pathways. It was how the system made it so easy for mundane people to learn magic at such an incredible speed.
Arthur's experimentation had already taught him that you could take a more active role in this process instead of letting the system dictate everything. It had been a long time since then, however, and he didn't know how much unlocking a class had changed things. Three hundred ether was hardly anything at all compared to what he normally worked with nowadays, but it was still a substantial amount of energy. He observed it carefully as he directed it through the established passive skill matrix. One revolution through it didn't do anything to the energy, and now it had nowhere to go unless he reversed his progress, brought the energy back to the entry point and pushed it down the route it normally went down.
Arthur didn't even know if such a thing was possible. He did it anyway, forcing the energy to trace its footsteps and return to its original position as if he'd done nothing in the first place. It was a difficult process, like trying to reverse the direction of a stream. Arthur was glad he'd chosen such a small amount of ether to use. He had to take an active role in controlling it every step of the way to stop it from flowing in the natural direction of the skill matrix. He could feel rivulets of sweat roll down his temples. How much time had passed? Ten seconds? Twenty?
The farther the ether returned upstream, the harder things got, like Arthur was pulling on a rubber band and holding all that tension. It was a delicate process and a single second of inattention would ruin everything. It was working though, or at least something was happening. He'd placed three hundred ether into the skill. Going through the usual pathways, the ether would have been converted into the healing affinity and outputted into his patient. What he'd just done, however, had changed the energy. Made it denser somehow. Three hundred ether had run to the end of the passive matrix's pathways. Reversing that loop and returning the energy to its original position turned that three hundred ether into two hundred and seventy. The energy hadn't been lost, it had nowhere to disappear to.
Arthur's experimentation had concentrated the ether and the chime of a skill level up confirmed things a moment later.
A Homunculi's Healing has reached level 4...
Arthur grinned. This was the breakthrough he'd been looking for. Placing a hand over the glowing purple gash on Ursula's stomach, Arthur channelled the concentrated healing into the beastkin's body.