I Reincarnated as the World's Worst Healer

Chapter 133: A Dark King’s Marriage Proposal (3)

The skeleton obeyed. Down in the maze, the middling piece raised its rusted sword and brought it down against the nearest wall of black roses.

The hedge parted under the blade — and then knit itself back together, thorns weaving over the cut as fast as it had opened. A second stroke. The same: severed, then healed, the rose-flesh closing like water poured back into a bowl.

The third stroke landed, and the hedge stayed open. The thorns shuddered, twitched, and went still, leaving a clean gap in the wall where there had been none.

"(Three cuts,)" Ebony noted, filing it away with grim satisfaction. "(Just like the old version. The walls regenerate twice and surrender on the third. Action over movement. He built the whole board to punish people who only ever think about going forward.)"

And across the garden, the king began to laugh.

Ebony’s head snapped up. "What’s so funny? I cracked it. I found your trick. The walls come down, my piece walks straight through, and you lose your little wedding." She crossed her arms. "You should be sulking."

"Oh, I knew you’d find it." The king wasn’t sulking in the slightest. He spread his arms wide atop his tower, voice rolling warm and amused across the maze.

"I hoped you would!" He paced a slow circle, gesturing as he went, every sentence punctuated with a flourish of those pale hands or a fresh ripple of laughter.

"You see — I’ve known Visitors before. Oh, many of them, over the long centuries. And they were always, always the most interesting things to come crawling into my country." A delighted little spin of the wrist.

"Because I could play with them! Games like this — games of rules, of systems, of clever hidden tricks — the people born to this world simply cannot keep up. Their minds don’t bend that way.

This world is so dreadfully boring, little Visitor, and the only souls who could ever match my pace were the ones who fell in from somewhere else."

He stopped, and pointed one finger directly at her across the whole expanse of thorns.

"But you—" another laugh, brighter "—you seem different even among Visitors. So I want you to keep playing well. It makes the game worth the candle. Do disappoint me eventually, though, won’t you? A wedding would be such fun to plan."

"You’re insufferable," Ebony muttered.

"I’m immortal. It amounts to the same thing."

And so they played.

Ebony and the dwarf rolled, and rolled again, turn after turn, and a strange thing began to happen at her shoulder: Hrazfel stopped arguing.

He’d started the game certain she was going to marry a corpse out of sheer stubbornness, and somewhere in the rhythm of it — her quiet orders, the way the shield-skeleton carved openings and the iron giant lumbered through them in its wake — the old dwarf shut his mouth and simply did what she said.

It was, for Hrazfel, an almost religious experience.

Almost.

"I have a question," he said, on the eleventh turn, watching her hand the giant another modest roll while the shield-bearer hacked open a fresh stretch of wall.

"Why are we nursing the big slow one along? My giant eats two points to move one square. If you’d just let your skeleton run free on the high rolls, you’d be halfway to the middle by now. You keep waiting for the tank. It’s maddening."

"Because the giant’s going to matter later." Ebony didn’t look up from the board.

"I don’t know exactly when yet, but a piece that survives a thorn volley without a scratch isn’t a piece you leave behind. Whatever’s at the center, I’d rather have iron standing next to me when I get there." She passed him the next roll.

"We advance together. No matter what happens, the two pieces stay close. That’s the rule I’m playing by, even if it’s slower."

"That’s not in his rules."

"It’s in mine."

Hrazfel grunted, and — miracle of miracles — kept moving the giant.

The minutes wore on. The shield-skeleton cut, the giant followed, the two of them grinding inward through ring after ring of black roses, until at last they pushed through the final hedge into the innermost circle — and there it was.

The giant silver chalice, gleaming. The white rose rising from its still water, pale and perfect against all that dark.

They’d almost made it.

And that was, of course, exactly when the head start ran out.

The hedges of the innermost ring shuddered, tore, and gathered — black rose-vines ripping themselves up out of the walls and braiding together into a shape, a hulking humanoid thing of woven thorn and creeper, with a single enormous black rose blooming where its head should be.

It planted itself between Ebony’s pieces and the chalice and let out a low, wet, rustling sound that was almost a growl.

"(A guardian. Of course there’s a guardian.)" Ebony exhaled. "(Kill it to reach the rose. The free turns are over. Now it’s a race, and he knows this part better than I do.)"

Across the maze, the king moved his piece.

And from behind his tower rose something new — a dragon, picked clean to the bone, vast wings of bare rib and tattered membrane unfolding against the red sky. A skeletal dragon, easily ten times the size of anything else on the board.

"Oh, that’s cheating!" Ebony pointed at it, outraged. "You can’t just produce a dragon! Where was that in the rules? Where was the dragon clause?"

"There was no clause forbidding it, either." The king’s grin carried across the garden. "And really, little Visitor — if you can’t win by cheating, as a Visitor of all things, then you’d have been better off never falling into this world at all. Cheating is practically your birthright. Do try to keep up."

Ebony made a sound of pure strangled fury.

The king rolled. A six. He laid his pale hand flat, and the skeletal dragon reared back and loosed a single perfect line of fire — a lance of flame that punched straight through the entire labyrinth from his side to the center, vaporizing every hedge in its path, leaving a clean black scorched corridor running directly to the chalice.

His piece began to stride up the open road he’d just burned.

"You enormous — you bony, cheating, four-hundred-year-old—" Ebony was halfway into a truly impressive run of profanity when a thick dwarven hand clamped firmly over her mouth.

"Mmf!"

"Don’t," Hrazfel said, very quietly, very seriously, all the bluster gone out of him. "Girl. Look at me.

That thing — whatever the games and the smiles and the grandfatherly nonsense — he did not earn the title ’king of the dead’ by being pleasant. He is a genuine monster. The realest one I know, and I know several."

His eyes flicked toward the distant black figure. "You do not insult a power like that to its face while you’re standing in its garden. You smile, you play, and you do not poke it. Understand?"

Ebony glared at him over the hand. Then, slowly, she nodded, and he let go.

"(Fine.)" She swallowed her rage and let the cold part of her brain take the wheel again.

"(He’s faster, he cheats, and he can erase the board whenever he likes. I can’t out-race a flamethrower. So I don’t race. I win the way the minigame was always meant to be won — patiently, and with a trick he won’t see coming because nobody in this world ever saw it coming.)"

So she changed her game entirely.

She spent her best rolls on the iron giant, inching it toward the chalice at a tortoise’s crawl, two squares at a time, while she used the cheap shield-skeleton not to advance at all — but to fight.

Turn after turn she sent the swordsman slashing at the rose-guardian, never trying to kill it, only harrying it, drawing it, baiting it away from the center, leading the great thorn-creature step by lumbering step away from the silver cup it was meant to protect.

The king rolled, and rolled, and his burned-road piece reached the edge of the innermost ring. Two more good rolls and the white rose was his. Ebony could see the wedding in his posture.

And on her next turn, she did not attack the guardian.

"Skeleton," she said to her swordsman. "Take off your own head. And throw it to the big one."

Hrazfel made a noise like a kettle. "It’ll do what?"

The shield-skeleton set its rusted blade to its own neck and struck. Its skull popped free, tumbled through the air across two squares — and the iron giant caught it and jammed it down onto its own shoulders, so that the great yeti-skeleton now stood there grinning with two skulls instead of one.

Across the maze, the king’s amusement vanished. "That," he said sharply, "is not in the rules. A piece cannot simply—"

"Oh, but it is." Ebony’s smile was all teeth now. "I told you — I know this game. And the rules say a skeleton counts as a living piece so long as its skull is intact.

The body doesn’t matter. The head matters. And a living piece may move a number of squares according to the dice." She let it land.

"My swordsman’s skull is perfectly intact. It’s just... riding on the giant now. Which means that giant isn’t one piece anymore — it’s two living pieces sharing a single body. And two living pieces—"

The king’s white eyes widened.

"—get to use both of our dice rolls," Ebony finished. "Mine and Hrazfel’s. Every turn. On the same body."

For the first time all night, the necromancer’s composure cracked.

He rolled, fast, almost desperate — and it wasn’t enough.

His piece advanced up the scorched road but fell short of the chalice, one square shy, the white rose hovering just beyond its reach. And the two-skulled iron giant, fed both dice at once, would close the gap on its next move without question.

"Burn it!" The king flung out his hand, and the skeletal dragon wheeled and spat its fire — a full roaring gout of it, straight down onto the two-headed giant.

Hrazfel flinched. "It’s going to cook them!"

"It’s fine," Ebony said.

The flame slammed into the giant and the whole center of the maze shook with it, fire boiling up around the silver chalice.

When it cleared, the iron armor had melted — slagged and run off the bones in glowing rivulets — and a few ribs had crumbled away to ash. But the great skeleton was still standing. Both skulls still grinned. Both pieces still lived.

"(Iron’s worthless against dragonfire,)" Ebony thought, watching it stand. "(But bone that’s lasted in this dead place a few hundred years? That’s another thing entirely. I told the old man the tank would matter. I just didn’t know it’d matter by eating a dragon’s breath and shrugging.)"

"Why," Hrazfel whispered, staring, "is it still alive."

"Because I picked the balanced one, you greedy raisin."

On the next turn, the two-skulled giant took both dice, lumbered the final squares across the scorched ground, reached up past the rose-guardian’s grasping vines, and closed its melted, fire-blackened hand around the white rose.

The bloom came free of the silver chalice with a soft, final snap.

The maze went still. Every black rose in the garden bowed its head at once.

Ebony turned toward the distant tower where the king of the dead stood frozen, and she put on her sweetest, most poisonous smile, and called across the whole ruined labyrinth:

"I do hope your army’s better than your skills at swindling a poor, defenseless woman."