Chapter 372: Operation: The Improved Elaine IX (Patreon)

AN: I can't math. Book 8 will be finished on Patreon and released on Amazon on October 14th.

FOR ONCE it'll be the same day on both. Unless Amazon can't handle a preorder properly. Hopefully it works...

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I skipped back, happy as could be. The sun was shining, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, I was a graduate once over, and my biomancy plans had gotten thoroughly analyzed by a panel of experts.

“Elaine! Iona!” A familiar voice called out to me, and we turned and looked at who’d called me.

It was Iya, the familiar naga flanked by a pair of retainers.

We swerved and headed over to her.

“Iya! What’s up?” Iona asked.

She slowly blinked at us.

“I heard that Elaine was taking her Biomancy Track examination. I wanted to offer my congratulations.”

I grinned.

“Just passed! Bronze in biomancy!”

She gave a small half-bow.

“My deepest congratulations on your success. If you do not have plans to celebrate, perhaps you will permit me to arrange for a small celebration?”

Iona and I glanced at each other, and I shrugged.

“Sure!” Iona said. “We’d love that!”

Iya beamed at us.

“Excellent! My mansion, after the final class today?”

“Sounds like a plan!” I agreed.

Iya had one of the fancy accommodations that some incredibly wealthy students could pay for. An entire house, just for her.

Well.

House was a bit of an understatement.

Mansion was correct. And Iya’s was nice. Silver linings to the whole Raith incident!

We kept going home, Fenrir slinking into his office.

“Should we do it now?” I asked Iona.

“Yeah, why not. Could even put Iya’s party as part of the mystery. A great big revelation during a fancy celebration? Right up his alley.”

“Brrrpt!!” Auri was thrilled with this idea, and the three of us got to work.

It only took a few minutes to get everything in position. We’d planned and prepared ahead of time.

With the scene set, the socks in position and the bear traps armed, I was ready to get to work.

I dramatically burst into Fenrir’s room.

Wait.

What the fuck?

How was it storming?? It was pouring outside, with the occasional thunderbolt punctuating the steady staccato of the storm. And where had he gotten the bottle of whiskey??

Eh. Whatever.

“Fenrir! It’s terrible! You’re the only one who can help me!” I dramatically cried out, pretending to swoon over his tail.

It was a dark and stormy night…

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“Hang on, we’re doing this now?” Iona was nervous, fidgeting with her hands.

“I mean, why not?” I asked her. “We got the wyvern blood, your design got thoroughly signed off on, and this takes a while.”

“Well, the guards might want to talk to us about last night…” She said.

I dismissed her concerns with a wave.

“We already told them it was a dramatic reenactment on campus.”

“And they yelled at us for not using the proper venues!” Iona said.

“I mean, yeah, but why would they follow up more? Iya already said she was fine.”

Iona grumbled.

“Fine, my butt. Nobody loses a wall of their house and is fine with it.”

“Sure, but that’s irrelevant to what we’re doing. If you’d like, we can stall, but… why?”

Iona blew a raspberry.

“Yeah, you’re right. There’s no good reason to stall. Let’s go get this scheduled.”

It wasn’t quite that easy. We needed to circle back on the mana use request form, then talk with the hospital staff to get a team ready. I was a little nervous on the sheer number of student healers involved - it only took one person fucking things up to make this much harder than it needed to be - but that was the price I paid. It was otherwise free, and how else would I get a team of healers doing nothing but watching over Iona for hours on end?

While we waited, I went back over my notes, seeing how my new skill worked.

It was disconcerting at first. I sat down with my notes, opened them up, and started reading.

As I read each word, as I studied each diagram, everything was cast in a faint shade of pink.

Not good.

[*ding!* [Analyze Diagram] leveled up! 1->2]

With the level, the red highlights on the words and pictures got a little darker, a little richer.

At the same time, I knew it wasn’t a complete and total disaster, like the skill was highlighting. I continued reading, the skill leveling up in the background, and the faint pink turning into a dark crimson.

An early page about my skills, and how I was relying on them for various aspects, turned green when I read them, instead of red.

Interesting.

I was about three quarters of the way through reading my notes when a dozen words on the page I was looking at snapped from deep red to bright green. Something had changed.

I flipped back to my first page, my skeletal design, noting that most of it had turned green, from the prior red.

My initial guess was it had to do with how much of my blueprints I’d ‘read’, letting the skill form a ‘structure’. Kind of stupid that I had to reread all of my own notes - I had perfect recall of them in the first place - but magic was wonky at times.

I didn’t go into great experimental depth, figuring I’d see what happened after I completed my reread. More and more words snapping to various shades of green and yellow, with a few reds still mixed in.

When I read the last word, nearly everything I was looking at turned various shades of green, with a few yellows in the mix.

My best guess? My notes used a combination of what I knew, plus what I’d read, in order to indicate if an aspect would work or not, and how poorly it would go otherwise. Skills rarely ‘gave’ knowledge, but instead highlighted aspects and drew attention as needed.

I flipped to a few aspects the panel had pointed out, finding most of them in various shades of orange or red.

One of them was highlighted in green still, and that was going to cause me a headache and a half. The items we all agreed on that were wrong were easy. They were wrong, and I needed to correct them.

This item?

It said that, as far as I knew, I was correct, but the professor had said it was incorrect, and gave his reasoning for it.

Well, shoot.

I had hoped to perform my biomancy immediately after Iona’s. Looked like I still had some work to do.

First things first though.

I was replacing my much-beloved second heart with additional kidneys. The panel had been right about that.

Which meant an insane number of items were going to need to be changed.

And double checked. Seven times.

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“Ready for your big day?” I asked Iona over breakfast. I’d gotten her favorites from the cafeteria.

She nodded.

“Nervous, but yeah. I have faith in you.”

That meant a lot, coming from the [Paladin].

“Thank you.” I grabbed her hand and squeezed it.

She squeezed back.

“So, about the pig thing…” Iona asked me.

I threw my hands up in exasperation.

“We are not doing the pig thing!”

Fenrir emphatically shook his head in agreement with me.

“Thanks.” He growled, his word barely understandable.

Time flew by, and we found ourselves in the hospital.

I was familiar with the head medic, and I recognized a few of the students from the rounds I’d been doing.

“Elaine! Glad to see you’re still around, thought you’d graduated or got kicked out!” He told me.

I shook my head.

“Nope, I was working on my biomancy thesis.”

“Excellent. Healer Winug, Healer Lippe, if the two of you would check in with the patient please?”

The two healers nodded, and I squeezed Iona’s hand. The two of them led Iona away to have a private conversation. Fairly standard stuff, making sure she wanted this of her own volition, that I wasn’t coercing her or pressuring her, et cetera.

“How’d your biomancy thesis go?” He asked. It felt a little awkward to be small talking in front of so many people, but we needed to burn a bit of time before the operation began.

“Graduated bronze! I had them tear apart my own plans. If everything goes well, I hope to be your next patient.”

“Excellent! When do you plan on doing that?”

I shrugged.

“Right after this? Figure we could keep each other company in the hospital. With that being said, I should probably start working.”

He nodded at me.

“Right. Follow me, we have a room with the proper access to the main mana stores prepared.”

We walked through the familiar halls of the hospital, the student-healers trailing along like a line of ducklings in black hats. Before long we ended up in the room in question.

The entire floor was a solid piece of arcanite, and I knew from my reading most of the arcanite on the campus were simply a few, solid, gigantic pieces, cleverly fused together to form the bones of the campus. They were in different segments just to prevent one idiot from draining the entire campus dry, but there was a scaling effect present with arcanite. A single 10 kilogram block held more mana than two 5 kilogram blocks combined. It encouraged large works.

The arcanite floor was hooked up directly to the campus’s main reserves, the idea being that if a healer needed the vast reserves on campus, they should be able to access it. Faith in the profession.

The firing range had another large piece, but it wasn’t hooked up to anything else important. Once a year or so some idiot bird would drain the entire thing.

There hadn’t even been anything left to burn! I had no idea what Auri was trying to do with that.

The room was atypical for a number of reasons.

The room itself had a single bed, entirely flat and not particularly designed for comfort, in the middle of the room. Plenty of space was given around the bed for a dozen or two healers to cram in. It was the major operating room, and it was assumed that anything that required the School’s massive reserves was also likely to require more than one healer.

It didn’t hurt to have the space just in case.

“I need a chair.” I pulled out my notebook dedicated to Iona’s changes, and started reading. One of the students got the nod from the head healer, and scrambled to get what I’d requested.

The head honcho in question clapped his hands.

“Right! Everyone, this is a rare opportunity. Healer Elaine is about to perform massive, large-scale biomancy on an adult warrior who is not her. I myself have only seen a half-dozen similar operations in all my decades here, and outside of the School? I know of no facilities that are capable of performing the same operation. Perform your diagnostic skills. Watch. Learn. Level.”

He’d captured everyone’s attention, and they were hanging onto his every word.

“For this operation, Healer Elaine is the boss. She says jump, you jump. She says to get out, you get out. If I tell you the sky is blue, and she says the sky is green, the sky is green. She knows what’s going on here better than I do, and if we screw up, we could kill the patient. Does anyone have an issue with this?”

Heads shook, but one hand went up. A student I didn’t recognize.

“Healer healer? What’s up with that?” He forced a laugh, but nobody laughed with him. We just gave him a stare.

The head healer coughed.

“Elaine was… unfortunately named.” He said, but I was more than a bit mad.

This was a delicate, high-powered, high-risk operation. I didn’t need jokesters, pranksters, funny people, or people who couldn’t stay serious and on-task here. The more healers present, the higher the risk of someone fucking something up.

“Out.” I ordered. “If making jokes is your idea of what’s appropriate in the operating theater, you’re not welcome.”

“But your name is funny.” He whined, and wilted under the combined glare of everyone else in the room.

He slunk out as Iona came in with the two healers.

“Everyone good?” Head honcho asked his two minions.

They nodded.

“Healer Elaine, I’m turning this over to you.” My chair arrived as he said that.

I directed it next to Iona’s bed, then stood on it so everyone could see me.

“Hello everyone! Let’s get right to it. Today, we are performing a full body biomancy operation on Iona here. Our relative magic power to vitality ratio means I can transform 12 grams a second. Iona weighs enough that this operation will take roughly three hours once I begin. Now, you’ve heard it before, but I’ll say it again. Do not blast unimaged heals at Iona. Do not try to simply fix an area. If you do, you’ll end up reverting the changes I’ve made, and worst case, we’ll need to start over from the beginning. Does everyone understand?”

I got a round muttering of ‘yes’ and ‘yes healer’ and ‘of course’.

Worked for me.

I clapped my hands together to refocus everyone.

“Excellent! I will now start preparing my image. This might take a significant amount of time. I will let you know when I begin casting. Iona, the skill’s off, right?” I asked her, referring to her vitality-boosting passive.

She nodded. “It’s off.”

I sat back down in my chair, grabbed my notebook on Iona’s build from my bag, and started skimming, rebuilding the image in my mind.

I had all of this memorized, checked, and cross-checked. The skimming simply helped form it in my mind properly.

Also, I was able to blatantly cheat.

I built the image in my mind, designing it to move from Iona’s extremities in, and made sure I was only targeting her. Then tied it off with [Persistent Casting], but using [Biological Manipulation] instead of my more common [Dance with the Heavens]. I opened my eyes.

“Everyone ready?” I asked.

There were some starts and jumping, and a new healer ran out the door to get a few of the other students who had left.

I didn’t blame them. Everyone was busy, and someone closing their eyes for an extended period of time wasn’t interesting, not when there were other things to do.

“I believe we are ready to assist.” The head honcho confirmed after a few minutes.

Iona raised her hand, and closed her eyes, her lips silently moving as she prayed to her goddesses.

“Hey.” Iona cracked her eyes open and turned to me, looking deep into my eyes. “I love you.”

I gave her a crooked grin that was meant to be reassuring, but I’d be lying if I said my heart wasn’t racing.

“I love you as well.”

Instead of grabbing her hand or anything like that, I leaned back in my chair, and stuck my right foot out, laying it across Iona’s legs. My left foot was touching the floor, and I started to draw mana in as quickly as it was leaving.

I could feel the burn as I channeled so much mana through my body. It was a well-studied phenomenon, but no biomancer or healer had ever found physical damage from channeling mana like this. It was simply uncomfortable, and the discomfort slowly increased with time.

“Whoo! Tingles!” Iona shuddered slightly.

“Yeah, legs, arms, lower torso, face, skull, then upper torso. Most of the issues will happen there.”

“And you’re just… sitting there?” Iona asked. I was getting some looks from the other healers.

I shrugged.

“Yes? I’m channeling my entire mana pool every second. This is difficult from a biological building standpoint, and from a mana and power access perspective, but the actual changing is fairly simple with all my skills.”

That wasn’t a surprise to anyone here. The only reason this room was used was for major operations that required enormous amounts of mana. The only part that raised a few eyebrows was my magic power to mana ratio being high enough that I could instantly dump my entire mana pool.

It was somewhat anticlimactic. The preparation had been the hard part, but the execution was straightforward.

“Right. All of you should start casting diagnostic skills. Nothing should be going wrong at this stage. This is a good opportunity to see the ‘normal’ problems that biomancy is causing in your diagnostics.” I told the assembled healers.

I followed my own advice and pulled up [Elvenoid Visualization], the tiny trickle of mana it required entirely inconsequential to the overall operation. As I watched, the very edges of Iona’s toes subtly changed, indicating my skill was working.

The ones who needed to touch Iona to work their magic jostled around a bit, and even my chair got bumped around. There was a reason I’d made my skill work on only Iona - I foresaw other people touching me, and that would cause issues.

“Leveled.” One of the healers tersely reported. I lifted an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything. It wasn’t disruptive.

“Leveled!” Another one called out, and I grinned. My next words would set the tone.

“Levels for everyone! Let’s stay focused, but we’re going to be here for a while. Any bets how many levels total, across everyone we get today?”

I flipped through the [Elvenoid Visualization] again, checking on the various layers of progress. So far so good.

“Eight!” The first call came in.

“Two levels already? Nah, we’re all getting a level. 14.” A second prediction was made.

“Ummmm…” Iona looked at me nervously. “Is this alright?”

I gave her a shrug as I leaned back in my chair more.

“It’s when we’re all doing nothing but talking about you and how you’re dying that we have a problem. If we’re chit-chatting about normal life? It means everything’s fine, and everything’s okay.” I told her.

The blonde gave me a stiff nod.

“Alright. Talking about normal life. I like that. Let’s talk about something normal. What about your third class?” She slipped into English for that last part, a private language only the two of us spoke.

“I’m still unsure, but yeah, I need to decide, don’t I.” I replied back in the same tongue. “Which one’s your favorite?”

Iona shook her head.

“My favorite doesn’t matter. I still think [Bookwyrm] is the best class for you. Think about it! What does the world of your soul look like?”

“A library.” I promptly replied. We’d shared this ages ago.

“A library.” Iona repeated. “With your guide being a librarian. Not an orchard, with your guide being a gardener.”

My mind instantly flashed to having a world of my soul being filled with trees and mangos, and needing to harvest the right one. Sounded fun.

“Not a zoo, with your guide being a keeper. Now granted, [Bookwyrm] is a reading class, not a librarian class, but it’s quintessentially you. It’s where your soul is most comfortable. It’s why I was delighted to see a [Paladin] class when my soul is a temple, and my guide a priestess. It just fits, in a way like nothing else does.” Iona brushed some of her hair out of her face, her hand spasming as parts of it got changed.

I stopped and thought about that. I wasn’t sure why Iona hadn’t brought it up before, but it made sense. I was in an intellectual bind. My classes all had powerful arguments for and against them on an intellectual level, but few on an emotional level like Iona was proposing.

“That… yes, that could work. Tell me more.” I told Iona.

She gave me her patented grin. Gods, that grin.

“Well, your love of reading and books is obvious, plus the Spatial element always comes with fun goodies. I think…”

We chatted away, the comfortable talk of two people who’d been together for a few years, and had caught up on most of each other’s history already. Who could almost read each other’s minds.

Occasionally Iona would twitch or grimace, as one change or another caused a type of discomfort that her [Chilled Mind] didn’t interpret as pain, and didn’t mute. The changes slowly marched through her body, 12 grams a second.

Time slowly tickled by, and light conversation surrounded us as the procedure continued. I was burning through a prodigious amount of mana, and I was starting to get an idea of just how crazy all of this was.

Assuming an absolutely perfect image, and no large penalty due to my range, and average sized people, I could heal six to twelve decapitations a second. That was how much mana I was pouring into Iona every second, and I was going to do it for two, almost three hours straight.

If I didn’t know for sure that the hospital had way more healers than patients, that everyone here was well looked after, and that the levels I was helping provide all the healers would go on to help them save more lives, I’d feel massively guilty over the whole thing.

Similarly, I was getting an idea just how insane it was that the white-robed witch was able to fully disintegrate the skinwalker with a single word, a single skill. She’d channeled as much mana, with the power to match, in a single second as what was taking me three hours.

It made me think of Destruction, the sharp pang of loss dulled somewhat by time and therapy. It would never go away, but the edges weren’t as jagged, weren’t as raw. I might’ve been able to accomplish something similar by grabbing [Channel] and working on it for… some 450ish days straight.

Nevermind.

“Healers! Look alive! We’re going into the final segments! Call out when you see a problem and that you’re fixing it, don’t wait for me to assign an issue!” I called out as my [Elvenoid Visualization] showed that we were creeping into her upper torso, along with the spinal column, neck, and other critical parts.

“I’m scared.” Iona whispered to me.

I leaned forward, awkwardly juggling around so I traded from my feet being on her, to holding her hand, all without ever losing contact with my girlfriend.

“I know. It’ll be ok.” I clasped her hand with both of mine, practically in a prayer pose.

She squeezed my hand, then squeezed my hand as her eyes went wide. Blood welled up as she bit her lip, her improved teeth combining with her biting skill in an unfortunate interaction.

She wasn’t screaming though, which was great for our focus. The other healers stopped chatting entirely, simply calling out when they spotted a problem and what they were doing to tackle it.

I felt the bones in my hand break, [Center of the Universe] dulling the pain. I didn’t say anything about it. Iona must know what she was doing, and I wasn’t going to give her grief over it. I could bear it.

[*ding!* [Center of the Universe] leveled up! 470 -> 471].

We sat there, locked together, in a private world of our own. Blue starry eyes staring unblinkingly into green starry eyes as my biomancy finished, controlled chaos all around us as the healers kept Iona alive through the procedure.

With no fanfare, just like that, we were done.

I pulsed [Permanence] through Iona once, twice, five times before the skill finally stopped ‘taking’.

“How do you feel?” I asked Iona.

“Weird. Hungry. Terrible about your hand.”

“No aches? Nothing feels wrong? No impending sense of doom?” I flicked her visualization back up, running through everything again.

She shook her head, the motion exaggeratedly large.

“No - whoa! - but I could eat an entire cow.”

I smiled at her.

“That’s normal. Now, as you’ve noticed, you’ve been improved. Small motions only until you’ve worked out your new body.”

“Understood.” She confirmed.

I let go of her hand, mentally throwing a lazy ‘heal’ at it. My bones snapped back into position, the bruise vanishing like it’d never existed. I shook it out once, then started talking.

“Excellent work everyone! Do we have a total level count?”

“Thirty three, plus whatever you got!” Someone called out. “Leveling in both classes counts as leveling twice!”

I grinned.

“Zero levels for me! My biomancy class is capped at 128.”

There were some boos at the announcement, predominantly from the person who’d bet 35 levels total from everyone, and was now losing to the person who’d bet 32. The stakes were simply bragging rights, but it was a fun team building activity.

“We need to move Iona to a recovery room. That’s all people, thank you for coming! Hope the levels and experience were worth your time. I can’t say how much I appreciate it.”

A few of the healers left, immediately off to other tasks. There were a few more rounds of self-congratulations, and the crowd dispersed. Four healers stayed back with a stretcher, and I carefully directed moving Iona from the bed to the stretcher, and off to a room.

“You know, I could get used to this sort of treatment.” Iona said. “I’m still hungry, and I’m under healer’s orders not to move much…” She fluttered her eyes at me.

I snorted at the blatant request.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll feed you your whole cow.” I said.

Iona wriggled her eyebrows at me, asking another question. I decided to half ignore it.

“You should be drawing again by the end of the week.” I told her. I was being extra-generous on the timeframe. Nobody got mad when they were told a week to recover and it took them three days, but if I told Iona it’d take a day and it took three instead, that just caused bad feelings all around.

I got pouty lips, but we were in a recovery room already.

It was the rare ailment that a healer couldn’t just wave a hand and fix, especially with the sheer number of different types of healers we had present. Occasionally, a problem would arise that would require moderate recovery times. Like some of the biomancy patients I had brought back to the hospital.

Or like having a nervous system rewired, and muscles dramatically strengthened. Iona would need a few days of physical therapy before she was in control of herself again. Her dexterity, and to a lesser extent, her vitality, would be helping, along with there being fundamentally nothing wrong with her, but changing all of her muscles wasn’t the same as simply leveling up and getting more stats.

I fed Iona, carefully slicing each piece of food into small, bite-sized pieces, and ladling a hearty stew into her mouth. At first she was awkward, her mouth opening too large and grinding too hard, but as I watched she quickly regained control of that one small portion of herself.

The [Physical Therapist] came as we finished up.

“Oh, I’m sorry, am I intruding?” She asked as she poked her head around the door.

I shook my head.

“I was just finishing up. I’m going to grab a few things, then I’ll probably be your next patient.” I cheerfully told the therapist.

I got a doubtful look from her.

“Don’t hurt yourself.” She told me, then turned to Iona.

“Hi, I have some students with me today, do you mind? I’m healer…” She started to give her usual speech.

I mouthed the words ‘I love you’ to Iona, and got a cheeky would-be wink in return. It was more like a comical grimace.

I left to get some supplies for my own biomancy operation.