“You’re who?” the guy asked, looking utterly confused. Not that my identity truly mattered, at least it shouldn’t matter in the slightest, given that these people were in a situation which would almost certainly end in their death if they didn’t get the help they needed, help that only very few people in the area could supply. So, questioning the person showing up out of nowhere in the middle of a powerful storm with a stated desire to help might not be the smartest thing to do. But, alas, if one relied on people reacting logically and with a modicum of intelligent thought to any given situation, the only thing one would reliably experience was disappointment.
“Jade Morgana, not that it truly matters,” I shrugged, “You are in a situation that requires rescue; Cy managed to get himself back to the farm and given that I happened to be in attendance, I was asked to go and help you.”
“Aren’t you a little tall to be Morgana?” another voice, one strangely filled with mirth, asked, causing me to frown for a moment. This was most likely Ned, the local legacy, so he might have seen some of my exploits on Mundus, but why would my physical size matter? Shaking my head to clear away the confusion, I stepped past the confused guy at the entrance and shouldered my way into their somewhat protected space.
Inside, I was greeted with a fairly intense smell of blood, thick enough to be noticeable despite the fact that the space was well-ventilated—or rather, that it was only partially enclosed, allowing the wind to bring in a constant stream of fresh air. Despite that, the scent was strong enough to make a weaker person nauseous, indicating just how bad the situation was.
“Now, as I’ve said, I’ve been asked to rescue you and to accomplish that task, I’ll first have to make sure you don’t die from the mess you managed to get yourself in,” I explained while taking a moment to assess the situation.
The scent of blood mainly came from one guy who appeared to be unconscious; his shirt was drenched in it, and the bandages I managed to spy through some tears didn’t look much better. Another guy, the one I assumed to be Ned, might have managed to break his leg; at least it was bandaged, and the way he was positioned indicated that he was trying to protect the leg from any movement. A serious injury, especially in the situation they were in as it essentially eliminated any mobility he might have, but not necessarily a fatal one in the short term. Sure, sepsis could kill him, but that held true for any wound. The guy next to me, at the entrance of the tent, had a few dings and scrapes, again, nothing overtly serious, while the last guy had his left arm tied across his chest, with some bloody bandages wrapped around the limb. Again, I couldn’t tell at a glance just how problematic the wound was. Still, at the very least, it limited his mobility and reduced his combat effectiveness to next to nothing unless the guy was, by some miracle, a spellcaster, something I highly doubted with the meagre amount of Astral Power I felt from him. At worst, the guy would soon die, just like the rest of them, if their wounds weren’t treated properly.
“Unless you prefer to die in this place, I’ll start with that guy,” I gestured, “If you have a deathwish, tell me now, and I’ll see that your body is taken care of,” I offered but I only received strange looks in response.
“What do you mean, start with that guy? And taken care of?” the one with the bandaged arm asked, looking at me with an amusing mixture of anger and fear in his eyes, apparently completely ignorant of my identity. Ned, on the other hand, seemed to have heard enough about me to know I shouldn’t be interrupted. Curiously, none of these people tried to Observe me, likely aware of the hostility such an act could generate.
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“He appears to be the one with the worst injuries, so logic dictates to make sure he doesn’t die while working on you and, well, I have no desire for the local critters to develop a taste for human flesh, so to take care of the bodies, I might incinerate them,” I explained, ignoring the fact that I might try to see if I could craft a golem of some sort from a fresh body. “Now, do you mind if I start saving lives?” I prodded, and now, I only received nods in acceptance, though I could see all three of the conscious people in the small space remained quite confused. I thought I heard Ned say something about having no respect for the classics, but given that I had bigger fish to fry, I decided to ignore him. I might inquire what he was talking about at a later time, but for now, it was simply irrelevant.
Stepping up next to the crumbled form, I knelt down to easily reach the body and placed a hand on one of the bruised patches of skin I could see. With that contact, sending my power into the body to get a good idea of its condition was trivial, though what I saw made it obvious that the next step would be anything but.
While I had never seen a body after one was hit by a bus or a similar conveyance, I could easily imagine that the damage would look somewhat similar: massive bruises everywhere, multiple broken bones, and, to top it all off, a deep laceration with the broken branch still sticking in the body. Granted, without that branch sealing some of the lacerated blood vessels, the guy would have bled out a while ago, but all in all, it was a minor miracle that he remained alive in the first place.
Thinking for a moment, I began to work, starting with the most troublesome wound, the broken and somewhat splintered branch. Even with a high level of regeneration, the wound would likely have healed with some of the pieces still stuck inside, causing infection and death, to say nothing of the potential hazard these pieces posed, especially as they were far too close to the intestines for comfort. Working from the inside out, I began to push the smallest pieces back to the main piece, making sure I wasn’t taxing the already broken body beyond its ability to cope and using a fair amount of Astral Power to make sure the guy wasn’t stressed overly hard.
As I was working, the other guys tried to talk to me, but given my continued concentration on the task at hand, I told them off once and afterwards, I simply ignored them. It didn’t take long for them to realise that I was actually doing something, especially when the pieces of wood started to push out of the wound and drop to the ground with an almost inaudible sound.
Still, it was one of the most difficult pieces of healing I had ever performed, both in complexity and in scope. The damage was bad enough to make the quest I had received seem almost impossible, but I was quite proud to see the timer tick up quite quickly, giving me some confidence in my ability to complete the quest and help these people get out of this mess. If not for me, they would have needed a miracle to survive, and I doubted anyone capable of performing miracles on that scale would be close enough to do so.
However, even with my abilities, I wasn’t able to heal all the damage in one fell swoop, at least not without overtaxing the body in question and leaving a pristine corpse at the end of my healing. So, after I had dealt with the most egregious damage to this guy, I decided to do something entirely different and reshape the small hideout they had made for themselves just to improve the overall situation.
Granted, shaping earth and stone was also a lot more relaxing on my mind, simply because nobody would die if I shaped the stone too quickly unless I was clumsy enough to cause a collapse or have the rocks they used as the basis of their shelter to crash down the hill, but I had enough control to avoid such events.
So, using a similar process to the one I had used to create the house at the farm these people called home, and any number of shelters and huts before that one, I quickly reshaped the stones. The narrow space wedged between multiple rocks and covered with a simple tarp quickly became a somewhat habitable area, protected from wind, rain and the occasional object carried by the storm.
After that, I glanced at the timers counting down in my quest and decided it would be a good idea to gather some information now that we were all in decent enough condition, both medically and in terms of comfort.
