Eventually the two men came into the room itself and stared at him. The shorter of the two, a balding man with a stern face, approached Laurence. He pulled up a chair and looked the boy in the eye. “Please state your power level, name, and family line for the record.” As the man spoke, an array beneath them crackled into life.
So the arrays work in the room. I wonder why. Laurence had very little time to consider the question before they would get suspicious, so he answered calmly and in a very measured way, “My rank is Saint, my name is Laurence Absolution, and I am of the lineage of Angus and Maris Absolution.”
The man blinked. He said nothing, but obviously recognised the names that had been given. Unlike everyone else who recognised the name of Laurence’s father, the man did not retreat in any way. He just sat, assessing the possibilities and deciding on the correct path of approach. “You are Law the Young, correct?” He said, after three minutes of silence.
“That's what you call me. I'm not sure why though. I mean it's accurate, but my name is just Law, or Laurence.”
“I don't know either, but I do know we have thirteen warrants for your arrest due to petty theft and larceny. We also now have ten men in the infirmary because of you. Do you have anything to say about that?”
Laurence frowned, “Well, I don't deny the theft charges, they were my way of earning money to keep living in the city. As for the men in your infirmary, there are no wounds there that won't heal. I made sure of that when I was breaking my way out.”
“You want me to believe that you went through my men and purposefully incapacitated them without killing them?” This was simply too much for the man to believe. He understood that there were monstrous children in the world, but to intentionally only injure people in places that would heal quickly was beyond what he could deal with.
“No. I want you to believe that with my strength, all of your men surviving should have been impossible, even with the amount of talismans you threw at me.” Laurence was deadpan, his face like stone. “I can also fix them if you don't have any of my clansmen around. I'm not exactly proficient with the Book of Life, but if you get me a few herbs that I can name for you, I can heal them in a way that means they will be fine within two weeks, no matter how bad the injury. Does that sound agreeable?”
The balding man stood up, with a worrisome look on his face. “End recording,” he said, before exiting the room. The other man who had been watching the interview quickly took him aside and they began arguing about something. While they argued, Laurence thought over the array that he had seen the man use, the one that had dissipated the moment he had told it to stop recording. It was not that different to the ones he was used to making, he just could not see where the battery was located. Generally speaking, an array would be inscribed on a battery to power it, and then if the array was required to be in a separate place to the battery, you would use an array marker to tether the array to a point far away. This array seemed to not work with that rule though. The more Laurence thought about it, the less the array made sense. The room’s walls and floor were perfectly smooth, there weren’t streams of mana that he could see defining the array. It was like the array was ignoring some of the rules that Laurence had learned about arrays.
The bald man came back, looking rather angry with someone. Laurence had not really paid any attention to the man as he was far too interested in working out how the array worked, than the outcome of what they decided to do about him.
“Law, we have spoken in great detail,” the man grumbled. “We have decided that we will release you, as long as you take the time to heal the members of my squad that you injured. We will put out word removing you from the wanted list, but that is on the proviso that you stay out of trouble.” He peeled the piece of paper that made up the talisman off Laurence’s chest and it immediately decayed before their eyes. The man pulled Laurence onto his feet before guiding him through the door. “You can go once you heal the people downstairs.”
As Laurence left the room, he noticed long streams of mana covering the outside of the room he was in. His eyes opened wide as he came to a realisation. So that’s how they did it! He realised that the reason why the array worked was because the whole room was a battery for an array, which meant that despite its strange capability to shut down mana inside it, the array could still activate.
With his curiosity satiated for the moment, the boy followed his captors down to the infirmary and began working. He began by getting the herbs needed for a Malmas Tincture, then mixed a batch up and moved on to more difficult remedies. The big issue for him was that while none of the wounds were life threatening, there were several people with bones that were pulverised beyond repair. He could stimulate bone growth with ease, but the challenge was getting it to set right. As it stood, the bones would regrow, but they likely would not connect, and there would be shards of bone shrapnel in the wounds of every single person who had been heavily injured.
Laurence knew that he had to heal these people well, as they could become valuable allies to him in future if he played his cards right.
He grabbed his bag and pulled a few Earth metals out, true forming them into pairs of rings. When he had six pairs, he began inscribing them with a fine blade of mana. Each line of the inscription was perfectly straight, and each glyph that was formed was perfect in shape, thanks to hours of practice that Laurence had made over the last year and a half. Ten minutes later he had six sets of identical steel rings, with a thin black line twisting round the shining metal.
Taking the rings to the balding man he handed him them and said, “These are Bone setting rings, I found them on my journey up Babel. I never really got any use out of them, and they are only of peak Earth rank, so I don't mind giving them to you. If a person channels mana into them then the rings will allow the bones of the person wearing them to set properly, no matter how badly they are damaged. The rings will change size if you will it, and can be used on any bone in the human body.” He paused, realising something for the first time. “They could likely also be used on corpses to make them look pristine when sending deceased members back to their families. I know that in the army, that can be important.”
For the first time since the two people met, the balding man looked shocked. These rings were an incredible gift, even if they were only of Earth ranking. “Thank... thank you. For a notorious thief, you are not what I expected.”
“You aren't bad either. I didn't know what to expect coming in here, but I'm pleasantly surprised as I leave.”
“You really aren't like those other gang kids, are you? You speak like an adult sometimes, and have focus that no normal child has.”
“Huh. I just try to live by what my daddy taught me. He always says that I should finish what I started, because giving up halfway is a crime to the soul. It's why no matter what I do, I put my whole being into it.”
“Your father is a wise man.” The balding man gave Laurence a soft smile. “My name is Bertrand Mallory, and if you ever need my help for something, just ask for the captain by that name. I will see what I can do to lend a hand.”
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