“AAAAAHHHHH!!!!! FUCK!!! FUCK!! Fuuuck!”
‘Warning! You need to visit a healer as soon as possible.’
“I know that! Fuck!” I said as I began walking out of the forest and towards the city.
I was in trouble. Big, big trouble. My arm, it was… well, it was mangled. The whole arm. Completely. I couldn’t even feel it anymore. My long coat sleeve was already gaining blood spots, and they were growing in number and size; as if the hand was seeping blood all over.
“How long do I have?” I asked.
‘Around ten minutes with the current rate of blood loss before you begin to experience fatigue; fifteen before you lose consciousness.’
I picked up speed as I walked out of the forest. The city walls looked so far away, had it being that far when I had first arrived? I remembered it being closer. How long had it taken me then to cross the distance? An hour? Less? More? I couldn’t be sure, but I was sure that I didn’t have that kind of time. I picked up more speed, nearly jogging with my four staffs held to my shoulder by my left hand. I could already feel the strain setting in at its muscles.
My right arm sleeve was completely soaked through already, with blood dripping on to the road, marking my passage through. I was already feeling lightheaded; had Clare being wrong in their assessment? Or was I just being overly anxious? It was hard to tell, and without having treatment, I wouldn’t be able to tell for certain.
As I got closer to the gates, so did I get closer to the ground. My body kept sagging more and more with every step I took. My legs felt weaker than they had ever felt before, taking a lot of effort just to take a step, the feet dragging on the ground longer, and in some occasions barely lifting from the ground at all. Then I kicked my heel, and stumbled forward.
Only the reflex action of my left hand kept me from going down completely. I didn’t think I would be able to get myself up if that happened. Most of my weight was held up by the bundle of staffs I held, my unresponsive right arm flopping about because of the jarring motion with blood droplets flying from it to a few steps ahead of me.
“How long?”
‘Seven minutes.’
It felt like I had been walking for an hour. My limbs were completely tired, and I could feel my hand slipping on the bundle of staffs. I looked up at the gates, and it looked like I hadn’t made any progress at all. Had I really walked for only three minutes? I looked back down, staring at my legs, willing them to move.
My right leg finally managed to take a step, and the whole of my body started to fall forward. I quickly moved the bundle of staffs ahead to stop the fall, with the left leg following through in a drag like it was only natural. And so it went, right leg, staffs, and the left leg. I tried looking up to see if I was making any progress at all, but the distance was daunting, I kept my eyes low. And every time I felt the urge to look up, I asked for the time instead.
Five minutes. Four… three. Clare never told me to hurry up, I assumed that meant I was on pace to make it to the gates before collapsing. I hoped it wasn’t one of those moments when they couldn’t tell me to hurry up my life was in danger.
Two. That had felt longer. Way longer than the interval between four and three. I asked, over and over again, and all I got was two. Then I bumped into something hard, and looked up.
I had made it to the gate, coming up a few steps to the side of the gate-guard’s opening. I slowly moved across to it, glad that there were no other people waiting to be let through. The whole process was a blur from there, even how I made it to the healer was lost to me. Maybe someone helped, but I didn’t really care. All that mattered was that I was no longer under the threat of bleeding to the death.
…
The first thing I checked when I was coherent enough to know where I was, was my right hand. I could feel it again, but it was not responding. I tried lifting it up, and got nothing. Clenching a fist was only rewarded with the barely there twitch of the fingers. I sat up, and stared at it.
It was there. It was in its normal brown color with no blood stains on it. I had somehow lost my long coat and shirt. But my modesty wasn’t the priority for me at the moment. No, that was the unresponsive right arm. That twitch was not a response in my rule book, especially considering where I was, and why I was there.
I could see it, I could feel it, and I could even feel the roughness of the bedding under the arm. But I couldn’t make it move. I stopped myself from panicking by telling myself that the immobility was only temporary; the treatment needed time to take effect. That my arm had been too damaged and it was only natural for it to take a while to recover. If I had been back on old earth, there wouldn’t have been hope for me to recover. Leave alone the technology that would be needed to repair a completely pulverized bone, shredded nerves and whatever else that had happened to my arm, I wouldn’t have been able to afford it.
“Oh, you’re up,” a soft feminine voice disrupted me from my self-loathing.
I looked towards it, and found a comely woman in the same light-green uniform that I had seen on most healers in the arena, she had her hair held in a tight ponytail. Maybe I had been brought to the arenas. Did that mean that my treatment would be free of charge just like everything else had been?
I sat up straighter, and tried to put on an air of being fine which I was sure that I failed miserably. She moved to a table by the side of the room. On it where my long coat and shirt, reminding me that I was shirtless. I tried to bring my hands to cover up some of my torso, but only the left responded. After trying to place it all over me, I gave up.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
She was doing something on the table, but I couldn’t tell what it was. I took that time to look around the room. It wasn’t that large, barely long enough for the bed, and wide enough for the bed and table, with a small two-person space between them. The table stretched from the door to halfway the bed.
“How are you feeling?” she asked, as she finally turned and leaned on the table, her hands in her trouser pockets.
“Other than the immobile hand, I’m fine,” I answered.
“Good. That’s good,” she said, shifting about on her place by the table. “Well, I have good news, and bad news for you.”
“Start with the bad.” She hadn’t even asked before I told her that.
“You sure?” she stilled as she asked that, her face contorted in a questionable expression and one of her eyebrows lifted high up.
When I nodded, she continued. “I only did enough to stop you from dying.”
And then she went silent. And I waited for a while before I realized that that was it, that was the bad news. I didn’t know what to think of it, I needed more time to form an opinion of it. “And the good news?”
“You’ll not be dying from blood loss today.” She then got this thoughtful look before she added, “Unless you do that again and fail to get to a healer in time.”
She went silent then, and I decided to start asking my own questions. And the first one,
“How much did that cost me?”
Because that was the only thing that mattered to me the most. Of course, there was always my own life but money came first before anything else.
“Eight golds.”
What? That… “That’s everything I have,” I said, the surprise forcing me to blurt it all out.
“I know.”
“You went through my pouch?”
“I needed to know what you could afford. Unless you have more savings elsewhere, then I could do more than that.”
Wasn’t there a rule about healers first treating the patients brought to them without care of whether they could afford the treatment or not? Or was that all in my head? Or an old earth thing?
“When you say you did enough to stop me from dying, what does that mean exactly?”
“I repaired your blood vessels to stem the bleeding.”
She was really skimping on her services, wasn’t she? Did my helpers bring me to the most expensive healer in Sjuma? I was a poor man, didn’t my whole get up not get that through to them?
“Only the blood vessels? What about the nerves and bones?”
“Most of your nerves are still shredded. I’m guessing you have some feeling in your arm, but nothing more.” I nodded to that as she continued, “Your bones are still scattered all over your arm in tiny, tiny, tiny fragments.”
I had expected them to be in a bad state, but not that bad. Maybe several breakages with the bones still retaining their overall shape and place. It sounded like there wasn’t even a way to tell which part belonged where anymore. Just how much force had been in that punch? And why had nothing happened to the tree? Aside from the little shaking that is.
I turned back to the healer, “There is a word for that, microscopic.”
“Hmm… they are not that small. Maybe a few, but most are not.”
“Will they repair themselves with time?” I asked hopefully. It was a magic world, with things like [Health Regeneration], my recently acquired General Skill. It had to be possible for the bones to repair themselves with time. They had to.
“Some might join up, but overall repair is not possible without a healer.”
“And how much would that cost? The repair to bring it back to its former glory,” I asked with bated breath. She had already laid claim to nearly everything I had, leaving me with a few coins of silver and copper.
She was silent for a while, as if calculating what it would actually cost. Hadn’t she known already? Maybe she was adding up the cost of that new coat she had seen. I wished I could read minds then, to know for sure so I could call her out on it. Then she finally said a number that nearly killed me.
“Eighty golds.”
Even she sounded ashamed of speaking that to me. How was I supposed to afford that? I had barely qualified for the semifinals; and that was with two fully functional arms. At worst, I would only get twenty golds. Not enough for even half the treatment cost, for that, I would need to finish third. To cover the whole cost, I would need to qualify for the finals. I didn’t think I could do it before, and I was most definitely no longer in a position to win any more fights. Then I remembered.
“What about the Health potions used in The Grand Competition, can they help me? I’ve seen them repair shattered joints,” I said.
“Those are temporary fixes. After the fight, the competitors usually spend a few hours in recovery rooms while high Skilled healers work on anything that actually needs to be repaired. Potions are no substitute for a healer’s Skill, no matter how high grade they are.”
That was vital information I hadn’t known before. I decided not to try and avoid the recovery rooms anymore. They were way more necessary than I had given them credit for.
And it also looked like I was headed to becoming a cripple if I didn’t get the amount of golds required for full repair to be done.
“But they can join up the bone, right?”
“For you, that would do more harm than good. It would cost more to meld it after you have used a Health potion.”
Oh, dear. That was bad. Like worse than I had thought bad. I could not win a fight without using a Health potion. Would the additional cost bloom over the hundred mark?
“I have to use a Health potion,” I said dejectedly.
“Why?” she simply asked. I was just glad she didn’t try to push the whole it was a bad idea thing.
“I’m a competitor, and I have a fight tomorrow.”
“Oh… right.”
I looked at her then, clearly pleading with my eyes. “Isn’t there something you can do for me? I have an assured twenty golds even if I don’t win at all anymore.”
“I don’t know. I could repair some of your nerves and realign the bone fragments enough for you to get back the use of your arm.”
I smiled then, thinking of all the [Hurtling Projectile]s I would use on my quest for the finals. But she crushed that fantasy fast.
“The fragments will be held together by Mana. If you use the hand as a conduit for Mana, it will destabilize the one holding the fragments together. And you will be back to where you are now.”
I looked at my hand, floppy by my side, I couldn’t have it like that during a fight. But what exactly would I use it for if not Mana.
“But I can use it normally? Punching and using a weapon?” I asked, knowing full well that my weapon was a two handed one. The only one-handed weapon I had was a dagger, it would fare abysmally against my next opponent, a staff user.
“As long as you don’t channel any Mana through it, it should be fine for a while.”
After coming to an agreement, she came close to me. And I finally saw what she had been fiddling with; potions. Several of them. And they were all in colors I hadn’t seen before. No blue, green or red on them. I went to ask what they were for but she began speaking before I could.
“I will try to realign the fragments in such a way that a Health potion will not create more issues than the unavoidable.”
“Okay,” I said as I laid back on the bed. Then I decided to ask her a question that had been bothering me, “Are you a healer in the arenas?”
She nodded. “Which one?”
“The Main Arena.”
I deflated further. She would be there to ensure that those healers didn’t do anything more than was necessary after the fight. Then again, they did do that pre-fight checkup. Was that what it was for?