SSS-Ranked Surgeon In Another World: The Healer Is Actually OP!

If he knew who this being was, would he have asked in the first place?!

The logic of that was airtight and the being knew it and had answered anyway, which meant the answer wasn’t meant to inform him. It was meant to do something else.

He just didn’t know what yet.

’What I want aligns with what you want.’

That one was worse. Because it was too deliberate to be dismissed. A being at this level , something that had reached through Velmora’s sealed spatial barrier like it was gauze, something that had crushed his aura at every height it had achieved without apparent effort , didn’t make careless statements. If it had said that, it had chosen to say that.

Which meant either it was true, or it wanted him to believe it was true.

He didn’t know which possibility unnerved him more.

Beside him, Lily had not let go of his arm. He could feel the tension in her fingers , controlled, deliberate, the grip of someone who had decided that whatever was happening, she was going to be standing right here when it finished. She wasn’t asking anymore. She had moved past asking into something quieter and more absolute.

He was grateful for it in a way he couldn’t have put into words.

’Heal.’

The aura came back. Larger. More terrifying in its scope than anything he had wielded before today.

He looked at it , not with his eyes but with whatever sense had always let him feel the edges of his own power , and he understood, with perfect clarity, that what he was holding right now would have ended almost anything he had ever faced.

He wrapped it around his mind.

Waited.

’Shatter.’

Same as the first time. Identical. As though nothing he had done had mattered at all, and perhaps more honestly , as though the being hadn’t needed to adjust. Hadn’t needed to think about it. Hadn’t needed to do anything other than decide, again, that this attempt ended the same way the others had.

He spat blood.

Kept walking.

Lily’s hand tightened on his arm, just slightly. She didn’t speak. Neither did he.

The premonition had stopped spiking. It had settled into something constant now , a low, unignorable pressure behind his sternum, like a hand pressed flat against his chest from the inside. Not warning him anymore. Just reminding him.

Something was coming.

And whatever it was, this being intended to be there when it arrived.

The cycle continued.

Build. Shatter. Heal. Build higher. Shatter again.

His aura had reached heights that should have been incomprehensible by now , he could feel the scope of it each time it returned, vast and ascending, something that rewrote the upper limit of what he understood his own power to be. And each time it came back, he tried. Each time he tried, the being ended it. The same way. With the same absence of effort that had characterized every single attempt from the first.

He had stopped counting.

Ahead of him, the familiar shape of his neighborhood had begun to resolve through the distance , rooftops, the particular quality of the light, the spatial texture of a place he had poured enough heal into that he knew it the way he knew his own heartbeat. He was close. A few minutes, no more.

Lily had not let go of his arm.

She wasn’t speaking, which was its own kind of pressure. Lily silent was Lily at her most focused, and her focus right now was entirely on him , tracking each stumble he couldn’t quite hide, each moment his stride hitched, each time he brought his hand to his face a half-second too slow. She was cataloguing. He knew her well enough to know that, and he knew that the catalogue was growing.

’Shatter.’

He caught himself on nothing but sheer will, he kept walking.

’Heal.’

Then the voice came again , and this time it carried something different. Not tone, exactly. More like a shift in the weight of the silence surrounding the words.

<I can teleport you against your will. Which is what I planned to do , to discuss things with you face to face. I want you to choose whether or not I should teleport you.>

Bruce’s jaw clenched so hard he felt it in his back teeth.

A choice. It was offering him a choice. He turned the shape of that over in his mind, looking for the edges of it, the part where the choice wasn’t actually a choice. It didn’t take long to find.

’What would happen if I say I don’t want to meet you.’

The monotonous voice shifted. Barely. But he caught it , the faint, horrible suggestion of something almost like amusement, coloring the edges of words that had no business carrying amusement.

He did not respond.

He didn’t need to. He was already guessing, already running the calculation with everything he knew about what he was dealing with , a being that had reached through Velmora’s sealed spatial barrier without disturbing it, that had shattered his aura at every height it had achieved, that had sat inside his mind for however long this had been going on with the patience of something that had decided, long before he was aware of it, how this would end. A being at that level, in the wrong temperament, could unmake this world. Not as a consequence of conflict. As an afterthought.

Velmora. Everything in it. Everyone in it.

Sophie. Lucy. Every person he had stood in front of, every life he had healed, every corner of this world he had quietly decided was worth protecting.

All of it, dependent on whatever this being was willing to allow.

His teeth stayed clenched. The fury was there , hot and specific and entirely useless , and he held it where it was because losing it would cost him something he couldn’t afford to spend.

He looked at Lily.

She was watching him with her jaw set and her eyes too steady, the expression she wore when she had already accepted that something was happening and had decided her only available response was to stay next to him and wait. He had raised her better than he’d raised himself in some ways.

He made the decision before he’d finished thinking it through.

He brought the aura up , not to shield his mind, not this time , and wrapped it around her instead. She made a small sound of surprise as he lifted her with it, pulling her against his side, and then he drove his focus downward, into the fabric of the space in front of him

This was what heal could do, at the level he had pushed it to. Space was not empty. It was structured , cellular, almost, vast and precise and woven through with the kind of order that most people never thought to look for. He had learned to look. Learned to press against it the way he pressed against damaged tissue , finding the seams, the boundaries, the places where one unit of space ended and another began.

He found them.

And he tore. He used his heal on the cell of space tearing through it…

The void opened.

He moved through the void. Coordinates already fixed in his mind , his home, the front path, the particular spatial signature of the gate he had healed so many times it was practically part of him.

He came through.

The spatial aftermath bloomed outward from the point of entry , jagged, turbulent, the fluctuations of someone who had done this exactly twice spreading through the local space like cracks through ice. He turned heal on it immediately, working through the instability before it could propagate, smoothing each fracture back toward coherence. It took longer than it should have. He was getting better at this, but better was relative, and the mana it cost him sat on top of everything else he had already spent.

Seeing the void for the second time made him understand something, he has been teleported by Vaelith before but haven’t seen the void back then because Vaelith’s Teleportation wasn’t true teleportation, he understood now, had understood it the moment he’d done this himself for the first time. Vaelith’s method was a space swap, simple and instantaneous, contained entirely within its own domain which is the entirety of Velmora, this was why Duke didn’t notice any fluctuations back when Vaelith teleported him and Bruce for the first time…

Bruce’s teleportation is not the clean, effortless swap that Vaelith used . He was forcing himself through the actual substrate of space, through the realm between places, and the cost of it was immediate and total.

Sighing, He set Lily down.

She found her footing and turned to look at him with an expression that had moved, finally, fully past the pretense of calm.

“Go inside,” he said. “Stay with Mum.”

“Where are you going big brother.”

“There’s something I need to handle.” He made himself smile. He wasn’t sure how well it worked. “It’s important.”