Level Up Saintess

The Bishop, 3 priests, and Chella, all set out amongst the crowd of rescued prisoners, leaving me to scan whomever I could see and try to pick out the worst looking ones who seemed like they could die any second. Sadly, or luckily, whichever you choose, there were only about 5 people here who looked really awful, like they were totally going to kick the bucket any second… which was less than the 8 that I remembered seeing earlier. I wanted to hope some of the people who the Bishop had healed before coming here were actually some of the missing ones, but judging from what I remembered of them, I really doubted it.

…I’ll have to give the Goddess a small prayer for them, once all of this is finished.

The first person I went to was absolutely covered in what seemed to be his own blood, with what looked to be a bunch of cuts and rips from being whipped, scattered all over his body. He was horribly pale, like he didn’t have enough blood inside of him, which, you know, made sense. He really looked like he should have been dead already, but judging from the two tattered dog ears atop his head, he must have survived this long just from the sheer vitality of the beastfolk. If he was just a simple human instead, well…

Before I could think about anymore what ifs, I started using [Greater Heal] on him.

Maybe it’s possible that a regular [Heal] would have been enough, but considering the fact that I could see bone in some places, I was pretty certain that this was gonna take a lot more oomph than a simple [Heal] would be able to provide. With the extent of his injuries, even the [Greater Heal] that I’d used after hesitantly placing my hand on some of his cuts was taking its sweet time to patch him up. It made sense though, since he was one of the most gravely and extensively injured people that I’d ever had to heal... If all it took was a little extra time for this man to be saved, then I would gladly give it.

After a few minutes, it seemed like the wounds were finally all cleared up, although it was hard to see for sure through all the blood. At least his breathing has returned to normal, and I appraised him and made sure that it didn’t list any more injuries to his health, although I had to do my best to ignore any of the status implications he had for now. Really, this would have been so much simpler if I could have just cleaned him off… Oh well, I have to work with what I have available right now.

I gave the now much more peacefully resting man a few gentle pats and whispered a few words of congratulations and encouragement to him before I moved on to the next patient.

~~~

Okay, so it didn’t take me long to figure out why the Bishop hadn’t been able to fix up the first guy I healed at all before coming here, despite how absolutely almost dead he looked.

While I was slowly taking care of my second patient’s internal injuries to her organs, I took a quick look around and studied how everyone else was doing. And from what I saw, unlike when I use my heals, where I just have to touch the affected spot and one [Heal] could fix every bruise on a body, they all had to focus on healing each and every single wound individually. I mean, even if I didn’t know exactly where the wound was and just did an unfocused heal, like I’d just had to do on this poor woman, that was only a one-time cast for just triple the cost, which apparently they also weren’t able to do. What they had to do was all terribly inefficient, both time-wise and also for their energy. What I’d thought would have been an easy task for Chella, what with a [Heal] only costing 5 energy and a [Cure] only costing 10, was actually quite tough.

As she’d shown me before in the bath, Chella definitely knew how to use both skills, but it seemed a bit slower than it should have, and sometimes her healing didn’t reach as wide of an area as she might have intended, and she had to go back and use [Heal] again just to finish off the job from her first one. At least she didn’t have that problem with using [Cure], just from the skill’s nature, but that still meant that she was blowing double the energy on something that should have been crazy simple, which was no good.

It wasn’t just her either, for the record; Plenty of the other priest’s heal skills were also kinda sloppy in one way or another. Sometimes they would miss an injury, or they wouldn’t notice that something needed curing, or just their simple use of their skills was subpar. And any time the priests would use [Greater Heal] for something, it took ages, I swear. For instance, the time it took for me to heal up the first guy I’d seen, who was horrifically over-injured and took a while to fix, was about how long it took for them just to heal a broken bone in a finger. The Bishop, true to his title, seemed to be much better at healing, and his technique was very sound and well practiced. But just like the others, he could only fix one injured spot at a time, instead of making it a full body thing like I could. It’s no wonder he wasn’t able to take care of the man who was covered with dozens of cuts and rips, that being the case.

Well anyways, I spent way too long hovering over the second lady pretending I was still healing her stomach, and I felt mega guilty once I realized all the time that I’d wasted while looking at everyone else.

Moving on, the third person I saw was another beast woman, this time a super cute bunny-girl whose legs had been chopped off from the mid-shin down. She looked like she was only a teenager, which somehow made the scene all the more tragic, although I suppose it would have been tragic no matter what age she was. I’m sure they must have done it just because they were afraid of her running away; Rabbit beastkin are known for their impressive speed and cute looks, after all.

So the problem here is that I’m going to have to heal her legs one at a time, since apparently [Regenerative Heal] doesn’t work as conveniently as the other two heals do. Or maybe it does, and I just haven’t understood the spell well enough, just like how all the other priests in this room can’t use their heals on as large of an area as me. Either way, since I don’t have any better options, I’ll have to use my [Regenerative Heal] twice so that I can bring both of her legs back. At first I was going to just use it unfocused, since that would have brought them both back at the same time, but considering that my energy was only about 380, it would be more cost effective to not triple the cost when I could get away with just double, even if it was slower. With heavy costs like that, I guess it's not such a big deal that I can't use it unfocused, anyways.

At least [Regenerative Heal] gave me exp for each leg, so that’s nice. Honestly, so far I haven’t really met someone who I needed to use it on multiple times, so I hadn’t expected that. Maybe it’s part of why I’m not allowed to do an unfocused heal with it? Or maybe I’m just making that up, and it can totally be done. Still, crazy that I never found any paraplegics or anything of the like up 'til now in such a dangerous world, really.

It super hurts that my energy made it down to 180 after rebuilding those legs, but at least I was already sitting on the floor when the exhaustion started kicking in again. The happy bunny-girl springing up and giddily shaking me while crying once she realized her legs were whole again was sweet, but it made me feel like I was going to barf. I’m lucky she noticed how sick I was looking before she made me pass out, for real. She helped me get back up onto my feet afterwards, but I almost immediately just plopped back down.

At least this time I landed onto one of the soft cushioned pews that filled the chapel. I could see some blood on it though, from someone who must have been laying there until they got healed, and the already nauseous feeling in my stomach grew stronger from the little bit of bloody wetness I could feel soaking onto my hand. I got up slowly and focused on my breathing for a while to try to feel better, but when I realized that it wasn’t working, I just decided to distract myself by going to my next patient.

The 4th patient was a man with extensive burn scars on his chest and neck, which seemed deep enough that they were affecting his breathing. From the sound of his wheezing breaths, he really wasn’t getting enough oxygen, and I was worried that it could have been slowly killing his brain. Honestly, I was confused why they’d even kidnapped him in the first place, but the only reason I could come up with was quite scary and sad; It’s likely that this man was very beautiful or talented, but put up too much of a fight and was burned by some kind of skill. Basically, they’d ‘ruined the merchandise’, which meant that this man was lucky to have been kept alive at all. I wonder if they’d only kept him because they knew they’d be going after me soon…

Agh, I do this all the time! I get tired and let my mind wander and I think of too many bad thoughts! I need to stick to being professional and not worrying too hard about how the people I meet became hurt the way they are. I’m sure it’ll only hurt me in the long run if I don’t try to fix this bad habit now instead of later. You don’t need to know what happened, Arissa, you just have to heal them! Just fix them up and send them on their way!

I used a simple unfocused [Greater Heal] on him, hoping to both fix his burns as well as maybe heal his possibly suffocated brain-tissue if that was allowed at all. He seemed like he fell asleep right as his breathing got better, which worried me a little bit, since I thought maybe it might not have just been due to exhaustion. I tried to use [Appraisal] on him to see if I’d missed something, but my vision swam and blurred while I was in the middle of speaking the skill, and it was all I could do to keep myself from collapsing on the floor.

Oh, right, I only have 90 energy left now...

I think percentage-wise this might actually be the lowest that my energy has ever gotten to so far.

Wow.

I guess I looked bad enough that the Bishop took notice, because he came over and gave me a quick check before he called Chella to come take me back to our room. I tried to tell him I’d be okay if he just let me sit on the steps and recover a bit more energy, but it didn’t seem like he wanted me to exhaust myself any further than I already had, and apparently Chella agreed. Although she didn’t look much better than I did, Chella still tried to prop me up and lead me away, all while she huffed out a bunch of winded sounding breaths. I certainly didn’t make things any easier for her either, since I struggled against her so that I could keep talking to the Bishop to make sure everything would be okay.

I still had 1 more person to heal that I wasn’t sure was going to make it through the night, after all.

After a lot of struggling, a bit of quiet yelling, and a lot of disgruntled sighs, I got the Bishop to agree to wake me up in a few hours, after I’d recovered enough to do some more healing. He promised me that he’d try to keep the remaining people stable, and also that he’d keep everyone from going home just yet so that I could give them a once over and make sure that everyone was really well enough to leave. I hate to say it and sound all snooty and superior, but from what I’ve seen, I can’t fully trust that the other priests didn’t miss some hidden injury or ailment, you know? I mean, literally over the past half hour I caught them making enough mistakes that I just wasn’t going to risk it. Puts a bad taste in my mouth to say it, sure, but it’s true.

…Also, well… Maybe I just wanted a chance to scrounge up whatever exp I could, you know? Can you blame me for it? There’s so many injured people in this room, and I only have 150/1400 exp right now. I’d be a fool to not try and suck every bit of exp from this situation as possible! I mean at this point it’s literally my lifeforce!

Hopefully I’ll have enough energy to do everything I need to by the time I wake up. We’ll have to see. I might cry from all the exp I’ll have to give up on, though.