DAMAGE DEALT: 34
CRITICAL HIT!!
DAMAGE DEALT: 75
Piggybacking off the [Time Stop] effect, I was able to line up two attacks with my ice spears. The first cultist took a glancing blow and was injured, but the second cultist was struck in the chest and fell to the ground.
The trees above blazed, the ground was covered with blood, and my tank was about a third empty. The girl that I just saved from the Lich Cult was unconscious, and the fire would be on her within an hour.
It was way too early for me to be picking a fight with the Lich Cult, but I had to do it. The moment I heard her call out the name “Sherlock,” I knew that she was a reincarnate from Earth like me. Finding other reincarnates took priority over my timetable.
I mentally reached out and extinguished all Hellfire sparks within range of my Talent. About half of the fire disappeared, but the self-propagating flames that had found fuel in the wood and the foliage of the forest continued to burn. Looking up at the burning forest fire, I realized that there was nothing I could do to put it out. I was a pyromancer, after all, not a hydromancer. It would take nothing less than [Call Storm] to put this out, and I did not know that spell.
Did you hear that? They called you a dragon. Thale, the Dragon of the Northern Realms, is quite the nickname, don’t you think?
To a fool, anyone with the [Hellfire] Talent and the [Fly] spell looks like a dragon. Certainly, there are plenty of “dragons” in this world.
To my right, I saw one of the lich cultists lying on the ground with an ice spear sprouting from his chest and an absolutely massive dog panting in pain. The dog was trying its best to reach me and the girl, but a brush fire stood in its way.
It was probably for the best that it couldn’t reach me, I thought. A dog that big could be seriously dangerous if it viewed me as a threat to its master.
Without dropping concentration on the [Fly] spell, I floated down to get a better look at the girl. I pulled her hood back to get a better look at her and saw that her features were similar to those of the royal family. The girl was an exact match for one of the statues in Ahriman’s cairn, serving as further evidence that we were the same.
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“Aqua,” I chanted, extinguishing the brush fire blocking the dog from reaching its master.
The dog moved forward, whimpering slightly in pain. It must have not viewed me as a threat, since it completely ignored me in favor of limping towards its master. I lifted the weightless girl toward the dog and sat her on the saddle. Once I felt that she was balanced, I dropped concentration on [Fly], causing her body to slump forward.
I grabbed the dog’s reins and started pulling it with me. I didn’t want it to run off with the first reincarnate I had found ever since I got to Ferrum.
“Stay,” I gestured to the 450-kilo dog as it looked up at the burning trees in fear.
Walking over to the man who had been pierced with an Ice Spear, I saw that he was bleeding heavily into the dirt. I withdrew a bag filled with surgeon’s tools from a pocket sown into my cloak as the blood rune on my left hand burned in preparation.
Injury: Critical trauma to the thoracic cavity. Heart and left lung have been completely destroyed by traumatic force. Patient has been dead for forty-three seconds.
A cold feeling washed over my body, and the surgical tools fell from my hand. One shaking hand reached for my healing potion, but I knew that wouldn’t work either. The cultist’s heart was completely gone. There was nothing I could do to save him.
“Damn!” I shouted, causing the dog to back away in fear.
If I had hit him anywhere else, I could have saved him with a mixture of surgical knowledge and blood magic. Since I had hit the cultist perfectly, nothing short of powerful healing magic could save his life.
You killed him. Good job.
Shut up.
Cease your melancholia, Johan. Our sympathetic link makes it hard for me to think when you get like this.
When I was a young man, I was taught to "do no harm." This... Well... Clearly, "no harm" is not an option for me.
I knelt down, feeling the weight of the planet push down upon me, and removed the mask from the dead man’s face. That must have been the thousandth time I saw a dead man’s face in my life, but it was the first time I looked into the face of my victim.
I wanted the man to look like a cartoon villain. I wanted his face to bear the weight of his sins and his allegiances. Instead, he just looked like a man. I could imagine myself walking down a street on Earth and crossing this man on the sidewalk.
The man’s life could have gone a million different ways. This just happened to be the permutation where he was killed by me.
My hands automatically started fishing through the dead man’s pockets. I quickly found a pouch of money in one pocket and some small glass objects in the other. Out of the dead man’s pockets, I retrieved a vial holding a crimson liquid and a glass disk on which a line of arcane runes had been carved. I shook the vial, quickly realizing that it was blood. The lich cultists probably used that contraption to track the girl.
Damn bleeding heart. This world will destroy you if you don’t toughen up.
A mote of Hellfire shot from my hand and began floating solemnly above the corpse. Just as the dog, the girl, and I reached the edge of my effective range, a cone of fire erupted from the mote, completely enveloping the corpse in scouring flame.