A/N: Want to read ahead (up to 40 chapters)? Go to my Patreоn and get your early access chapters
https://www.pаtreon.com/HPMan
May the magic be with you! Enjoy!
______________________
Delphine held out a dramatic pause, and Hermione straightened up again, preparing to hear something very important.
"A high-ranking healer is required to know blood magic, necromancy, and dark magic at the level of at least an apprentice, and more importantly, to be able to use it."
"Oh..." Hermione was somewhat surprised.
"What did you expect?" Delphine looked at us with a chuckle. "You can't cure a patient without knowing the magic used. You can relieve the symptoms, you can stop a disease or curse, but you can't cure it. Undoubtedly, the greatest and most talented healers manage without this knowledge, using only the deepest understanding of the principles of the body and the ability to put it in order without regard to all cause-and-effect relations. But there are only a few of them, and not in England, but in the world, and they have been coming to this level for decades and even more. You should not hope for your own great uniqueness but should learn all that is necessary. This knowledge, along with the ability to apply it, by the way, is one of the reasons why official healers are left alone."
"Can I ask you a question?" Hermione even tried to raise her hand but stopped herself, causing a slight smile and a nod from Delphine. "Are you officially a member of the guild?"
"If I understand the meaning of your message correctly, yes and no. I have a valid membership in an international guild, but at the same time, I am exempt from oaths as a non-practicing healer."
"Oaths? Hm... No harm, except in cases of self-defense?"
"Exactly."
"And how deep is your knowledge in the disciplines related to healing magic?"
"Sufficient, for a master healer, but no more. Such knowledge is hard to get, and practicing it disgusts me as a fighter and a healer. If the need has come to inflict injuries incompatible with life, then achieve these goals with one powerful and accurate blow. Do not try to get the brain through one place, simultaneously turning the enemy inside out. And since we have touched on this topic, it will be useful for you, Max, to know and understand that one of the important problems of fighters follows from this — it is difficult for us with half measures. Some people even divide us into three types... Don't you want to guess which ones?"
Hermione thought about it, and I used the obvious classification from computer games, which, to my great regret, there are not very many in their good performance yet. Well, at least for me.
"I think," I looked at both ladies in turn. "Something defensive type, offensive type, and something like assassin type."
"Hmm," Delphine looked at me thoughtfully and even tilted her head to the side. "You're right. The names vary from country to country, but that's the gist of it. Because of the disciplines, I've become a master of, I pass under that classification as a battle mage specializing in defense. But it's all really just guild bureaucracy to make distributing tasks in any gatherings or joint operations easier. That doesn't mean that defender can't attack and an attacker can't defend."
"It seems that everything is not so simple," Hermione nodded.
"How else could it be? It's at school that everyone is a student and nominally everyone is equal. But outside of Hogwarts, things are much more complicated. Let the world of wizards be incomparably smaller than that of ordinary people. However, it is no less diverse, and in some regions, there are still innumerable works on the research of this very world and the magical heritage of antiquity. Anyway, we have gone a little off topic. Let's begin to look at everything in more detail..."
***
The two weekends of my first week at Hogwarts were not at all in "weekend" mode. We spent the mornings and evenings at the Three Broomsticks, listening to summaries of healing magic and the mandatory areas of blood magic, dark magic, and necromancy. We have already learned some in the Restricted Section, but there were often methods of purely practical use. Still, according to Delphine, the basis of these sciences should be looked for in the libraries of other families, but the whole problem is that knowledge is not shared. For most old families, this knowledge is their bread and butter, their specialty. Of course, no one will voluntarily share this. You can also get this knowledge in the relevant guilds, but there are also oaths, restrictions, contracts, donations, and the guilds themselves, as organizations often international, in order to pursue their interests may well send you to the ass of the world. Not for a "thank you," of course, but not everyone likes that. So it turns out that it is very difficult to be self-taught and not to kill yourself in the process of reinventing the bicycle…