Again, I woke up to something slamming into my face. I lurched up, screamed, then collapsed back to the ground.

“Shit.” I croaked out.

My body still laid in a twisted heap, covered in chunks of roofing as well as other less pleasant pieces of my attacker. Pieces of the roof fell and bounced around on the floor near me. That’s what had roused me out of my comatose state, not Kan’on slapping me around, for a change.

I wasn’t dead. I craned my neck around, my star blessed, unbroken neck, to examine what I could see of my leg. Pain shot through every part of me, but I could see that the healing had done a rough job, stopping me from bleeding out from the grisly remains of my butchered leg.

I cackled, endorphins from the pain and the joy of surviving yet another scrap flooding me. I let the positive energy ripple through me, heedless of the pain, and stared out the gap in the roof at the stars.

No sign of the assassin remained, as expected, but the same could also be said of a large chunk of my leg. That would cost me. Without the pieces of my flesh to help knit everything back together, I would have to expend an insane amount of power. Oh well, nothing was free, everything had a price.

I let the pain fade before attempting a healing rune. Very carefully, I drew the most precise version of the rune I could, careful to make it a complete construct, unlike what I normally did with sloppy healing spells.

My body was in no condition to handle the way I normally treated it with healing. The shock of such a use of power would likely kill me by itself as everything would be forcefully wrenched around, causing its own kind of trauma.

I poked the rune with a mental filament, narrowing my focus to a sharp point so there could be no room for misinterpretation of my intent, and with my willpower invested a tiny spark of power into it. The rune activated in the normal way, without any tricky additions.

A tiny speck of healing power leaked out of the rune, suffusing my body in a small trickle that I could barely perceive. Perfect. It would take a while, and I’d have to set it up over and over, but there wouldn’t be any soul wrenching, bone twisting, agonizing healing and the resulting shock to deal with.

I thought back to the battle. The Inculid, the assassin, hadn’t been a thrall and it had been hyper focused on me. It reinforced my idea that it had been sent specifically to kill me. Reaching out to the Flow to poke the Queen would be a mistake in my current state, but the temptation was there to rub my survival in her face. She probably already knew, since my filaments were spread out all over the place and my rhythmic domain in full swing. I wouldn’t get the satisfaction of feeling her reaction, but I’d get mine, in the end.

They’d made a big mistake, failing to kill me. Even though I’d already discovered the little secret to… what to call it? Void tunneling? I’d already discovered the possibility, but the real failure had been letting me see it in action so many times. I was nothing if not a survivor, picking up tricks from all my experiences. To not just let me see it, but to show me repeatedly how to do it… that mistake would be what did them in.

The last of the power leaked out of the rune and the small, incremental changes in my body eased a bit of the pain, but there would be more to come. It always hurt worse in the end. I redrew and repowered the rune and fell back into my thoughts.

Each time the assassin had void tunneled, I’d felt a spike of intent puncture normal space, and only then would the rift open. That’s not how I’d ever used the cubby. It always felt like I just turned an invisible corner and there it appeared, no force necessary.

Experimentally, I reached into my cubby with my mind. It took almost no effort to get there, especially if I wasn’t physically reaching in. I poked around the infinite edge with my mind, trying to push through with a normal amount of pressure, but as expected nothing changed.

I formed a sharp spike of intent and drove it into the same area. A breach formed, not yet a rift, but a tunnel, nonetheless. The power needed was easily manageable, compared to the brute force it had originally taken in my first few attempts back at the manor.

There was just one problem; I didn’t know where the tunnel led. I knew it led somewhere because I could feel the currents on the other side, the normal properties of the Flow that I could never mistake for anything else. So where was the real trick? What did I lack?

More pieces of the roof fell and showered me with debris. If it kept up, I’d end up buried in my own trap. I renewed the rune again and let it keep doing its slow, steady work.

Footsteps echoed down from the roof. A faint silhouette blocked the light of the stars from reaching through the hole. I’d recognize that disgustingly handsome outline anywhere. Kan’on, of course he would find me looking the worst I’d looked in a decade.

His silhouette disappeared from the hole and a faint presence appeared beside me, kneeling.

“You live,” he said.

“Obviously,” I croaked out of my tortured throat.

“Obviously. I’m surprised you don’t just go around slaying everything with that sarcastic tongue of yours.”

He examined my crippled body, clearly upset, but lacking words to express it. To someone like him, I should be on my last gasp of air, dying a warrior’s death, but everything I did would be counter to his experience.

“Your capacity for healing is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Like nothing I’ve ever heard about… from anyone. This rune, it’s the most basic of healing runes, so basic even I could use it… sort of. I’m terrible at healing. Regardless, what it’s doing is impossible.”

“I told you before. You can use your magic, and you’re powerful even if you choose not to use it most of the time, but you’re blind to what’s really out there. Completely blind.”

He sat back into a crouch, staring at me. His eyes tracked to my leg, missing everything below the knee. We’d had the ‘your blind’ discussion before, most recently on the last leg of the journey in the caravan. He’d probably not want to rehash that talk all over again.

“Can you heal the leg too?” He asked the question, but I heard in his voice that he feared the answer. I’m not sure whether he feared that I wouldn’t be able to and be crippled, or that I could do something that not even the most prestigious healers in the kingdom could.

“Yes.

He sighed, tilted his head back, and looked at the stars.

“What are you really? I see this with my own eyes, but I can’t attach meaning to it, where is the connection? Where does this path start? How does one even find the beginning of this path?”

I wasn’t really sure what he spoke of, maybe some of his martial cultivating mumbo jumbo. This talk of a path struck a chord within me though. There had been a lot of thought of a path tumbling around in my head lately. The half-remembered dream told me to follow a path. What was the path? What even was a path?

Regardless, I knew the feeling. When I first saw the Flow, it made no sense. Nothing about it had made sense back then, how everything connected to everything else, different levels of power and intent of the creatures of the world causing the currents to wind throughout, weaving everything together.

“How do you think I survived all this time?” I asked. “I’m probably the single most hated, most feared person alive… at least in the kingdom. Do you think that I went all these years without ambushes, assassination attempts, honor duels, torture, revenge attempts… did you think I just traipsed around the countryside having a grand adventure? I’ve delved the Labyrinth countless times, been wounded or nearly dead more times than I remember. I’ve had to learn to be a survivor. Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned out of necessity. I, as you see me now, am the result of the world trying to stomp me out of existence, over and over.”

I renewed the healing rune, this time pumping more power into it, accelerating the effect. Small snaps and cracks sounded out from my twisted body into the warehouse as it slowly pulled bones and tissue back into alignment

I hissed and gritted my teeth as more pain washed over me. Kan’on looked on, horror evident in his eyes as my body untwisted itself one inch at a time right before his eyes.

“None of this was ever a game for me, Kan’on. You walk around, untouchable, only having entered the world as an adult after you were taught secret techniques by a millennia old school of some of the world’s most powerful men. Some of us had to claw our way out of the muck, one tragedy at a time. I’ve fought, stole, cheated, and killed my way to everything I have; world be taken by the depths.”

We both let the silence deepen, me trying to conserve energy and Kan’on consumed by his own thoughts. The silence lasted long enough that I renewed the healing rune a couple more times, with increasing power.

“I didn’t ask earlier, but how is Kayla holding up?”

“She’s capable enough. The shadows gave her some trouble, but she persevered with only minor injuries. She is keeping watch on the defenders.”

“And you? Anything interesting happen?”

“Their movement ability is interesting, but only the large ones presented a challenge. There wasn’t anything I could learn from them.”

“I figured out how they do it.”

Kan’on’s eyes snapped down to look at me, eyes wide?

“How?”

Grinning, I lifted my now straight arm and reached into my cubby. From his perspective, my arm would disappear. He’d seen it before, of course, but there was new information to add to the puzzle.

He chuckled, then laughed out loud. I think it might have been the first time I’d ever seen him laugh, and it made me feel good. It showed that he was human and not a single-minded monster.

“I still need to to figure out the rest, but I’ve got a good start on it already.”

“Tricks you call them. Well, it will be satisfying to use their tricks against them in the Labyrinth, won’t it?”

I nodded, glad that he understood. Very few things satisfied as much as turning the tables on your enemies using their own methods. I was also glad that he expressed so much confidence in me.

“You should go oversee the rest of the battle. I’m almost done here. Fixing the leg is going to take more than I can do sitting here in this warehouse, so I’ll have to do it later.”

Kan’on waved my statement away and said, “The battle is well in hand. After the shadows fell, there are only Carvers left, and the barrier mitigates their threat.”

“Help me up then.”

Kan’on got to his feet, then reached down so I could grasp his wrist. He yanked me up, perhaps too forcefully as every part of me protested in pain, and I balanced on my one good leg.

“This is going to hurt.”

I drew one final healing rune, pumping it with power, then swiped my hand through it. Healing power poured through me, and everything that hadn’t already been put back in order suddenly snapped back into place. I gasped in pain, using Kan’on’s shoulder as a crutch as the final wave of agony washed over me.

“Can you find my sword for me? The damned thing should be down here somewhere. Probably buried under shingles.”

Kan’on headed off in search the baggage of my past, while I hopped around in the debris, looking for a length of wood long enough to use as a temporary crutch. It took me a few minutes, but I found a likely candidate in the form of a shattered ceiling beam.

I peeled off large pieces of wood, trying to clean it up, until Kan’on returned to me with my weapon in tow. I thanked him and used it to shave off the worst of the splinters and shards of wood, then focused a little harder on smoothing out a hand hold. Finished, I shoved the length of deep steel into the cubby. Good riddance.

“Let’s go see how many people I can heal before I run out of juice. I’m crippled, not dead you know.”

Kan’on snorted but helped me limp out of the warehouse and into the ongoing battle.