My arrival in the new world was marked by being plunged into searing agony.

Every nerve of the body I found myself in felt like it was aflame, being corroded from the inside out. The limbs were barely responsive and there was a gaping emptiness somewhere in its lower abdomen.

After having spent a timeless eternity in an incorporeal state, it was an overwhelmingly jarring sensation, nauseatingly so. The body I was in tried to heave in an echo of my reaction, but nothing came up. All it accomplished was a spasming jerk, which was accompanied by a fresh wave of pain.

Each shallow and laborious breath this body took smelled and tasted overwhelmingly of blood and acrid chemicals. Each heartbeat was weak and on the edge of faltering.

People shouted frantically around me in an unfamiliar language, the tones of their voices ranging from controlled under pressure to barely restrained panic. The sounds of crashing objects and explosions came from further away, muffled by walls.

There were so many living beings and other lifeforms that I could feel everywhere around me, so many blends of exotic energies saturating every bit of the environment, and so so many unfamiliar patterns to it all.

Too much information was bombarding me from senses I hadn’t had in far too long on top of the new ones I’d acquired while stuck in the strange place that had been my afterlife.

But this wasn’t the time to get distracted, not when the last desperate plea of the person who’d reached out and begged me for help still echoed in my mind.

If the sensations were too distracting, then perhaps I needed a bit of distance from them. Given that this wasn’t my body, just one I was borrowing, it only took a few tries to find the right amount of disconnection from it to turn the sensory input into slightly abstracted data rather than the visceral experience they were.

Then I focused through the cacophony, searching for the tiny life signs of the infants, and wrenched the body’s remaining eye open when I heard their faint reedy cries… just in time to witness the door turn into splinters with a cracking boom.

What little order had remained in the room collapsed when the table and chairs barricading the door were sent flying. The guards jumped clear with surprising grace and the apparent non-combatants scattered, with the pair holding the infants seeking shelter behind a counter.

Half a dozen attackers rushed inside, immediately beginning to clash with the defenders. The combatants on both sides were superhumanly agile, durable, and strong (although to varying degrees), and also seemed to exclusively use melee weapons.

A bit of concentration let me pick out the way they were directing some kind of energy inside themselves to accomplish that from the background noise. The elemental bolts and empowered weapons being brought out were further confirmations of this world having some form of magic.

Once upon a time (that is back in my original life), I’d have doubted my senses. Now, I knew better and focused on figuring out if I could make use of anything similar.

The body I was occupying had something like an extra circulatory system, albeit meant for conducting the energy the people here used to perform their superhuman feats. It wasn’t the same energy that I produced and ran on, and so much as letting a trickle of it touch anything outside this body immediately started to cause some awful and disturbing effects. Alright, so using that around anyone or anything I didn’t want to harm would be a pretty bad idea. Good to know.

But this meant I needed alternatives.

With a bit of testing, I was able to convert the energy I produced into a form similar to what the locals used and fed it into the body’s extra circulatory system. The results were promising, reinforcing the failing tissues and organs, and letting me sense echoes of patterns in which the energy had been used most often by the original occupant. If I duplicated them correctly, then I should be able to copy them and make use of the techniques.

That was going to have to be good enough because the guards had been overwhelmed and the intruders were rushing toward the pair holding the softly crying infants with weapons still at the ready.

Well, hadn’t I come here to save those children in the first place?

I gathered as much of the converted energy as the body could bear without failing and directed it through the most well-worn pattern with an offensive feel to it. The technique formed quickly and reached out into the room and latched onto every bit of wood it found. It breathed life back into the dead material and gave me control over the way it would grow.

Without direction, the technique probably caused new trees to warp or break obstructions as they grew with explosive speed and unnatural force. But it had built-in controls and responded roughly to my will.

That meant that the intruders got speared and swept away by the sudden appearance of a forest of sharp branches. Messily and violently so because I wasn’t exactly familiar with the technique and barely avoided seriously injuring the others with it as well.

In the end, the only conscious people in the room were the children (who’d been shielded by the adults) and I (who’d been able to keep the space around me clear of sharp branches).

Now we were trapped in a room overgrown with trees and probably cut off from the rest of the building, and thus help, thanks to me not knowing what the hell I’d been doing with the technique.

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Fucking lovely.

*****

Since I’d gotten myself, my charges, and the people that had been protecting them stuck in here, I took it upon myself to clean up and get them into somewhat more comfortable positions.

Moving was difficult, both because I was so out of practice and because the body I was occupying was so damaged. Aside from the probable poisoning (which showed externally as blackened veins) and the rather large incision on the abdomen (likely from an emergency c-section), there was a large swathe of burnt flesh, various gashes, bruises, and a sprained ankle.

The body’s original owner had taken one hell of a beating, but probably not lying down. Underneath the injuries, this form was corded with some serious muscle and littered with signs of past injuries. The hands were callused, and not just from writing.

She’d been rather desperate when her plea had reached me, but tenacious and willing to do whatever it took to save her children’s lives. That had been pretty admirable and humbling to witness.

I didn’t want to accidentally damage the body of that woman further, especially not by experimenting with trying to adapt things I’d picked up that were foreign to this world. After all, it was my native energy that was keeping this body from dying despite the injuries. While the converted energy flowing through its extra circulatory system was reinforcing the tissues it was also barely keeping the poison in check.

Instead, I went looking for medical supplies among the mess that I’d made out of what looked surprisingly similar to some of the early twentieth-century surgery rooms of my original world. In normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have tried self-treatment, but this situation was anything but that. Doing a mundane patch job would have to suffice.

I stitched the abdominal incision and all the gashes I could reach shut with the threads stored near the curved surgical needles and tightly wrapped everything in bandages afterward. That wasn’t the best idea when dealing with a horrible burn, but letting more debris get into it and upsetting the locals with the grisly sight wouldn’t be great either.

I probably ended up looking like a mummy, but that was vastly more presentable than being mistaken for a walking corpse. Unfortunately, there were no clothing options outside of the bloodstained shapeless surgical gown, so I made do with stitching up the openings that had been cut into it and cinching it at the waist so it didn’t flap around as much.

The work on cleaning myself up had gotten me more used to moving in a three-dimensional space again, so I began to pull the other survivors into more comfortable positions. I’d checked on them earlier as best as I could, but hadn’t wanted to accidentally injure them with my ungainly movements. Fortunately, I’d also figured out how to make the branches I’d grown shift out of the way and settle into a new configuration, so I was able to create some floor space that wasn’t completely covered in blood.

Interestingly enough, two of the four that I presumed to be guards or soldiers of some sort were women. It might mean that there were more female warriors around here than in mundane worlds thanks to magical powers evening the playing field, though without knowing the gender ratio it was difficult to tell. They were the most heavily injured, but their internal energy looked like it was keeping them more stable than they looked and working on accelerating their recovery.

Of the five I presumed to be civilians, three were dressed in western-style maid uniforms. One of them was a cat-girl, while the other two had unusual (by which I meant technicolor) shades of hair.

The last two were wearing something like old-fashioned surgical smocks over more colorful clothes. The pair had been protecting the infants so I was doubly careful when moving them and trying to figure out how to best wake them up. From what I’d observed earlier, the gray-haired man (who had orange skin and patches of snake-like scales on his skin) was the senior medical practitioner of the two, since the blonde woman had been playing assistant. Or maybe he was the expert on neonatal care.

In any case, the two medics had been banged up, but hopefully not too bad because those guards needed treatment.

I coaxed some of the smoothest branches into forming a basket-like structure large enough to fit the infants and padded it with blankets I found in one of the cabinets. Pulling the infants from the medics’ hold proved tricky and I was a little disappointed that it didn’t wake them up. It did give me a chance to examine the children more closely, however.

They were small, wrinkly, and red, with a fuzz of downy baby hair on their heads. Their pudgy cheeks, scrunched-up faces, and the toothless gums they exposed as they voiced their dissatisfaction with the situation were tragically cute.

They were a bit too small actually, at least by the standards I was familiar with. Their life force was weak, fluttering like candle flames in the breeze, which boded really poorly for their continued survival. It would hardly be saving them if I’d managed to stop what might have been an assassination attempt and then let them die from something mundane like exposure afterward.

I needed to wake the medics, but how to do so reasonably safely?

It was a terrible idea of course, but I admitted that I needed a test subject in order to find out if injecting a bit of extra energy (of the local flavor) into a person would do any harm. The ones I found most suitable were the surviving attackers, both because they’d been aiming to kill two newborns and one of the defenders might be necessary for the twins’ continued survival.

Once upon a time, I’d have balked at jumping to human experimentation so quickly, but that was in another life and an eternity ago. Now, even if the prospect didn’t sit right with me, I still went through with it. Fortunately, the two test subjects sufficed for calibrating something workable that didn’t cause any immediate harm. Long-term effects were obviously unknown, but those could be dealt with after the current crisis passed.

Thus, having prepared to the best of my ability, I injected a generous amount of the converted and refined energy into the two medics. I poured in enough of the stuff to completely fill up their metaphorical tanks, which jolted them right back into consciousness.

The two were a bit disoriented, both having taken knocks to their heads and needing a few moments before they could focus on me. Then they recognized the body I was currently occupying and understandably mistook me for the original owner, who was probably named either Helen or Stavros.

I was about to try to explain that I wasn’t whom they thought I was when the orange-skinned man paused to use some kind of technique.

Curious and not sensing enough power in it to harm me, I let the technique actually touch me and do its work. Which turned out to be nothing as it fell apart into wisps the moment it touched my un-filtered energy.

There was a beat of silence as the blonde woman looked questioningly at the orange-skinned man. The person in question however was staring at me with wide horrified eyes and rapidly turning very pale.

“Sophia,” I said, clearly enunciating the name while pointing at myself.

That was apparently too much for the guy because the next thing that came out of his mouth was a high-pitched and utterly terrified scream.