He was Almost Absorbed by the System

Extra - The Dark Healer

Teacher Vitalous was born Askehil Tailor and raised by his beloved mother Ismay Tailor. He never knew his father, he did not even know whether his mother had once been married and frankly, as he grew up beside his poor mother in their distant village, he did not really care.

Even as a tiny child, he held a dark fascination with certain things like pulling the legs off of insects and poking the corpses of reptiles, but most saw this as childish curiosity of a boy let to be too idle. He loved attention, whether good or bad, but especially that of his mother. His smile could light the darkest of places upon receiving praise after helping his mother as she sewed tattered clothes and darned socks for many within the village. He adored his mother and she adored him.

However at the age of seven, with a small crowd of other children ranging from five to nine years of age, he was taken from the village to the city. There, he received his mark and was found to be a very rare talent. He had the ability of Healing. He was automatically placed into the Mage Halls with no opportunity to even bade his mother a proper goodbye and his Teachers had him placed in the S-class. There, he was expected to complete the vigorous training plan created specifically for him. He put his mind to doing so, hoping that once he had finished in school, he would be able to return to his village and his mother and be more of an aid to them as their Healer. He grew to love his studies, especially those on diseases and illnesses of the body and mind and savoured the dream that he would bring his knowledge home and earn love and praise from those he had grown up with. He would make his mother proud of him.

But a dream often only can remain a dream and so he learned this at the age of thirteen when he graduated. Instead of being allowed to return home, he was given a place in the upper city, surrounded by the large homes of the elite and given servants, who might as well have been his jailers. He came to learn that he would be expected to use his gifts to help those who came to this clinic and came to realise that even then, he would only be visited by the elite few. Perhaps spurned on by his youth and naivety, as well as the convenience of his magic, those elite would come to him for the most foolish of reasons and abused his talents. Not one thanked him, often instead he received curses when he could not perform as they wished or was unable to Heal anymore due to wasting the magic on other fools.

On his sixteenth birthday, he was forced to wed a princess, a cousin to the immediate royal family, further to keep him rooted to the city and under its control. He soon came to loathe the whiny bitch, whose nature of entitlement scratched at the core of his being. She also loathed him, his poor and common background was not balanced by his blessed gift in her view and the pair suffered each other's company beneath the same roof for a long time. Eventually, due to heavy expectations, they came together to produce a lone child. The boy, who was named Lewin, was given to the servants to raise. His mother visited her parents home so often that she might as well and did move back in with them and his father was too busy with his clinic and later endeavours to pay him any heed.

Things came to a head when a Lord summoned him to his home to cure his son, who had issues within his mind. Vitalous could not, his magic was tempered to Healing the body, he lacked any spiritual ability that might help to cure a mind. During his time with the child, he soon came to learn that the boy's problem was not one he was born with but one he had developed. His environment was suffocating him, his father was ridiculously strict and would beat him when his expectations were not fulfilled and then neglect him emotionally at all other times. It struck an interest in the Healer that a child's mind could be ruined so. When the Healer admitted that there was little he could do in regards of magic to help the suffering child, the Lord attempted to pull rank on him. But Vitalous was now an adult, not the naive child trying to please, he told the man exactly as he felt and reminded him that as the lone Healer within the Kingdom, should he not show him some respect, then he would have to find treatment in the ways of commoners, with bandages and 'potions'. The Lord had no choice but to back down.

Reveling in his newly realised power, Vitalous left the city and travelled back to the village of his birth and to the mother that he had not seen in twenty years. He still sorely missed her and hoped that he would at the least be able to bring her back to the city to provide and care for her as she had done so for him. If this had occurred, perhaps his future would have a happier outcome, but alas he arrived to find out that she had passed away three seasons past. Heart broken and diving into the abyss of hatred, he lay all the blame for his situation on the city and the King and the horrible Elite.

On returning to the city, he opted to become a Teacher, hoping to steer excellent talents in sharing his views and not long after this did his experiments begin. Opting for those children who would not be noticed if they disappeared, he made a deal with a shady man, who was escaping death at the hands of one of the underworld's shadowy masters. With a handful of magi, that felt unappreciated or hated for their unusual talents and some of the shady man's own people, they began to warp and break the minds of the children. Their hands were soon covered in blood as one by one the children lost their lives to the brutal training and only when the strongest and most cunning survived all of their trials, were they reshaped into deadly assassins. They swiftly became the perfect option if one needed to remove a living obstacle. Certain circles within the elite were especially pleased with their services.

Vitalous loved each and everyone of his beautiful experiments, though was disappointed when Three and Nine showed that they still retained some of their humanity and needed to be eliminated. He was especially fond of the child known as Seven. The child was a vision to look at and wore his childish innocence like a mask as he poisoned his victims with the most potent of concoctions. He often summoned the boy to his rooms within the tower so that he might rant of his exhausting and unhappy dealings with the wealthy elite, knowing the boy's face would remain the same; nonjudgmental and quiet. There would be no words of defence for them or of dislike, in fact the boy would say nothing at all, just hop along back to his cell when he was dismissed; the perfect puppet.

So he was most distressed to learn that the boy had been lost to the forest on one of his missions and warned his partner in this venture to be more careful of his things. He no longer wished to play with them, but that did not mean he did not have a use for them later on. Instead, he had found a new toy, an extremely powerful fire mage and if he could sway this child to his side, the boy could literally burn down the city for him! However, despite the fact that the boy was clearly bright enough to see that unpretty reality of the upper city, he was not so easily won over and vanished during an unexpected event in the middle sections of the city, along with the son he had almost forgotten existed. That child had not become a Healer like himself, but though his talent was fairly rare, his power was not that impressive, so Vitalous decided he could not be used and had no real opinion about his disappearance.

Vitalous was not foolish that he had no other plans to set in motion to seek what he wished; a purge, a cleansing of the Kingdom and hopefully the death of the King and his lot. He would set about beginning a war in which he would selflessly Heal the sick and wounded, while quietly pointing fingers at the cause. It was easier to create than he had expected. Poisoning the crops of one village and convincing a Council member that the villagers still ought pay their taxes... the idiot King lapped up the advice like a thirsty dog and set his soldiers upon the already suffering villagers. The explosive power of that boy had been an unexpected bonus, Vitalous just pitied that he could not have obtained him first.

The events that lead to the war barely needed a guiding hand after that and the Healer simply sat back and watched as war descended upon them like a poisonous cloud of pollen. He could not predict, however, that those he helped create would come for him. He knew about the massacre, it had amused him, but had not been able to figure out where the assassins disappeared to and so nothing he planned would aid him when they suddenly reappeared. Were he an outsider, he might have thought it ironic that he became locked within his mind, just as his actions had once caused Seven to be locked inside his. Instead he screamed and cried out in madness as he was pushed to perform Healing after Healing for every wounded soldier, for every simpering madam, for every mage who lost control, until his magic was wiped and his body was exhausted and still his servant guided him to the next client, uncaring that he had lost his mind.

And then the Queen was Exiled with her first born son and a few others and they came to the Healer and told him to come with them. Naturally, he could not refuse their command and followed them to the surface, all the while scratching the back of his brain, trying to regain his limbs. He healed them of poison and of acid burns, but he could not heal other ailments that the forest caused. And when vines shot out of the bushes to try an claim a fresh victim, he was pushed into them in order to protect the already failing body of the former prince. He did not escape their clutches.