CHAPTER 206

Tom’s awareness spread through Harry’s body as Healing Tranquillity activated. There was no rush. His mana was currently depleted, so he had time to monitor what was happening inside Harry and plan out what needed to occur.

A few things became clear immediately. The wound itself was insignificant.

It was not small and on Earth, it might have been enough for the victim to lose his leg, but Tom doubted it. Not with modern medicine. An emergency department would have patched it up in no time… Elsewhere? In the slums of a third world country? Maybe, there, the leg would have been lost… Not that it mattered. They were no longer on Earth. Here on Existentia the physical damage would only require a short focused healing session and then it would not have left a scar. Even in the absence of healers, it wouldn’t have been a concern. A day for natural healing to fix it and maybe a follow-up session to remove the scar tissue sometime later.

The wound was nothing, but the venom that had been injected was a completely different matter.

Observing this wound, he was immensely thankful that DEUS had gifted them the fate mechanism. They were lucky to be alive.

Tom remembered how the antelope had shrugged off one of these attacks. What would have happened if the antelopes hadn’t been immune? It was easy enough to imagine how their wild plan would have failed if the vulnerabilities and resistances had been something else. If the antelopes had been susceptible to the venom, then the scorpoise would have wiped them out with hardly any losses. What then? Tom could only imagine what the situation would have been like at the end of the battle if most of the scorpoise had been alive.

He, Everlyn, Jingyi they probably could have survived… Tom by dodging and fighting them to a standstill and the others by hiding… but the rest of his team they would have been overwhelmed…

Tom pushed the morose thoughts aside. He had a patient that he was not sure how to treat.

Harry, Tom decided as he finished his assessment was lucky to be alive. The venom unopposed could literally kill someone in less than a minute. Michael must have reacted almost instantly to stop its spread and then with Clare had managed to somehow fight the venom to a standstill. They had succeeded, but they were not winning the fight. A stalemate was not victory and the one they were in was heading toward a loss because it was clear they were running out of mana and the venom had not been weakened in any substantial way.

Tom’s mana ticked upwards, and he considered how to contribute.

Michael and Clare had engineered a similar situation to what he had done with a wasp poison on the first day. They had tried to quarantine the venom and keep the key parts that kept Harry alive going.

The majority of the toxic substance the scorpoise had injected was concentrated in the original leg, but veins of it at spread to create pockets elsewhere. One such tendril had settled around the collarbone and was threatening to push into the brain.

Without hesitating further, he committed his single point of mana to that spot in order to boost the defence that Michael had established. Michael’s method of corralling the stuff was to place a barrier down that burned any of the corruption that tried to pass through it. While he did that, Clare was sending waves of healing to fix the critical areas of Harry’s body. Lungs, heart and brain primarily and then occasionally boosting other spots to prevent an entire section from dying off.

Tom could not do either task as well as the dedicated professionals, so he attempted a more physical solution. He remembered what he had done to deal with the sores in his legs. He had possessed a driving need to make his skin whole in order to survive the next antelope engagement. However, he immediately discovered the consequences of only fixing the skin. The decay energy in the previously open sores was still there. Instead of leaking out of his body in pustular form it had been trapped within him and had formed a dangerous positive feedback loop inside his body. The fix had been to generate abscesses, pockets to contain the foreign energy. He had created prisons out of a shell of tissue to physically separate out the decay energy from the rest of him along with the nearby flesh. It did not heal anything directly, but it was effective at buying time, which is exactly what Harry needed.

The tendril of corruption in the shoulder was the most pressing issue and became his focus. First, he constructed a wall to stop the venom from reaching the brain.

Michael said nothing, but the barrier that he had set up to burn away the leaking venom moved subtly. It shifted to the left and some of its energy vanished as Michael’s attention turned to address other issues.

More mana came into his system. He strengthened the wall that he’d created, extending it further. A few more points and all the corruption in the shoulder would be isolated, and he could turn his focus elsewhere.

“That’s good,” Michael said finally. “After you’ve done that one, can you seal off the main leg.”

“I’ll see,” Tom promised immediately.

“Stop standing around and watching,” He heard Everlyn ordered. “We have less than forty minutes to process these corpses. We have two objectives. The first is to clear the bodies so the next wave of monsters doesn’t pause to eat them.”

Tom shuddered at that thought. It would be a disaster if they got stuck behind another circular breakdown.

“That’s vital, but the second need is credits. We have to get as many of them as possible and we have no time, so if you’re not saving Harry’s life, then move!”

Tom ignored them. While what they were doing was important, it wasn’t relevant to his task.

All his attention was on extracting the maximum value from each precious point of mana that he regenerated. Briefly, he wondered whether he had sufficient experience points to grab the four levels necessary to get a boost to magic. Increasing his mana pool by almost fifty would assist them in keeping Harry alive.

He broke his focus and stepped into his system room.

His available experience and the cost of four levels in his elemental summoner class were on the wall.

Experience: 35,200

Cost of four levels of elemental summoner: 55,750

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That wasn’t nearly enough to hit the threshold of four levels. Tom should have known better. Of course, he wouldn’t have accumulated sufficient experience fighting a single lizard and a few antelopes to gain four whole levels.

The expectation was ridiculous.

With a curse, he returned to focusing on Harry. There was nothing he could do or buy to make this easier.

First, he checked the collarbone area and his lack of attentiveness even if it had only been a few seconds, had caused the tissue to fray slightly. That was unfortunate because it meant that unlike with the decay energy he would need to continually reinforce the barrier pockets. Things were never easy, but he shouldn’t have been surprised. It made sense that dedicated venom would be more potent that the aftereffects of a decay aura. Absently, he reinforced the tissue and then shifted his focus to address the next issue that Michael had asked him to look at.

The leg was ugly to view through his senses. It lived still and had not died off fully. There was still life flowing through it, but it was in a terrible state and was exporting the venom to elsewhere in the body. Tom examined how to seal it off.

He frowned. The simple solution he had applied to the collarbone was not available. Basic biology prevented it. The entire leg was infected, but human legs couldn’t live by themselves. Actually, Tom wasn’t sure that was the case in Existentia, but what he did know was that the leg attached to Harry needed its blood to keep flowing to survive. If he closed the arteries pumping blood in, then, given its state, he might as well amputate immediately.

It was better to find a different solution because while the leg could be restored, doing so in the underground when they were running for their lives would be difficult.

“I can’t block off the veins and arteries.” Tom told them.

“We know. Do the rest of it.” Michael ordered tightly.

Tom complied, building his own partitions to stop the flow of the corruption. Then he traced the blood through the leg and blocked off spots where the worst of the venom was getting into the bloodstream.

“Whatever you’re doing, keep it up.” Michael said.

Tom glanced at the healer in surprise. The stress levels in his voice had set alarm bells ringing. Sweat was running down Michael’s face and his brow was wrinkled in a way that Tom knew indicated mana depletion. From his own growing headache, Tom was more than aware that he would look the same to any outside observer.

Yet there was nothing any of them could do to rush things. Tom finished the barrier and continued on. The venom, despite their efforts was still spreading. None of them were trying to save the second leg, the one that had not had venom injected into it and it had progressed from mildly infected to the point where it now needed extensive healing.

Tom pushed aside his rising panic.

What he was doing was surgery and that meant calm, precise actions. There was a chance that Harry might not survive despite Tom’s best efforts. However, that outcome was guaranteed if Tom wasted his mana by panicking.

It was a disaster. Venom was leaking into the bloodstream and running wholesale through the ritualist’s body. The small pockets he had locked away were helping, but were not the solution, especially given the maintenance that Tom had to do to keep them functioning. Even with his oversight there were leaks. The others were out of mana and Harry was no longer stabilised.

They had to change things up. They needed to take the fight to this infection more aggressively.

Tom pulled out his butchering dagger. “Sorry mate.”

He cut.

Foul smelling dark purple liquid splashed out as he hacked out a section of Harry’s thigh that was as large as his fist. Touch heal was supporting him. The blood vessels he should have been slicing through which would have caused extensive bleeding where either sealed off or had been already redirected to an area he was not hacking. His precautions meant there was no explosion of red blood, even as his actions left a gaping wound in the thigh. A carved-out partition of flesh and beneath the damaged and badly infected bits that remained he could see the solid pink of the barrier he had put in place.

Tom concentrated to thicken it up and then split it in two. Then with fingers he pinched two sides of the bag like material he had created and tugged upward. The inner layer of the barrier came loose, and he pulled it. It was disgusting, almost see through pink material containing bits of muscle, skin, fat along with the green poison.

Tom tossed it away.

Grimly, he returned his focus back into Harry’s body.

The blood-brain barrier was failing in places. Venom was getting into the brain. Without hesitation, Tom moved to shore it up. Where the barrier was permeable, he reinforced it with his own stronger, unyielding version. It completely cut off oxygen transfer to some sections of the brain, a death sentence on Earth, but this was Existentia. Individual cells would last longer now before dying of oxygen depletion, and his job was to buy time for the other two to use their magic to purge the venom.

His attention went to the next most concentrated clump of material. This time the problem was in the little finger.

He didn’t hesitate. The dagger plunged down and he cut the finger right off. The stump bled straight away, and Tom did nothing to stop it. Natural platelets would cause the blood to clot and seal the wound. It was better for him to keep his mana to address more serious problems.

The venom he had isolated in the stomach was leaking out through his barriers. Tom temporarily strengthened the material and then his knife cut more carefully into the skin near the belly button. He shoved his fingers into the small wound, pinched the top of the packet, and then yanked it out.

Once more, he tossed the disgusting parcel away and ignored the laceration he had left on the stomach.

Instead, he hunted for the next bit of venom to physically extract.

“You’re doing great Tom.” Michael said.

Tom kept going with his work.

It became more and more fiddly as the large concentrations of venom had already been removed, necessitating him to target smaller problems. His technique improved. All he needed was a slice wide enough to slide two fingers in. It wasn’t quite pin hole surgery, but it was close.

Tom noticed the wounds he left were being healed. The finger that he had hacked off had scabbed over, aided by magic.

Harry’s body looked very similar to how he had after that first encounter with the antelopes. Foreign energy was running rampant and large sections of internal tissue was dying. But because of Tom’s own efforts there was no longer a concentrated source of contamination spreading the infection further. Instead, there was damage that was already done and background radiation like effect of the venom that had diffused throughout Harry. Without intervention, that background source of destruction would escalate into an unstoppable freight train, but Clare had established a routine where she would pulse her power every thirty seconds, and that seemed to be enough to stop the ongoing damage.

“He is stable.” Tom said in amazement.

“Yes, he is.” Michael sounded exhausted.

Tom stood up and stepped away from the body. There was nothing specific he could do anymore. His generic heal would, of course help at the margins but Clare and Michael’s versions were far more efficient than his own now.

It was better for him to stop and fully regenerate his mana in case he needed to fight another lizard or some yet unknown threat.

Tom glanced around having lost track of time.

He was stunned by the changes that he could observe.

Well, over a thousand corpses had been spread out in front of them in a mostly straight line. Most of them were gone and Tom could see the rest of his team scattered over the landscape, continuing that work. They were running from spot to spot, grabbing antelopes and stacking them together and then doing the same with the scorpoise. When a pile reached ten, they would quickly butcher them. And it was quick. From what Tom could observe for the antelopes, they were only extracting the decay glands, and for the scorpoise they just hacked off their stinger. Then they activate the auction house and a glowing portal would consume the bodies.

Tom shuddered a little internally at how much value was being lost by the failure to process the bodies properly. But he understood the reasoning. With so many corpses and the fact they knew another monster pack had to be incoming, this was the most efficient use of their time.

What amazed Tom was how efficient the group had been, or possibly he had been engrossed in saving Harry’s life for longer than he had realised.

For almost two minutes, he watched them working, and then it was like a signal had gone out. They all abandoned collecting new bodies, activated the auction house over half-finished piles, and then started running over towards where Tom stood.

“I think we have to move.” Tom told the two healers.

“That’s fine.” Michael said relief in his voice. “He’s stabilised. He’s going to survive.”