"Lith’s greatest virtue is that he has no ambition. He never asked me for titles or power, nor has he tried to turn his village into his own small kingdom, like many mages of humble origins do, intoxicated by their new abilities.

It implies that whenever you require his services, he’ll never try to harm the Kingdom, since your goals are unlikely to clash with his."

Sylpha thought back at her husband words during their last quarrel. Maybe he was right wanting to arrange Lith’s reward as soon as possible.

"I still think that your evaluation is too exaggerated. He is still just a kid, even if he becomes as powerful as Marth, he is still far from a level S threat."

Mirim shook her head, sighing.

"You are thinking too straightforward. He is not going to raise an undead army like the god of death, or unleash a plague like Hatorne. He may not be capable of such feats, but that doesn’t make him less dangerous.

What makes you underestimate Lith, is that so far he abides to the law, but that’s because it suits him. If there is one thing I understood about him, is that he wants to be left alone.

Think about his past. When his brothers started to antagonize him, one was disowned and the other left of his own choice. When a noble family messed with him, it was wiped out, because after killing several adults without shedding a tear, he had the presence of spirit of bringing proof of their contractor.

And he was respectively five and six years old at the time. Each of his achievements, taken separately is remarkable. But when you assemble all the pieces of the puzzle you get a kid that lacks any conscience, patient, manipulative, unscrupulous towards his own kin, let alone strangers.

And you are letting such a person near the most dangerous disease the Griffon Kingdom has ever faced. Think about it. He accepted to help you because he was promised a reward of his own choice, Lith couldn’t care less about the infected.

If he manages to cure it, you’ll have to take into account that he probably is capable or replicating it, or even make it worse. If angered, there is no telling how far Lith is willing to go for revenge, and I am not willing to learn it the hard way.

That’s why I always bound him only through gratitude, helping him when he needed. Consider him a freelance to call I the times of need, but always remember to pay his due.

Force him to live under your roof, and he’ll burn the house down after boarding up doors and windows."

Sylpha mulled those words for a few seconds, drumming her fingers on the armrest.

"I see your point with the kite strategy. Too dangerous to bring him close, too valuable to kill. Good thinking, without him, we would still be in hot waters with the plague. Any idea about how to reward him?"

"It’s still too early to tell. Give him something precious, but not too much, otherwise he will not need us anymore."

Sylpha nodded.

"What about the box? Any news?"

"No, the lock is really complicated, and we have only one shot at it. Same for the former Headmistress Linnea and Hatorne. I don’t think we have to worry about Hatorne, though.

She has left the Kingdom the same day the lab exploded, and that was a big mistake on her side. Here she could still rely on her contractor, but once the other countries learn what she did, they’ll kill her in our stead.

The Blood Desert tribes value honour above everything else, and what she did is the highest form of cowardice, killing hundreds of innocents for money. As for the Gorgon Empire, the Magic Empress would never employ someone that didn’t hesitate betraying her own country."

"Agreed. If I had ever suspected she was capable of doing such a thing, I would have killed her years ago."

"Geniuses are erratic." Mirim sighed. "That’s why they are so precious yet so dangerous. And that’s why I prefer people like Lith or Marth, they are predictable."

The two women kept talking for hours discussing the future of the mages of the whole country.

***

In the following days, Lith kept searching for a cure, but to no avail. Even after Professor Marth’s arrival, the situation remained dire. Lith started to work with the healers from the White Griffon academy, sharing with them over time everything he had learned about the parasites.

Solus racked Lith’s brain non stop, looking through all his memories about Earth technology and medicine, searching for a clue. But there were still too many things they ignored about magic; science seemed to have nothing to offer against those monstrosities.

Both of them were at their wits end, feeling their sanity slipping away. Lith was sick and tired of the life at the military camp, with most of his abilities sealed, always looking his back against traitors.

He hated being forced to spend his days with people he didn’t like, working on something that had no interest for him, with no privacy at all except during the sleeping hours.

If it wasn’t for Solus’ constant support and care, he would have gone on rampage, rising from the dead every single corpse available and exploiting the ensuing chaos to run away from that prison.

As for Solus, she was experiencing what Marth feared would happen to Quylla if she took part in the research project. For the first time in her existence, she was facing the darkest side of humans, against which Lith had warned her over and over.

During their work, she had to witness death, misery and pain, knowing it was no accident or natural catastrophe, but the result of the constant war than men waged against other men for the sake of power.

Until that moment, she had always lived surrounded by the love of Lith’s family and friends, allowing herself to believe that the world wasn’t as dark as Lith painted it, and that he had been scarred by the unfortunate events in his first life.

The plague didn’t discriminate between young and old, good and bad people. Every death they were powerless to prevent, left a scar in her heart. Her only solace was Lith’s constant nagging about the food, their living quarters, the mask that made him sweat bullets, everything.

Whenever Solus felt she was about to lose herself in the madness surrounding them, she would find a safe harbour in his heart, uncaring for the ever growing body count or their failure, the only thing he worried about was her.

As often happens in the history of science, a crucial element for their survival was discovered almost by accident.

Lith’s research team had confirmed that the worms couldn’t be killed or removed, either by magic and surgery, without causing them to release the necrosis inducing toxin that lead to the patient’s death.

To make things worse, Lith had discovered that even if the parasites’ effects weren’t triggered by the active use of mana, once their number grew above what the mana capacity of the host could sustain, they would start to feed on his flesh and blood causing his demise.

It was after one of such cases occurred that Lith noticed something he had missed until that point. The corpse, like all the others caused by the worms’ reproductive cycle, was perfectly normal.

Temperature, rigidity, everything was as it was supposed to be, with no sign of premature decay.

After consulting with Marth, they devised together a spell that would allow them to confirm his new theory. Being comprised only by experts, it took Marth’s team only a few hours to create a trial spell, instead of the weeks that Lith would need if he had worked alone.

Lith had already helped creating a diagnostic spell that would allow even to fake mages to detect the parasites, so he decided to let Marth conduct the experiment. He needed a cure that anyone could use, or everything would be for naught.

First, Marth located the parasites in a patient’s limb, then he applied the trial spell. Once again, Lith’s core idea was simple. He had observed that the natural death of the parasites would deal no harm to the host, so all they had to do was not to kill them but to let them die.

The trial spell flooded the patient’s body with darkness magic, without directly attacking the parasites. The limb progressively lost its mana and vitality, until the point the worms were incapable to draw sustenance from it, starving immediately.

Lith was able to follow the whole procedure via Invigoration, ready to step in if something went wrong. The first to collapse were the eggs, withering as soon the slightest trace of darkness touched them.

Unlike the adult form, they had no protection against it. The keystone in Lith’s new spell was that they weren’t attacking the whole limb, but only the locations were the parasites resided.

So, once their life force was extinguished, having being tricked in perceiving their host as dead, the healers were free to regenerate the damaged tissues and inject energy in the patient.

The procedure lasted more than an hour, Lith and the other healers had to intervene more than once to prevent the spell from attacking safe tissues. Being only a trial version, it emphasized strength rather than finesse.

When it was over, Marth was drenched in sweat, his mask’s eye crystals were fogged by the body heat.

"My dear colleagues, this leg needs to be regenerated a bit, but I’d say this was a success!"