James’s eyes shot open. He tried to open his mouth, but he couldn’t speak.

“James, can you hear me?” Lunaris asked repeatedly.

“Brother, blink if you can hear us.” Helios said.

Despite his eyelids feeling as heavy as mountains, he forced himself to blink repeatedly.

Immediately, smiles brighter than any smile they’ve ever had before appeared on their faces. The dwarves began laughing and cheering, breaking into dance from sheer joy.

But the smiles vanished just as quickly when they remembered the situation they were in.

There was no hospital for many thousands of miles. And this wasn’t a wound that could just wait. They had to heal him now or he could actually die.

Lunaris began pouring her healing into James at a downright dangerous rate. In mere seconds, she was already wobbling, lightheaded from the violent torrent of healing escaping her body.

It was immediately clear that she wouldn’t have enough mana to fully rebuild James’s body. She had greatly improved as a healer over the past few months, but this was a task way above her level.

Without a word, Helios placed his hands on her and began transferring his mana into her.

“Guys, give her all her mana! Regardless of the impurities, we need all the mana we can get!” Helios said as he focused with his eyes closed.

“Gladly!” They all answered in unison, placing their hands on Lunaris.

“Wait, we won’t have some crazy agent attacking us out of nowhere while we’re healing him, right?” Emilia asked as she looked around paranoically.

“Unlikely.” Helios answered. “Their cities are thousands of miles apart from one another. And our kamikaze friend basically wiped this one off the map. Well, at least every living being within it.” Helios grinned fiendishly. Even though their current situation was far from ideal, he couldn’t help but be proud at what James had accomplished.

Suddenly, it dawned on all of them. They hadn’t realized because they had been engaged in the most stressful mission of their lives for days now.

But James had really killed a city full of agents. Thousands of agents, all dead at the hands of one man. And not just the normal agents either, he even took down their crazed, seemingly unkillable leader.

They all had their eyes wide open in disbelief, jaws dropped. They hadn’t had time to process it, but now they were shocked at the insanity of that accomplishment.

The shock of such an incredible, unbelievable feat stunned them for a while. But as they were beginning to come back to reality, they realized that there was something even more shocking. And it was happening at that very moment.

The man was a head! Nothing but a head!

It didn’t make any sense that he was even alive. There were a lot of weird magics in the world, nothing was truly impossible for the mages that trained for thousands of years. But to their knowledge, James didn’t possess any such esoteric powers.

And yet, here he was, surviving as just a head.

But as shocked as they all were, they took the task at hand very seriously, not stopping the mana transfer for a single second.

Lunaris was pumping her healing into James, and the rest of them were pumping their mana into Lunaris.

Luckily, James was a freak when it came to mana, so it didn’t really matter if he received some impurities from all the foreign and convoluted mana in the healing.

His body was slowly regrowing. They could see his nerves, muscles and bones regenerating. Those brave enough to sneak a peak, that is. The sight was so grotesque that most of them kept their eyes clenched closed, not daring to subject their eyes and psyches to more than a millisecond of that image.

The pain of regrowing flesh was the most excruciating of them all, but James surprisingly didn’t feel all that bad. It felt like he was floating in a pool of saltwater, only able to feel his head as his body was caressed by the gentle waves.

The only thing that did make him feel bad was putting his friends through this stress. But as he looked at them in his mute state, he saw them smiling. He knew he had put them through a lot, but at least it was over now.

The more time passed, the happier Lunaris and Helios seemed to become. Even though they could barely look at James’s grotesque flesh being regenerated muscle fiber by muscle fiber, they seemed happier that he’s alive than James himself.

This time around, they weren’t mad at him at all for worrying them like that. He did what had to be done, and he was alive to tell the tale. And that’s all that really mattered.

For now though, he wasn’t actually able to tell the tale. Half of his body had regenerated, but he still didn’t seem to be capable of speech yet.

And Lunaris seemed to be running out of power already. The fact that she was able to heal him even this much made her one of the most powerful healers in Hedonia. But she had her limits, and she was very close to reaching them.

James still wasn’t in a state where he could make the journey to the hospital though. They had to heal him now, and that meant that the rest of them had to pick up the slack.

Without hesitation, Denmac took out the expensive bottle of wine Helios had given him, and chugged it down within seconds.

“Don’t say anything about the price, cause money doesn’t matter right now.” Helios chuckled and pulled out three other bottles of wine.

Their power was clearly even higher than of the previous wines he had given to Denmac, one could tell from the scent alone. Their auras were so strong that the bottles looked like they were glowing.

Nobody could process the wine like Denmac could, so Helios gave him the bottles. But for the rest of them, he pulled out mana potions.

“Bottoms up!” Helios yelled, and they all downed their potions right away.

Suddenly, a new torrent of mana hit Lunaris. Her green, healing glow seemed to regain strength right away, pushing James’s recovery speed into overdrive.

“Ow!” James shouted, surprising even himself.

“You can finally talk!” Lunaris smiled as she poured even more healing into him.

Seeing as their efforts weren’t in vain, the group chugged another batch of potions right away.

“God damn, that hurts!” James shouted while smiling. It seemed that the pain was getting stronger as more of his body regrew. But that didn’t matter to him much, he couldn’t keep himself from smiling. The fact that they were all safe and relatively sound was a miracle, and that was a stronger sensation than any pain could ever be, at least to someone as used to regularly inflicting tremendous pain upon themselves.

His flesh was visibly regrowing by the second. By the 4th round of potions, it looked like they’d be done any second now.

The group chugged yet another batch of potions while putting their earplugs in to mute James’s infernal screams, the last parts of flesh and the skin being the most painful to regrow. It wasn’t something that any of them weren’t used to though. Hospitals were full of such reckless fools that screamed their heart out. None that visited the hospital every other month though, like a certain maniac.

The screams were so loud that they could even hear them through earplugs.

But all of a sudden, they stopped.

They pulled them out and looked at James, finally daring to fully open their eyes.

A man who was just a head not long ago, was now smiling in front of them, looking like he had just come out of a spa.

Without a word, Helios and Lunaris leapt towards him and hugged him.

James laughed and hugged them back. “Let’s go home, guys!”