The Heavenly Host

The peg-legged man glanced at his compatriot and came lunging at Hilda with a sickle. Hilda shook her head, dove under his poorly wielded sickle and grabbed his peg, pulling it and his leg up and to the side while infusing the leg with healing power. The man tumbled to the ground as she let go and started thrashing and screaming in pain, trying to get the peg unstrapped from his rapidly healing leg.

“Sorry about the pain, guys,” Hilda shouted. “This is healing combat, which is basically the opposite of combat healing.” She moved towards the woman who had unfurled a whip and had only been waiting for the peg-legged man to get out of her way so she could use it on Hilda.

This woman had a terrible case of — leprosy! What the...? Hilda shook her head. How in Tiernon’s worst nightmare were they allowing a leper to run around the city? It was a figurative miracle that there had not been a huge outbreak. But clearly it was leprosy; she could see the craggy skin nodules, the missing fingers from the woman’s left hand. She was blind in one eye, her right foot twisted and club-like. This one was going to need a huge rush of antibiotic mana to eliminate the bacteria and then some widespread regeneration.

This was going to hurt the beggar woman like crazy! Hilda dove and tackled the woman before she could bring her whip around. Hilda wrapped herself like a blanket around the leprous woman, essentially irradiating her whole being in healing mana while chanting multiple rituals of healing.

The woman screamed like bloody murder. “Sorry!” Hilda said, standing up to face the man with the big dagger and one eye. He was picking up his dagger from the ground; Hilda suspected he had thrown it at her and it had been deflected by her wards.

“Healing Combat,” Hilda told the man as they began to circle each other, “is like Combat Healing in that it has to be done in the middle of battle, but with Combat Healing I am rapidly healing one of my own, so while I have to work very fast and use a lot of excess mana, I can also suppress the patient’s nerve endings to numb the pain of healing too quickly.

“In the case of Healing Combat, I am in combat and don’t have the necessary links to my patient, so all I can do is shove out an excessive amount of healing mana very quickly. This leads to extremely abrupt healing and regeneration, which typically itches, tingles and overwhelms the nerves. It also taxes the body’s systems to a huge level, weakening them as their natural regenerative systems are forced into a very unnatural overdrive,” Hilda explained as she warily faced down the man with the dagger. She was not completely sure why she felt the need to explain why their healing hurt so much. Perhaps it was guilt about inflicting pain.

“In any event, you are going to be healed,” Hilda told the one-eyed man with the dagger. “You don’t have to like it, but it’s going to happen. We can do this the easy way or the painful way. Your choice.”

“Screw you, bitch!” The man lunged at her with his giant dagger, clearly mistaking a large target for an easy target. Hilda shook her head and stepped to her right, twisting sideways as he lunged forward and then away from where she’d stepped, deflected by her protection ritual. As he skittered by, trying to reorient after what must have seemed like a mystifying miss, Hilda brought her left palm around and slapped him hard on the eye patch, at the same time channeling a rapid ocular regeneration ritual into his head. He was about to have one nasty migraine.

The beggar dropped his dagger and grabbed his head and started screaming. Hilda quickly started chanting and extended a silence spell over the section of the alley they were in. There had already been a lot of screaming; with luck, the city guards in Freehold were as lax as they were in most cities.

The man started to stagger away; Hilda could not allow that. She quickly ran after him and grasped him by the waist while chanting a ritual to rapidly clear and clean his skin. Of course, that meant getting rid of some nasty bacterial infections and a few viruses. This was really going to hurt.

The beggar dropped to his knees, frantically scratching at his itching skin. This was not going to help skin regeneration. Hilda quickly performed a mild paralysis ritual to slow him down. It would not completely paralyze him, but he would not be able to scratch at himself effectively and disturb the healing.

Thinking better of her previous actions, she did the same for the other beggars, who were also writhing, the exception being mister hacking lung, who needed to continue to clear out his lungs. After they were stabilized, she cast a Ritual of Unnoticement on their area to keep prying eyes from seeing too much. It was time to roll up her sleeves and get to work properly healing her new patients.