Having come up with a plan of action, while increasing his body’s physical abilities, Ajax starts moving immediately. One second has passed.
He moves towards the people closest to him. There is a human woman with her dress burning at her right shoulder. She appears to Ajax as if she’s moving in slow motion while he’s moving without any limits. Ajax carefully moves his index finger to touch the flame on her shoulder. He cannot accidentally freeze her shoulder without meaning to.
The flame is extinguished instantly. However, the concentrated liquid fuel on her shoulder has burned through her clothes and is touching her shoulder muscle, having already scorched her skin off. If he leaves it be, the fuel will simply ignite once more, burning through her shoulder, perhaps even severing her arm.
Ajax freezes the small piece of her shoulder muscle which has the liquid fuel on it. He detaches the piece of her now frozen muscle as if picking off a tumor, using a sharp pocket knife to do so to ensure at least healing can take place cleanly. He holds the jawbreaker sized piece of frozen muscle with the fuel on it and freezes it as cold as possible.
The energy he retrieves from those few drops of fuel, now crystallized, somewhat alleviates his energy expenditure. Though the human woman has lost a piece of her shoulder, Ajax freezes the surface of the wound he’s created, preventing it from bleeding out. She should be able to recover from her injury, though her shoulder might not be usable any longer.
Unless she has access to above average healing magic at least.
Ajax spent 0.5 seconds on those actions for a single person. He moves onto someone else. Within the next couple minutes, he tears off burning clothes, freezes burning, destroyed skin, in some cases tearing it off, and is even forced to perform full amputations.
In some cases, only amputations are able to deal with burning flames that have already reached straight into the bones of arms and legs. His amputations are carefully done and he freezes the stumps over to prevent bleeding. He helps several people, though he doesn’t really know if he did any good as they only continue to scream and cry in agony.
They would never thank him for this, either.
As he rushes to help more people, he notices the charred heads and bodies of the dead in his periphery. He refuses to stare directly at them, at least at first. However, he cannot help himself. He looks at some of the corpses for a brief moment before moving on, unable to do anything for the ones who were instantly killed.
He doesn't look too closely at them, as it’s all he can do from vomiting in disgust at their destroyed forms. The people with deformed, melted faces and exposed facial muscles, though in less life-threatening danger, also make him feel nauseated. If he was faster, maybe he could have saved them from this fate. Unlike him, they can not heal so easily.
Prior to receiving help from healing mages of a high enough skill, they will have to live at least temporarily with their faces destroyed, unable to know if they can even be healed. All because of his incompetence.
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He cannot feel the heat around him, but he can see the shimmering air filling the area.
This fire has burned extremely hot. As he moves, he absorbs some of the heat from the surrounding air, returning it back to its neutral, late-Fall temperature. Though, nothing he does can get rid of the smell of the dead. After a while, he decides he can only hold his breath.
He visits every living member of the crowd once and discovers that at least 80 people are still alive. Though he has helped all of them in some manner, many of them are in need of more help than he can offer. For example, the few of them that are unconscious, gasping for breath due to the thick smoke, or some of them with burns that he cannot truly cure or treat.
He can perhaps freeze the burns, but he cannot just remove all the damaged skin off their wounds, especially when healers might be able to heal the skin back up. It would be a wasted effort to poorly treat them. So, the only thing he can do is bring their bodies away from the area.
He carries person after person, the ones most in need of help he cannot provide, towards the entrance of the main road leading towards a Maz square entrance. There should be people from there coming over soon who have seen the smoke rising. They can offer more help than he can, especially the healers, if there are enough ready and willing to treat everyone.
His perception starts to slow down and his strength returns to a slightly more manageable level, his well of excess energy being mostly used up. About three minutes have passed since the ignition started. He continues to remain unbreathing, now carrying the people who have less time sensitive and life threatening injuries away from the smoke filled epicenter.
His pace also naturally slows down as he does what little he can. He starts to return to the thoughts he was having when he first saw the white flames around him.
He can only return to one thought now. How had things come to this?
Why am I here? Why did I decide to come out here today? Couldn’t… Couldn’t I have just stayed home? Couldn’t I have just done more reading, done more preparation for… for this… I don’t even know what kind of weapon this was, what kind of fucking bomb. I… I couldn’t save…
The reason he is here in general is because a force he cannot yet fathom plucked him from his safe life and brought him to this different world. A world where he has power beyond his wildest ambitions. He had tried to find things in his new place that were familiar to him, reminiscent of where he had grown up, the country of Western Britannia on Earth.
He found many analogous things like that. But, there was always this undercurrent of something sinister near him.
The feudal powers, the violent police force, the backwards laws, the regressive culture concerning women and demihumans… he supposes this was one of the reasons why Shaula was adamant on the training they put themselves through, and perhaps also why he practiced as much as he did.
Danger is always close to them, even with how protected they were in this world through their powers. An ever vigilant Shaula is by his side… What did he have to fear? He personally had no reason to fear; that part ended up being true. The lives of those around him however were always forfeit.
It was always meant to be that he could not save them in the moment of truth. He might blame his complacency, his ego, or his unfamiliarity with cruelty.
There's no point crying over spilt milk. But, this kind of spilt milk…