The Sixth School Ch. 055

Not that it mattered.

There was no doubt in Greg that the beast's fate had been sealed the moment the healer walked into the clearing. He didn't have to wait long for his words to be proven true. Years as a creature that few others were willing to challenge had left the obsidian earthmover too bold for its own good. In the end, it chose to challenge the healer. The last mistake it would ever make in this life. With a deep bellow, the beast aimed its long obsidian horn at the healer and began to charge at her. Greg turned to look at his teacher, curious to see what she would do in response. With her hands behind her back, however, the healer just calmly watched it approach.

Owing to its massive size, the beast only needed to take ten steps to cross the distance between them from the other side of the clearing. This short distance, however, might as well have been an impassable chasm for the beast. For reasons that Greg couldn't decipher, it only managed to accelerate in the first four steps. The beast slowed in its last six steps before coming to a complete stop with the sharp point of its horn just inches away from the healer's chest. Looking at the way the beast's eyes had gone wide, Greg could tell that it hadn't slowed down of its own volition. There seemed to be some struggle in its eyes but it didn't move an inch. Like a statue, it stood frozen before the healer.

"Are you familiar with puppets?" The healer suddenly asked.

The question was out of left field and Greg wasn't sure what she was after. Given the mood she was in, however, Greg just gave a straight answer. "Yes, the carpenter would make them to entertain us back when we were kids," he said. While he was familiar with them even from his former life, Greg gave an answer relevant to this one.

"In a way, our bodies, be they human or animal, are like puppets," She said with a quiet fascination that caused cold chills to crawl down Greg's spine. "The bones are the figurines being controlled, the muscles are the strings being pulled to move the bones, and through very small almost invisible strings that are spread throughout your body that act as the puppeteer's fingers, the brain controls this puppet," she stated.

Had he been born and raised in this little town, the healer's words would have been confusing to Greg. As someone from the twenty-first century who'd always been fond of the sciences, he knew a bit about the human anatomy. And when he thought through what the healer had just said, it made perfect sense. All muscles in the body, except perhaps for the tongue, were attached to a particular bone. Any motion made by the human body is usually because, like a puppet string, a certain muscle is pulling against certain bones. Greg could even remember seeing a picture of the layout of nerves in the body. It was all too easy to see why one would think of them as strings spread out from the brain to the whole body.

"Hard as it may be to picture this, it is the truth," The healer calmly continued, heedless of just how much Greg did indeed understand her words. Both Greg's and the beast's eyes followed her hand as the healer raised it and then lifted her finger pointing it to the sky. The healer's voice grew a lot colder as she continued. "I may not be a mind mage, but with enough insight into the school of life, you can learn how to hijack control from the brain," She stated. Like a metronome, the healer started to move her finger from left to right. Greg could feel a block of ice settle in the pit of his stomach as he watched the massive head of the beast start to move left to right in time with the healer's finger.

"My kind of control is even better than that of mind mages because I don't need to have a battle of wills with your mind. I simply bypass the puppeteer and take control of the puppet itself. Unless they are equal to me or more powerful than I am, then regardless of their cunning, of their intelligence, of which school of magic they ascribe to, of whether they be man or beast, there are few beings that I've met that I can not make to kneel before me," The healer's words were marked by the loud sound of the obsidian earthmover's body hitting the ground before her. Only it wasn't its whole body. The creature's back legs were still straight even as its muzzle was driven into the dirt making it look like it was in supplication to the healer.

"Even among my peers, few were willing to antagonize me enough to find out just how far my control can go," She continued, the look in her eyes growing more and more dangerous with each passing second. "The few fools that did never got to tell tale of it. You see, trusting in their ability to keep control of their body, they thought themselves safe from me. Little did they know that I don't need to attack from the top down," she said, a cruel gleam in her eyes. Greg noticed all the muscles on the body of the obsidian earthmover tense up and for a moment, he thought that it was fighting to regain control. This thought, however, was dispelled as it remained frozen and the healer continued to speak.

"I can take control at any level I wish to," She declared with the finality of an emperor even as the muscles in the beast continued to tighten up beyond anything that could have been comfortable. The eyes of the beast were wide with clear agony, but not a sound escaped it. Even without her saying so, Greg knew that his teacher was depriving the beast of the ability to give voice to its agony. The only voice allowed in the clearing was the healer's. "What do you think happens when the puppet is not strong enough to withstand the pull of the string?" The healer almost whispered even as the clearing was filled with the sound of the beast's back legs being crushed.

The bones in its back legs weren't just broken, it was like a man had placed a biscuit in the palm of his hand and closed it with every bit of strength they could muster. Greg didn't know how, but the healer had made the muscles in the beast's back legs almost double in size and then contract with such force that the bones they were attached to were reduced to mush. The beast was now lying on the ground on its stomach, probably cursing itself for not choosing to run away when it could. "I can make your bones so brittle that the very act of turning your head will break all seven bones in your neck. I can make them so weak that your body weight would be enough to snap them like rotten twigs!" She said, ice in her voice.

Over the next hour, Greg went from fearing the obsidian earthmover to pitying the creature as the healer showed him the true horror of a healer who chose to turn their knowledge of the body against it. Her abilities didn't just end at taking control of the beast. Greg watched as the beast's obsidian armor along with its skin fell off like they were loose garments. He watched as spikes grew from the bones of the flayed beast and pierced through the muscles around them turning the beast into a macabre hedgehog. He watched as the beast's muscles repeatedly tore and repaired themselves. He watched as the back of the beast opened up like a pair of doors, exposing its organs to the sunlight, all the while it was still very much alive. The beast stayed like this for most of the hour as the healer played around with its insides. The beast was finally granted the mercy of death when the healer turned its lungs to bone and watched as the beast slowly suffocated to death.

By the time the healer was done, Greg was visibly shaking in fear. The darker side of the healer that had clawed its way up to the seventh tier in a cruel magical world had shown itself and one thing was for certain, Greg hadn't at all been prepared. What was even more terrifying was the thought that his teacher was holding back. She was limited in the amount of mana that she could use to the equivalent of a third-tier mage despite being a seventh-tier one. As such, by definition, she hadn't gone all out. It made Greg weak in the knees to imagine what Alena would be able to do if she was at her full power. Greg didn't know if the three families had been subjected to the same spectacle, but he now fully understood why they feared her.

"You see that I am limited in how much mana I can use to the equivalent of a third-tier mage so you make the grave mistake of thinking that I am equal to them in power! I am a seventh-tier mage Roka, the things I know, the things I can do, no third-tier mage can hope to replicate! Even if I only had access to half the mana that I do now, there isn't a third-tier mage or beast in this world that can hope to be a match for me! When your awakening through the sigil is done, you'll be a first-tier mage with enough mana to match a third-tier mage. When you dissolve my mana pathways, and take me through the process, I'll still be a seventh-tier mage limited to the amount of mana that a third-tier mage has!" She growled, her cold eyes fixed on him. "Do not ever repeat this, Roka! Do I make myself clear?" She demanded.

His throat dry, Greg could only nod in acquiescence.

The healer glared at him for what was probably a few seconds but felt like an eternity. In the end, she offered one last statement as she turned around. "Your break is over! I expect to see you for lessons tomorrow," She said walking back over to the corpse. Greg wasn't too bothered by his break being cut short, he was too preoccupied with the sudden fear that the healer planned to continue her horror show with the beast. The thing should have been dead, but after an hour-long demonstration of just what she could do, Greg wouldn't put it past her to somehow resurrect the animal and continue with her torture.

The healer, however, did no such thing. Casting a spell under her breath, Greg watched as ghostly hands reached into the chest of the beast and picked up the sizable heart inside. The thing had to be almost twenty kilograms by Greg's estimation. The four large blood vessels attached to it simply fell off as if someone had detached them. With the organ now floating before her, Greg watched as the healer ran the index finger of her right hand along the midline of the heart. Like the world's sharpest scalpel, the finger cleanly cut the heart in two. At first, Greg couldn't understand what the healer was up to. Was this some last act of cruelty to emphasize her point or something? Then the crystal fell out.

It was a small, amber-colored thing, about the size of a golf ball and smooth as a cue ball. Inside a human heart, the thing would have been big enough to be life-threatening. But relative to the obsidian earthmover's massive heart, it was small enough to be lodged inside one of its muscles. The last rational thought that Greg could remember having was that this was probably the obsidian earthmover's beast core. With the hunger of a man that hadn't eaten a thing for a week straight or the thirst of a parched man in the desert every cell in Greg's body so forcefully craved the simple pebble-like thing that he was moving before he even knew it. All horror at what the healer had just done was forgotten, all fear of her barely even registered in the face of one simple fact, he had to have that core...

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