I Reincarnated as the World's Worst Healer

Chapter 135: The Twins, the Storm, and the Old Man

Hrazfel hit the fortress like a dropped anvil.

He activated his magic halfway down — the storm-blue swelling across his skin, the lightning waking in his eyes — and the giant form took the impact that the dwarf alone never could have.

He struck the center of the snow-dusted courtyard and the stone erupted, a crater blooming outward, flagstones flung in every direction, a thunderclap of dust and noise rolling out across the entire mountaintop castle.

He came up out of the crater roaring, alive, four meters of furious blue muscle — and immediately surrounded.

They came from everywhere at once. Monks. Dozens of them, pouring out of doorways and down stairs and off the walls, every one of them wearing the body of a child — pale, smooth-faced, terribly young, and terribly wrong once you knew what was underneath.

None of them spoke. Instead they raised curved horns to their lips and blew, a low droning blast that echoed off the peaks and called more of their brothers running, and then, in eerie silence, they threw themselves at the dwarf.

Hrazfel met them with the one-handed hammer the king had pressed on him at the door — for old time’s sake, you ungrateful child, try not to die with it.

The hammer crackled with stolen thunder and he swung it in great whistling arcs, and child-bodied monks went flying, and more took their place.

They fought with discipline. Warrior arts bloomed across their small frames — fists wrapped in stone, in frost, in pressure — and they struck in coordinated waves, three high, three low, wearing the giant down by inches, until even Hrazfel’s bellowing began to take on a strained edge.

"Any — time — now!" he howled at the sky.

High above, the red dragon dropped through the last of the cloud, and Ebony jumped.

She fell from a height her boosted body could just survive, snow and stone rushing up — and angled herself, at the last second, directly onto a monk.

She crashed down on him full-weight, driving him into the flagstones with a crunch, and rolled up out of the landing already swinging.

"Sorry I’m late!" she called to Hrazfel. "Had to watch you make your entrance. Very dramatic. Real artistry in the screaming."

"I’m going to bury you!"

"Later! Working!"

They fought back to back. Hrazfel was a wrecking ball, all thunder and reach; Ebony was something quieter and more precise.

She fought mostly with her fists, the green purification fire flaring up only in bursts — a flash to burn through a monk’s stone-armored guard, gone again the instant the opening was made. On, off. On, off. Surgical.

"(Conserve. On for the cut, off the moment it lands. Don’t bleed mana you don’t have.)" It was a discipline she’d been drilling herself in ever since the mana-sickness first crippled her, that horrible stretch when overdrawing her magic had nearly hollowed her out.

"(Most healers burn out because they treat their well like it’s bottomless. It isn’t. So you make every drop do something.)"

She ducked a horn-blast of pressure, came up inside a monk’s guard, flared the fire across her knuckle for a single heartbeat as she struck, and let it die as the body dropped.

"(And the strange thing is — I think I’m getting better at it. Faster. Cleaner. Like the limit’s teaching me something the bottomless well never could.)"

For a moment, fighting like that, she almost forgot how outnumbered they were.

Then the doors at the top of the castle opened, and the almost ended.

Two figures stepped out onto the high terrace. They were not children.

They were grown men, dark-skinned and bald, broad through the shoulders — and unmistakably twins, identical down to the scars, which ran across their faces in patterns that matched, one a mirror of the other.

Both wore strips of cloth bound over their eyes. Both were blind.

They spoke in unison, two voices layered into one, carrying easily over the din.

"First intruders we’ve had since we took this mountain. And strong, for trespassers. Strong enough to be worth our time." A pause, in perfect sync. "Which means it’s time you faced some real weight."

Hrazfel’s giant form tensed. "Girl," he said lowly. "Those two feel wrong. Heavy wrong."

Ebony cracked her neck and grinned. "Then they can wait. I didn’t fall out of the sky and kick you off a dragon to fight the seconds-in-command." She raised her voice toward the terrace. "No offense, boys, but I came for the big fish! You two are appetizers!"

And she put two fingers to her lips and let out a single, piercing whistle.

Far above and off to the side — kept at a distance by the monks’ arrow-fire — the red dragon banked, with little Stor still riding its shoulder. At the whistle, both dragons climbed.

Higher, and higher still, until they were specks against the gray, and then they began to work — the red dragon breathing long rolling gouts of flame, Stor loosing crackling forks of lightning, again and again into the open sky.

To the watchers below it looked like nonsense. Two dragons burning empty air.

But with every roar, with every blast of heat and charge dumped into the cold mountain atmosphere, clouds began to gather. Thickening. Darkening. Spiraling slowly inward over the peak.

"(That’s it,)" Ebony thought, watching the sky bruise. "(A storm dragon doesn’t just throw lightning — it makes weather. Feed enough heat and charge into cold high air and you build a thunderhead.

Stor’s barely a day old, but the instinct’s already in him. He just needs the raw fuel, and a friend who breathes fire is excellent fuel.)"

The blind twins couldn’t see the clouds massing overhead. But they could hear that the dragon-sounds were not normal sounds, and they were not fools. As one, they dropped into a fighting stance and invoked.

{{Warrior Art: Iron Muscle}}

Their arms transformed — the muscle itself turning to living iron, dark metal flexing and sliding beneath the skin like a thing still alive, and they came down off the terrace in two great bounds, fists like wrecking balls, fast despite their blindness, homing in on sound and air-pressure alone.

Ebony stepped back and smiled wider. "(They took the bait too easy. First round’s on the house, boys.)"

She whistled again — sharper, a different note. An order.

High above, Stor folded his wings and dove into the gathered clouds, vanishing into the dark churn of them.

The thunderhead lit from within, flickering, sparking — and Ebony felt rather than saw the little dragon gorging up there, drinking the storm’s charge straight out of the air, packing it into his small body until he couldn’t hold any more.

The clouds spat and flashed. The whole sky over the mountain went taut and electric.

Then Stor loosed it.

A single colossal bolt of lightning tore down out of the thunderhead — not a breath, but the storm itself, channeled and aimed — and slammed straight into the two iron-armed twins.

They threw their metal arms up and tried to take it, tried to ground it through their transformed bodies — and for half a second they held.

Then the bolt overwhelmed them, white light swallowing the courtyard, and when it cleared the twins lay smoking on the cracked flagstones, iron arms scorched dull, both of them unconscious.

The remaining monks froze. As one, the silent child-bodied horde took a step back.

Ebony spread her arms in the sudden quiet and shouted up at the castle.

"Is that it? Come on! Send out the real monsters, or does your whole ’world-conquering organization’ run on this much noise and this few nuts? All those grand plans and you’re throwing children and a pair of light-up twins at me?"

For a long moment, nothing.

Then, deep in the castle, an enormous door ground open — a door that opened onto the lowest, darkest part of the fortress, a throat of pure black at the mountain’s heart. And out of that darkness shuffled an old man.

He was thin. Stooped. Frail-looking, his robes hanging off a frame that seemed barely able to carry them, shuffling forward with the unsteady gait of someone’s harmless grandfather. He looked like nothing at all.

And every monk in the courtyard — the silent, disciplined, child-faced horde that hadn’t flinched at a dwarven giant or a lightning strike — recoiled in open terror and scrambled away from him, pressing themselves against the walls to keep as far from the old man as the courtyard allowed.

Ebony looked at him. Looked at the monks fleeing him. And, naturally, opened her mouth.

"Hey! Somebody lost a grandpa!" She jerked a thumb at the shuffling old figure. "Don’t be jerks, help the old man find the bathroom before he has an accident!"

The old man’s face deformed with rage — the harmless grandfather mask collapsing into something twisted and furious, every wrinkle pulling tight around a hatred that aged decades off his pretense in an instant.

Ebony whistled.

Another bolt screamed down from the thunderhead, the same storm that had flattened the twins, aimed dead at the old man’s stooped frame.

He raised one hand.

And caught it.

The lightning struck his open palm and simply — stopped, coiling and crackling against his skin, going nowhere. He closed his fist around it, slowly, and the bolt guttered out and died, snuffed like a candle between two fingers.

Ebony’s grin froze on her face. "(...Ah. There he is.)"

The old man lowered his hand and rolled his thin shoulders, and the air around him began to hum — a deep, grinding, metallic resonance, the sound of something vast and hard waking up.

"Tremble," he said, "and behold."

{{Warrior Art × Dragon Magic: Iron Dragon Fist}}