“Oh...” Back in the present, underground, Velitra stared blankly into space, pressing down on where the stab wound had been. That pain was gone thanks to Zenos’s magic, but another remained deeper within. “That’s what happened...”
“It’s not true that our master only cared about me,” Zenos pointed out. “He cared about me, yeah, but he cared about you too.” That was why he’d laid down his life to save them both.
Velitra understood now. Perhaps that had been the price their mentor had paid for using resurrection magic. Despite knowing this, he hadn’t hesitated at all to cast a spell to save them.
“He saved us, Velitra,” Zenos added.
“Yeah...”
“You think it doesn’t matter what happens to you, as long as he comes back? Don’t you get it? How he felt when he saved us? You dumbass. Think about all the lives you were about to sacrifice too.” Zenos lightly smacked his friend’s forehead.
Clasping a hand over where Zenos’s slap had landed, Velitra pouted slightly. “It wasn’t like I was going to take the lives of good people. I targeted Black Guild scum.”
“We’re healers,” Zenos said. “Our job is to save lives, not take them.”
Velitra said nothing to that.
“Granted, that might sound like sugary nonsense in reality.”
Still, their mentor had held fast to his ideals until the very end. His sayings had surely come from those ideals, born of the knowledge of the harsh realities of the world. He’d wanted to convey them to his two apprentices, who had still been learning healing magic.
“The ideal healer...” Velitra murmured with a distant look.
Zenos had followed their mentor’s last wishes and cremated the man’s body. Then the orphanage had burned down, leaving him with nowhere to go. He’d been terribly exhausted, and Velitra had vanished; Zenos hadn’t had the chance to talk to his friend about their mentor’s final moments.
All that had remained to him was their mentor’s well-worn black cloak. Having lost his place in the world, Zenos had been sitting on the roadside with the cloak draped over his shoulders when Aston—leader of the Golden Phoenix—spoke to him. This had marked the beginning of the second chapter of his life, when he became an adventurer, for better or worse. But that was a whole other story.
Anguished, Velitra said softly, “It’s all my fault, Zenos.”
“What do you mean?” the shadow healer asked.
“I wanted to leave the orphanage and study more under our master. I didn’t want to lose to you. So I took the money from Dalitz’s safe.”
“You’re kidding,” Zenos said. “You stole the money? They nearly killed me thinking I was the thief.”
“I was also the one who set fire to the orphanage.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
“You can hate me if you want. It was all my fault. I stole that money. If I hadn’t, our master wouldn’t have died,” Velitra said, biting a lip.
Zenos took a deep breath. “It doesn’t matter anymore. No one could’ve predicted what happened to our master. And the orphanage, well, it was for the best that it was gone.”
“Zenos...” Velitra sat up, grabbing Zenos’s black cloak with both hands. “I... I’m sorry...” It was the first time since they parted ways that Zenos had seen his friend be so sincere. Velitra looked like a child again, eyes filled with tears while clutching the worn-out cloak. “Still, I miss our master. I wanted to see him again, no matter the cost.”
The shadow healer pursed his lips, staring over his old friend’s shoulder. Beyond the necromantic circle lay another magic circle, even bigger. Velitra had to have drawn it. “That magic circle is really complex. Did you come up with it?”
“No,” Velitra admitted. “That was hidden in our master’s notes. I studied the subject to an extent, but never to that level of completion. I’m using it practically as it was.”
Velitra had holed up underground to research necromancy, hidden documents, and fragments of their mentor’s notes. These studies had uncovered that in order to activate a resurrection spell, several things were needed: a large-scale magic circle, valuable sacrifices, immense amounts of mana, and a special chant. But precious little existed on the magic circle itself, so Velitra had used the one from the journal nearly unchanged.
“Well, maybe...” Zenos began, slowly pushing to his feet and putting a hand on a puzzled Velitra’s shoulder. “Maybe we can see gramps again.”
“We can...?” Velitra echoed, indigo eyes blinking in confusion. “What do you mean? The offerings are gone, so we can’t activate the resurrection spell anym—”
“No, I mean, think about it. Is this really a resurrection magic circle?” Zenos interrupted.
“Well, I can’t fully decipher this, but there’s a complex regeneration spell intricately incorporated into the circle. I’ve never seen anything like it, so it’s reasonable to assume...” Velitra pulled out the black leather journal and showed Zenos the part with the magic circle.
After examining it for a moment, Zenos stepped toward the circle. “Gramps regretted messing with resurrection magic in the first place. I know that’s his journal, but would he really have left something so dangerous there? Wouldn’t he have burned any evidence of something that dangerous long ago?”
Velitra staggered after Zenos. “This circle was drawn with invisible ink. It was deliberately hidden.”
“Maybe it was hidden for a different reason,” Zenos ventured.
“Huh?”
“When he was saying his goodbyes, he said he couldn’t think of the right words to say right then. He mentioned he was glad he’d prepared beforehand.” At the time, Zenos had been confused too, not fully understanding what their mentor had meant. But maybe...
Zenos moved to the center of the resurrection magic circle, and Velitra moved to stand next to him, puzzled. “It’s useless, Zenos. I’ve tried many times, but simply infusing the circle with mana won’t activate it.”
“Looks like it, yeah. I just tried, but it didn’t react at all.”
“Yes. It needs some other sort of input.”
“Something of value, you said before.”
“That’s what I thought.” Materials that constituted the human body, large sums of money, and numerous lives.
Zenos folded his arms, staring intently at the magic circle. “True resurrection magic might need such things, yes, but this circle might have different activation conditions.”
“What do you mean?”
“It didn’t work because you did it all by yourself, I think.”
Velitra’s indigo eyes widened.
“Do you remember when gramps showed us a weird magic circle that made his face pop out and laugh? Remember what we had to do to activate that one?”
After a moment’s silence, Velitra said, a bit unsure, “Use both of our mana?”
“That’s right. Do you still have any mana left?”
“I rested a little, so I think I’ve recovered some...”
The pair crouched down and placed their palms in the center of the circle. “Here goes nothing,” Zenos said.
Hesitantly, Velitra nodded.
When they poured their mana—polished from years of practice—into the circle, its outline began to glow faintly. A high-pitched ringing noise filled the air, and the entire circle flickered in the colors of the rainbow.
“I-It worked!” Velitra exclaimed.
“Something’s coming out!”
The air around them began to swirl as though being sucked into the circle. The wind grew stronger, and the two had to brace themselves to avoid being blown away. Bits of dirt whipped through the air, making it impossible to keep their eyes open.