The sound of Myla’s scream tore Eres’ attention from the corpses in front of him. He spun on his heel and started towards the sound before he had even thought to move. His body reacted faster than his brain, turning him into a dead sprint across the clearing, but as soon as he saw what was happening he didn’t think he would be fast enough.
Myla had dispatched the second of the trio of briar wolves, and judging by the fact that its torso was still sailing through the air behind her, it hadn’t been long since the killing blow was struck. However, at that moment the third wolf had charged into her, clawing her side and dragging twisted brambles through the wounds.
If that was all it was, Eres wouldn’t worry. Myla was far tougher than him and she would shake that wound off in no time, and by the gods, it wouldn’t have made her scream. No, she had screamed not in pain, but in rage, as she realised that the monster wasn’t aiming for her, it was aiming for Freya.
The limb that’s claw was shoved into the Berserker girl's side had been used like a springboard, launching it through the air with jaws spread wide as it lunged towards Freya’s throat.
If Eres had thought more, then perhaps he wouldn’t have worried. After all, Freya had been trained by Brom, just like him, and she was no slouch in a fight. She was deadly enough with her staff or a long knife, and she had learned to evade attacks from all angles with nearly no warning so that she could deal with situations just like this.
But Eres didn’t have time to think. He didn’t have time to do anything other than act. The Mana in his Gauntlets was tied up so a Shield spell wouldn’t be fast enough. He was still learning how to deal with multiple types of constructs at once and in the time needed for one to dispel he knew he would never get the second up in time. He wouldn’t be able to run there in time, and as far as he could tell, Freya could die if he wasn’t there.
The thought tore at him, as all of these worries blasted through his brain in an instant, he remembered the vision of Myla’s death, of his sister's suicide. It wasn’t real to him, these things never happened, but still, they weighed on him. Never again, he raged, heart pounding with rage and fury.
So he reached for that other place, the one he hadn’t channelled yet, the one he was still meant to be creating. He reached for that place that no one had properly explained, his soul, his life force or his willpower. He reached for his Spirit and he did what he did with his Mana. He demanded the world change and commanded action to happen. He felt that well of power erupt in his chest, scorching through his veins. Unlike the cool, lethargic ebb and flow of the first time he had channelled Mana, this was like molten metal, searing him from the inside out as it fought for release.
Eres poured all of that rage, fire and Spirit into a single thought.
MOVE!
He felt time still around him, his body tearing apart with the heat and effort of what he was trying to do. Something he wasn’t meant to do, something he hadn’t yet learned to do. He didn’t care if it hurt him, crippled him, even killed him. He just needed to stop that thing from getting to Freya, but his body just wouldn’t move through the stilled time.
“Really, Eres, stepping into my domain already?” A young voice chimed from around him. Familiar, but also distant, almost ethereal.
“Very well, but please, try not to break yourself next time. I won’t be able to interfere again,” Ekros’ voice echoed out and faded before Eres' vision seemed to… snap. One moment he was staring across the clearing, the next he was directly in front of the monster's snapping jaws, its jagged wooden fangs approaching him. His entire body screamed in pain, and he could taste blood, but he didn’t have time to think about any of that.
He had appeared slightly off the floor, directly in the wolf’s path, but with no foothold or purchase the best he could do was twist his body around and bring his forearm up in front of his face. He barely noticed that the gauntlets he had created had vanished, only concentrating on getting his limb in front of his vital areas.
Then time was a blur of green and red. There was pain shooting through his arm and he thought he heard someone shout his name, but all of his focus was on the creature worrying at his bone. Somehow they had rolled and ended up on the floor, or were they still rolling? Eres wasn’t sure, but he capitalised on it, pushing his arm further into this thing's mouth and ignoring the scream of pain as his body begged him to stop. He pushed and pushed until he had its head pinned to the floor. Its jaws still worked back and forth as it tried to bite him, claws still scrabbled weakly at his leathers as they tried to find purchase.
Then, all of a sudden, it just stopped moving. There was no more struggling, biting or clawing, just stillness. It took more than a few seconds for Eres to realise what was happening, to feel the hands on his shoulders pulling him up from the ground, to hear anything other than the blood thundering in his ears.
“Damn, there is blood everywhere,” Freya muttered, a frown etched on her face, “Eres, you have fragments from at least one of its fangs in your wounds. Healing you is going to push them out, and it is going to hurt, so bite down on this and bite down hard.”
She shoved a strip of leather between his teeth and looked at him, still frowning and stern. “Ready?”
He nodded.
Stolen story; please report.
A few whispered words later and her body once again started to shed motes of gold into the air around her, and Eres clamped his jaw down, feeling the leather between his teeth and the stale taste of it on his tongue. He tried to focus on those sensations rather than the pain in his arm, but he couldn’t stop himself from staring at the ragged wound on his arm. He could see the perforations through the skin and see various shards of wood in the wound where Freya had cleaned the blood away. When had she done that? He didn’t remember.
He tried to remember, but his focus was quickly stolen by the throbbing in his arm being replaced by a searing sensation. He groaned into the leather but kept his eyes on his arm as he watched some of the golden motes settle into the skin. Eres remembered watching time lapses in his last life, nature documentaries often showed a whole area of forest growing and dying or a creature decomposing. Watching his arm heal reminded him of that, in an abstract way.
He watched each shard of wood get drawn out from his flesh inch by inch and watched the skin and flesh ripple as it filled in the wound over a few seconds. Honestly, he was glad it was so jarring and unpleasant to watch because it let his brain focus on that rather than how awful it was to feel. Each movement of the wood before it left his skin felt worse than the bite that put them there and the flesh that grew to fill the wound itched as if biting insects were crawling inside his skin.
Eres didn’t think he would ever get used to how unpleasant the faster healing Miracles felt, no matter how many times Freya used them on him.
“Alright, looks like that will do for now. I will give it another look tonight.” Freya hummed as she wiped the blood off from the skin and leather of his forearm, “It might scar, but I don’t want to do anything more intense now, not when we need to move and I might need to cast more later.
“Also… Eres, what the fuck was that?” Freya snapped irritably.
“Ah,” Eres said dumbly, his tongue feeling heavy in his mouth. He knew he had fucked up now he had longer to think about it, but the look on Freya’s face was murderous.
The look on both their faces, he thought as he looked over to see Myla scowling at one of the monster's corpses.
“‘Ah’? Really? That’s all you have?” Freya seethed, “That thing wouldn’t have come anywhere near me, and we could have killed it easily, especially if you had used a fire spell from over there. You know how hard I trained, Eres, so explain what the hell that was all about, because right now I’m wondering if I need to smack you around the head a little to screw it back on straight!”
“Well…” Eres started before he had to stifle a laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Freya said coldly, eyes narrowed.
“No, no I’m sorry, I’m not laughing at you it's just… How quickly you turned from calling me Master Eres to threatening me with violence. It made me laugh and it made me happy, that’s all,” he said quickly, hands up to placate the angry brunette, “And as for what happened… I don’t know, but that’s on me. I heard Myla scream and I saw it jumping at you and then…
“I don’t know, Freya. I just got scared of you getting hurt, of losing one of you and I reacted. I wasn’t thinking. I know you can look after yourself and I will be the first to put my hands up and say I fucked up on this one. I got hurt cause I jumped in the way of something you two could deal with and because I let my emotions get in the way, but this wasn’t me thinking you couldn’t deal with it. This was me not thinking at all.”
Freya glared at him for another few seconds before she let out a big huff of air and poked him in the forehead. “Apology accepted. Don’t let it happen again though, okay? We are a team, so let's work like it.”
Eres looked over at Myla who was still scowling down at the monsters. “Yeah, I will try not to let it happen again. What about you Myla? You okay, love?”
She started a little, looking back at the pair of them and grimacing slightly. “Yeah, sorry, I’m fine. Freya healed me at the same time she healed you.”
“No, not that, though I am glad you are okay physically. I meant am I forgiven for my fuck up,” Eres said gently, smiling at his blonde companion.
“Eh, you are fine. Mistakes happen, and you learn. Good enough for me.”
“Then why do you still look like you want to take one of these wolves and put it through the nearest tree,” Freya asked, brushing her hands off as she stood and helped Eres to his feet.
“Oh, right. Just… I fucked up too. One got past me. I’m trying to let it go, 'cause yeah it was just a mistake,” Myla laughed, “Way easier to give that advice compared to taking it though.”
“Look, both of you. It was our first fight, and we got out alive with no major injuries,” Freya soothed as she put a hand on each of their shoulders and smiled, “As Myla said, we learn, right? So now we know some pitfalls and how we should work on them.”
“Yeah, you are right,” Myla sighed and the tension and rage seemed to bleed out of her posture. She kept her head swivelling around, keeping watch as she gathered up their packs and handed them out. “There is one thing I don’t get though.”
“Oh?”
“Eres, how did you… get there? Teleportation spells are high-level and usually require a lot of time to focus on, right? I don’t know much about magic compared to the pair of you, but that one stuck with me, cause spatial magic sounded cool. So what did you do?”
“Huh,” Freya said, “I was so pissed off I hadn’t even thought about it. One second you weren’t there and the next you just… Were. Myla is right, it looked like teleportation. How did you manage to have the Mana for that? And when did you even learn that spell?”
“Oh, that.” Eres hadn’t noticed until now, but the feeling of pain throughout his body was mostly gone, now more of an ache. Whatever Miracle that Freya had used must have patched up the damage he had got from forcing his body to move with Spirit. “Well, I think it was more a fluke than anything. Brom helped me work on channelling Spirit, but I never started working on an Art, I just didn’t have time. When I knew I couldn’t do it with Mana I tried to use the only other thing available. It hurt like nobody's business, and honestly, I think the only reason I can stand right now is because you healed me right afterwards but… It worked, even if it wasn’t necessary.”
He turned and saw both of them were just staring at him open-mouthed.
“What?” Eres shrugged, “I always intended to be a Battlemage. Needed to learn to use Spirit eventually… but maybe not anytime soon. I have a lot more to learn first.”
Not to mention a God of Time to talk to, Eres thought as they set back onto the trail.