"Yes! Give that bastard everything he deserves! Wait, where are you going?! You can't leave him alive! He's a monster in feathered wings. You don't know what he's done!" With foresight blaring a klaxon alarm in his skull, Jiran ignored Chokkra and turned back toward the Matrons. He blasted away, a screaming Lulu in tow.
Before he was halfway there, the dome of ice began to shake and distort. Multiple sections along its surface bowed out like boiling bubbles ready to pop. The misty ribbons of cooled moisture rising from it danced chaotically, doubling in size as something within struggled to break free.
That ice is strong enough to hold a tier seven! What in the inferno are they doing in there? I really need to figure out how to teleport!
Jiran sent a silent apology to Lulu as he picked up speed. The girl's eyes rolled back in her skull and she went limp in his aura. Two seconds later, Jiran was nearly at the dome which shuddered one last time before it exploded. Shards of ultra-hard ice shot outward, showering the clearing and nearby woods with razor-sharp projectiles. He rapidly scanned the area, seeing hundreds of Timberlings unconscious on the ground. Only a few of them had been hit, and his stomach dropped out from under him when he realized that not a single one of them moved.
Foresight screamed bloody murder and Jiran’s perception of time swelled until the world moved at a crawl. An unusual wave of force pressed against his aura. It undulated like a sound wave and he instinctively hardened a shell to block the sound. The wave pushed right through as if his defenses weren't there and he sensed dozens more waves right behind it. As the first one struck his body, he heard the sounds of a thousand women screaming in agony and felt his brain swell and vibrate. Something cracked, sending a reverberating pop echoing inside his skull. Blood hemorrhaged from his nose, eyes, and mouth. His mana immediately raged to repair the damage as the second wave worked its way through his aura.
Even with five trains of thought working simultaneously, he barely had the presence of mind to tuck Lulu behind him and fill her brain-layer and heartwood with regenerative mana. The portion of his mind trying to save her clinically noted how the damage she was receiving was nowhere near as bad as his. The next wave crashed into him, doing its best to rupture his skull entirely. An agonized groan leaked from his lips as he pushed more and more mana into his head, ignoring the catastrophic damage to the rest of his body.
He curled into a ball and tightened his aura until it covered only a single meter around him. He hardened every centimeter of it, hoping to block the deadly sound that wasn’t a sound. His efforts successfully lessened the damage he was taking but didn’t stop it entirely. Now able to manageably heal through the brain-rending damage, his thoughts raced to understand what was happening.
Is this the true power of their singing skill? I knew it was some kind of mental manipulation ability, but how did they make it strong enough to get through my aura? Thankfully, it’s not affecting Lulu the same way it is me. Maybe the Timberlings are naturally resistant? She’s definitely taking damage though, just not enough to kill her instantly.
Jiran managed to arrest their momentum and began flying away, but not fast enough to avoid the third wave which was far stronger than the previous two.
Does it function on an entirely different principle to mana and sound? Maybe a psychic attack? No, I don’t think that’s right. It shattered the dome and it's ripping me apart just fine, so it’s clearly physical in nature. The dome! The Matrons were at the center!
Jiran grit his teeth and dove headfirst into the waves. Each one sent agony tearing through his skull, forcing him to lower his speed to the point where he could barely heal between them. With Foresight speeding his perception of time, it felt like ages passed between each wave, though it was only fractions of a second. He saw them in the distance, twelve women unconscious in a ring around what was left of the Forkara. The murderers’ deaths were a forgone conclusion and Jiran paid their remains no mind, his focus entirely on the unmoving women.
He lost count of how many waves he pushed through. The blood that leaked from his head had long since soaked his shirt. Finally, he passed through the last one and his aura exploded outward, wrapping around each of the Matrons and pulling them together. The last of his mana spread between them, sinking into the layer of their body that acted as a brain to repair the ruptures. Since he had been healing Lulu through each wave, he knew exactly where the damage would be worst and dove into those areas as quickly as he could, leaving the subsidiary injuries for later.
Not one of the women showed signs of life, but that didn’t stop him for a second. Enthralling Touch pulled almost all the mana from their bodies. Remembering how completely draining the women from the Sect of Hunters caused them to collapse into convulsions, he left a trickle within each of their heartwoods. He repurposed their mana toward his goals, directing it far more efficiently than they could with their limited knowledge of healing. While he separated the unique saps of each layer and re-sealed them, his aura positioned their bodies so they were all touching one another. He then used the last dregs of their energy to send jolts of current through the entire group.
He recalled when he first arrived through the portal just two days ago how their bodies and mana all moved in sync. So he used the mana and sap pulsing through Lulu to time his shocks. After the third pulse, eight of the twelve gasped weakly as they came back to life. Jiran pulled them out of the pile and then borrowed Lulu’s mana to continue shocking the rest. By the fifteenth round of defibrillations, the last was revived.
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Jiran immediately jumped into the air and flew toward the nearest group of Timberlings. He scooped them up, draining their dissipating mana to heal them while moving toward more. He didn’t stop until he had a group of fifteen and revived them together as well. Two were stubbornly refusing to come back so he dragged them along behind him as he raced toward the tree line.
Just inside the shelter of their ancestral trees, he spotted several hundred more Timberlings and his heart leaped into his throat. Thankfully, the shelter, or distance from the matrons, had protected them as none were dead, only unconscious or moaning while rolling on the ground clutching their heads. Enthralling Touch pulled as much mana as he needed from whoever was nearby. He threw it into the last two women. He healed every single scrape, broken chip of bark, and disformity inside each of their layers before shocking them again and again.
Finally, the last one’s eyes fluttered open and she stared blankly at the distant sky which peeked through the boughs above. Jiran fell onto his back, joining her in the moment of stillness, his aura wrapped tightly around him, blocking the sounds of pain and misery from the nearby injured Timberlings.
What… was that? How can sound waves break through a hardened aura? Why was the damage I took so much worse than Lulu? Well, I’m not going to get any answers lying around here.
With a weary sigh, Jiran climbed to his feet. Hollow, blinking faces stared at him as he leaped above the tree line and made his way back to the shattered dome. None of the matrons were conscious yet. They drew in weak, shallow breaths and their skin was even more pale than usual. Jiran’s mana and aura swept through their bodies, healing everything he had ignored the first time.
The smell of blood was thick in the air from the nearby Forkara corpses. Elemental Castigation was put to good use creating casks of stone for each of them. As he was sealing the last few, a group of seven Timberlings exited the forest. They walked slowly, two even using gnarled roots as walking sticks. They were by far the oldest women he had seen among the strange race, and Jiran immediately had an idea of who he was looking at. He quickly finished with the Forkara and then met the women as they reached the unconscious matrons.
They didn’t say a word, nor did they greet him in the usual way. He waited patiently as one of them moved between each of the matrons, checking their vitals with gently probing fingers. When she was finished with the last, she nodded at the others before joining them. Jiran refused to fidget as seven pairs of wizened eyes examined every square centimeter of him. He looked right back, memorizing the tough, gnarled bark and cracks that snaked across their skin.
Finally, one of them opened her mouth to sing, but not before Mana Confluence struck with impossible speed, sealing her mana from accessing the skill that had caused so much damage to begin with. The old woman inhaled sharply before quickly relaxing, “We meet at last. Welcome to our home, prophesied one. My name is Sil, and these are my sisters, Tom, Fri, Lua, Ras, Ker, and Par. How may we call you?”
“Jiran, thank you for asking, Sil. Your names are quite a bit shorter than the others.”
The old woman smiled, the wrinkles and cracks around her eyes widening, “Our saplings chose our own names as theirs, adding syllables with each generation,” She sighed wistfully, caught up in fond memories as her smile grew, “They can be quite sweet at times. I do hope you continue to treat them well. Thank you, for saving our young ones from their own foolishness,” She swept her hand toward the matrons.
Jiran shrugged, “I don’t like seeing people die in front of me.”
Sil nodded sagely, “The why does not matter, only the choice to save them.”
When the elder didn’t say anything else, Jiran asked the question that was burning a hole in his brain, “What did they do, exactly? I wasn’t here to see.”
Sil took a deep breath to gather her thoughts before responding, “We call it a harmony. All our people share a connection to the song within us. When we sing together, that connection grows in power, quickly becoming deadly. A song of two would only cause a headache. Three, and unconsciousness would be the result. Some of our more rambunctious saplings will often play such games regardless of how strict the punishment. Five songs woven together is the limit, even a single utterance from five at once is guaranteed death for any who hear it, and all of us would suffer backlash, regardless of distance. For you to have saved so many from a harmony of twelve is truly remarkable.” A single tear sprouted to create a jagged trail down the cracked bark of her cheek. She didn’t move to wipe it away, never once breaking her gaze from Jiran.
Jiran’s brow furrowed and he mumbled to himself as her words sank in, “You’re singing skill… is connected? Some kind of feedback loop? But the skill, no, that’s not necessarily true, there’s always a connection. Yes! That’s got to be it!” Suddenly, a dozen clues began to weave together into a tapestry of understanding that sent shivers down his spine and goosebumps racing up his arms, “It always comes back to the soul! Of course that would be the answer. And that even explains the failure to integrate!” Jiran became more animated with each word as his mind spun wildly with the possibilities of his theory.
I know divination connects with the soul, so it makes sense that other skills do to a minor degree. Which means it’s not their skill that was creating a feedback loop, it's their souls! Well, maybe soul would be more accurate since if my theory is right, then there’s only one soul between them all. That’s why they’re born as tier three and why their population is capped at such a specific number. That's why their harmony creates a feedback loop—it's not multiple of the same skill being used, it’s the exact same skill being used across multiple outlets of the same massive soul! It was able to move through my hardened aura because it was attacking my soul directly the entire time. They probably failed to integrate because they don’t each have their own soul.
If I’m right, that means the soul and the system are directly tied together in some way, too.
“The truth unravels, as she sang it, so it has become,” Sil's smiling expression turned sad as she looked at each of her sisters. One by one, they nodded gravely before she sang again, “Our time is here at last, my dear sisters.”
The melancholy in her song snapped Jiran from his thoughts, “What do you mean by that?”
“All seasons pass, and we have waited so, so long. There was one more prophecy from our mother. We chose to keep it from our children, its burden ours alone to bear. I would sing it for you now, if you would listen.