Divinity Rescue Corps
117- It’s Happening

The ‘objects’ in question were all tools, as it turned out. We’d found the awl, the adze, and the pickaxe, and in transporting them, I had created a magical mallet. The search turned up a shovel, a belaying pin used to anchor sailors to the ship’s lines so they didn’t fall to their deaths, a screwdriver, a hammer, an adjustable wrench, a cake server, a flat metal slidey thing used to grab large trays out of huge, deep ovens—which is called a peel if you can believe it— and more. We’d found stonemason’s tools, like the chisel, woodworker’s tools, like a hand-cranked drill, leatherworking tools like a super thick needle… shears for sheep, bellows for stoking the smith’s fire, and a whole host of blacksmithing tools.

And then there was the anvil. This thing must’ve been easily two hundred pounds or more. Hopefully it wasn’t going to be a problem.

Initial tests showed that the Guardian magic shield could not, in fact, be used to scoop up and toss divine objects like we’d hoped. Well, they could be used once and threatened immediate divinity poisoning. Isabelle went right over to scold Ivy for moving the shovel about ten feet and nearly passing out from the effort.

It fell to Shakindria and I to handle the situation.

Shakindria reminded me telepathically that underground, we wouldn’t need to catch them. Still, it felt disrespectful to scoop them up with telekinesis and huck them down the hallway. She sighed and assented, but I could tell she was pleased I wanted to keep us together rather than separate us. My job would be to stand there, look pretty, give her access to Healer’s Resistance, and feed her a series of potions to help recover her stamina.

And also slowly work myself into a lather considering how to help her escape the confines of the city. She had been so good to me and my team, and it felt like a betrayal to just leave her here.

Barring the gnawing guilt, working like this meant at least a week of slowly transporting objects down halls. And since I’d set out four day workweeks with two days in between, it was going to be quite some time at the task.

“Unless…” Cinzy said. All eyes turned to her, which of course she liked. That attention-grabbing was her style of doing things, and the self-satisfied smile that appeared confirmed it. “We’ve been doing Jacoby’s team a lot of favors lately, and I think we could call in one of those favors.”

I doubted it.

“What did you have in mind?”

“They have a number of Wizards, and those Wizards should have a short-distance teleport spell. Working together, you could toss those items directly to the surface, to a predetermined spot. You treated all the drunken inhabitants, right? We shouldn’t have any free roamers.”

Not only had we done that, but we’d been working on setting up the twelve workaholic craftspeople in their own shops outside of town. We weren’t yet fully ready for all of them, because Trent was only one man, but once he had workshops ready, we’d make sure there were no more free-roaming wakeful townsfolk at all. They’d all be comatose after that.

There were still the tireless maniac workers, but they kept to certain paths. These we could avoid.

Cinzy finished up her amazing plan. “If we finish taking the craftspeople out of town, there will be nobody to accidentally trip or bash into with killer divine objects.”

“If you can do that, I wouldn’t mind Shakindria tossing them,” I said.

“We’ll powwow on how to make the negotiations fruitful,” Cinzy promised with a wink and smile. I definitely saw a knowing smile cross Regina’s face, and she elbowed Tara before whispering something in her ear.

While I was glad Cinzy was feeling better after our little session the other night, I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of Drat, Alan or Trent figuring out how much action I was getting. I knew Trent had a Nakamamon he was seeing in town, while Alan mostly just convalesced with the help of some Nakamamon from the refugee camp—

Wait, were they both getting their freak on and I didn’t know about it? I mentally dismissed Drat as impossible to know, since secrets were his whole thing and this wasn’t mission related. I’d never know with Drat and I was coming to terms with that.

We were eventually forced to have this meeting on the very outskirts of town, where the influence of the god faded and Shakindria could be within earshot. Her magical bounds were not so inconvenient logistically, but all of us felt pretty terrible that she was trapped like this. Still, she bore it with a stoicism I probably couldn’t have mustered.

“Okay,” I said, after briefing Shakindria on the plan. “That’s plan A. If we can’t get a Wizard to help teleport all these tools into one place, it’s plan B. Shakindria and I will take them one by one. It would be one or two tools a day, so anywhere from two workweeks to four. Down through the subterranean tunnels to the secret stairway—“

“Up the secret stairway will take some fancy handling,” Shakindria added. “That will add time to our task.”

“That’s way too long,” Tara complained.

“We have been here for roughly five hundred years,” Trent said.

“Yeah, well, we haven’t even talked about the anvil,” Drat said, face impassive and hands jammed in his pockets. “I have this crazy feeling this one,” he pointed at Shakindria with one thumb, “is going to be able to lift that, let alone throw it.”

She had, in fact, lifted the two of us up in the air so we could have strange and unique sex, but I didn’t feel like spilling that kind of tea at this moment, with the entire team present and listening.

“I know things are taking a long time,” I told them. “Jacoby’s team and Archie’s situation have added complications to that. However, I want you to think of this town as a single patient with a long-term ailment. We’ve all been trying to make them comfortable for a long time, while we run some tests and find out the best way to go about treating our patient. The key word here is patient, okay? In both senses of the word. I know magic seems like a shortcut to getting anything we want whenever we want it, but that’s not how healing works in this world, or back on earth. Slow and steady wins the race.”

They couldn’t argue with my logic, but they still didn’t love being stuck here for weeks on end with progress inching forward. Finding all these tools had been a serious morale builder, but it also made them antsy to be done with the task at hand.

“Fletcher’s right,” Cinzy said, and she must’ve used an ability on us at that point, because the only thing I remembered coming after that was the general feeling that Wow, she was so inspiring! And I’m so glad to have the amazing super genius and sexy, magnificent Bard Cinzy on my team.

It turned out she’d overcome my social resistances using Stalwart and Fierce. Oof, I hadn’t been the only one leveling.

“All right,” I said. In the unlikely event we couldn’t pry the anvil out of the floor down here, we’d just make it the meeting point.”

When the team worked together, we’d accomplished an absolute ton in a very short time. For now, Cinzy had convinced all of us we’d done an amazing job and we could expect more amazing progress soon.

It was time to go to work.

***

Although we were getting the bucket line started at dawn, the girls and I were up in the dead hours before dawn, collecting up and replanting more blue crocuses, more Grandfather’s Beard, and more morning dewdrop.

Morning dewdrops get their name from the way the flower looks: hanging straight down on a bent stalk, the flower faces the ground. The petals are raindrop—or dewdrop—shaped, along with the leaves.

We collected hundreds of these, and I set Vellenia to the task of drying out the Grandfather’s Beard while we got the water boiling for the distilled blue crocuses we already had from the night before. We also started up another batch. Vellenia could handle the stirring and the mana addition even though she wasn’t a Healer, because of the bond.

Now, I’d gained aspect resistances. Vellenia couldn’t hurt me or affect me with her aspect-based elemental powers, and I had considerable resistances to those aspects from other Nakamamon. I also gained a power from both of her aspects.

She, in turn, gained abilities from me.

Healer’s Assistant: You may add mana into a Treatment or Cure that your bond mate has worked on. You gain 3 levels in the appropriate skills to do so when assisting your bond mate with healing.

Apothecary: You gain xp to your species or class for assisting your bond mate in Healer-related tasks.

Pleasure’s Bounty: Each time you engage with your bond mate sexually, you gain experience points to your species or class. The amount gained is based upon your relationship level with your bond mate.

O Face: each orgasm you or your bond mate achieve while engaging with your bond mate grants additional Relationship points. Each one grants an increasing chance of regaining a lost Token. Once a Token is regained, the chance reverts back to zero.

I had a feeling that the abilities were more watered down they could be, since I had two classes. The Healer powers could’ve been stronger, had I only the one class. I didn’t dislike the Pleasure Seeker abilities, far from, but I did wish they had a better Healer ability for times like this when I needed a whole lot in a very short amount of time.

It would have to do. My beautiful assistant got to work adding mana to the blue crocuses in order to distill them for what came next.

By the time people started rousing and eating a hastily prepared breakfast, we had the first punch bowl full of the finalized treatment ready.

Treatment check (Potions): You have the Treatment (Potions) skill at level 4, Develop Cure (medium) at level 4 , while Ingenuity is at level 9. Other applicable skills are unranked. This check is Extreme, requiring 10 successes. Would you like to spend 5 Tokens* for an automatic success?

Total Tokens: 4 Ingenuity and 7 Free Tokens.

Note: This check falls under the Hard At Work special ability.

I tried to go it alone with my 17 levels, and ended up with an incredible 7 successes… which was sadly still not enough. Still, I’d neared a 50% success rate, which was practically unheard of.

So I took the free retry from Hard At Work and spent the 5 Tokens. This blasted through the remainder of my Ingenuity Tokens and one of my Free ones, so I was once again silently thankful for almost killing myself on that first day in this new world.

Success! You have crafted a magical treatment for a mental ailment!

“That’s right,” I told the system.

We had several hundred people working for us, but that number was about to skyrocket. All I had to do was, for almost half an hour, allow the Nakamamon who were assisting to grab the use of Healer’s Resistance by spending their own Ingenuity Tokens. After all, I didn’t have any left. It was one flare of orange energy coalescing into a leafy flower pattern over the head after another, after another.

My team, who all had Divine Resistance, would be roving up and down the line to make sure everyone stayed under the aegis of Healer’s Resistance. The Guardians had their own special abilities for taking some of that on themselves, which they would do if necessary. The plan was for them to take the burden onto themselves, sprint out of town, and get a spoonful of my treatment.

“Okay people!” Cinzy called. “You were given your assignments yesterday! If you feel the effects wearing off, tell your team leader and get out of town as fast as you can. No one drops unconscious today, okay?”

The moment the last person got their dose of Healer’s Resistance with complementary cool orange halo of floral incandescence, I leveled up.

“That’s what I’m talking about!” I called, grinning at the congratulations message. You have reached level 24 in your Healer class!

Level 24: +4 skill points

I immediately threw a skill point into Potions, one into Medium, one into Large, and then the last… that one would need to go into Develop Cure.

That still didn’t put me over the edge into level 25, which was something I now needed. A punch bowl’s worth of potion would handle healing up a good number of folks, perhaps 500 if we rationed the cure a bit. We could use one of the metal straws like a pipette, clamping a finger over the end in order to get a bit from leaking out. Antigravity at its finest. Vellenia had been blown away when I showed her this trick.

Vellenia and Alan were in charge of administering the cure, since Alan had gone and gotten himself divinity poisoned. They raced to open the mouths of all these weird creatures being brought to them, get the straw in there, dump the potion, and clamp their mouths shut so they could swallow it.

Fifteen seconds per patient had been a pipe dream. Crafting a potion enough for thousands of patients had been just as insanely ambitious. This wasn’t going to work…

Cinzy was in charge of using their Bard abilities to get batches of people un-confused and over to me where they could get Healer’s Resistance.

They loudly called out the situation: they had just been awoken through the efforts of a dedicated Healer; see that guy over there? He’s the Healer in question. Once you interview with Alan about your stats, you need to get Healer’s Resistance from that very same Healer, head into town to join the bucket line, and hand your fellow townsfolk down the line until they got here, just like you. If your Durability or Ingenuity was only level 1, you should stick around here.

The people came to me while I was in the middle of getting together the second batch of potion, spending their own Ingenuity Tokens and head into town.

It wasn’t happening fast enough. I didn’t have enough mana. I couldn’t divide my concentration well enough between consenting to give these people my ability and threading my mana down into the potion. It was a conveyor belt and it was speeding up.

What I hadn’t counted on was the acceleration.

The whole process began to speed up as more and more people awoke from their comatose state. Cinzy got them up and out of their stupor, Alan got them processed and sent them off to where they needed to go, and pretty soon where some of them needed to go was right back to Cinzy and Alan, in order to process incoming patients. Vellenia came over and stirred the potion while I gave everyone Healer’s Resistance, over and over and over again. Dozens turned into hundreds, until the Potions check came once again. When that happened, I dashed from the Verdant Rejuvenation garden to where Vellenia was finishing up her task of adding mana.

Treatment check (Potions): You have the Treatment (Potions) skill at level 4, Develop Cure (medium) at level 4 , while Ingenuity is at level 9…

I tried, and once again failed, to whip up the gigantic batch of potion just with skill alone. I had only 6 Free Tokens left, and that would take care of this batch…

Success! You have crafted a magical treatment for a mental ailment!

I breathed out a hefty sigh. Using my abilities hundreds of times wasn’t as taxing as simply pressing Yes hundreds of times in the UI while also trying to channel mana. Now I no longer had any Tokens to make the next… four batches.

I kept right on pressing Yes mentally. I had already pressed it some two or three hundred times, but that meant we weren’t even a quarter of the way done. Exhaustion was already threatening and it wasn’t even ten o’clock in the morning…

I was able to slog through another several hundred more Yes’s to grant people the use of my ability before I suddenly froze.

Congratulations! You have reached level 25 in Healer.

You have graduated from Apprentice to Journeyman!

“Guys…” I muttered. No one heard me. It didn’t matter. “It’s happening…”

This is Christopher muttering to himself.

Search the lightnovelworld.cc website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.