Chapter 52: Accidents Again

It was the day of the accident and Suria was already on her way. At some point it would be wiser to investigate what had actually caused it, but for the moment she was keeping her focus tight: she needed to impress the department enough for them to allow her entrance.

From the outside, the Grand Prince's Medical Ward looked as peaceful as ever, belying the chaos she knew was unfolding within. Suria took a deep breath as she approached and checked the talismans she'd created just for this purpose. Though she still lacked a substantial number of healing inscriptions, with a much higher runic capacity she could amplify all of her spells.

She stepped inside and was immediately engulfed by the medical emergency. Most of the healers were in the middle of urgent business, but there was an older man in between patients, leaning back against a wall, so she approached him.

"What can I do to help?" she asked.

"Are you Suria Northbrook?" He wiped his forehead and shook his head. "We planned to figure out something for your interview, but we hadn't gotten to it yet. What can you cast?"

"Flesh healing and pain relief. I don't have b-"

"Just come this way."

She was led down one of the hallways, but the patient wasn't the woman with a crushed foot who Suria remembered. Just as well, because she couldn't restore a limb like that, much less attempt regeneration. Instead there was a man who looked like a local worker, his intestines still over his stomach, held in place by a cleansing sheet.

First Suria cast a spell to cleanse her own hands, then she plunged directly in, checking his intestines and making sure they were properly in place. She then had a problem of limited hands, but to her surprise the man cast a binding spell, as if they were actually colleagues. That freed Suria to cast her flesh healing spell, now with four empowering augments.

The flesh grew over the wound with speed that shocked even Suria, though it left behind an inflamed and weak section of skin. She followed up with pain relief but didn't use her healing sleep spell, since she remembered about the hospital beds.

"That's stronger than we'd expect from a student," the man said with some surprise. "But just empowering augments? No balancing or cleansing?"

"I don't know a full set of inscriptions," Suria told him with a helpless shrug. "I can try to help with brute force healing."

"Mana is always a problem, with big disasters like this. We'll take it."

So she threw herself into helping as well as she could, often serving as assistant to the primary healers. Once they figured out the spells she knew, they usually let her take over those aspects while they handled the more delicate work. Suria felt clumsy in comparison to the experts, but her control had been massively improved from all the other study she'd done.

Though the overall effort seemed organized, Suria didn't understand what methods they were using and mostly went where she was told. The chaos somehow brought her with an older woman to a room where a young man lay in a deep sleep. After checking his eyelids, the healer winced.

"Coma," she said grimly. "Probably can't afford to shock him awake."

"Is the bed inscribed with healing sleep wards?" Suria asked. Revealing that knowledge might have been too suspicious last cycle, but in the middle of an emergency like this, no one was going to suspect her.

"Good thought, but... no, it's been disabled. We'll have to hope he pulls through."

"Wait, let me try something."

With a flash of inspiration, Suria pulled out one of her spare talismans and formed a full glyph - twelve runes had been impossible for her not so long ago, but now it went quickly. She drew her healing sleep inscription in the center, then added two empowering augments... and then two inverting augments. Since escaping Convocation Hall she had been learning so many new inscriptions that she hadn't thought about it, but inversion seemed useful here.

"Will this work?" Suria asked, showing the talisman to the older woman. "I don't know if the empowering and the inversion cancel, or..."

"You haven't done this before?" The healer's eyes widened, but she shook her head. "No, they'll work together. Just be careful."

Despite the warning, the process seemed straightforward to Suria. Inverting the core inscription should create a sort of "healing wakefulness" - her only concern had been that the healing aspect would be inverted as well. Since it had been approved by a veteran healer, Suria cast as powerfully as she could.

For a second she thought nothing happened, then the young man let out a gasp and jerked almost to a seated position. Several others came in, calming him down, but the surge of energy was already fading as the spell ended. At least he wasn't risking death in a coma anymore.

"That's unorthodox," one of the other healers said. "You don't have inversion augments specific to healing?"

"I'm here because I need them!" Suria protested. No one was truly criticizing her, though; they were all just committed to saving as many as possible.

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After an hour it seemed like they'd passed the worst of the crisis, at least as far as open wounds risking bleeding out or infection. There were still a large number of broken or crushed bones, which left Suria able to do little but offer pain relief. Bone injuries had always been a problem at her old clinic, because she didn't have relevant inscriptions, and it seemed that hadn't changed.

Except... Suria might not have been able to study healing, but she had been fully applying herself at Darkmoon University for many months. She got out of the way, then pulled out a spare talisman and began forming a pentagon. It had been a while since Orinyan taught her the perception technique, but she had internalized it well enough to reproduce it now.

As soon as she activated the spell, she began to see the spells around her in much greater detail. When the healers cast, she immediately had a sense for how complex each spell was, as if each individual rune had weight. With a little practice she could guess the number of augments as well, but could she discern the inscriptions? That proved harder, and no matter how hard she focused, her sense of the details remained fuzzy. There was a common pattern every time the healers cast spells to heal bone, however, and if she could just practice enough...

Her first inscription was clearly wrong, but she had plenty more stone. If she kept watching the spells around her, she might be able to draw enough information from her perception spell to fully replicate the inscription. That should be possible, according to what Orinyan had told her, she just wasn't sure if she could pull it off in time.

"Are you attempting to learn an inscription in the middle of a crisis?" Professor Gwaslos was standing behind her, serene despite the bloody scene all around them.

"It's all I can do," Suria said softly.

"You've done enough. Follow me and then we'll talk."

They passed through the ward, helping with the remaining patients. Suria noticed that the professor wasn't simply helping with her spells; she offered words of advice and encouragement. Her skill with healing was transcendent, but it was that human touch that Suria doubted she could ever equal.

Eventually they passed through a door and, to Suria's surprise, entered a small courtyard. She hadn't known that it existed because it was surrounded on all sides, like a cell cut out of the Medical Ward. There were windows on all the walls, looking into the small garden with a few benches and a tree that was pure white, from its roots to its leaves.

"Sit down," Professor Gwaslos suggested gently. "You should get off your feet."

As soon as Suria sat down on the bench, she realized how much her legs hurt. She might have built up her mana reserves, but her body wasn't accustomed to this sort of work. That might actually be a problem given the limits of the time loop... she set all those thoughts aside, because she knew this could be the essential part of the interview.

Though she expected the professor to begin, Suria was too curious not to ask a question of her own, and she thought this moment was the best to push. "Is it always this bad?" she asked. "When there's an accident, I mean."

"It's unfortunate that it happened now," Professor Gwaslos told her. "Normally we would have a lot of students serving as assistants, but before the term, we're short-staffed. You actually played that assistant role quite well, despite your lack of experience in a ward like this."

"Thank you. I was really impressed with everything you could do."

"Oh, don't be. There was an incident a few days ago that required me to overdraw my mana, so I entered this disaster exhausted. Hopefully you won't have to face a crisis like this again."

Abruptly Suria had been handed another clue, though she hadn't been aiming for it or even thinking it might exist. The "incident" being referenced was almost certainly the battle between professors. If they brought Professor Gwaslos in to heal them afterward, that explained why they could all attend the feast just days later, apparently untouched.

And yet... despite the battle playing out in different ways, being interrupted at different times, Professor Drazen had never once survived. Suria had seen the battle and knew he wasn't fighting the other thrones alone, so it didn't seem like his death would be so certain. As much as she'd learned, that mystery remained a knot she couldn't untangle.

As the silence stretched, Professor Gwaslos folded her arms in her sleeves and began the interview. "What type of healer did you say you were?"

"I'm a village healer. From the Westlakes." Suria knew that her abilities were rather strange compared to what she had been, or what anyone would expect, so she had anticipated the question. "I haven't been formally educated in Medicine, which is why I'm missing so many spells. I know a little Evocation for self-defense, and I've picked up some other inscriptions, but it all feels so... scattered."

"Honestly, none of that matters so much to me. Do you know what I was primarily looking for?"

"No?"

"A mix of compassion and a cool head." Professor Gwaslos stared into the square of sky above them. "Inscriptions can be learned, and runic capacity can always increase. But the personality to deploy them wisely... that's difficult to teach."

"Then can I join the Medicine program?" Suria asked eagerly. "There's so much I need to learn..."

"Frankly, you're one of the most promising young students I've seen in recent years. It's really quite odd for someone with your experience to have mana reserves and runic capacity like that, but you can use it in your favor. We'd be happy to have you."

"That's wonderful." Suria breathed a sigh of relief, for a short time not needing to worry about acting at all. "Umm... I left two slots in my schedule open for this term. I hope to learn enough to gain basic competence by the end."

"Sometimes it feels like you never actually reach competence." Professor Gwaslos shook her head and then summoned a scroll and quill, on which she began writing. "To start we'll put you in Fundamentals of Medicine I - all students in the Medicine department take that series of courses. But if you're feeling ambitious, perhaps we can find something specific to you..."

They discussed several available options for young students. Suria was sorely tempted by a class called Battlefield Medicine, since it seemed likely that she would end up in violent situations again, but eventually chose another called Emergency Healing. That would give her rough and ready spells that might keep her alive, and hopefully would be enough to save Rije.

And then it was done. Suria was enrolled in the Medicine program at Darkmoon University. Her goals and problems had increased massively since she had first arrived at the university, and she didn't think she would be simply a healer anymore, but this was still something she had wanted for a very long time.

"You'll need healer's robes," Professor Gwaslos told her. "I see you've already been to the tailor?"

"I have, but..." Suria's happiness slipped a little. "How much will they cost? I'm not sure..."

"Don't think about it again." The professor waved the issue aside. "I want you working in the ward, so I'm not going to balk at a little fee. If you stay in the department you'll actually start receiving pay for your work before too long."

Most likely Suria would never reach that point, at least not in this loop, but she was glad that money wasn't going to be an obstacle anymore. She started out every loop poor, but if she gained enough magic, that wouldn't matter.