I stood behind Elder Bark and watched as the edges of the wound on the young woman's face sealed together like two pieces of wet clay in less than a minute. The old healer then spent a few more minutes pressing and swiping her hands over the woman's scalp, humming and grunting to herself at seemingly random times.

Giving a harumph of begrudging acceptance, Bark pressed her hands to the fish's stomach for a few seconds before leaning back and flicking her hand to the orderlies to take the unconscious woman away. More than the healing, I was more curious about what sequence of events led the young woman to get two wounds with only one sword. Maybe she tripped and fell on her sword, then a rock? No, that was a sword slash to the head…

The two other fish hovering on the other side of the table from Bark looked at each other, both of them slightly tilting their heads at her and elbowing the other until the one with the shoulder slash finally spoke up. "Umm… I— is she going to be alright?"

Bark looked at them for a second before motioning to the stretcher she was being taken away on and shrugging. "Never can tell with head wounds until they wake up, but she should be fine. Though I am curious how she stabbed herself in the gut while slashing her head."

The pair didn't look happy with the first part of the answer, but it was the best they would get. The second sentence caused the one with a blood-soaked leg to look ashamed and guilty as he shuffled his feet and looked down at them.

After a moment, he hesitantly answered, "My training partner and me… were sparring during our break. I knocked his gladius out of his hand, and it slashed her face. As she fell, her own sword went into her guts, and she knocked her head on the ground hard, passing out…" Both of my eyebrows were raised at this point, in utter shock at the idiocy of what happened and the fact that he clearly wasn't done yet. "…In my rush to check on her, I tripped over my feet and ended up slashing open my leg."

I couldn't help but snort in amusement as I looked at the young man who would be in a world of hurt when he finally returned to his instructor. This "sparring" more than likely fell into the category of showing off than anything else, meaning he wasn't so exhausted that moving would seem like a punishment. Then to add to the shit show, he ended up falling on his own blade. Meaning he forgot a whole week of training on how to not kill yourself with your weapon like a moron while falling, making his instructor look bad for several reasons.

After all, it was well known that the instructors had betting pools on who would have the most idiotic trainee accidents, along with every other category tangental to the topic. I had a feeling this one would be hard to beat, and the instructor would lose quite a few coins because of it.

Reaching forward, Bark smacked the young man on the side of his head, then motioned to the table and said harshly, "Get on, Idiot." As the large boy was climbing up, attempting to stifle his groans of pain, the medico reached up to each of her shoulders, popping two buttons off her clothing. With a practiced flick of the wrist, the top back section of her clothes fell away, revealing her upper back. Letting out a breath and not saying a word, I reached out, pressing my hand against her spine.

Closing my eyes, I began blanking my mind, calming and suppressing stray thoughts. Slowly, I focused my will on my reservoir of mental power, infusing it with the intent that it was a washcloth. Once I was content with the infusion, I started pulling mental energy from my reserve and sweeping it through my mind and body like I was wiping off a dirty table before I pushed the energy down my extended arm.

As my mental energy exited my body, it immediately came into contact and stopped against Bark's skin. Instead of the typical reaction of my energy and willpower corroding away as it touched another person's body, a moment passed where nothing happened. Then I felt another strand of mental energy that felt hard on the outside but with a soft and warm center begin enveloping my own before seeking to merge with it and to gain control.

Suppressing the urge to fight against Bark as she sought to dominate my tendril, I took a moment to shift my energy to better harmonize with hers before willingly seeding over control, almost like forming a union. The major difference between what we were doing and a union was that a union was generally limited to mental links to share thoughts and willpower.

While mental energy could be shared, those who supplied power to the casting had partial control over it. This was why castings in a union weren't typically overly technical or required a lot of control, like a large shield, as getting many people to work together even while sharing thoughts wasn't easy. However, that wasn't to say a person with a strong will couldn't dominate a union's collective energy and perform castings beyond some individuals in the union's skill, but that was beside the point.

What I was doing with Bark was more challenging than simply forming a union because I was basically cut off from my mental energy while still in control of it. It was like I was letting her move my body around while I watched from the back of my mind. This was necessary because if she completely took possession of my mental energy, utterly cutting me off, she would have to replace my willpower within the energy with her own.

Regardless of how fast and strong of will she was, there would always be some loss of mental energy, and it would take a mental toll, which was the exact opposite of what this situation was meant to do. Rather, she let a strand of my will remain in the energy so I could faintly feel what it was doing as she guided our mental energy along the surface of her body.

As the two energies traveled so near to her body, they combined and integrated with one another. When the front edge was halfway down Bark's arm, that portion of the energy had a fundamental shift as it took on something I simply couldn't understand. At that moment, to suppress a shiver and resist instinctually pulling away in what was close to scratching an itch.

At this point, even if I wanted to, I couldn't pull the shifted mental energy back under my control, regardless of how much willpower I had. My mental energy had mixed with Barks to the point that it had partially taken on her healing attribute.

The shift in the mixture wasn't total, as it was more like watered-down wine, so I guess it was theoretically possible to separate the two energies. But practically speaking, the bread was already baked. Due to that fact, there would be another consequence. Bark's healing wouldn't be as effective as when she used solely her own energy in the same amount.

If the purity of the aspected energy was the only detail that went into the casting, there would be little point in my being here. After all, what was the point in watering down healing energy and draining Bark's willpower when she could do the same with less energy? There wouldn't be.

While I cannot control the aspected energy as I have no affinity with it, my willpower was infused into the mental energy. With my intention to help and assist with the casting, Bark can use the barest of her own willpower to achieve the same or even greater results as all the energy being aspected for healing. At least, that remained true for as long as I was willing to dump all of my willpower into my supplied energy, which was extremely useful during a battle when hundreds of legionaries needed to be healed to get back to the lines.

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The problem was that few could reinforce a healer's casting without messing up or being useless. Your reservoir size meant nothing, as only willpower would matter, and the list of those with strong wills and reserves small enough to not have a critical job was small.

Even if you were on that small list, you then had to basically stand frozen in place as your nose itched without scratching it and as your body was moved around for you… Or that was how most describe the sensation of foreign control, which took a whole other type of willpower to resist the instinctual jerking back and ruining the healer's casting.

With literal years of practice, I could usually stand the feeling until I ran out of willpower and mental energy. Most of the time, at least. There were times when I simply couldn't get into the right mindset.

Distantly, I felt Bark guide our combined energy from her hand and into the young man with the sword on his leg. If I wanted a closer look at what she was doing, all I had to do was pay attention to the union we were in, as the mental energy stretching between us acted as a link between our minds.

Because of my line of thoughts, I began to feel Bark's emotions and saw flashes of memories, and I'm sure some part of her mind saw some of mine. Though it was common courtesy to never mention such times, another courtesy would be suppressing my thoughts so as not to distract her, which I quickly set about doing again.

It would be nice if we could avoid being in a union, but given we were trying to share energy and will, a union was required, and sharing power was easiest while in physical contact. It could be done without contact, but there was no need for unnecessary strain when trying to heal a lot of people.

Keeping up a constant and steady flow of energy while mentally sitting back and watching Bark work, I appreciated her control. Bark was a master of healing. No one could deny that, though it didn't mean as much as it would otherwise suggest, given her profession.

Most decent medicos could control five tendrils as their level of skill. It went with the job or, more accurately, the calling. There are records of people with sufficient levels of training and dedication who achieved some degree of attributing their energy to healing. However, they are the few and far-between outliers.

Most medicos developed the ability to heal naturally. Typically, it was the people who were naturally caring and did not like to see others in pain, and at some point during their youth, they discovered a way to prevent said pain. That being said, it was unsurprising that most turned out to be women.

That usually meant that medicos were easygoing and kind, at least when they started out. Being in a legion and thus around so much death, not to mention living life in general, quickly caused the gentle souls to become calloused.

As my mental energy continually trickled out of my body, I resigned myself to being a reservoir of power for Bark due to the choice I made to befriend her and the other medicos. Getting on the medicos' good side was always a smart thing to do. Volunteering to help them out was an easy way to do that, so long as you could perform a proper energy transfer. Thanks to my unusual level of control, even if I only had a small amount of mental energy, when I performed a union with a medico, I made them far more… efficient.

If the efficiency was up, that meant the time of the healing was down, which was what mattered the most, not only because of the energy spent by the medico but also because the more time they spent healing, the greater the residue within a patient was. This was an important matter to me at the moment because I was guessing that Bark spent quite a while patching me up, as I felt quite a lot of residue within me.

As my mental energy flowed through my mind and body, I felt tiny pockets of foreign power dislodge from my flesh and flow out of me along with the current. The sensation was like stretching your muscles and back and feeling the pops, which was pretty satisfying. However, every time some of the residual energy was dislodged, it momentarily disrupted my stream of mental energy, which took a constant fraction of my attention to stabilize my stream to Bark and keep it steady.

I knew the reasons behind it all well from all of Bark's lectures. When a medico used their mental energy to stimulate the growth and manipulation of the body for healing, some of the mental energy they used would remain inside of the body, unused. Usually, this isn't a problem. The use of mental energy in daily life and time would eventually work out the residue left in the body.

When it came to a head wound or other vital body parts, especially one like — let's say as an example — a mini-stroke you would probably have when pushing yourself too hard while falling into a haze, it was necessary to remove the residue as fast as possible. Generally, the leftover healing energy did nothing. However, there were those rare times when the residue would spontaneously twist and distort the flesh it was lodged in.

If such an event happened in some muscle group, who cares? It might be painful, but a medico could heal it right up within moments. If it happened in an organ or the brain, you would no longer have a working brain or organ.

So, it was best to clear out one's mental energy in the first week to dislodge the residue of any procedure involving one's mind. Just in case fate decided to hand out the rare reward of spontaneously dying, you didn't want to leave your mental energy stagnating too long after waking up from a head wound. I could have rested for a day, though… I mentally complained to myself.

"Hush, Boy." a faint, chastising voice said in my mind.

Wincing at the mild rebuke, I silence the grumbling thoughts in my mind, trying not to distract Bark. She was unlikely to be distracted by anything I did short of trying to regain control of my mental energy, but that wasn't the point.

I could distract her, and she could kill her patient because of it, meaning I would be at fault. The fact that my thoughts strayed to the point of catching her attention at all showed that I was not as great at control as I liked to believe. Or that I wasn't giving it my full effort because I was told I volunteered…

It could be a little of both.

Even if it was for my own good, I still didn't want to do the task, but that meant little in life. Resigned to the long hall with Bark, I decided to get serious so the time would pass a little faster. After all the time I spent helping out the medicos, I found the best way to keep one's mind clear was to follow what they were doing.

Our combined mental energy pooled in Bark's hands. With every twitch of her finger, she would send out multiple tiny tendrils and pulses of mental energy into the young man's body every second to perform some task.

The pulses give her an image of the body's internal structure, and her knowledge and practice allowed her to tell if something was wrong. The tendrils would supply the mental energy and intent to stimulate growth in a specific way so the wounded areas of the body would heal. While a general infusion of the area with the intention to heal would eventually work for most wounds, it was not nearly as fast or efficient as detailed control and intent.

As Bark's finger tapped on the outside edge of the wound, I could feel the tendril shoot into his body. The energy went to the deepest parts of the wound and layered itself along the bone and flesh like a net. There was a slight vibration of the energy in parted flesh. Distantly, I felt small objects on the bottom and edges of the wound pushed to the surface and collected by the layer of healing energy.

She tapped a finger on the inside of the wound, sending out several strands of energy that wrapped around where the femur was sliced into. After a second, Bark adjusted the healing energy layered onto the bone to only cover the damaged section. I could feel her give a few more slight adjustments, then give a small push to the energy, letting it go to do its work.

I got the briefest sensation of the power seeping into the bone and flesh around it before losing my connection to it altogether. That is not to say I did not see its effect, but I could no longer feel it directly. Bark's focus moved to a different part of the wound, and she began layering energy onto the area, casting the flesh shut.

I asked once why she healed specific areas and not others before going back over it again. She said something about how muscles have layers and different groups, and she was ensuring they all healed right before moving on to the next. She then said other things I don't really remember. After the lecture she gave me on the topic, I never asked again… which might have been her plan…

The medico continued to send out one pulse and tendril after another, almost like she was stitching the wound shut. Tapping on the freshly sealed wound, she sent one last pulse echoing through the trainee's body, searching for any more damage. Once she was satisfied with her work, I felt her lean back in her chair, and I didn't move or let go of the union while she relaxed momentarily as she waited for her next patient.

I could see the number of fish that hurt themselves lined up to the side. With the news I told her earlier, there was no way she was leaving before they were all healed or recovering. And I would just have to suffer through this until then.

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