Chapter 41: The Price of a Healer

Chapter 41: Chapter 41: The Price of a Healer

The transport cut through the sky at full speed, Aria seated near the front, exhaustion from the past several days barely showing through her usual calm.

Behind her, Vesper Cruz stayed unconscious under multiple layers of suppression.

Aria raised her communicator. "Commander Rask."

Gideon’s voice came through immediately. "Report."

"Target secured. Vesper Cruz is alive, fully suppressed. Returning to headquarters, estimated arrival, eight hours."

A brief pause. "Good work." His tone shifted.

"One more thing, and it’s urgent. Tell your pilot to push the transport faster. We need Felix at headquarters as soon as possible."

Aria straightened. "Reason?"

"Five heroes in critical condition. Our healers can keep them stable, nothing more. We’ve got the high-tier potions ready, but we’re running out of time on this." His voice sharpened. "Get him here fast."

"Understood." The line cut, and she turned straight toward the cockpit. "Push it. Headquarters, now."

The pilot glanced back. "Understood." His hands moved over the controls. "Everyone, seatbelts."

The transport surged forward.

---

"Why the rush?" Mira asked from the back.

Aria turned. Mira was sitting beside Felix, who’d already fallen asleep. "Healers need him. Five heroes are in critical condition."

Mira nodded quietly, then noticed his seatbelt had come loose and reached over to fasten it properly.

"Let him sleep."

"He’ll need the energy," Aria said, and the transport kept racing on.

---

Four hours later it touched down, and Felix was awake and moving the instant the doors opened.

"How bad?"

Aria didn’t get a word out before he was already reading the answer off her face. "Medical facility," she said anyway.

He nodded, and the next instant he was gone.

*BOOM*

The distance between the landing platform and the medical wing closing in under a minute. An A-rank healer was already waiting outside the emergency entrance, and relief flooded his face the second he spotted Felix.

"Felix! Hurry!" He grabbed his arm and pulled him through the doors, and what waited on the other side made Felix’s expression drop instantly.

Five heroes. Five critical patients. The first had lost his entire right arm. The second—

Felix stopped cold. Both legs were gone, and the healer working on him was pouring everything he had just to keep the man’s life force from slipping any further.

"He’s the worst of them," the healer said fast. "We’ve kept him stable, but—"

"Bring every high-tier mana potion you’ve got," Felix said, already moving in.

Deep emerald mana poured from his palm, dense enough that the air around him seemed to thicken with it.

He pressed his hand to the man’s hip and let it flood through the ruined body: tissue rebuilding, muscle, vessels, bone, nerve, faster with every passing second.

Within minutes the first leg started taking shape. Then the second. The healers around him stood frozen, watching two complete limbs form out of nothing but shattered hip joints.

His vision suddenly swam, and his body swayed hard enough that a nearby healer caught him before he went down.

"Felix!"

A potion was pressed into his hand. He drank it in one go, the dizziness easing off. He exhaled. "Next."

---

The second patient had catastrophic internal damage. Felix checked the abdomen and went serious. "The liver."

"Almost completely destroyed," the attending healer confirmed. "Lightning-based attack, most likely."

"How much did you remove?"

"None of it."

"Good." The healer looked confused, and Felix explained while gathering his mana. "If you’d cut the remaining tissue out, I’d be building the whole organ from scratch. That costs a lot more than repairing what’s left." He placed his hand over the wound. "Keep it intact."

Emerald mana poured into the damaged organ, charred tissue slowly knitting itself back together piece by piece until the liver was whole again.

His breathing had gone heavier by the time he finished, nearly a third of his mana already spent and he moved straight to the next bed without stopping to recover.

A hero with both eyes gouged out and a wound tearing from shoulder to ribs. Then a missing hand. Then half a destroyed lung.

Potion, heal, potion, heal, again and again, until the medical wing held nothing but footsteps, equipment noise, and the increasingly ragged sound of his own breathing.

The last patient finally stabilized, and Felix stepped back on shaking legs. Three empty high-tier potion bottles sat beside him, his mana drained and refilled and drained again more times than he could easily count, and it wasn’t just his reserves that were spent. His mind felt scraped completely clean.

All five patients, alive. Stabilized. Fully healed, every one of them.

"Done," he breathed, and found the nearest empty bed. He didn’t so much lie down on it as fall into it, unconscious within seconds.

---

Gideon got the report a few minutes later. All five critical heroes, fully healed. He closed his eyes for a moment and let the relief land, no casualties from the earlier incident with Seraphina.

Then a different problem surfaced in his head. Felix. And this one had the potential to get considerably messier.

He pulled up the contract on his desk. A very specific clause in it: full jurisdiction over his own assigned rehabilitation patients during the therapy period, with any significant changes discussed with him first.

Seraphina had been transferred to another team without a word to him. Her entire arrangement had been rewritten behind his back and after the plaza incident, management had gone further still, confiscating her books, and confiscating Liora’s gaming console, the one Felix had personally brought her, all under emergency security protocol.

Gideon rubbed his forehead. That alone was going to be a problem.

Then there was Vesper. Her escape hadn’t come from some outside accomplice breaking into Acheron: no rescue operation, no conspiracy, no external attack.

She’d exploited holes in the facility’s own security. That failure belonged squarely to the Association, and Felix had every right to ask why his rehabilitation work was getting restricted over a mess that had nothing to do with him.

Gideon stared at the ceiling. Management seemed to have forgotten something important.

Felix Valerius wasn’t just an exceptionally talented healer, he was one of the most valuable healers alive, a combatant in his own right, a Valerius, and, more than any of that, genuinely invested in the people he was assigned to.

Gideon had watched Seraphina’s reaction firsthand when Felix got pulled away from her. He’d watched what Liora had become since Felix started showing up.

And now management had disrupted both relationships in the same week.

He sighed. "Wonderful."

Nobody in the room answered. He glanced toward the medical wing, where Felix was still unconscious, which was, for the moment, probably the best possible outcome.

Because the second he woke up and found out everything that had happened while he was gone, the next few days were going to be very unpleasant.

Very, very unpleasant.