Chapter 144 – Towers (4)
(Erynd)
The Tower's infirmary smelled like clean linen and old incense. Not Church-grade holy smoke, not the sharp bite of sterilizing agents from an alchemist's lab. Just… the Tower's version of "safe."
Safe was relative.
I sat on the edge of the cot while a healer ran glowing fingers over the burn on my arm, humming a quiet cadence. The spellwork was gentle, measured, meant to restore without provoking the body into revolt.
I watched the light seep into my skin and knit it together.
And my first thought, the one that always arrived like a rat sniffing for crumbs, was obvious.
Healing magic could be a weapon.
Not in the noble sense. Not in the "miracle" sense.
In the simplest, ugliest way.
If you could heal fast enough, you could train harder. Take more damage. Push your muscles until they tore and then stitch them again, over and over, until your body learned a new definition of endurance. There were ways to turn recovery into acceleration.
The thought lasted less than a heartbeat before it died.
Not because it wasn't possible.
Because it was stupid.
I exhaled slowly and let my gaze settle on my arm again.
"Healing during combat," I murmured, mostly to myself, "is how you end up with a body that looks whole and moves wrong."
The healer glanced up. "Viscount?"
"Not you," I said. "Just thinking."
I could feel Nyxa at the doorway, leaning on the frame like she owned the concept of entrances. She wasn't inside. She wasn't outside. She was simply there, half watching me, half watching the corridor like she was listening to the building's bones.
Her eyes narrowed slightly as she met mine.
"You're thinking about cheating," she said.
"I'm thinking about consequences," I corrected.
Nyxa's expression said she didn't see a difference.
The healer finished a pass and the burn faded from angry red to pale pink. "That should do it. Keep it clean. Don't strain it."
I snorted softly. "I'm in a tournament."
"And you're bleeding on my floor," the healer replied, deadpan.
Fair.
I flexed my fingers. The pain was reduced, but not gone, and that was important. Pain had information. It told you what was still fragile. What would fail if you forgot yourself for even a second.
People liked to talk about healing like it was purely good.
They didn't talk about what happened when you healed wrong.
Most healing magic required stillness. Not just physical, but structural. The body had to be in a stable state for the magic to knit flesh where it belonged. Movement changed angles. Changed tension. Changed where cells should align.
Try to heal while you're twisting, sprinting, getting slammed into stone?
One tendon sets in a fraction off. One muscle rebuilds too tight. One nerve is "repaired" in a way that stops screaming and starts… buzzing.
You don't notice immediately.
You only notice when you swing a sword and your hand arrives a hair late.
Or when you jump and your ankle tells you, with quiet certainty, that it will not be loyal this time.
Or when the wound looks closed but the nerves underneath keep screaming anyway, trapped in a loop of false signals.
Phantom pain.
Phantom weakness.
A healed limb that isn't yours anymore.
I'd seen it in war. Men who came back with arms that looked perfect and still couldn't grip a cup without shaking. Women whose legs healed straight but whose nerves never stopped burning, as if the body remembered the injury and refused to forget.
Healing wasn't just knitting skin.
It was rewriting a living system while it fought you.
And then there was the other law.
The one nobody liked to admit because it ruined the fantasy.
Metabolic cost.
A body didn't grow new tissue out of optimism. Cells needed fuel. Proteins. Water. Salt. Oxygen. Time.
Magic could accelerate the process, yes, but it didn't conjure matter from nothing. It forced the body to burn reserves.
Heal too much, too fast, and your muscles ate themselves. Your organs started borrowing from tomorrow. Hunger became a weapon pointed inward. You could be "fully healed" and still collapse because your body had nothing left to pay with.
The law was cruel and simple.
The body was not infinite.
And it had a cadence.
Healing spells had rhythms. Breathing had rhythms. Heartbeats had rhythms. Every system inside you moved on a tempo, and if you forced one rhythm to sprint while the others trudged, something snapped.
That was why divine healing was different. It wasn't just mana. It wasn't just cellular acceleration. It was… an external authority telling reality to behave.
If I had access to that kind of healing, I'd use it.
If I had a mana-based healing art that didn't demand stillness, didn't demand strict cadence, didn't demand the body's cooperation?
I'd carve it into my arsenal tomorrow.
But I didn't.
And in a fight, the laws didn't care what I wanted.
So healing in close combat remained what it always was.
A nice idea for people who didn't get stabbed for a living.
I stood, rolling my shoulder, feeling the last of the sting fade.
Nyxa's gaze tracked the motion.
"You're going back out," she said.
"Yes."
"You're annoyed," she observed.
"Yes."
She smiled slightly. "Good. Annoyance makes you sharp."
"I don't need emotions to be sharp," I muttered.
Nyxa's eyes flicked up and down my face like she was reading a book she'd already memorized. "You do. You just don't like admitting it."
I didn't answer.
Because she was, unfortunately, correct.
***
(Unknown)
The room was dim, warded, and smelled faintly of old wax and crushed herbs.
Three figures stood around a table where green ward diagrams were drawn in ink so thick it looked like dried blood.
Person 1 spoke first, voice low.
"So you're saying the yellow man is a traitor."
Person 2 exhaled, slow. "I'm saying he's not loyal to us. There's a difference."
Person 3 slammed a hand on the table hard enough to rattle the ink pots.
"Fuck. Fuck. He was the only one who was supposed to help us," Person 3 snarled. "We were supposed to use him. He was supposed to open the door."
Person 2's tone sharpened. "Your rage again. Boy, calm down."
"Don't call me boy."
Person 2 didn't flinch. "Then stop acting like one. Rage is useful in war. It's useless in planning."
Person 1 leaned forward, tapping the diagram. "If he's compromised, then our timetable shifts."
"It doesn't," Person 2 said. "We simply… try something else."
Person 3's breathing was too fast. "Try what."
Person 2 smiled in the dark.
"Like I said," they murmured. "The Tower will be good to try something with."
***
Back to the courtyard
When I stepped out again, the duels were still going.
The crowd had grown thicker. More robes. More perfume. More eager faces watching people gamble their cores for applause.
And the green wards pulsed like a heartbeat under everything.
I leaned against a stone pillar near the edge of Circle Three and watched.
It didn't take long to notice the pattern.
They weren't just fighting.
They were feeding.
Mages stepped into the rings and pushed harder than they should have been able to. Spells formed faster. Walls of flame higher. Spears of stone sharper.
The wards boosted them.
Not cleanly. Not safely. But undeniably.
And almost all of them used it recklessly, drunk on borrowed power.
I could see their mana cores with mage-sight, bright centers wrapped in channels and intent. Everything looked… normal.
That was the problem.
With mage-sight, the corruption didn't show.
It slid in under the lattice like a hairline crack. Like a parasite that had learned how to dress itself as "enhancement."
But with Qlippothic sight, the world told the truth.
I narrowed my eyes and let the eldritch layer open in my perception.
There it was.
A thread of wrongness.
Not dramatic. Not screaming. Not the blatant rot of an Outer beast.
Something subtler.
Something that slipped into a mage's core at the moment they drew on the green wards. Like a fine residue. Like a seed being pressed into fertile soil.
It didn't explode.
It didn't mutate them instantly.
It just… stayed.
Waiting.
Nyxa had noticed it earlier than me. Of course she had. Her senses weren't limited to the polite categories of mortal magic.
She drifted beside me, hands in her pockets, eyes fixed on a duel where two students were laughing while trying to melt each other's shields.
"They're eating it," she said, quiet.
"They don't know," I replied.
Nyxa's mouth twisted. "They never know."
My gaze followed the pulses of green light around the ring.
This was too wild.
Not wild as in unpredictable.
Wild as in old.
Like something that used to exist and had been buried for centuries, forgotten by civilized magic, locked away the way people locked away inconvenient truths.
Wild magic.
It was a phrase that tasted like history books and nightmares.
It wasn't supposed to be here.
Not now.
Not in a Tower run by scholars who preached order and structure and careful progression.
Yet the wards glowed green.
And the crowd cheered.
And somewhere under all that noise, something was planting itself in the cores of people who thought they were simply competing for an artifact.
I felt my jaw tighten.
If this was deliberate… then this wasn't a tournament.
It was a harvest.
A controlled environment to see what grew when you fed mages a tainted boost and encouraged them to gorge themselves on it.
I glanced toward the main dais where the Crystal Heart of Zotal sat inside a transparent ward cage.
The artifact gleamed like a promise.
And promises were always bait.
***
Natharion approached me between matches, expression tight, sleeves rolled as if he'd been dragged into logistics hell.
"You're in the top eight," he said. "Congratulations."
"Lucky me," I replied.
He hesitated. "You're watching the wards."
"Yes."
His eyes flicked away. "They told me it was safe."
"They always say that," I said.
Natharion's mouth flattened. "If I shut it down now, the patrons will—"
"Will be angry," I finished for him. "And angry patrons in Towers tend to come with funding withdrawal and political consequences."
He looked at me sharply. "You understand."
"I understand extortion wearing silk," I said.
Nyxa leaned in slightly behind me. "He also understands stabbing."
Natharion's gaze flicked to her and then away again like he'd touched a hot stove. "I would prefer not to need that understanding today."
I didn't respond, because my attention had shifted.
A name on the bracket board.
A name that made my stomach drop a fraction.
Goldwynn.
I stared.
Then I stared harder, as if the ink might change if I disapproved enough.
It didn't.
"Why," I muttered, not to Natharion, not to Nyxa, but to the universe itself. "Why is she here."
Nyxa tilted her head. "You know her."
"Yes."
"You like her," Nyxa added, too casually.
"That's not relevant," I said sharply.
Nyxa's eyes glittered. "It's always relevant."
Natharion, who had been following my gaze, went pale. "She insisted."
I looked at him. "Insisted on what."
"On entering," he said quietly. "She arrived this morning. She wasn't… supposed to be awake yet, but she was. She came to my office and said she needed the prize."
My blood chilled.
"She said that," I repeated.
Natharion nodded once, jaw tight. "She didn't explain. She just… asked, politely, the way dangerous people ask."
I stared at the bracket again.
Top eight.
Meaning my next match…
I would face her.
The crowd noise blurred for a second.
All I could hear was the faint pulse of the green wards, like a heartbeat that wasn't human.
And the memory of Yue in Yggdrasil's lab, the rot that had been stabilized, the continuity error that had made a coma into a split.
Goldwynn was tied to the Tower in ways that weren't clean.
And now she was standing in the tournament bracket like a person with a plan.
A person who needed an artifact.
I forced myself to breathe.
Then I walked toward Circle One, where the next match would be announced.
Goldwynn stood at the edge of the ring, cloak drawn tight around her shoulders, eyes too bright.
When she saw me, her lips parted.
She took a step forward.
"I'm sorry," she said, voice trembling. "But I really need it."
Tears shone in her eyes.
Not performative tears.
Real ones.
Something in my chest tightened.
Because I believed her.
And that was the worst part.
I opened my mouth to ask the obvious question.
Need it for what.
But the bell rang.
The green wards flared.
And Goldwynn stepped into the circle like she was walking into a confession she couldn't escape.