VRMMO: World's First Glyphborne-Chapter 122: I can walk. I can Fight!
Taking a few more minutes to regain her strength and allow more mana to enter her body, Valerie rolled over as she still laid on the floor. She stared at her legs, the useless things they were now as her disease had absolutely ravaged her muscles, and still was to this day.
It ate her alive, bringing with it serious bouts of agony and put her life expectancy at mid-thirties, at the best.
She had honestly gotten used to all of those things. The pain and the certainty of death. It was easy to face them with a smile and put on a brave face for others, telling everyone she was fine for so long that she guessed that she just started to believe it.
There was something about a disease being incurable that was strangely peaceful. You could kick, scream, cry and generally make a big fuss about it, which she did at first. But when you can’t do anything to stop it, you eventually learn acceptance.
To enjoy the ride while it lasts, because it doesn’t last for long.
But now, she might have had a possibility of a cure. Her body in Dawd was powerful, it was strong. It had muscles fuelled by mana, to the point that she could do extraordinary feats of strength.
If she could even get just a sliver of that here... then she could actually have a normal life.
Stirring up her mana, and the dregs of mana in the air, Valerie concentrated on pushing it through her body and into the withered muscles of her legs. Infusing herself not with elemental force, but with pure mana.
Before her very eyes her legs began to change. The atrophied and miserable limbs began to inflate, as if they were nothing more than balloons. Her skin, that hung sad and loose off of the bone thin legs, started to be stretched over new muscles that grew underneath.
Her legs gained youth, lustre, and shine as they rapidly evolved from useless twigs to real, functional legs.
Tears streamed down Valerie’s eyes, almost breaking her concentration on her mana cycling, but she clamped a hand over her mouth to contain her joyful sobs and fought to keep her concentration.
She wiggled her toes, a feat she could barely accomplish before and even so came with piercing pain. But now? It was as easy as it was in Dawd.
Valerie slowly got to her feet, which shook unsteadily beneath her, and took a few nervous steps as her muffled sobs continued. Slowly but surely, she walked back and forth, first taking everything slowly before finally picking up speed and walking at a normal pace.
"I can walk... I CAN WALK!" She cried out, throwing her hands up in victory. Her mana cycling finally gave out, a wave of exhaustion hitting her again. But she didn’t care, by this point her legs had fully regained their muscles and function.
She looked towards the wheel chair sitting beside her bed and offered it quite the obscene gesture.
"I don’t ever need to use you again! Oh god, how I have dreamed of this day for so god damned long!" She shouted at it with a laugh, before a new realisation dawned on her.
"I need to tell Jason," She said, rushing around the room and quickly getting dressed, stumbling slightly as she had to remember how to put on trousers with functional legs.
"I need to tell him about everything. He is going to freak out!"
Naturally, Valerie had made sure that she was looking extra good, even if she had a slight bruise on her forehead from the coin.
Then she rushed to the door, swung it open and took a step out only to immediately collapse to the floor as her leg gave out beneath her. Her hands clamped around her legs as she could feel her muscles writhing and convulsing underneath her skin, as new waves of agonising pain coursed through her body.
Her legs felt like they had been dipped in lava, had the lava washed off by acid and then given a massage with butchers knives and chainsaws for good measure.
Tears streamed down her cheeks once again as she writhed on the floor, but there was no joy in them this time. The muscles in her legs rapidly shrunk, back down to what they had been like before and then they shrivelled up even more for good measure.
Valerie screamed, writhed and squirmed on the floor for an entire minute until finally the pain subsided. Her nice outfit was completely dishevelled and ruined, her hair a mess and, beneath the trousers she had stepped into moments before, there was a pair of bone thin legs that looked ready to drop off.
She wept softly on the floor, not just from the pain she had experienced but at the simple cruelty of life.
What had she done to deserve this? Who had she wronged to earn a lifetime of hardship and misery. A lifetime that was bound to be cut short by the same disease she had thought she had finally escaped from.
Hope... was truly the cruellest trick of them all.
Of course her disease was genetic, it was a part of her from birth as much as her legs were, even if the two of them fought against each other.
Which meant whenever she enhanced her body with mana, she was enhancing her genetic disease too. It didn’t just undo everything, it advanced her condition even more.
Valerie stayed on the floor for god knows how long. She didn’t bother counting the seconds. Instead, when her tears had finally dried up and her shattered hope had once more been buried underneath the miserable veil of acceptance, she dragged her broken body back over to her wheelchair.
She could feel it mocking her as she clambered into it and released the brake before rolling out of the room like she always did.
"Fine then..." She muttered, her voice filled with determination as her brow creased into a defiant frown, "If I can’t be Belladonna in this world... Then they’ll just have to see how powerful of a wizard Valerie can be. A broken body can’t stop my mind.
If I can’t rise to their level, they will have to bow to me."
