I was beginning to get really tired of this passing-out thing. I woke up a lot faster than last time though – one second I was completely out of it, and the next fully awake. I blinked a few times, the smell of blood making my nose wrinkle up in disgust. Slowly, I turned my head over to the side, and stared at the corpse of the monster. It was… mutilated. The head and at least 8 feet worth of the body had been sliced open, the cut reaching about halfway through it in terms of depth… It's guts and… god-knows what else were spilled out all around it on the ground. I gagged, and felt bile rise in my throat. …And then, I noticed the massive oozing burns covering its body. I promptly turned my head the other way, and threw up. Well… more like dry-heaved, but whatever. Vomit's vomit. Ugh. Closing my eyes, I remembered the battle…
It was kind of blurry… it was especially hard to remember what had happened once I had tranced, but… I could remember how I had gone ballistic. And I could remember slicing it open. And… I could remember my Grand Lethal attack. That must have been where the burns had come from – but I honestly couldn't remember that attack doing anything like that before… Screw it. It didn't matter – the point was that I was alive, and it was dead.
Ignoring, of course, the massive injuries I…
I blinked again… and I realized something strange. I could hear. During the battle, the monster's sonic attack had completely ruptured my ear-drums (or at least, I was pretty sure it did), so… why could I hear the mournful wind currents in the Iifa tree blow past…? My ears still hurt – a lot, but… had I somehow…? I remembered where else I had been injured, and mentally checked them over. My back and arm hurt… they hurt a LOT… but no-where NEAR as much as they should have. Not really sure what to expect, I tried to move the fingers on the arm that had been crushed. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see them move… and it barely hurt. Slowly, I raised my arm out in front of my face, and looked at it. I winced slightly, seeing the massive bruising (no doubt from horrendous internal bleeding), but then, I narrowed my eyes as I noticed something. I held my arm closer to my face, trying to see if I had really just seen what I thought I had.
…The hell…?
Right before my eyes, I could actually see the bruises fading way…. I stared, entranced as it changed from the purple-black color, to dark blotchy red, a sickly yellow-gray, and then…
The bruises were gone.
I jerked upright, my eyes wide, staring at it in mute amazement. It didn't escape my notice that my back didn't hurt anymore either. I craned my head back to see if the cuts were gone… and they were. If it weren't for the blood all over me, and the new gapping tears in the back of my vest, I would have wondered if I had ever been hurt in the first place. I placed a hand to my forehead, and scooted over to a nearby wall, leaning back. I let out a long, frustrated sigh.
"What the hell is happening to me!"
The only answer I got was the cold, stale air of the Iifa tree blowing through it, sounding as if it were the spirits of the dead crying.
… Maybe it was.
I didn't stay there for very long – there's a limit as to how long you can freak out about something (namely the fact that you should be dead, and yet you aren't) while a dead corpse rots next to you. …A few minutes later, I had gotten up and left, refusing to look back at the remains of the monster. It kind of bothered me that it hadn't disappeared… with mist monsters, they usually do once you kill them… I didn't think about it too much though. Anyway, for the most part the rest of my journey through the Iifa tree was uneventful, save a few weak monsters, which I got rid of with next to no effort. My mind however… was not so peaceful.
It had happened twice now… the healing thing, I mean. The first time I could have chalked up as delusion or some kind of last gift from Kuja, but the second time… there really wasn't any explanation for that. It wasn't a bad thing – not really, just… it was… really disconcerting. I mean, I had never been able to heal like that before – not ever. And now, all of a sudden I'm… It was just creepy. Anyway, it really bothered me – I don't like things I can't figure out, and this fit the bill. Argh… I didn't like this at all… this kind of stuff was all supposed to be over now that we beat Garland… I mean… what if.…
Stop thinking about it. Your mind's just running around in circles. Keep it up and you'll end up walking off a cliff by accident.
Finally, far ahead of me, I could see light in the distance. Real sunlight, not the green-tinted phosphorescent stuff of the Iifa tree. I started running, a smile gracing my face for the first time in what felt like years. I scrambled up the twisted branches and god-knows-what else, climbing like a maniac to reach the soft golden light that had managed to reach through what I hoped was a hole big enough for me to get through. And then, I reached it. It was barely big enough, but I squeezed through and burst out into the sunlight, a triumphant whoop issuing from me. I was grinning like a maniac as I stood out there on the ledge looking at the sunlit sky. I must have been at least a few hundred feet up, but frankly I couldn't care less.
It was the sky – the beautiful open blue sky…