This was quite possibly the most unpleasant thing Loran had ever done.

Sure, reattaching his own limb was agonizingly painful, but that pain had helped distract him from the reality of handling a severed limb. Now he was perfectly lucid and was forcing himself to intensely examine the gored flesh of another person. He wasn't queasy or anything, but there was something about rooting around in an open wound that he knew was going to be living rent-free in his head for years.

'Okay...I think that's the best I can do.'

Loran was no surgeon, and as potent as magic was it couldn't perform miracles. He wouldn't be able to reattach the limb perfectly, that would require knowing the exact structure of the muscles and the connecting points for every nerve. The most he could do was ensure the bone was lined up properly and hope that magic would be enough to reproperly reconnect everything.

'Even if it doesn't work perfectly, getting it as close as possible should at least reduce the duration of the debuff.'

Unfortunately, even this was easier said than done. The archer hadn't suffered a clean break, and the bone was essentially broken into three pieces with several smaller fragments. There wasn't much he could do about the tiny shards except remove them so they didn't become a problem later on, but the larger pieces were enough to repair the overall structure. There would still be some holes, but those could heal naturally.

With the wound as clean and clear as it could be, Loran prepared to reattach the bone.

"Okay, I'm going to have to put my fingers in there again," Loran said as he held a piece of leather to the archer's mouth.

"You're a shit doctor," he said, sweat pouring down his face from the first time Loran was digging around in his arm.

"I know, but it's this or you lose the arm completely. Do you want a stump, or something more functional?"

The archer closed his eyes for a moment, actually considering giving up his hand, before biting down on the leather and nodding to Loran.

"I need restraints!" Loran shouted, and a few high Strength players appeared from the crowd to hold down the archer, preventing any involuntary muscle spasms from interrupting the process.

Loran pressed bone against bone, and the archer's body started to seize up. No matter how hard he tried to keep still, the amount of pain was unbearable. It took a few minutes, but soon the bones were reattached.

He let out a deep sigh as the magic faded away, the spell requiring much more concentration than usual. Bones didn't heal as quickly as flesh, and he needed to be quick, or else the arm would probably die off completely. In addition to making the spell work faster, he also needed to restrict the healing to just the bone, lest the surrounding flesh start to seal up before the wound could be properly closed.

'Almost done,' he thought, rubbing his temples to deal with the mental strain. 'Now I just have to...shit.'

Unfortunately, Loran was at his limit, as revealed by his nearly empty MP bar. He had wasted a tremendous amount of MP creating a ball for the wolf cub earlier, and reattaching the bone had consumed the last of it. He was down to only a few points of MP, and using that would just knock him out long before any healing was done.

"We need another healer over here!" he shouted, but no one responded. The magic users had come out in full force to help with the injured, but less than half of them had the MP supply Loran had, and even fewer could use the healing spell at maximum efficiency.

"C-can I help?" a small voice asked from beside Loran.

Turning his head, Loran was shocked to see Maya, shoulders hunched as she tried her best to not look at the archer's injury, her trepidation telling him that she had already seen too much.

"Maya? Who let you in here?"

A grin spread across her face. "I Sneaked in," she said quietly, looking every bit like a child that got away with stealing from the cookie jar.

'This little shit,' Loran thought affectionately. "You said you wanted to help, do you know the healing spell?"

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She shook her head. "No, but I've been playing with my magic more."

"Then you can probably learn it quickly." The healing spell was actually one of the simpler spells to learn, it just required good player control to maximize the efficiency. Maya was easily the most talented magic player in the village, her control was more than enough. "Close your eyes and scoot over, I don't want you looking at this."

Doing as she was told, Maya moved next to Loran while keeping her eyes shut. She raised her hands and pointed her open palms towards where she remembered the archer's arm was. Then Loran moved her arms a little lower to correct her aim.

"Alright, now bring out the mana and make it blow up like a balloon."

"Oh, like the light spell?" she asked, sounding surprised.

"Yeah, you know the part where the light disappears for a bit?"

"Yeah."

"That's the healing spell."

"Okay."

Maya stuck out her tongue as she focused on the spell. A bead of mana appeared before her palm and quickly expanded. Loran was about to tell her to stop once the mana turned invisible, but to his amazement she managed to stop on her own, apparently having sensed that it was at the proper size without the visual cue.

"Is this right?" she asked, sounding very relaxed.

"Y-yeah," Loran said, eyes wide. "That looks go- oh."

The spell quickly flickered back into the visible spectrum. Maya's brow furrowed as she corrected it, maintaining control but with more effort than she was expecting. "It's all slippy."

"Don't worry, you're doing great."

Even though the method to perform the healing spell was simple, it still required the spell to maintain a very precise volume with little room for deviation. Even the more experienced magic users found their spells flickering occasionally, and even Loran could only maintain it for a minute without error. It was like trying to hold your finger and thumb as close to each other as possible without actually letting them touch. Just as a human's body is not meant to maintain that level of precision, even the slightest loss of concentration could alter the effects of a spell.

"Can you use more mana?" As impressive as it was for Maya to learn the spell so quickly, they still needed to hurry to save the arm.

"I think so. Should I?"

"As much as you can while keeping it like this."

A steady flow of mana began moving from Maya's body to the spell. Although the spell was invisible to the naked eye, all the magic users in the area could sense the spell growing more intense as more mana was infused into it. Loran smiled as the spell's strength grew to match his own, impressed by the young player.

His smile quickly dropped as the spell quickly surpassed his level of strength, then doubled it and kept growing!

'H-how high did she raise her Intelligence?!'

Too curious to resist, Loran checked her stats with [ANALYSE].

[NAME]: Maya

[SPECIES]: Human

[LEVEL]: 13

[STATUS]

{HP}: 45/45

{SP}: 2/45

{MP}: 643/680

[END]: 9

[STR]: 6

[AGI]: 12

[DEX]: 8

[PER]: 8

[INT]: 35

[SPT]: 34

[SKILLS]

[MANA SENSE] Lv.10

(Passive) Allows the user to detect and manipulate their internal Mana stores.

[MORE MANA] Lv.10

(Passive) Decrease SP and HP by 50% while increasing MP by 100%.

[SNEAK] Lv. 10

(Active Cost: 5 SP/sec) Reduces the user's presence.

[STALWART] Lv.1

(Passive) Reduce damage received by 1%.

Loran's jaw dropped. Not only were Maya's stats insane, she even had a Skill that he hadn't heard of before. He wondered how she could have possibly gathered this much EXP, but as he thought on it the more things made sense.

Much like Alexx, Maya had told others that she had never played an RPG before. Apparently, she had borrowed her older brother's AetherGear after he had been complaining about a game not running properly and accidentally booted up New Eden Online before he could. She had managed to get through character creation on her own but had mostly avoided using the interface ever since the start of the game. On top of that, she had been helping out in the Kitchen and Workshop for over three months now without ever spending her EXP.

Adding that massive stockpile of EXP together with her recent fascination with NEO's magic system, it wasn't hard to imagine her putting real effort into finding new ways to play with magic. In this case, that meant drastically expanding her magical power.

'W-with stats like that, she could probably one-shot a Demon Bear!'

No one else in NEO would have spent so long at level 0, and Loran realized very quickly that the most powerful spell caster in the game was a seven-year-old girl who didn't know she could kill him with a thought.

For a moment, Loran considered teaching her to fight, seeing as she had offensive power that surpassed even Alexx's, but he quickly dismissed the idea. She was simply too young to be put in danger like that. Additionally, the graphics of NEO were too realistic for her, based on her reaction to seeing a player's injured arm how could he possibly ask her to kill something?

'I definitely should teach her some combat spells though, just in case.' The fact that something as dangerous as the Demon Bear had gotten so close to the village demonstrated that it wouldn't always be safe. Maya had more than enough stats to defend herself in an emergency, he just hoped she would never have to do so.

"Am I done yet?" Maya said, snapping Loran out of his thoughts. Turning his attention back to the archer, he saw that all of his injuries, not just his arm, were completely healed.

"Yeah, you're done, Maya. You did great." Using the last of his SP, Loran used [ANALYSE] to check the player's condition. Sure enough, he still had the [CRIPPLED HAND] debuff, but this time the duration was only a tenth of Loran's and would clear up in a few months even without magical assistance.

Maya jumped to her feet. "I'm gonna go help the others too!" she said as she ran to where another injured player was laying.

Loran sighed. "I swear, she's more energetic than that wolf pup." Letting out a yawn, he began looking around. "Hey! Can someone carry me back to my shelter?"