Jessica sat tied to the same tree she’d been tied to for days. It was sundown, and her captors would return from their hunt soon. Only Grub remained, picking meat out of her teeth with her knife. Luckily, besides some unsettling chatter, Grub mainly ignored her.

Jessica’s wrists were raw from the ropes again, the scratchy fibers cutting into her soft flesh. Her body was tired from sitting in the same position for days, and she shuffled her feet, tucking them under herself to rise into a squat. The movement made the ropes cut deeper into her wrists, and she hissed in pain.

“Ay, shut up! I’m concentrating!” Grub said, taking her knife out from between her teeth. She pulled a long string of pork out from her incisor, then looked at it, shrugged, and plopped in back in her mouth. Jessica found the woman disgusting.

Not that she was much better. The bandits wouldn’t even untie her to eat, let alone bathe, so she was filthy from days of captivity. Her white robes were stained dark grey from dust and dirt and dried blood. Her hair lay in stringy clumps around her head, and her skin was pale and sallow. She looked better than Grub did, at least — the bandits focused on hunting as their source of food, and already easy prey was becoming sparse in the area. Two days had passed without McClain and Serafin and the barbarian brothers bringing home a meal. Grub, being at the very bottom of the bandit totem pole, was living off scraps. But Jessica knew that if McClain cleared the nearby forest of deer and boar, soon all the bandits would starve. She didn’t mourn that.

Jessica, on the other hand, hadn’t lost a pound. She’d picked a skill that allowed her to use healing energy to replace food energy, and converted her mana into nourishment in secret. She didn’t tell McClain and his murderers how she managed to stay healthy, and she hoped it wasn’t too obvious. She figured that her abilities were best kept under wraps, if possible, lest she be recruited to feed them as well as heal them. Still, she had to imagine that McClain would eventually find out, especially if the rest of them started to starve.

Suddenly, she felt a trickle of blood on her palm. The scabs from where the rope had rubbed against her wrists had broken open, and she could smell the metallic tang of blood. She closed her eyes and concentrated, imagining a white light flooding her hands. Then she felt that thing — mana, she supposed — follow the white light, and seep into the wounds on her wrists. Relief washed over them, and the wounds closed, returning the skin to smooth brown.

She let herself relax. Then she put a little more mana into her sore muscles, her aching joints, her scraped knees. She did this all while Grub was distracted. The bandits knew that she could heal herself — the first few beatings had made that clear — but she didn’t want them to see how often she was doing it. She didn’t want them to realize what she was doing.

Level 3.4 reached!

A crash came through the trees to her right. McClain appeared, blood spattered, his face grim. He looked like hell, like a battle had taken everything he’d had to give. Serafin came in behind him, looking relatively untouched, except for a long scrape on her otherwise flawless face. Her clothes were tattered, one sleeve nearly ripped off. Jessica hadn’t told them she could repair their gear — again, not being too keen on helping them — but that meant she couldn’t use magic to clean or repair her own robes.

Behind Serafin were the twins. Bjorn carried Brock, who was laying limply in his arms. The huge man looked silly being carried like a child, but Jessica could tell that he was gravely hurt. Bjorn’s face was stoic, and it looked like he’d been hurt as well, just not as badly as his brother. He set his brother’s limp form down on the ground before Jessica, and she could see the gaping wound in his stomach where something claw-like had torn into him. In a few moments, he would bleed out. She was almost shocked that he hadn’t already.

“Heal him,” McClain said. His voice was hoarse. Jessica looked up at the man scanning him. He walked with a slight limp, and there was a thick cut on his forehead which washed his face with blood. The scarred half of him looked like a corpse, with that much blood on it.

Jessica paused. If she just waited a few more minutes — if she stalled enough — then Brock wouldn’t live. That was one less captor. One less enemy when Theo and Blake eventually came back for her.

She did nothing.

“Heal him,” McClain said, “or I will torture you until your mind is broken and you beg for death. Then I’ll mount you on a spike and go find your bear friend, and use his pelt as a bed roll. Heal him.”

Jessica looked at McClain. She knew he was serious. For some reason, the Game had put a bunch of psychopaths in the same party. McClain, Serafin, even Grub — they’d each kill her six times over if they thought they’d have a good time doing it. She shivered.

Behind her, she felt Bjorn untying the ropes around her wrists. When they fell away, she rubbed them, cleaning them of crusted blood. Then she leaned over Brock and began to chant.

She didn’t know where the song came from. She didn’t know what language it was. But she knew it helped her channel her mana, send it through her and into the dying man before her. Her hands glowed white, and tendrils of glowing mist reached from them and into Brock’s bloody innards. They swelled and thickened, and she watched as the organs began to reknit themselves, folding over themselves in fresh pink threads.

Sweat beaded on her forehead. She felt her mana drain completely. She kept pushing, pushing out the last drops of it, and her body wracked with spasms.

Finally, a new layer of scarred skin formed over Brock’s stomach. It was poorly shaped, criss crossed with deep scar tissue in the shape of claw marks. She still couldn’t make terrible wounds seem like they’d never happened, but she could save a life from something that would otherwise kill a person.

She collapsed into the dirt, her hands against the ground, trembling.

Congratulations! You have reached level 3.5. New skills available.

She felt the rush of levels flooding her. It felt so good. Without regular food, cramped on the floor, tied and beaten, leveling was the only thing she had to look forward to. It was quickly becoming an addiction. That’s why she spent time healing herself in secret. That’s why she agreed to heal them when they came to her. The levels were all she had.

“Is he alive?” Bjorn said. She looked up. She could see his chest rise and fall, see his eyes flutter. More than that, her healing gave her innate sense of his health. He would live, unfortunately. It would take a few days, but his healing factor — something to do with the Durability skill — would take him the rest of the way.

She nodded. “He’ll live. He needs food and water. I can do more, with medicine. I can send you out to get the herbs I need —“

“We’re not wasting time on herbs,” McClain said, “we need meat. This area is hunted out. That, or the bigger beasts have scared off the littler ones.”

He nodded grimly to Brock, still laying maimed on the ground.

“No more people neither,” Grub said, “we killed all those, too.”

Jessica looked at her darkly. She wished whatever beast they’d found had killed all of them. If that were the case, maybe she could have taken out Grub and escaped. Maybe, if she chose her skills wisely, she could take them all out.

Would you kill them? Would you kill them, really? She thought. But she already knew the answer. She’d watched them kill Ron and Leyah. They’d laughed while they did it. She’d kill them all without a second thought.

“I’m up next,”McClain said. He knelt next to Jessica and gestured to his forehead, “heal it.”

“I’m out of mana,” Jessica said. It was true. When she reached inside for that white light, it was gone. Extinguished.

McClain pulled a small blue vial, about the size of a shotgun casing, from his belt. He tossed it in the dirt next to her. “Drink up,” he said.

She picked up the mana potion. Inside it, rainbow-white light swirled in the blue liquid. Pure mana. She didn’t want to heal McClain, but healing him meant levels for her, and she wanted the levels desperately. She opened the vial and tossed back the liquid. It tasted alcoholic, almost like a shot of lavender liquor. She hissed at the burn, feeling the warm mana spread through her body. The world seemed to glow and spin for a second, outlined in rainbow color. Then she crawled towards him, white robes becoming even more filthy from the dirt. Soon, they would be stained nearly black.

She raised a hand and sent white light rushing into his wound. It sealed in an instant, barely leaving a scar save for a faint white tracery that would vanish within a day. Minor wounds meant nothing to her now.

She healed Bjorn next, running her hands along the bruised muscles on his chest and back. Then Serafin came to her.

Serafin was the strangest of them. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen. Her face was mousy and pale, with over-large eyes that were so blue they edged on purple. Her hair was raven-black, and hung in straight pleats from her head. And more than that, she didn’t seem to wear a normal wizard’s robes, but instead a kind of school uniform: a blue jacket and plaid skirt.

More than that, she was more powerful than even McClain. Her abilities didn’t seem like Theo or Blake’s magic. Instead, she stuck to telekinesis. But her telekinesis was advanced, and she could make invisible blades that could sever stone. Jessica didn’t like the way the girl looked at her.

Serafin knelt down next to Jessica, not making eye contact. Jessica healed the wound on her head, then some of the scrapes on her arm. When she was done, Serafin turned to look at her. Her eyes showed the whites all the way around.

“What is your name, healer?” the girl said.

Jessica didn’t like the sound of her voice. It was too prim and proper, but rose barely above a whisper.

“J-Jessica,” she said. She didn’t want to stutter. She didn’t want to seem afraid of this girl. Jessica vaguely understood that to appear afraid of Serafin was dangerous. She was like a shark, ready to strike at the first sign of weakness.

“Why did you choose to be a healer, Jessica?” Serafin said.

“I wanted to help people,” Jessica said, “fix what’s broken.”

Serafin nodded, looking at the ground. “I chose what I am because I am broken. And I wanted to break other people in return. There’s power in breaking things.”

Jessica said nothing. It was more than she’d ever heard Serafin say.

Serafin continued. “We’re opposites like that. I break things. You fix them. There’s power in opposites. We could use that power.”

Serafin turned to look at her. She raised a finger, brought it to Jessica’s temple, and then slowly started lowering it.

Pain screamed across Jessica’s skin. As Serafin dragged her finger down Jessica’s face, an invisible blade cut her to the bone. Jessica thrashed, but some unseen force held her down. Blood ran in sheaths across her robes. When Serafin was done, Jessica sat shaking, the open wound stinging against the cold air.

“Heal it,” Serafin said.

Jessica blinked. She sent mana to the wound, and it healed rapidly, closing back up like a zipper. Serafin’s face showed no emotion. She only nodded. In the background, Jessica could feel her experience points growing with the healing, and she realized what Serafin was doing.

“Again,” the girl said.

Serafin raised her finger, face passive, and began to cut once more.