Chapter Eight: 0 Territory
It was the next day.
“Hey, Naofumi! Wake up!” Melty exclaimed in a panic. She was hammering on the door to my room.
“What’s all the noise?” I said.
“Big trouble! Wake up and listen to this!” Melty shouted.
“Okay, okay. What’s going on? Another Piensa attack?” I asked.
“Indirectly, yes!” Melty exclaimed. I shook my head. They weren’t going to give up easily. I’d thought proclaiming loud and clear that we had the Hammer Hero would have shut them up, but it didn’t seem to have worked. It might be time to crush them once and for all. That sounded like a faster move than waiting for Mamoru to take care of things. We’d give them a taste of what it was like to be invaded.
“We sent emissaries in order to form our own alliance to other nations. They’ve been attacking all of those nations!” Melty said.
“Finally showing their true colors,” I muttered. We had them on the ropes, but that also made them dangerous. But we should be careful or they might hand us the justice in this situation.
“I don’t know what they want. But they aren’t holding anything back. Shadow barely made it back,” Melty said.
“That’z right,” Shadow said, arriving moments later. He was a mess and was basically being held up by Raphtalia. He was badly injured. Bloody bandages were wrapped around his head. The Raph specimen that had been with him was badly injured too. He was basically clinging to Shadow’s shoulder. Things were bad if they had discovered Shadow’s covert infiltration and caused this much damage to him.
“Mr. Naofumi, the situation is grave,” Raphtalia said.
“I see that, but we need to prioritize healing them first,” I replied.
“That would be welcome,” Shadow said, “but I’m not zure even you can heal these woundz, Zhield Hero.” The Raph specimen squeaked too.
“I think I can handle it,” I said. They didn’t look completely hopeless, like Atla had. In fact, they looked like a little magic or medicine would heal them right up without any trouble. But no one had done that yet, which suggested something else was going on here. There was only one way to find out—I incanted some healing magic at the Shadow and his ninja-cosplay Raph specimen.
“My time to shine!” said the Demon Dragon in my head.
“All Liberation Heal,” I said. My healing magic was instantly activated. For a moment I thought it was working, but in the next instant their wounds burst open again. “What’s the problem?” I exclaimed.
“The Pienza forcez have introduced zome myzteriouz new weaponz that cause incurable injuriez. The zoldierz from the nationz we tried to form an alliance with were attacked in the zame way. The battle was completely one-zided,” Shadow explained. This was a new pain in the ass that I didn’t need. It looked like some kind of curse. Perhaps it was similar to when I was badly wounded by Blood Sacrifice. I combined the power of my shield and the Demon Dragon to analyze Shadow’s wounds. I hoped that some ritual magic or holy water could cure them. If not, they were eventually going to die. The continued bleeding was weakening them, I could tell.
“Raphtalia, we need to get them to the treatment center in the village,” I said.
“Of course,” Raphtalia replied.
“Naofumi. They’ll be okay, won’t they?” Melty asked.
“We’ll heal them, don’t worry,” I assured her. “Can you get Rat and Holn, please?”
“Sure,” Melty replied. We took Shadow and the Raph specimen to the village treatment center and began their treatment. Rat and Holn arrived quickly and joined me in analyzing the wounds of Shadow.
“I’m not seeing many signs of a little old curse,” Holn admitted.
“Indeed,” Rat agreed. “It’s more like the wounds have been fixed in an open position. I think their condition would be even worse if it wasn’t for the properties of Duke’s healing magic.” Rat and Holn’s analysis revealed that incorrect treatment would have the opposite effect, and so should be avoided. The reason that my magic hadn’t made things worse was because I couldn’t attack. The effects of incoming magic were being reversed, which should turn healing into attack. Seeing as I was unable to attack, however, the healing magic just cut out instead. I wasn’t sure whether to be happy or abjectly depressed at this new twist in my physiology. At least it had prevented Shadow and the Raph specimen from getting any worse.
“This whole setup is pretty nasty,” Holn muttered. “I don’t think Piensa has access to technology like this.”
“There’s a curse that prevents healing in the future . . . but nothing quite like this,” Rat admitted.
“Diagnosis is one thing. But is there any way to fix it?” I asked.
“Maybe in a limited capacity,” Holn said. “They might heal if the wounds were cut out completely.”
“Cazes like that were zeen in the intel I gathered . . . The woundz zimply got deeper,” Shadow reported. He had been collecting information on our enemies, and it sounded like that had included information on other victims. I cursed. Every treatment I had been thinking of would probably have the opposite effect.
“We could try using healing cultivation fluid,” Rat suggested. “Let’s see what that does.” She took out a test tube of it and placed some on one of Shadow’s wounds. Smoke rose with a sizzling sound, blood sprayed out, and the wound only got deeper. “That’s having the opposite effect,” she said, quickly stopping.
“I refuse to believe that anything is impossible to heal. That sounds like complete fiction,” Holn said firmly. It certainly sounded like fiction to me too—like a weapon from some ancient myth from Earth that caused wounds that would never heal. “We might be able to overwrite it with a cell transplant. This is pretty thorough though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it blocks that too,” she went on. I cursed again. This was black, twisted technology. It was just evil. It was almost as if S’yne’s sister and her organization were here working in Piensa. We were in the past, so they actually might be . . .
“Do you have any other ideas?” I asked. If the wounds themselves couldn’t be healed, maybe we could treat the area around them. But even placing a skin transplant over the top probably wasn’t going to work here.
Then I recalled how Kizuna had saved the modified Tsugumi and ended the power of one of the resurrected.
“Raphtalia,” I said. Ren and S’yne were here too, looking on with concern, but I thought it was fastest to ask Raphtalia.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Try cutting their wounds with Katana 0,” I told her.
“Are you sure?” she asked after a pause.
“The 0 weapons don’t have any attack power. They’re also the only thing I can think of that might work against a bundle of pure evil like this,” I said. This seemed as unfair, unjust, or irregular as anything we had seen so far. The 0 weapons seemed to exist to combat that brand of unfairness.
“I’ll give it a try,” Raphtalia said. She drew her katana, changed it to Katana 0, and slid the blade over Shadow’s wounds. He moaned, trying to withstand the pain. Something seemed to be working. Maybe that was all we needed to do.
“First Heal,” I said, applying some healing magic to the areas Raphtalia had tended to. But there didn’t seem to be any major changes, and blood started to seep out again.
“I can’t believe it,” Raphtalia said.
“Even 0 can’t help us,” I muttered. Maybe this wasn’t such an irregularity after all.
“This is extreme,” Rat agreed.
“I must admit even my impressive brain can’t seem to come up with a treatment,” Holn said. “Maybe I could create some homunculi and transfer their souls over?”
“And you can do that in time?” I asked.
“I ztill have . . . a little time. I’m not . . . dying yet,” Shadow said weakly. Probably not in the next few minutes, but with all the bleeding, I’d be surprised if he had two days. Maybe we should use that time to raid Piensa and find the one responsible for this.
“Will your idea work in time, Holn?” I asked again.