I Reincarnated as the World's Worst Healer

Chapter 127: Storm in a Cradle

Ebony watched Hrazfel vanish into the trees, and she didn’t have the time to hate him for it.

The dragon was winding up. The tremor in the ground was climbing, the pressure on her skin building toward something, and the rational part of her — the part that had kept her alive through a year of this world — was already flipping through everything she knew like a deck of cards, fast, looking for the one that mattered.

"(Think. Think. Storm dragon, newborn, can’t reason with it, can’t outrun it, can’t out-muscle it — what does it want. It’s hungry. It wants to feed. So what does a creature made of lightning want to eat?)"

The card came up.

"(My shield.)"

Her thunder shield. It was wrecked — cracked down the boss, the rim split, three campaigns of abuse finally catching up to it — but it was still charged. It still held thunder essence soaked into the metal from every time she’d channeled through it. To a thing that ate lightning, that broken shield wasn’t scrap. It was a meal.

"(Two ways through this. Feed it the shield and pray it’s enough to take the edge off the hunger. Or burn it down with purifying fire — and to do that I have to land a hand on it, which means closing to melee range with an S-class lightning dragon, which is just an elaborate way to commit suicide.)"

So. The shield.

Ebony turned and ran.

Across the clearing, Lucian saw her bolt — saw the unflappable healer who held swords inside her own body just turn and sprint — and his stomach dropped before he even understood why. Then he saw what was behind her.

The white-and-gold shape, the yellow eyes, the lightning crackling off newborn scales, and every drop of color left his face.

"Storm dragon — !"

He left his hounds where they stood and ran.

The pack held the line behind them, twelve wooden guardians throwing themselves at the thing, and the dragon snapped at them with childish, ferocious delight — but neither elf nor healer stayed to watch how that went.

There are spectacles a person survives by not witnessing, and a newborn storm dragon discovering it can eat is high on the list.

"How." Lucian drew level with her, legs pumping. "How does this keep happening to you. We were walking. We were having a nice walk."

"It was the dwarf!" Ebony shot back between breaths. "He cracked an egg in his hand like a maniac and left — it’s his fault, not mine, file your complaint with him —"

"He’s gone!"

"Then it’s nobody’s fault and we keep running!"

"We should kill it." Lucian said it grimly, ducking a branch. "You know we should. A storm dragon loose in this forest — it’ll level the whole territory inside a month. Everything that lives here dies. The merciful thing, the responsible thing, is to put it down now while it’s small —"

"It’s an S-class!"

"It’s the size of a cat!"

"It’s a cat that just punched a tunnel through a forest with its nose, Lucian!" Ebony vaulted a fallen log without breaking stride. "We are not killing it, we are feeding it, and if you have a better plan than the one I’m running toward I would genuinely love to hear it in the next thirty seconds!"

Lucian did not have a better plan. He ran.

They crashed into the camp still arguing.

Daniel was already on his feet, axes in hand, drawn by the noise — and Veronica was upright too, pale and unsteady but alert, her cat-bright eyes snapping to the treeline.

Kanary, against all reason, was still flat on her bedroll, sound asleep, snoring with the deep contented rhythm of a girl who had earned it.

"What — " Daniel started.

"Storm dragon, newborn, S-class, hungry, incoming." Ebony dropped to her pack and tore it open, throwing gear aside. "Don’t ask, don’t admire it, just move."

Daniel’s whole face lit up like a child’s. "A dragon? An actual — Ebony, we should keep it! Do you know what a dragon is worth, do you know what a dragon could do for us, we could —"

"The first thing we are keeping," Ebony said, hauling the broken shield out of the pack, "is our own lives. We can discuss your pet collection if we’re alive in five minutes."

The sky lit up.

The dragon came down out of it like a thrown bolt — a ball of white lightning dropping straight into the middle of the camp — and the impact detonated.

Everyone went down. Light, noise, the smell of scorched air, the whole world a white blank for a half second, bedrolls flung, the fire scattered, five people knocked flat in a ringing daze.

Ebony came up first, because Ebony always came up first, the broken shield clutched in both hands.

The dragon shook itself out of the crater it had made and looked at her, and there was no hesitation in it. It chose her. It launched.

She had one move and she made it. As the thing closed, jaws gaping, she jammed the shattered halves of the thunder shield straight into its open mouth.

The dragon bit down.

And for a moment — a beautiful, hopeful moment — it worked. The creature’s eyes flickered as its jaws crushed the metal, and it began to eat, to draw the thunder essence out of the wrecked shield, devouring the charge soaked into every fracture. The searing yellow of its eyes dimmed. The tremor in the ground eased. The hunger, for one breath, looked like it might be answered.

Then it finished the shield.

And it was still hungry. Less — but not enough. The eyes brightened again, not all the way, but enough, and the small body coiled, and the lightning began to gather in its throat for another breath.

It reared back to loose it point-blank into Ebony’s face.

"Shit —" was all she had time to say to her own imminent death.

"Shield!"

{{Water Magic: Pillar of the Ocean}}

The voice was Kanary’s — awake, on her feet, one hand thrown forward, hair wild from sleep and eyes wide with the specific clarity of someone yanked out of a dream straight into a crisis. Between Ebony and the dragon, the ground erupted upward in a single massive column of water, a pillar as thick as a tree trunk and twice as tall, slamming up out of nowhere to take the breath full-on.

The lightning hit the pillar.

The water took all of it — and there was too much.

The charge that should have grounded out instead overloaded the whole structure, the unstable newborn power more than the water could swallow, and the pillar exploded, a burst of steam and electrified spray that blew across the camp and knocked everyone back a second time.

Ebony staggered up through the steam, soaked, ears ringing for the third time in an hour.

The dragon was already inhaling again.

"(No time. No shield. No mana to spare. One play left and it’s insane.)"

She found Kanary through the steam, met her eyes, and shouted the question that her whole survival now hung on:

"Kanary! The Armor of the Ocean — do you know it? Can you cast it?"

Kanary’s face went through confusion, then recognition, then pure alarm as she understood exactly what Ebony was about to ask her to wear it for.

"I — yes! I know it! But — Ebony, you’re not — that’s insane, you want me to —"

"To survive," Ebony said, already moving toward the dragon, "sanity sometimes has to die first."

The dragon didn’t wait for them to finish arguing about its future.

It loosed another breath — a forking white lash of lightning that ripped across the camp toward Ebony — and this time it was Lucian who answered. He drove both hands at the ground and a thick lattice of roots tore up between Ebony and the dragon, woven dense as a shield wall, and the lightning slammed into it.

The wood blackened and split where the bolt struck, smoke pouring off the ruined roots, but it held the half-second it needed to hold, and the breath scattered harmlessly into the dirt around them.

"That won’t work twice!" Lucian shouted, the roots already crumbling to char. "Whatever you’re doing, do it now!"

"Kanary!" Ebony planted her feet. "Do it!"

Kanary threw both hands forward, and the water that had blown apart from the shattered pillar answered her, gathering in a rush around Ebony’s body.

"{{Water Magic: Armor of the Sea Knight}}"

It didn’t splash over her — it built on her, layer over layer, hardening as it formed: a robust suit of deep blue armor that clung to every limb, thick at the chest and shoulders, segmented at the joints, so dense and solid it looked less like water than like sapphire poured into the shape of a knight.

It moved when she moved. It was water, and it was armor, and it was both at once.

Ebony flexed a gauntleted hand. The blue plates slid over her knuckles like they’d been forged for her.

"Good," she breathed. Then, louder, to all of them: "Listen — I can’t reach it on the ground, it’ll fry me before I land a hand on it. I need to come down on it from above, and I need it looking everywhere but up. So I need all of you. Right now. Together."

For once, nobody argued.

Veronica moved first, despite the gray pallor still on her, because this was exactly the kind of thing she was built for. She brought her hands together and her own image peeled away from her — once, twice, four times — spiritual copies of herself fanning out across the camp, each one solid enough to fool the eye, each one shouting and darting and waving to draw a hunter’s attention.

The dragon’s head snapped toward the nearest one. It breathed. The bolt blew the copy apart into dissipating light — and another Veronica was already shouting from the opposite side, and the dragon spun and breathed at that one, and the next, lightning lashing out in every direction across the clearing.

Every direction but up.

"Lucian!" Ebony ran at him. "Throw me!"

He understood instantly. Roots erupted under Ebony’s feet, coiling into a launching cradle, and Lucian whipped them skyward with everything he had — and Ebony shot up into the night above the camp, the blue armor catching the moonlight, rising over the distracted dragon as it burned another of Veronica’s ghosts to nothing.

"Daniel — your axe! Both!"

Daniel didn’t hesitate. He hurled one of his twin axes spinning across the clearing at the dragon — and the creature, catching the motion at the last instant, wrenched around and loosed its breath at the incoming blade instead, its lightning discharging sideways, away, into the trees.

It spent the bolt on the wrong target.

And it never looked up.

Ebony came down out of the dark like a dropped anchor, the second axe — the one Daniel had pressed into her hand as she passed — clutched tight, and she hit the dragon with the full weight of her fall and the blue armor and everything she had left.

The impact cratered the earth. Light and dust and a crack like the sky breaking.

When the dust thinned, Ebony was on top of it.

She had the storm dragon wrapped in one arm, crushing its jaws shut against her chest, and with the other hand she had driven the borrowed axe straight down through the dirt, burying the head of it deep into the ground beside them — an anchor, a stake, pinning them both in place.

She gripped the metal of the blade with her bare gauntlet’s palm, skin to steel.

The dragon thrashed. Its mouth was forced shut by her grip, so the lightning had nowhere to go — and it began to discharge through its own body instead, white-violet electricity crawling out across every white-and-gold scale, into Ebony, into the blue armor that sheathed her.

And the armor did exactly what she’d gambled it would do.

The water took the charge — drank it, channeled it — and ran it down through her arm, through her bare palm on the blade, down the axe, and into the earth.

She was the ground wire. She was the path of least resistance for a newborn S-class storm dragon’s full output, and her body was the part of the circuit that bled.

The pain was beyond anything she had words for.

"Heal —"

{{Life Magic: Healing}}

"— Heal — Heal —"

She screamed the command over and over, the green light flickering to life across her own body as fast as the lightning destroyed it, healing burns the instant they formed, knitting flesh that cooked and split and cooked again, a desperate frantic loop of damage and repair that kept her alive one heartbeat at a time.

Violent forks of lightning whipped off the creature’s struggling body, scarring the ground in rings around them, the whole clearing strobing white with each surge.

The dragon convulsed against her chest, furious, terrified, pouring everything it had into the girl who refused to let go.

And Ebony held on, and healed, and held on, and healed, and waited for the thing in her arms to finally, finally run out of storm.