The sounds of pain and death surrounded Thera as she did her best to focus on her work, moving from one patient to the next, doing her all she could to get each one healed and out to free up space for the next body that was going to want to fill it as she tried to do her part in emptying the area and easing the burden on the other healers around her.
Flesh, scale, carapace, she bent her power to assemble each example she saw and more, trying to bring each victim back to fighting shape as fast as she could while reaching out with her magic to ease the burdens for the other mages carrying out the same work and feeling like she was lost watching a sea of pain and death.
While she was there, they were able to keep up to some extent but when she left to fight it was only going to get worse again as the hospital fluctuated between barely manageable and widely over capacitated, all depending on where she needed to be as the second wave made her truly understand the weight that came with having a second tier skill.
With the world at its tipping point, power and responsibility went hand in hand. It was something she hadn’t been able to see in the first wave, but now, more than halfway through the second it felt like a weight threatening to crush her from trying to manage her time alone.
Even then it was getting near her return to the battlefield but with so many more injured, that meant leaving them. The other healers would do their best but plenty who were already waiting would die in the hours she was gone, another body to be stored away amongst a mountain of corpses, with fire mages coming around to burn them on mass, the resources needed to find out who each was and what funeral rites they followed simply non-existent compared to how better spent they’d be going towards the living.
It was a world going to hell and that meant there was no time to think of the dead.
Don’t think of anything, just work. She told herself as she applied her magic to a screaming man, burns covering most of his body in a way that left her surprised he’d survived whatever he’d been up against as dead skin fell away under her touch, revealing soft flesh in its place.
She was going to move on the second she was done but even once finished he still wailed in agony, leaving her to look him over one more time.
There’s nothing. She concluded after pushing her mana examination. His body is in perfect shape, so psychological then?
She didn’t feel equipped to help handle the mental harm that was beating down a world of people. There wasn’t going to be a single person on the planet who wasn’t at least a little traumatized by all of the death and destruction and trying to help him would have just meant getting him to a good enough shape to make him fight all over again.
But that’s exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.
There wasn’t the leeway to let people have their breakdowns, they needed bodies, so instead of leaving him be from there to let his mind find what calm it could she gently touched the side of his head, casting a subtle dark spell to help stabilize his thoughts.
A spell that did nothing. Still he screamed, still pain assaulted him from all sides, with neither his body nor his mind being the culprit.
His soul.
It wasn’t something she would have thought of if she hadn’t seen Ben go through the same thing but that was the last avenue that could have been causing such agony for him, leaving her with nothing she could do to help. From the way he yelled it seemed bad but she could only assume it would heal with time, nothing she could repair without being a soul mage herself.
There was nothing more she could do, and worse, her time was up. She needed to go fight and as her final act, she at least alerted another healer to the situation before leaving through the gate to whatever disaster waited beyond.
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It was the same scene she’d witnessed every time she went through a gate.
Sure, the locations were different, maybe the times of day too depending on the ones she went through, but most of it was blocked out by the horde of demons swarming through.
By that point in the battle, what few bits of ground there was to be seen through the stampede were covered by crushed bodies, the demons rushing over them like everything else to get through and beyond as she let the chaos of it all distract her. With the world feeling like it was coming down all around her, she didn’t need to think about everyone she needed to save or couldn’t save, she didn’t need to think about Ben, all she had to focus on was killing as many as she could.
It was something she was getting better at too, spending thousands of points of mana on otherwise simple spells. Use a dark spell to weaken part of the swarm to act as a barrier for the ones behind, making them slow down and trample each other. Once there was a large enough pile from that, change the consistency of the dirt beneath their feet to let them fall below and fix the consistency after to trap them. Strengthen both spells with her non-affinitied magic and repeat in a different section, translating to thousands of deaths in a single attack, even if she would vary it from time to for what little bits of improvement she could attempt, with her next variation of the same attack feeling like it had potential.
She started with the same thing, casting her dark spell on a swath of the group, but farther back behind them she did something different, adding a life spell to the mix.
Not just any life spell though, but a buff spell, increasing their speed and strength to create a group that would push the ones behind the slowed group forward, increasing the number she’d be able to kill in that one time.
This works. She told herself, even if that final bit of strain caused her staff to crumble after days of constant and intense use without any upkeep. It left her looking at her empty hand for a second, feeling the last bits of dust fall from it before collecting herself and pulling a new one from her ring as she carried out more of the same spell, watching as chunks of the battlefield were emptied out before refilling seconds later with demons moving to occupy that now-barren space, all while she continued to cast without letting her mind wander to what just happened.
It was an act she carried out for hours, only stopping for a second to down a potion from her ring, and had intended to keep up with for hours more, only pausing when a small light filled the warzone.
It wasn’t something she immediately recognized, not the lightning from the gods that were even then bringing down the flying demons, nor the magic of a light mage for whatever reason one might have for doing it.
No, it took a second to understand but when she did she realized it was far worse. Not light, but a flash of mana, telling her one among the demons had just awakened.
But which one?
Her eyes were already scanning the battlefield while she began casting her spells, not caring about efficiency as the properties of the dirt disappeared under thousands of feet in the hopes of getting which one it had been. The sheer volume of them was already bad enough, they didn’t need more awakened ones slipping past them to the wider world.
Not getting it though, it was those same spells that revealed it in the end, currents of air holding one above the ground as it locked eyes on her.
Air affinitied, got it.
She stabbed up at it with the dirt below but it was already moving, flying towards her and through her dark spell, the effects of it not enough to make up the difference from the level of mana it had gained as it rushed right at her to take out what it was viewing as the biggest threat on the battlefield.
The biggest threat, but underestimated. It may have just awakened a skill but Thera had many, two of which were on the high end of the second tier. The demon may have been fast, flying at her with a speed others around them couldn’t react to, but she was different. With the flood of power, it had thought it had the drop on her but once it was feet away she held up her hand, petrifying it before it could react and breaking it down to a fine sand, its effects never to be undone.
A few of the other mages around her flinched but she didn’t notice. Since something so dangerous had just made the mistake of trying to attack her instead of making its escape, her main concern went back to what she had been doing, killing as many as she could as the war went on.