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99. The Horror Part 1

"Hey, Prisca, you alright? How'd that guy end up?" Ajax asks. Prisca is not walking with the middle aged demihuman anymore.

"...He decided to go home. I can't really blame him." Prisca states, her arms crossed in quiet contemplation. "I told him to take it easy, not to do anything really mentally taxing, get some sleep, but to wait a bit before going to bed. You know, just concussion things."

"Alright, that's good, that's good. Come on, let's go look for more people to heal." Ajax replies as he raises his sense of smell towards the vicinity.

Prisca just stares back at him. She is curious why he didn't mention what went down with those two humans. It's not exactly that he's embarrassed that they got away, it's more that he can't really do anything about it now unless he were to track them like a bloodhound.

Wouldn't his services be of more value here rather than obsessively searching for those two pricks? Prisca asks anyway.

"So… how did it go with those two? What ended up–"

"Unfortunately, they got away. I wanted to go looking for them, but the guards were closing in on the area when those two made their escape." Ajax says, dejected.

"Oh… well, it's alright, it wasn't your job to deal with those two anyways." Prisca shrugs the two of them off.

"You know, they tried to kill me? Haha, I got pretty lucky at one point, but they looked like they were both trained in some kind of fighting technique."

"They… tried to kill you? H-How?" Prisca asks, slightly flustered by the sudden revelation.

"Well, one of them tried to stab me in the eye. Then, the other one tried to stab me in the other eye. Both attempts failed. Though, she was able to stab my thigh, but… eh, it wasn't a big deal."

Ajax laughs a bit and continues searching.

"W-Wasn't a big deal!?" Prisca shouts, drawing some eyes from their surroundings. Blushing in embarrassment, she whispers again sharply, "Not a big deal?"

"...Shit, why'd I just blurt that out?" Ajax mutters.

"Show me."

"Look, it's already–"

"Show. Me." Her eyes narrow and her voice becomes quite cold.

Slightly taken aback, Ajax points towards a thin, dark crimson tear in the fabric of his leg. The blood was nearly hidden by the dark color of his pants, but now that she's noticed it, she can't ignore it. The blood is still wet too, she can see it glisten on his pant leg.

She rushes Ajax away from the crowd and towards a place to sit. He tries to argue with her that he's not hurt, but she disregards his complaints. Once he sits down, she immediately tears apart the fabric of his pant leg to get a better look at his wound.

"H-Hey! Why'd you do that? S-Stop!"

"Ajax, please shut up, this isn't a small amount of blood… but… where is…"

She carefully examined his entire thigh. She sees the blood sticking to his leg, too much blood to be from a small cut or even a slash. However, she doesn't see the wound that caused all the blood.

"Did… did someone already heal you? No, you weren't gone long enough to stumble on a healer able to heal a stab wound…"

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"I, uh, I know some healing magic."

"...No, you don't, there's no way. If you did, you would have used it on the people around here. You're not so spineless that you would hide your healing magic when there are people in need of it… Ajax. What's going on?" Ajax is slightly taken aback by the faith she has in him.

Although he hasn’t shown himself to be undependable yet, has he really done so much today? He still tries one more excuse.

"...Well, I'm not able to use healing magic on other people. Just on myself."

"That's not how healing magic works. If you can heal yourself, you can heal someone else. Plus you have no mana to use for healing magic anyway, otherwise I'd have sensed it by now."

Prisca stares at Ajax quite closely. He had excuses prepared for why he heals his injuries quickly if some stranger were to ask, he had even told Shaula to have such excuses ready. However, he didn't think he'd have to explain himself to someone who knows more about healing magic than he does.

Why the fuck did I blurt all that shit out… was it because nobody's ever tried to kill me before and I just had to share it with someone? Well… fine, let's see how she handles the truth.

Ajax takes out one of the three daggers that were used to try and kill him. Without meaning too, he picks the one that has some small droplets of blood remaining, even though he had wiped it.

"...why do you still have that? And… wait, that's blood? Is that the dagger that stabbed you?" Prisca has a strong stomach as a healer, she’s just surprised he would carry the weapon around, the one that stabbed him resulting in excruciating pain. She also sniffs the blood from the dagger.

She raises her head, perplexed, then sniffs it again and again. She looks back at Ajax.

"Ah, yeah, I noticed my blood doesn't smell similar to other people's a while ago. I think I have a rare blood type or something." This is more of a half truth, both he and Shaula have blood that smells the same.

Their ‘enhanced’ blood still has the iron rich scent, but a little something else is mixed in. It's not too surprising that the blood of their superhuman, healing-factor augmented bodies have different smells from normal blood.

Ajax has even done experiments on their special blood after seeing how it never seems to dry. Even his blood stains soaked into his clothing are still liquid. He’s also found that the blood separated from their bodies doesn't evaporate or freeze like normal blood might. Where their blood is spilled, it remains until someone sees the odd liquid and cleans it up.

He has shared with Shaula its properties. He even commented to her about what might happen if someone were to drink their blood or receive a blood transfusion of it. He theorized that those who drink it would either be poisoned by it or it would flow into them and out, unable to be assimilated by their digestive tracts.

With blood transfusions, he’s read that incompatible blood could poison the recipient. However, would that apply to his and Shaula’s special blood? Would it be impossible for their blood to offer some of the special healing properties that they possess?

After all, he remembered when he was in that classroom before reaching Omicron that he had felt excruciating pain as his body was repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt. Then, in the final moment, he felt his blood as electricity, restoring his body to a peak condition. Could it work the same way for other people who receive it?

"Anyways, just watch." Ajax tells Prisca. He does enjoy showing this off. This will be the only other person who’s seen their healing factor. Maybe he could receive some insight from her, a healing mage, about how it could work.

"Wait, what are you–"

Before Prisca can protest, Ajax uses his knife and cuts a small cut on his palm. Prisca immediately starts preparing a healing spell, flustered by Ajax’s sudden action.

However, she stops as she sees the way his palm heals instantaneously. It heals even faster than it would if she had used a healing spell.

"What is… no chant healing… no, I still feel no mana."

Ajax shakes his head.

"It's not healing magic, Prisca. I feel like I can trust you with this, you don’t seem like someone who’d spread this to the guards or the government or anything… Well, the long and the short of it is that my body just heals by itself."

"Ah… Oh… so it even healed that… stab wound."

"Yeah, pretty cool, huh?"

"...” Prisca tries to speak but feels like she has no response to what Ajax has just shown her. Maybe she can just lie to herself and just say that it’s some kind of special healing magic that he somehow cannot apply to another person. However, before she can answer…

"Ajax!"

Ajax turns to the source of a familiar voice. Prisca also notices a human woman approaching the two of them through the crowd.

"Shaula? What are you doing here?" Ajax asks, surprised.