Toren Daen

The pieces of a plan started to solidify in my mind.

I lobbed another fireball into the path of an oncoming hornet, taking note once more of how many were attacking our small group versus how many were swarming the downed nest.

The glowing green acid seeping into the ground provided enough light to see across the forest floor. And from what I could make out. far, far more hornets were swarming what remained of the nest. If that many hornets attacked us, we would be overwhelmed in an instant. Furthermore, there was a notable lack of green acid coating the papery nest material.

The hornets had outright avoided coating it in the dissolving fluid. That meant that the nest was more important to them than our ragged resistance.

Acting on a hunch, I began to condense a sound grenade in my palm. I packed in a decent bit of mana, but not too much: I had only a little over a quarter of my maximum mana capacity left. I couldn’t afford to waste it now.

I lobbed my mana construct into the night, the shimmering oil-like rainbow of colors within belying the power it contained. When it got far enough away, the grenade burst in a thunderous bang.

Many of the hornets around us froze, then zipped toward the explosion in an angry buzz. They whirled around where my sound bomb detonated, searching for whatever made the noise.

I quickly maneuvered to Vaelum, killing a few of the remaining bugs along the way.

“Vaelum!” I called, causing the man to turn. His hair was matted to his head by sweat, and his eyes were wild with adrenaline. “I’ve figured out a way to get us out!” I called, swatting away another hornet.

Vaelum’s eyes flitted to where my sound grenade had gone off, his mind clearly working to catch up. “That sound won’t be enough. We can’t get out if the dome isn’t breached! And what’s to stop these monsters from chasing us down even after we escape?” he asked, anger lacing his tone.

I pointed a finger at the caster with graying hair, who shuffled closer to us. “He’s our ticket out,” I said. “If he can create a wind ball large enough, he can blast a hole that we can escape through. And if I use my sound grenade to draw the stray hornet’s attention, we can make a clean getaway!” I said, my breath coming quicker. “The hornets came here because of the crashing sound this nest made when it fell. They clearly care about it more than us. We have to get away from it if we want to survive!”

It wasn’t difficult to put together the pieces on how these insectoid bastards hunted. Every instance I had run into them–which to be fair, wasn’t terribly often–was always preceded by a loud noise. They mobbed the drift apes when I detonated a sound grenade near them. They swarmed us here after the echoing crash of the falling nest. Then, the hornets attacked the location of my most recent sound grenade.

Vaelum and the wind caster looked at each other, some silent conversation occurring between the two. “Do you think you can do it?” Vaelum asked aloud, having calmed down slightly at my explanation. “Blow a hole in this barrier?”

The wind caster looked at the edges of the buzzing dome. “With my Wind Ball spell? I think it would be pretty easy. But keeping the gap open for long is the hard part.” He turned to me, raising a graying eyebrow. “And that’s where your sound bomb comes into play, I presume?”

I nodded. “Do you think you can do it?”

He looked over the remains of the convoy: once forty strong, now less than twenty. “I have to try. But I’ll be out of mana after this. It’s my last shot.”

I nodded, then began to focus on condensing a sound grenade. Vaelum began to rally the remaining men, urging them to move toward the dome's edge. We began to shuffle toward the buzzing horde, but having to avoid puddles of septic green ooze hampered much of our progress. All the shields were now visibly tiring, sweat on all of their faces and weak in the knees. This was truly our last shot.

I looked up from my concentration momentarily as I felt a truly impressive swell of mana building. The wind caster had created a sphere of wind that was easily ten feet across and whirling with the contained power of a hurricane. He strained visibly to keep it in check, the complex pattern of mana demanding to be set loose.

And in my hand, I now held the condensed force of nearly all of the rest of my mana. It rippled and pulsed with shimmering color, the vibrations of sound twisting the light in odd ways. I looked up, meeting Vaelum’s eyes behind my mask and doing my best to signal I was ready.

The spearman brought his weapon down, yelling for all he was worth. “Fire it now!”

The wind caster released his spell at the wall of chittering carapaces. It sounded like the roar of a train; like a thunderstorm given purpose. At the same time, I threw my grenade with as much force as I could muster far across the clearing. It bounced once, twice, then came to a stop.

The sphere of wind pressed into the edge of the wall, buoying the hornets outward in a bulbous swell. Then it burst in a gale of power, blowing a thirty-foot gap in the wall of death. The sound must have been like that of a tornado ripping buildings apart.

I said ‘must have’ because the explosion of my sound grenade caused my hearing to descend into a loud, persistent ringing. Even protected by mana and reinforced as much as I could manage, the force of my concussive grenade rang out like a gong, sending ripples through the entire forest and utterly disabling my sense of hearing. I stumbled from the vibrations that traveled through me, but it was nothing compared to the non-mages nearby. They had their hands over their ears even before the blast, but that didn’t save them. They stumbled forward, clearly screaming as their ears bled from the force. No doubt their eardrums had burst, but it was a better fate than being destroyed by the hornets.

But we couldn’t let the opening go. The casters and shields weren’t as affected by my grenade, but their spells wavered and winked out all the same. They managed to pull many of the nonmages with them–including the sentry–as we ran for the opening, but my feet stalled when I noticed a few were falling behind, the pain in their ears and the disorientation distracting them.

The sound grenade had pulled the attention of hundreds of the flying insects. The gap in the dome wasn’t closing nearly as fast as it had when Meera ran, as dozens of hornets rushed from their enclosure to swarm toward the sound. But it was still inching closed at an inevitable pace.

My decision was taken from me when a hand gripped the back of my cloak and dragged me away from the stumbling men behind me. I wanted to resist and fight; go back and help the men left behind. But the closing gap silenced all of my worries.

Vaelum pulled me along, yelling something out. I couldn’t hear him over the ringing in my ears: in fact, I doubted anybody could hear him. But it was easy enough to read his lips.

Move! Move! Move!

I stumbled past the wall of death just in time, the dome of fluttering wings and hexagonal eyes closing behind me. We broke into a sprint, trying to put as much distance between us and the hornets as we possibly could.

I was near backlash, the ache in my core telling of how much I had overworked my magic. My hearing was slowly returning, the ringing quieting as the sounds of the forest returned.

We ran for several minutes, fear dogging our heels. I chanced a glance back once, horror building in my chest as I watched the hornets crash down on the nest like an imploding tide. I couldn’t see them like I used to: only vague outlines and skittering wings reflecting what little light remained.

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But my fear was unfounded. The insects didn’t give chase, though they certainly could catch us with ease. They were content to attack what was left of the house-sized nest that the expedition crew had brought down.

We slowed to a stop in a small clearing, the majority of the people with us stumbling to their knees and collapsing in various states of disarray and terror.

I looked to all who had made it out alive. Vaelum, the wind caster, the three shields, the sentry, four non-mages, and myself.

Of the forty or so men who had entered this forest, only a quarter had survived.

I swallowed heavily as I surveyed our surroundings once more, something that had been drilled into me by my many nights in this forest. The expedition had avoided many attacks from mana beasts because of their high numbers, but now? Now they were all exhausted and weak, with none of the previous numbers to bolster their morale and forces.

They were still in the deepest parts of the forest, surrounded by monsters that would happily eat them all alive. The only illumination available to us was from a few lighting artifacts latched onto the belts of the shields. The forest floor was far more dangerous than the treetops, and with the low lighting…

I was brought out of my hazy thoughts by the sound of another man collapsing. I turned my head slowly, realizing that it was someone I knew. Vaelum leaned against a tall clarwood, staring upward with a vacant gaze. His hand clutched at his side, a shade of deep red leaking from his plated armor.

I rushed over, falling to my knees at his side. I could see it now: a small hole had been torn in the metal chestplate under his ribs, leaking small amounts of blood. His skin was too pale to be healthy, but he wasn’t bleeding enough to look so hurt.

I looked at the wound again, finally spotting the cause. Small drops of bright green liquid flowed along with the streams of blood.

Some of the acid had reached his system.

His eyes focused on me again, a note of familiarity within. “We got out,” he whispered. “How about that?”

My mind flashed to the man who had died under my watch, his midsection dissolved by the stinger of a hornet. The men who had fallen behind in our desperate bid to escape, who I had been unable to pull with us.

“You’re not dying here,” I said, touching his armored shoulder. Toren’s knowledge of healing and mending wounds rushed to the forefront of my mind, the years of working beside a surgeon and doctor providing ample experience. I gave the man another cursory inspection: the bleeding was light, so the stinger hadn’t pierced deep or cut any major blood vessels. The greatest danger was from the acid that had gotten into his wounds.

While the acid hadn’t reached a major artery, it was going to reach his heart eventually. I could easily predict the repercussions of that.

I laid my hands on Vaelum’s side, dismissing his wince. “I’m going to push some of my mana into your wound,” I said, keeping my eye on the small gash that peeked out from the side of his chestplate. “I need you to take that in, purify it, and use it to break down the acid in your body. We don’t have much time.”

Vaelum didn’t reply, so I pushed on anyway. I was almost at backlash, my mana almost completely expended. But the phoenix feather in my core was regenerating my reserves at a rapid rate, allowing me to push more into the mage’s body.

I focused on the mana channels in my arms, funneling the familiar warmth of mana through them and into the body near me. I paused for a second, making sure Vaelum was purifying the mana. Mana that wasn’t purified of foreign intent and signatures would prove poisonous unless stripped of another mage’s marks. My channels ached from overuse, the attempt at pushing man through them like twisting a sprained muscle, but I pushed on anyways.

Vaelum was gradually removing my stamp from the mana, though it was a sluggish and slow process. My awareness of the mana entering his body dimmed and faded, becoming subsumed by the man’s core.

After a minute, I removed my hands. A bit of color had already returned to Vaelum’s cheeks, something that relieved a lot of my stress.

There were no Emitters in Alacrya; the healing mages of Dicathen were something entirely unique to their own continent. In Alacrya, the study of the body and medicine took its place. And through countless experiments and documentation, the mages of Alacrya helped to flesh out the amazing vitality-encouraging properties of mana.

Mana could be used to strengthen the body. This was common knowledge for every mage, but the intricacies of this ran even deeper. Mana didn’t just strengthen your muscles, allowing you to lift heavier loads or punch with the strength of ten men. It also enhanced a person’s healing factor by several magnitudes. Granted, it was nothing compared to the active healing of soulfire or vivum arts, but a light cut could close in under a day once your core was purified enough.

An extension of this was the strengthening of a mage’s immune system. Mages rarely ever got sick, and as long as mana was in their system infection was unlikely.

What I had done for Vaelum was a stopgap measure, but it would hopefully last us the next couple of hours.

I was pulled away from the body by a heavy hand, causing me to stumble. I was tired from all the fighting I had been doing, so the sudden movement caused my head to spin.

“What are you doing to him?” a harsh voice asked, wrenching me from my disorientation as I had been wrenched from my work. “You get your filthy hands off of him!”

It was one of the shields that Vaelum had saved, the one that used earth magic. He was a big man, and I had to resist the urge to cringe from how he loomed over me.

“I was infusing him with mana,” I snapped back, my patience thin from the fight I had just gone through. “He’s practically out, and if you hadn’t noticed, one of the hornets scored him with acid! If I didn’t lend help, he wouldn’t be able to fight it off!”

The shield was taken aback by my caustic barb, but his reply was cut off by the intervention of the aged wind caster.

“Quiet, you dolts!” he hissed, pushing past the both of us and kneeling by Vaelum, who had drifted off to sleep. He peered over Vaelum’s body, inspecting it as I had a moment ago. “We’re still in the depths of the forest. Anything that can hear us will want us dead. So shush,” he said in a low tone.

“But we don’t even know this masked mage,” the shield said at a more modest volume, though not lacking in anger. “And he appeared right when we were attacked by that swarm of acidbeam hornets! He probably brought them to us!” he said, glaring at me indignantly.

“I was the one who alerted you all they were coming, you ungrateful ass!” I spat back, trying to moderate my tone. My hearing was still slightly dampened by the sound grenade I had thrown earlier, so I had no way to gauge how loud I was being. “I could’ve just run off, leaving you all to be buried in acid!”

The wind caster turned away from Vaelum’s body. “That you could have, and we’re grateful you didn’t,” he said mildly. “Your plan was what got us out of that accursed entrapment alive, I’ll give you that. Without your aid, most of us would be dead, if not all. And you helped our leader recover his strength somewhat with your mana, though he does still need to be bandaged.”

I narrowed my eyes at the shield, the wind caster’s compliments bolstering my defense. But then it came crashing down.

“However,” he said, his voice lowering even more as he stood. “I’ve talked with our sentry, and it seems that he felt you following us for quite some time, all the way through the forest. At first, he didn’t recognize the attention as a person following us.” The caster paused, sparing a glance at the tall clarwoods. ”But after you finally intervened, he put two and two together. You were following us for a long time. Why was that, I wonder?”

The shield redoubled his glare, and I resisted the urge to bite back. I couldn’t exactly tell them I planned to jump their leader in the dead of night and pry him for information about Blood Joan.

Our standoff continued for a little while longer before the older mage sighed. “It doesn’t matter now,” he said, the weariness he surely felt finally leaking into his tone. “We haven’t been attacked by beasts just yet because of how close we still are to the nest. The beasts in this forest respect territory, but they haven’t yet realized that this is open land now. But they will soon.”

I shuddered, finally remembering where we were. We were in the depths of the Clarwood Forest, as deep as I had ever gone.

“We all want to make it out of here alive,” the old mage continued, “But most of our mages are spent and weary, barely able to fire a spell. The rest are unads, unable to fight at all. But we don’t need to leave the forest entirely: all we need to do is get to the border between the deeper parts of the forest. And the chances that we do that rise exponentially with another mage on our team.”

I shared another glance with the combative shield, recognizing the truth in his words. Whatever he saw in my own eyes behind my mask settled him somewhat.

“I’ll be keeping an eye on you,” he said with a huff, walking off toward the rest of our party.

“We all will,” the older caster said. “And when we’re out of this godforsaken forest, we’ll get some answers from you.”

I felt my mana refilling at a rapid pace, egged on by the flow from the feather in my core. It would take several hours to reach the edge of the forest, and by then my mana would be fully recovered. If I had anything to say about it, they’d get no answers at all.