I Reincarnated as the World's Worst Healer

Chapter 134: How to Weaponize a Dwarf

The king snapped his fingers, and the garden was gone.

They were back in the dining hall, in the same chairs, around the same long table — though the feast had not returned.

Only the gray dust of it remained, a faint outline of where roast and fruit had been before his footsteps rotted them to powder. The king, however, had changed.

The cold theatrical menace of the porch and the garden had drained away, and what sat at the head of the table now was something almost relaxed. Almost fond.

"Do you know," he said, lacing his pale fingers together, "how long it has been since someone beat me at one of my own games?"

"Given the state of your social calendar," Ebony said, "I’m going to guess a while."

"Centuries," he said, ignoring the jab with the serenity of a man who had enjoyed it. "Centuries, little Visitor.

They come, they’re clever for an evening, and they lose, and I plan a wedding or a funeral depending on my mood." He smiled, and for once there was nothing predatory in it. "You took the rose.

Fairly — well. Cleverly, which is better than fairly and far rarer. I’ll be glad to give you your army. I’m a great many unpleasant things, but I keep my wagers. It’s practically the only thing holding the kingdom together."

"A king of his word." Ebony leaned back. "And here I had you pegged as the type to add a clause in tiny print at the bottom."

"Oh, I considered it." He sounded genuinely regretful.

"But your dwarf’s blood-pact protects you from harm, and one does so hate to read the small print of one’s own contracts. Tedious." He waved it off. "No. You won. Take your prize and go save your doomed little friends, and do try to come back alive so we can do this again."

"You’re a strange man."

"I’m not, strictly speaking, a man at all. But I appreciate the effort."

He reached into the folds of his black robe and drew something out, and held it across the table to her in one pale palm.

It was a skull. Small — small enough to sit comfortably in her hand — delicate and pale, of no creature Ebony could have named at a glance.

She took it, and the moment she got a proper look at it her flippancy evaporated. She turned it over once, twice, peering at the joins of it, the size of it, the faint markings etched across the bone. Her breath caught.

"...Is this level one?" she asked, almost afraid to. "Or two?"

"Three," the king said.

"Three." Ebony nearly came out of her chair. She held the little skull up to the light, turning it this way and that, examining every contour with the focus of someone who had absolutely not expected to be holding something like this today.

Hrazfel watched this performance with mounting bafflement. "It’s a skull," he said flatly. "A wee little skull off some wee little thing. Why in the seven pits are you stroking it like it’s a sack of gold?"

"Because it is a sack of gold, you uncultured raisin." Ebony angled it toward him and tapped the small symbol carved into the brow.

"This is a fae skull. And not just any fae — see this mark, right here, on the forehead? This is the skull of a Fae King."

Hrazfel squinted. "And that means?"

"It means," the king cut in smoothly, clearly enjoying himself, "that inside that little skull are hundreds — thousands — of bound spirits.

A whole court of them, sealed in the bone. An army you can carry in your pocket." He laced his fingers again. "Crack it open at the right moment and the spirits pour out and possess whatever’s in front of them.

An entire castle, paralyzed where they stand — for seconds. Perhaps minutes, if you’re lucky and the garrison’s weak-willed."

"And even the low-ranked ones," Ebony added, still turning the skull over reverently, "don’t just stun. They take full control.

You can make a whole fortress of guards turn around and kill each other before they understand what’s happening to them." She let out a slow, disbelieving breath.

"(A pocket army. He wasn’t being poetic. He gave me an actual pocket army.)"

"You see," the king said pleasantly, "I really am generous, when properly entertained."

Ebony closed her fingers carefully around the skull and, for the first time, dropped the irony entirely. "Thank you," she said. "I mean it. This — this might actually save them."

"Then we’re square." He rose, and the hem of his robe stirred the dust of his ruined dinner. "And you’ll always be welcome here, little Visitor. Knock on any of my doors. I’d very much like to play again sometime — next time perhaps with stakes you’ll actually have to sweat over."

A sly tilt of the hat. "The wedding offer remains open indefinitely, of course."

"I’ll keep it in mind right next to all my other nightmares."

"Charming."

He led them out of the hall and down a corridor of black stone, past the great room full of mirrors — each one a window onto somewhere else in the world — until he stopped before one whose glass showed a forest under deep snow, pale and silent and lit by an ordinary gray daylight that Ebony hadn’t seen in what felt like a very long time.

"This one opens at the border of your mountain," the king said. "The very hexagon your Eclipse friends have made their nest. Step through, and you’ll be at the foot of it — close enough to see what you’ve gotten yourself into, far enough that they won’t see you arrive."

He gestured at the snow beyond the glass. "From here you’re on your own. My dead don’t cross into that territory. The Eclipse and I have an understanding, and the understanding is that we pretend the other doesn’t exist."

"Thank you. Again." Ebony stepped toward the mirror.

"Do come back," the king said behind her, "if you live."

"Your hospitality is overwhelming."

She stepped through. The glass gave like cold jelly, clinging and dragging, and then she was on the other side, boots sinking into snow, gray sky overhead — real sky, sunless and overcast but not that suffocating red — and a wind that smelled of pine and ice.

Hrazfel came through a moment later, grumbling, brushing himself down.

They stood at the foot of an enormous mountain.

It rose ahead of them and up, and up, vanishing into a band of low cloud, its lower slopes black rock and dark pine, its heights lost in white. Somewhere up in that cloud was the thing they’d come for.

"So." Hrazfel planted his hands on his hips and craned his neck back.

"What’s the grand plan, then? Because it’s plain as day the lair’s up top — fortresses always are. And if we go strolling up the slope like a pair of sightseers, they’ll pick us off from range long before we’re in reach. Arrows, spells, whatever the Eclipse fancies. We’ll be pincushions on a hillside."

"(He’s right.)" Ebony studied the mountain, chewing it over. "(Frontal approach is suicide. Long sightlines, high ground, no cover. They’d see us coming for an hour.)"

She didn’t have a complete plan, if she was honest. But she had one thing the situation kept insisting she use, and ignoring it was starting to feel stupid.

"We have a dragon," she said.

Hrazfel followed her gaze to the red dragon waiting at the treeline — the trafficker’s adolescent beast, with little Stor still asleep and coiled around Ebony’s neck like a scarf. The dwarf’s face did something complicated.

"...I don’t like where this is going," he said.

"You will." She was already walking toward the dragon. "Or you won’t. Either way, it’s the plan."

They climbed onto the red dragon’s back, and it heaved itself into the gray sky, beating upward in wide spirals, higher and higher above the hexagon until the mountain’s flanks dropped away beneath them and the wind howled thin and cold.

Ebony peeled the sleeping hatchling gently from around her neck and set him in the curve of the red dragon’s shoulder.

"You’re staying with the big one for this part," she told Stor softly.

The little storm dragon blinked awake, golden eyes confused. "I’ll be back. And listen to me, this is important—" she tipped his chin up with one finger

"—do not try to eat him. He is not breakfast. He is a colleague. We don’t eat colleagues."

Stor yawned, considered the red dragon with naked appetite, and then — grudgingly — curled back up. Ebony decided to take that as a yes.

"All right." She turned to Hrazfel, the wind whipping her hair. "Time to jump."

"Time to what."

"Jump. Off the dragon. Down onto the fortress."

"I want to register," Hrazfel said, with the dignity of a man clinging very hard to a dragon’s spine at altitude, "that I am deeply uncomfortable with this."

"It’s fine!" Ebony had to half-shout over the wind. "My magic boosts resilience — yours too, by extension, while we’re pact-bound. The fall won’t kill you. And think about it: two bodies dropping out of the sky like a pair of bombs, straight into the middle of their fortress? It’s the perfect surprise. They’ll never see it coming, because nobody sane does this."

"Nobody sane is the operative phrase!"

"When we land," Ebony pressed on, "first priority is the lower levels. That’s where they’ll be holding the prisoners — dungeons are always at the bottom. We find Lucian, Daniel, Veronica, and your men, and we work our way up from there. Got it?"

Hrazfel exhaled a long, miserable breath, and squared his shoulders, and shuffled toward the edge of the dragon’s back with the air of a man walking to the gallows.

"Got it. Lower levels first. Find the prisoners. Fine. Fine. Let’s get this lunacy over with."

"Oh — one more thing." Ebony said it lightly, almost as an afterthought. "I forgot to mention. My resilience boost? It’ll keep you alive through the landing. Just you."

Hrazfel went very still at the edge. "...And you?"

"Oh, I’d die instantly. Splat. Couldn’t survive that drop in a hundred years." She smiled at him, bright and cheerful and absolutely without mercy.

"So you go first. You hit the courtyard, you make a magnificent scene, everybody runs to gawk at the screaming dwarf who fell out of the sky — and once they’re all distracted looking at you, I float down nice and easy on the dragon. Brilliant, isn’t it?"

"You—" Hrazfel’s face purpled. "You absolute — that’s why you brought me! That’s the whole—"

"Happy landings, old man!"

And Ebony planted her boot squarely against his chest and shoved.

Hrazfel went off the dragon’s back with a roar that the wind tore to shreds, tumbling and bellowing every curse in two languages, plummeting down through the cold gray air toward the fortress hidden in the cloud below — a furious, flailing, perfectly aimed opening move.

Ebony leaned over the edge to watch him go, one hand shielding her eyes.

"(Three... two...)" She grinned. "(Showtime.)"