SSS-Ranked Surgeon In Another World: The Healer Is Actually OP!

Bruce banked them around a long bend in the river. The bend was tighter than he’d been taking. He let it lean them harder, and Lily, already learning, already incorporating, leaned with him without being told, her trailing hand never breaking contact with the water, the silver wake curving with the river the way a calligrapher’s brush curves with the page.

At the apex of the bend, where the river widened into a shallow pool, he did something he had been saving.

He pulled them up.

Sharp. Clean. A vertical climb that lifted them off the water in a single arcing rise, water still trailing from Lily’s fingers in long bright threads, the river falling away beneath them like a dropped ribbon.

Lily made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite a scream and entirely a yes, and Bruce kept the climb going until they were high enough that the river was a thin shining line below and the curve of the next valley was visible to the south.

He hovered them there.

Lily was breathing hard. Cheeks pink. Hair wet at the ends from the spray. Her trailing hand was still extended out into the air, fingers curled, as if she couldn’t quite believe she had just been allowed to drag it along a river at speeds that should have broken it.

She turned her face up to him.

“Brother,” she said, and the word carried about six different feelings at once.

“Mm?”

“That was the best.”

“Yeah?”

“That was the best thing I have ever done.”

Bruce smiled. The complicated chest-thing was happening again, and he didn’t bother fighting it this time. He just let it sit warm where it sat, and adjusted his grip on her, and hovered them in the bright morning above the river that had just been her toy.

“Want to do something else?” he asked.

Her eyes lit. “What?”

“Watch.”

He spun them.

Slow at first, a gentle rotation, like a leaf turning in a slow current, and Lily laughed, a high startled laugh, and gripped his neck tighter. Then faster. He spun them in a long slow spiral that took them higher as it turned, the world rotating around them in a smooth circular blur, the river below becoming a coiled silver thread, the green of the forest becoming a turning wheel of color.

“BROTHER, the world SPINNING,”

“We’re spinning.”

“WE’RE SPINNING WE’RE BROTHER, THE WORLD IS SPINNING”

He slowed the spin gradually, letting her stomach catch up, and brought them to a hovering stop facing east, where the morning sun was still climbing. Lily was laughing so hard she had hiccups. She buried her face in his shoulder for a moment to catch her breath, and Bruce felt her small body shake against his with the kind of laughter that only happened when a child had run out of room to hold the joy inside.

“Okay,” she gasped, when she could speak. “Okay. Okay. Okay. What’s next.”

“What’s next?”

“What’s NEXT, brother, you can’t STOP, this is the best day,”

He grinned.

“Next,” he said, “we go up.”

“How up?”

“As up as you want.”

Her eyes, already enormous, somehow widened further.

“All the up?” she breathed.

“Lily. There’s no such thing as all the up.”

“Haha! Big brother you fell for it, I’m saying that on purpose. Take me a lot of the way up.”

He laughed again, third time, definitely a record now, and tightened his grip on her, and reinforced the aura sheath around her body for the cold and the thinning air, and tilted them skyward.

And went.

The river fell away. The valley fell away. The continent fell away. Lily clung to his neck and laughed into his shoulder and watched the world become small beneath them, and somewhere in her small chest the warm feeling kept getting bigger, the way warm feelings do when there’s no obvious ceiling for them to bump against.

’Big brother can fly now,’ she thought, for the second time that morning, and this time the thought was accompanied by a small private addition, ’and he takes me with him.’

She held on tight.

She watched the world.

She had, by every measure available to a child of her age, the best morning of her life.

Bruce pulled them up out of the river-skim with a slow easy rise, the mirror beneath them breaking back into ordinary water as their silhouette dissolved.

Lily made a small protesting noise, she’d have flown low forever, given the choice, but he ignored it, banked them north, and pointed them toward a town he hadn’t visited in a while.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Somewhere.”

“Brother?”

“Somewhere good.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Mm.”

She huffed into his shoulder, a small indignant huff that was mostly for show, because she was still flying, and flying was apparently incompatible with being genuinely upset about anything.

Bruce let her sulk for the duration of the flight and kept his pace easy, letting her watch the landscape scroll by beneath them. Fields. A patch of forest. A stretch of low hills with a goat track winding through them. A small river that wasn’t their river. Then, cresting a rise, the town.

It was a modest place. Old stone. Narrow streets laid out before anyone had thought of planning them. A market square at the center with a fountain in it that had been worn smooth by generations of hands drawing water.

Bruce circled them once at a polite altitude, high enough not to startle anyone, low enough that Lily could see everything, and then brought them down in a quiet alley between two buildings at the edge of the square, where no one was watching.

Her feet touched cobblestones for the first time in what felt like half the morning.

She wobbled.

Bruce kept a hand at her back until her balance caught up, which took about three seconds. She looked down at the ground, offended, briefly, that it had stopped being below her and was now, rudely, underfoot, and then looked up at him with cute curious eyes.

“Where are we?”

“Come on.”

He took her hand.

She walked beside him, half-walking, half-skipping, still too full of flight to do anything in a straight line, as he led her out of the alley and into the market square.

The place was busy in the way small towns got busy mid-morning, vendors with carts, a few older women haggling over vegetables, a pair of town watch standing by the fountain pretending they weren’t half-asleep, children chasing each other between the stalls. Ordinary. Warm.

The smell of bread from somewhere, and something fried from somewhere else, and the faint sweet edge of fruit going slightly over-ripe on a cart at the edge.

Lily looked at all of it.

Bruce kept walking. He steered her through the square with the easy confidence of someone who knew exactly which direction he was heading, past the fountain, past the bread-smell, past a man selling small wooden toys, to the far corner where a narrow storefront sat tucked between a leather-worker and a tailor.

The shop had a blue-painted door and a small hand-painted sign above it, a pair of berries, frost-rimed, with a sprig of something green, and the moment Lily saw the sign, her whole face changed.

She stopped walking.

Bruce kept hold of her hand and felt the stop in her fingers. He looked down.

Lily was staring at the blue door with an expression he had not seen on her face in years. Not since she’d been very small, and he’d come home from somewhere and produced a small paper twist of something cold and sweet from his pocket, and her entire small world had rearranged itself around the flavor of it.

“Brother,” she said, very quietly.

“Mm.”

“Brother. Is this, is this where,”

“Mm.”

“Is this the place…”

“This is the place.”

She looked up at him. Her eyes were so wide they were almost comic. There was something almost betrayed in her expression, in the specific way a younger sibling is betrayed when she discovers that a thing she had believed was magic has actually had a location this entire time.

“You buy them here?”

“Yes.”

“This whole time?”

“Yes.”

“I pass here the days I come back alone or with mum in a mana taxi mobile”

“That’s good.”

He pushed the door open with his shoulder, still holding her hand, and drew her gently in after him.

The inside of the shop was small and cold in the particular way places that worked with frost were cold, not uncomfortable, but a consistent chill that settled into the skin pleasantly on a warm morning.

The air smelled of sugar and berry and the clean sharp bite of frost. The walls were lined with shelves. The shelves were lined with glass jars. The jars were full of frosted berry, the man seemed to be deep in the production stage when they stepped in. Yes, he was using telekinesis to mix things up and form the final product he was pretty good at it and was almost done the time they stepped in.