Rules of Biomancy: A LitRPG Healer Fantasy

Sven had gotten very good at preparing tea for his boss. After letting the bag sit in the water for precisely three minutes, it was removed and discarded. Then came the additions. Firstly, he added two teaspoons of sugar, with a spoon-edge more on top, alongside a dash of milk. Then, after carefully moving the spoon back and forth exactly three times, Sven found a new spoon for his boss to use. Ester was very particular about the spoon not being in the teacup when he put it on her desk, for one of her bosses had commented on it two years ago.

Even if nobody but them could be found in the office with her, the comment had stuck, and she had made it clear Sven was never to make that mistake again.

Moving from the small kitchen and over to Ester's office, Sven stopped at the entrance. She didn't look at him, only speaking when he made two quick knocks on the open door.

"Put it in the usual spot," she ordered, which Sven obeyed without comment. What counted as 'the usual spot' varied wildly through the week.

On Mondays, it was the far corner, as the rest of the desk would be covered in personal accounts and reports from the southern spies. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, it would be slightly closer to the center, as the last of the paperwork was dealt with, but Thursdays and Fridays would have it be in the exact center, as the desk would be completely clean then. Not because either of them had finished emptying their backlog, but because the local and distant leaders would visit those days, and Ester refused to be seen as overworked or tired. A clean and tidy work area showed an air of control and calm.

Apparently.

Sven personally felt that the stuffed cabinet behind Ester, which threatened to burst open those days when nudged from the side, would prove the effort futile at some point, but he didn't comment. He liked having free time to work in the garden, after all, and being set to work planning out an efficient management system for two days of the week was not something he wanted to fit into their calendar.

I wonder if the sun is going to shine today.

Maybe, if Ester felt tired from the recent late nights, he could find a way to move out of the town for a few hours and laze by one of the old oaks.

A nice dream, ruined by the sudden beeping that caused his boss's writing to stop abruptly.

"Took them long enough," Ester commented, pushing away whatever letters she'd been writing to make space for a certain artifact. A small sculpture of a turtle, the size of an apple, to be exact, that had been borrowed from one of Ester's peers. From what Sven had been able to overhear, it cost more than what he earned in two years. "I was beginning to think that Oliver's men would prove useless. Sven, get the screen ready."

After pulling out the curtains to darken the room, Sven flipped the hidden switch by the bookcase. After a small sputter, a blue screen materialized in front of the desk. It was thin and mildly translucent, similar in structure to the blue screens the world could show, but this offered different information. It allowed for a two-way visual and auditory feed from kilometers away, making it possible for Ester to oversee delicate ongoing operations.

"Target spotted," rang out from the screen. A male voice, one Thomas Reed, who was the leader of this subgroup. "Sensors were tripped in location four. Moving nearby groups over to assist with clean-up. ETA is twenty-five minutes."

"Copy that," another voice added. On the screen, Sven could see the rocky area and the multitude of dwarves and humans. "Additional non-dwarven personnel are surrounding the target. Do we still go?"

Ester pressed a small button on the statue, and a click was heard through the screen.

"Kill them all," she ordered.

"Copy."

"How many do you recognize?" Ester asked Sven, shuffling through some of the buried notes. "We've seen the older man next to Hafrad before somewhere."

"Elijah Caede, Serenova's Royal Healer. I think—" Sven cut himself off, as a black beam flew through the air on the screen. A lethal shot to Hafrad's head.

"Continue," his boss ordered, unfazed by the sight as she sipped at her tea. By how she frowned a little, Sven knew he must've been too lenient on the last bit of sugar.

He found himself not caring at the sight of another dwarf losing their head.

"The larger human is Aleksi Grey, the bodyguard of the Royal Healer," Sven continued, cross-checking with his notes. During the old reports, he'd written that the larger man had no innate abilities, yet there had been signs of some form of enhancement. The green veins that now covered the man seemed to confirm that theory. "We have little history on him. Do you want me to put in an order with the spies?"

"Set it to a low-priority, since it won't matter for anything but archival documentation soon," Ester replied, leaning forward a little as she squinted. "We've seen the curly-haired kid before as well. I believe that's the Metamancer from Kulvik."

"That would be… Jack Larson, yes," Sven confirmed, skimming through one of the reports that had mentioned the mage by name. "Came into the royal fold at the same time as the new royal healer. Our people theorized familial ties, but any information about the man has been strictly confidential."

"So a larger figure inside Serenova's circle of influence," his boss concluded. Sven didn't correct her, as two of the dwarven warriors moved towards the Metamancer. They didn't make it far before they succumbed to one of the bolts, but the attempt itself meant they were important. "The girl next to him… She looks new."

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

For a second, Sven could swear the woman beside the Metamancer looked their way. Even with the blurred feed and the long distance, those black pupils unsettled him. His notes didn't mention meeting somebody like that in Kulvik, but the positioning indicated some form of connection.

I guess it won't matter.

"Oliver's people sure take their time," Ester commented, trying a second sip of the tea before looking even more annoyed than the first time. "I am promised a quick and discreet force of specialists, who can take down anybody in an instant, and yet here they are, wasting my time with pointless maneuvering."

From the vantage point that the leader had, Sven could see the difficulty the fighters had when it came to finding the opportunity to shoot. The gauntlets could fire bolts that went through armor with incredible force, but a meter-thick wall of stone proved too difficult still. And, when it required a charging time of two full seconds, and temporarily halting movements, it became a difficult act without fearing the flying rocks would crush them.

"Who is that Earth Mage anyway?" his boss asked. Squinting didn't allow the truth to appear, but that dark armour which he and the dwarven warriors began to make questions form in both of their minds. "Get me a better view of the dwarven mage."

Following her words, the team leader adjusted his position. Stopping his attempts at dealing with the other dwarves, the helmet's vision was changed to zoom in on the Earth Mage. Though the grey beard and helmet hid most of the features, alongside the shield raised to stop any bolts from hitting him, a circular insignia on the shoulder plate became obvious.

"A dwarven lord… Not a terrible figure to die on Serenova's land," Ester muttered, happy for a moment before she clicked her tongue. "The symbol and colors don't match any of the dwarven lords in Darim. And, if I'm not mistaken, that's a rebreather on his breastplate."

"He's from Stroham," Sven blurted out, the severity of the situation dawning on him.

"My thoughts exactly," his boss agreed, a smile on her face. "If our people had done their job properly, and informed us of this, we could've had enough flies ready to deal with this quickly. Instead, we have this mess. Honestly, Oliver, what kind of—"

Ester paused, as the final human mage, who'd been hiding behind the stone walls, made her move. With a muttered word and a wave of her arm, the five underlings who'd been trying to find the opportunity to strike all fell to the ground. It wasn't a failure of equipment, and gravity wouldn't have pulled them so swiftly. They were thrown.

Brief shouts on the communication line were heard, a dozen curses flying all at once, before momentary gasps of pain, and then… nothing. The list of operatives on the left side of the screen listed all five dead.

"Incompetent fools," Ester commented, before pressing down on the sculpture again. "Kill as many as you can."

"The other groups will be here in twenty minutes, ma'am," the remaining operative said. "Would it not—"

"Now."

The top of the sculpture's head was pressed, and an additional clicking sound emanated. The screen flashed red in a corner, the view flickery, before it got back to normal.

Sven didn't like to think about how much pain the other man had been through at that moment.

"Understood," came the monotone response. The second that one of the dwarven warriors peeked over one of the walls, the leader aimed the gauntlet and shot a bolt. Even when a hundred meters away, it hit perfectly, decades of training showing fruit.

A second later, a cloud of dirt could be seen in the distance, the giant man appearing through it. Sven's eyebrows rose when he saw the superhuman jumps across the broken houses, and the final leap—

"Shit," Sven cursed, taking a step back as the giant's face filled the screen. They'd made use of the screen for weeks now, but the sudden approaches still had a way of getting him.

As begging could be heard through the screen, the team leader muttering some words that didn't carry through properly, the sound of crushed armor became obvious.

"Interesting," Ester, as red covered the screen, the operative's blood covering most of his vision. "Say… What age do you think that large man was?"

"Old," Sven said, his throat feeling tight as he continued to watch the screen. For the armor to transmit the feed, it technically wasn't a requirement for the operatives to be alive, but watching from the perspective of a corpse being dragged made him queasy. "Early sixties maybe."

"If I had to wager, I'd put his age just around seventy to seventy-five," his boss confidently said.

"Why?"

"Call it a hunch, for now. We're going through the archive tonight to be sure."

"But if the group arriving in twenty minutes kill him, wouldn't it be—"

"I'm calling them off," Ester cut in. "They won't need to kill them with the security measures in the armor, though that doesn't matter as much anymore. A dwarven diplomat has died on Serenova's soil, killed by humans who wore their queen's emblem."

Sven remembered the conversation with Oliver about that modification to the armor. The man had called it useless, that his operatives would never require such a thing, but Ester had insisted.

Some part of him wondered if she'd planned on intentionally sacrificing their people for this.

"Of course, the brutes have to destroy the heads," Ester remarked, as she switched between the different sub-feeds, trying to find one of the dead operatives with functional hearing. The second that the helmet had been removed from the team leader, they'd been stopped from listening in. "No matter, I suppose. Sven, give me the hammer on the shelf."

Momentarily confused, he did as asked, deeply inhaling to keep calm as Ester shattered the small sculpture.

Two years' worth of wages…

"Remind me to find something fancy to give Oliver as a consolation when we meet at the gala next week. I know he liked that little side-project of his," Ester said, handing him the broken sculpture. "And go remake that tea. You put too much sugar in this one."

"Will do," Sven said, blank-eyed as he thought about the number of lives that had just ended from a single hammer. Eight different locations, six operatives on each potential site, all dead to stop any chance of a leak. "Is there a precise time you want to visit the archive?"

"After dinner. We've got to look over the counter-offers from Ethon before that," Ester said, the good mood falling down the drain at the mention. "If they keep being so difficult, I might just need to ask Oliver for another favor."

Sven almost stopped in his steps, as he heard the last part muttered under Ester's breath.

… I don't want to do this anymore.

"Just a few more years," Sven said to himself, as he put down the sculpture on the kitchen counter and began to heat some more water. "Just a little more time, and you get to have the cottage you've dreamt about. A peaceful life surrounded by nature."

But how much could that life truly be worth, if Sven had to stand and watch the one he loved die?