Leif ended up staying in Klos for over a week, there was far more to do than healing those who had been severely injured in the fire that had claimed over a quarter of the town. There was an interesting, if morbid phenomenon he observed while treating the victims. The survivors were moderately levelled, their increased attributes having granted them enough resilience to stave off death until they could receive healing.

The death toll was high, the demographics that had died painted a grim picture. Many who he had healed had lost everything, their homes, belongings, friends and family. It pained him greatly that he could mend them physically, but emotionally they would be scarred, perhaps for the rest of their lives.

Restoring Klos was more than just healing its people, reconstruction efforts started almost immediately, the excess of manpower from both military forces aiding where many of the non-local adventurers did not. With every day that passed more and more of those who had travelled to the frontier to hunt monsters and earn coin slunk out of the town, often to the silent scorn of the townsfolk. Leif resented them, but couldn’t blame them, they were people who had spent their whole lives in, or seeking battle, time was experience and money and not everyone had the luxury to waste both.

As for him, there was no experience to gain, he had reached level fifty after all. While any experience he gained now would be banked, likely resulting in a massive surge of levels after he passed the advancement trial, he didn’t particularly feel the need to grind. His goal now should be to fuse his number of skills down to, or below fifteen. [Aura of Recovery] had finally reached rank three, and with some trepidation he used it as the base for fusing [Aura of Nobility]. There was no benefit to keeping skills in a class that could no longer gain levels, and his plan was to eventually have [Noble] be completely empty of skills, but it still felt strange to be finally changing what was likely his most used ability.

He didn’t begin the fusion process right away, even if delaying the beginning of the fusion would only delay its completion. It was important to get the intention perfect for his new aura skill, especially with his focus on [Charisma] as his primary attribute. Aura strength was a big part of his overall combat ability, it had allowed him to fight three humans, who he suspected to have been just below, or perhaps even above level fifty themselves without being suppressed. Instead he had been pressing all three at the same time, making them have to focus on their aura control to prevent themselves from being suppressed in turn.

The intention he finally decided upon for the aura fusion had been ‘benevolence’, a somewhat awkward decision to make, since the aura would be how others would detect his presence, though after some self reflection he determined it to be a good fit. Nobility, the title not the class, was about authority and control, but when looked at from the lens of a more idealistic perspective you could argue it also represented responsibility. Responsibility to protect, to uphold laws, and to provide for.

Being benevolent didn’t necessarily mean selfless, and while he intended the fusion to embody as much restoration as it did nobility, benevolence required a position of authority, of power to be most effective. Or maybe he was deluding himself, trying to fit a naive ideal into a skill meant to reflect what he was. As he had levelled up [Aura of Recovery], he had realised that improving the skill wasn’t so much about control and finesse, but about embodying what the aura represented. Leif’s understanding of this concept was somewhat vague, but he suspected that going forward it would become an increasingly important factor in his aura strength.

Samil, Olav and Liv had left after two days helping with the town’s recovery. They had left not so much because of a desire not to help, but rather to escape the near endless meeting, debriefings and interrogations that the town and military leadership insisted was necessary. As demikin they were treated on the very edge of fairness, if it wasn’t for their help in protecting the town, not to mention Leif’s own influence after the events, they likely would have been chased out of town.

The imperial commander, a willowy man who showed too much gum when he smiled, and he did that a lot, had suggested that the demikin could be used as a scapegoat for the incident. He did so while in a meeting, a meeting that Leif was attending along with other people of influence, a suggestion the scion had politely told the man to choke to death on. Politely, and he didn’t actually say that, but that didn’t stop the commander from becoming quite upset. He never stopped smiling though, a fact many of the locals found unsettling, but they couldn’t not invite him to meetings with his soldiers aiding in the rebuilding effort.

After Leif contemplated throwing the man out of a window for the fourth time in an hour-long meeting, he reflected, not for the first time, that it was more than likely the empire sent its worst officers to the frontiers of humanity, and by doing so neatly putting them out of sight. It would explain a lot.

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He had of course also gained a new skill after levelling up [Adept], neither choice seemed particularly powerful, and he had chosen the one he hoped would have potential synergy with some of his other skills.

===

Restful Recovery:

Aspects: Enhancement (Body)*, Technique (Life)*

Whenever you rest your body receives a bonus to its recovery speed, and any wounds become less fatal.

You may bestow this effect onto someone else who is resting with a touch.

===

It wasn’t overly useful for himself, but the ability to bestow the skill’s effects was surprisingly helpful. When people received large amounts of magical healing, they often fell into a healing coma as their bodies went into partial shock from the physical trauma. This usually lasted several days, and Leif had experience seeing a fairly severe coma in the past. Marcus had almost been bisected during his, Sieg and Leif’s escape of the Mythhold, and the academy student had spent almost a week sleeping off the injury.

There was another [Adept] working in the healing warehouses, and the man had the exact same skill. According to him, it would shorten the duration of the comas, and alleviate any of the potential side effects that rarely occurred among the severely injured. Apparently, even after being healed people sometimes lost the use of limbs, or had their senses altered. Personality shifts were also not unheard of.

During the many meetings Leif found himself wondering how the two academy students were doing, hopefully if they had gone on any other expeditions those would have turned out better than the one in which he had met them. Visiting the famous imperial institution was one of his immediate goals, and hopefully he could reconnect with both men. After all they had been through, he hoped they still considered him friends.

Town officials were needed to approve the rebuilding of destroyed structures, but due to the scale of the reconstruction effort there weren’t enough to go around. As a noble, apparently Leif had enough qualifications to be an acceptable replacement, and so he was continuously asked by store owners or homeless families to approve one thing or another. As somebody with a class related in some way to wood, he was also one of the primary builders, this only served to compound people’s desire to pull him around town and ask him for help.

Mostly he stuck to houses, though one particularly insistent woman followed him around in an effort to get him to approve the reconstruction of her business. A business she wasn’t willing to reveal the details of, and thus she couldn’t effectively argue for having its priority bumped up the queue. She tried everything, from bribery to seduction, the latter was a uniquely strange experience. In the end it turned out she was the owner of the pleasure house, he had caught one of the city officials approving the reconstruction a day after she had finally given up trying to persuade him.

The bandits Leif had captured were executed along with several people who had been caught looting and stealing following the disaster that had befallen the town. His suspicion that one of them had been magically silenced, unable to provide information about those who had hired them was correct, but there was little that could be done. With nobody having the skills necessary to attempt breaking whatever magic was binding the man, there was little they could do.

It hardly mattered, they knew who had hired the men. But from what Peri told him, there was little that could be done about it. The Republic was across the sea, holding territory to the west. Tensions had been building over the past few decades, but neither side was looking to start any sort of conflict. According to the captain, this sort of remote sabotage wasn’t uncommon. All they could do was report it to higher authorities and hope the attacks would stop due to political pressure.

===

Finally he felt like he had done enough, he informed those in charge he would be leaving, and despite their best efforts to make him stay, even offering him a not inconsiderable amount of land and property, he departed.

The road to Ahle-ho was long and winding, it passed through several villages and towns, even an old stone fort. He met refugees and farmers, soldiers and adventurers, merchants and even a particularly brave thief. Finally the wind changed, and he could taste salt in the air. The further south he travelled the less temperate the climate, and the less fertile the soil. Buildings went from mostly made of wood, to boxy constructs of polished and often painted limestone.

The beginning of turbulence began to roll over the land, strange weather patterns and arcane phenomena becoming increasingly frequent. One day, just after the breaking of a storm he finally caught sight of his destination. On the horizon stretched a seemingly endless line of blue, and to the east were the tips of shimmering spires.