Chapter 281: Chapter 260: Mutation

Once again, I'd messed up. I'd counted fifteen kids, but the System had told us only twelve were diseased. Why did I stupidly assume that meant three had been spared? The healthy count matched the size of the beastkin party; there were no others left over, but I'd assumed that even that coalescence of insanity disguised in human skin wouldn't have murdered babies.

Of course he would. They were the first to die; the three the System had identified as victims of heatstroke. Heatstroke was underselling it; their skin was blistered and burnt, to the extent Krana feared he'd accidentally been responsible. The other seven weren't much better off, and had died with terrible fevers, rivulets of blood running from eyes and ears, fresh enough to not yet have clotted.

The last survivors were the older teens. The youngest—a girl who [Eye of Judgement] named Emma and reported as a year younger than me—was unconscious on the floor, eyes open and glassy, but thankfully still breathing, albeit shallowly. The elder four, three boys and a girl, were huddled in a corner, their expressions distant as they waited their turn.

Jason kept a blank expression as he blasted everyone in the room with healing magic. Then his expression warped to one of confusion and concern.

"Huh?" he asked rhetorically.

"What's wrong?" immediately questioned Serlv.

"That gave me a 'working' message."

Nothing further happened for a few seconds, giving my mind a chance to spin and throw together a few discreet pieces of information. I'd been getting foreign soul notifications from this village. After my soul grew catkin ears and tail, healing magic grew real ones. Furthermore, Erryn's broken soul suggested that healing magic worked on a pristine image of the soul, rather than taking into account any acute damage. Yet my catkin features proved that the pristine image could be modified.

There was a terrifying possibility that Jason's healing could accelerate the changes the virus was trying to force, instead of reversing them. It all hinged on how the System interpreted their conditions. I didn't know the rules; I had no idea if healing magic really operated based on the soul, or if there was something else underlying both, but the exact mechanisms were unimportant. I knew the empirical facts.

I flipped on [Soul Perception], just in time to see Emma's soul crumbling.

The unconscious child started writhing in obvious pain, thankfully not awake to feel it. The younger pair of the four conscious kids gasped, too, clutching at their chests, and I could see their souls warp and pulsate. Only the eldest two remained stable.

ding
Administrative notification: Foreign soul detected at coordinates 31.781, 6.935
Administrative notification: Foreign soul detected at coordinates 31.781, 6.935
Administrative notification: Foreign soul detected at coordinates 31.781, 6.935

"What's happening?" demanded Serlv.

"I... don't know!" answered Jason.

"I do!" I interjected, scanning all five with [Eye of Judgement]. None of them listed [Diseased] as a status condition, but three of the five were below half health. "The disease has been purged from all five of them, but because of the mutations it causes, the System no longer knows what their healthy state is supposed to be. The healing magic isn't sure what to do. I think the eldest two are okay, but the others are stuck in a halfway state."

"A curse on Earth and its interference in our world," muttered Serlv, which I felt wasn't entirely fair.

"You may have been worse off without them," I pointed out, making a note to tell her my theories on Erryn's soul degradation, and what could have happened without a big event like the Emerald Caverns to force her to confront it. "Besides, it looks like a third world was responsible for all of this."

"Have that argument later," snapped Jason, running to the youngest living child and casting [Pain Nullification], to little effect. "What can we do?"

[Full Heal] was a rank four spell that would completely restore someone to perfect health, regardless of the extent of their injuries. During our hihi'irokane manufacturing spree, Jason had used it to regrow my limbs in a matter of seconds. It would hopefully work on the children, although what their 'perfect' condition was, I didn't want to guess.

The other problem with it was that Jason only had the mana to cast it once. With the amount he'd already expended on healing, he may not have had enough for even that.

Thank goodness for my recharge trick.

I started pumping the mana the same time as speaking. "[Full Heal] is their only chance. I'm just not sure if they'll end up human afterwards."

"I don't have the mana for that!" replied Jason as he cast the spell on the unconscious Emma, dropping his reserves to practically empty.

"Working on it! Here, I've got some rank three mana potions, unless you have better ones?"

He didn't, taking an armful of mine and downing one while I pumped mana in as quickly as possible. There was no result from his first cast, but that was likely because the System was still processing it.

If healing was a System effect, couldn't we use our administrative access to just tell the System to fix them? Not that we had time to get back to the ark now, but hindsight was a terrible thing. Just like the way we knew now that it wasn't contagious, and we could have healed them long ago without risking the lives of the healers. This sort of asymmetric situation where we needed to act within artificial limits of the System but the condition we were fighting did not was frustrating in the extreme.

One of the four survivors shrieked in pure horror; a boy called Noah, the same age as me. He was staring at his hand, where blue veins were visible beneath his skin, running up his entire arm. The skin of his fingers had changed to the same shade, the infected area spreading before our eyes. His soul was pulling back not just from his fingers, but was slowly withdrawing up all four of his limbs.

And then the blue fingers started to liquefy, dripping down his arm, with his hand turning blue in turn.

"Help me!" he cried, with eyes full of terror.

"I almost have the mana. Just a few more seconds..."

Of the other three, I was now almost certain the two eldest were fine. There were no abnormalities in their status and they'd reached full health, still with stable, human-looking souls and no parts of their bodies liquefying. The third—a boy called Benjamin who was again my age—was still hovering at half health, and looked just as terrified as the melting kid, though he was putting a braver face on it. I didn't miss the way he was sitting awkwardly with one arm hidden behind his back, either. [Soul Perception] showed his soul expanding from his fingers, rather than pulling back from them.

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"Got it!" shouted Jason, snapping out the spell the instant he had sufficient mana.

For a few more seconds, nothing at all happened beyond Jason chugging down another potion. The decay of Noah's body ceased and his soul remained unchanged, now nothing more than a torso and head, the chains of Law dissolving into it and even the System shard looking distorted.

And then, all at once, the spells hit. I saw the System shards in both 'healed' children flash with activity as mana poured out into the flesh of the pair of them.

Noah began a scream, but it lasted less than a second before twisting into a terrible gurgling, which in turn became a coughing fit, each cough spewing blue liquid from his lungs. An optimistic person might claim everything had a silver lining, and if there was one here, it was only that his sudden inability to breathe distracted him from the fact his entire arm had liquefied in an instant, joining the contents of his lungs on the floor in a rapidly expanding puddle.

He looked up, his face a mask of terror, patterned with blue veins. They grew into his eyes, which turned wholly blue and dripped out of his face. He just sat there, no longer coughing. No longer moving at all, even as his remaining limbs turned into the same blue goo.

Of the elder children, a boy called Lucas grabbed the other, a girl called Mia, turning her away from us and covering her eyes.

"No!" screamed the final child, Benjamin, reaching out and grasping Noah in a tight hug.

Now I saw what he'd been hiding behind him, presumably in an attempt to get Jason to heal his friend first. The skin of his hand had developed a coating of grey fur, and his fingers ended in vicious-looking claws.

Claws which tore into the back of Noah, ripping through the skin as if it were wet tissue and causing another outpouring of the viscous blue liquid, with not a drop of red blood in sight.

Benjamin squeezed tighter, Noah's blue body deforming in a way that implied a serious lack of skeleton. With blue fluids running from every orifice, his skin discoloured and his eyes missing, I could no longer make out any recognisable expression. I could only assume he was still terrified, but there was no longer anything we could do. We'd gambled on a [Full Heal], and it had simply driven his mutation to its conclusion.

And then he burst, the skin ripping in half around where Benjamin had been squeezing, leaving nothing behind but a few rapidly decaying lumps of skin floating in a blue puddle.

"You... You..." stammered Benjamin, his chains of Law flashing angrily even as they deteriorated in his deforming soul. "You killed him! You!"

He lashed out at Jason with his clawed hand, which I grabbed. He may have been my age, but claws or not, I vastly out-levelled and out-stated him, even before considering the effects of my enchanted jewellery. "I'm sorry we weren't in time," I said, not feeling up to making excuses.

And then I noticed that Noah's soul wasn't fading away in the same way as Maximilian's... It had collapsed further, now little more than a sphere, but it was there.

[Eye of Judgement] confirmed it. Despite being a puddle on the floor, he was still alive. Stranger than that, he had full health! His species, age and stats all errored out, though, and the System shard looked heavily distorted, with the chains of Law completely gone.

... The disease mutated people into monsters. I recognised that shade of blue.

"Noah? Can you hear me?" I asked the puddle of slime, eliciting no response.

"Of course he can't!" exclaimed Benjamin. "He's dead! You killed him!"

"He lives still," stated Krana, backing me up. "Although I know not how."

"What? How?"

The horror of Noah liquefying into a slime had distracted me from the fact there was another child Jason had cast [Full Heal] on. The girl called Emma hadn't moved or cried out, and hadn't oozed out of her clothing, so had done nothing to attract our attention.

A closer inspection revealed she'd shrunk slightly, her skin a putrid green and her features warped. Where a human had once lay was now a goblin, although once again, [Eye of Judgement] refused to display a species. Like with Noah, though, she was alive and at full health.

Given Benjamin's fur, I'd guess wolf. All three were low-levelled monsters that Maximilian would have had access to. [Eye of Judgement] had shown his health rise in response to the [Major Heal], but now it was falling again as he grew progressively more agitated. The fur was spreading, too, now reaching his elbow, and his other hand had sprouted claws of its own. His feet, too; sharp blades of keratin burst from the fronts of his shoes, which were bulging in weird places as the shape of his feet changed.

I liked to complain about my life, and how I'd been tasked to deal with things that I was woefully underqualified for, but I was hardly the one worst off in this room. I needed to do what I could.

"Benjamin, I know it's hard, but please try to stay calm. Jason can heal you, but you... won't be human any more. But you'll be alive."

"No..." he said, backing away from our group, towards the pair of frightened survivors, but staring at what had become of Emma and Noah. Noah chose that moment to show physical signs of life, the pool of slime rippling and drawing itself upwards into a thicker, more blobby puddle. "Noah turned into... into a slime! And Emma is a goblin! I don't want to be a monster! But... I don't want to die..."

The poor boy was crying, tears streaming down his face from eyes that had turned a bright yellow, the pupils elongated into vertical slits.

"There is no time," said Serlv, mercilessly. "Do it."

Jason complied, while Lucas wrapped his arms tightly around Mia's ears, doing his best to protect her from the screaming.

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