How could Quinnzel even begin to describe her situation? She was welly and truly fucked. When she woke up, her body was in a slightly better shape, but she still had several broken bones and dislocated joints. She groaned as she leaned up against the small crevice, feeling her joints pull on sundered skin. Fresh blood leaked from her various wounds, falling into pools inside of her sagen.

It was quite disgusting. Her sagen had done a good job of keeping all of her blood from leaking out of the crevice like she had hoped. Too good of a job. Her entire lower half was soaked in dried stains from where it had pooled around her body.

Another barely audible groan echoed around the cave as her addled brain began to take stock of her shitty situation. What would she even do? It's not like there were a lot of options. For one, there was no chance of receiving any kind of help this far underground unless some psychotic healer was wandering about in the depths. Even if there was such a wackjob, she couldn’t trust anything down here.

The biggest problems currently plaguing her were her shredded ankle and the wound on her chest. They were the two bleeders other than the dozens of scrapes and cuts she had from hitting various debris on her way down. The other wounds were broken bones and dislocated joints that she would have to set if she had any chance at surviving.

Quinn tried to shrug her pack off her shoulders, but the pieces of her bow - snapped in the fall - were stuck on various cracks in the crevice. She couldn’t even reach around to free it since her right arm was almost entirely unresponsive to her desires. So, she has just a single drastic maneuver left. She forced herself to shift to the other side of the tiny crevice using her left side entirely. She flopped to the side of the cave, aggravating her injuries as her broken bones rubbed up against one another.

She managed to stifle her groan this time as her head filled with a white cloud of torture. Several minutes later, after she had caught her breath, the heavily injured woman reached for the dim gray visage of her bag and opened it up. Various murky items spilled out onto the floor thanks to her shaking hands.

Her bloodied left hand slowly sifted through the contents of her bag until it landed on two rolled-up bandages. They were the bandages that she had been using previously in Mauershein. Instead of tossing the worn bandages after her previous injuries healed, she simply hit them with Cleanse and put them in her bag in case she would need them later.

A mental grumble of thanks went to her past self as Quinn unraveled the bandage and began to wrap up her ankle. It was thankfully too dim for her to see just how bad her injury was, though she was sure it wasn’t a pretty sight. She couldn’t see it, but she could feel the boiled skin, burned flesh, and deep gouges from where the creature held on.

A groan of pain, both physical and emotional, shot through her as she finished up the wrap. Her right boot was just… gone. The beast's acid had melted right through the boot. If she wasn’t in so much pain, she might’ve just curled into a ball and cried. She had barely two weeks with the expensive boots, and now she was back to walking on her bare feet… at least she had her left boot still.

Once the bandage was wrapped tight, she removed the tourniquet, allowing blood to flow back into her limb. She began to bleed again but turned to focus on her other injuries after deciding she probably wouldn’t bleed out. Thankfully, she wasn’t as battered as she originally thought. Her Slaythern Spider Silk shirt had come in clutch and protected almost all of her torso from the flying debris. Aside from around her wrists and hands, she was almost scot-free of minor scratches.

That was only true if she ignored the effects of Mana Reversion. The wayward mana hadn’t even damaged her shirt but destroyed her flesh through it. And there were also countless bruises all over her flesh from her impact with various bits of debris.

Quinn struggled to pull her shirt and pants in such a way she could wrap her torso up. With only one limb in motion, it took quite a while. Once she had access to her bloodied skin once more, she poked and prodded at her sore ribs. A gasp went through her as she touched the hurt one. Thankfully, it seemed to be only cracked and not broken like she had feared. After that, she wrapped her torso to cover the massive patch of missing skin above and to the left of her waist.

Quinn gave herself a moment to relax as the pressing issues had mostly been dealt with. Now she just had to worry about her limbs. She was no medical expert, preferring more physics than anything, but she understood the basics of resetting a joint. Unfortunately, her right arm was nearly paralyzed between her multiple injuries, so she had to guide herself with the other as she reached up. Then, in one solid motion so as not to focus too much on the pain, wrenched her shoulder back into place with a sickening pop!

That left… only her head injury, which would explain why everything felt so foggy. That stone had fallen rather far to smack her head. She reached up with her hand and felt a rather large splotch of blood on her scalp. Did she have a concussion? Nothing she could do about it. Aside from that, several cuts and bruises were all over her face, and her right eye was covered in black. So much so it was uncomfortable to even hold it open.

Unfortunately, she could do nothing about the injuries but lay back down against the stone in a semblance of comfort. She cast Cleanse over herself a couple of times to clean up the wounds and used Magellan’s Drink at every opportunity to replenish her fluids. She realistically didn’t have any other way to combat blood loss. Keeping up the magic was surprisingly difficult. Over half her mana was already gone when she awoke, so she had to take long breaks for the substance to return between casts.

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She sat in her little hole in the wall for hours as her brain began to turn sluggish. Would the people on the surface even realize she was gone? Pulled under the earth into this hell of cold stone and clotted blood? Probably not… she was used to it, so she would be fine if they moved on without her. After all, she couldn’t expect the caravan of hundreds strong to wait for her. A large part of her hoped Mikeal would wait up, but he was an apprentice mage from the prestigious Merlo. There was no way he would stop everything. And she probably wouldn’t even make it out of this damn cave.

Since she was in a speculative mood, Quinn couldn’t help wondering how her mother and sister were doing. Sure they hated her with a burning, raging passion, but she couldn’t really blame them. Still, even if they wished she would die, she loved them nonetheless. She couldn’t find it in her heart to hate them back after what she did…

She wondered if her sister was still attending college, searching for the highest paying job as she had since her youth. Life would probably be much easier for them assuming her life insurance agency paid out. Her sister would have enough money to graduate, and her mom… her mom would have enough to drink herself into a coma like she had been trying for the past seven years. After that? The sky was the limit. Her sister was incredibly intelligent, so there was a large chance she was head places in life.

Ah, life… how simple things had been back then. She had traveled a daily commute without worry of being devoured or snatched by eldritch worms. She had safely had a place to go, people to see, and objectives to achieve before restarting the next day. Oh how nice her neat schedules and comfy bed were. It was surely better than the stone that leeched her body heat.

And the food! She could go out and get food whenever she wanted, whatever she wanted. Just the thought of a solid burger and sugar-filled coffee panged her with longing. What she wouldn't do for a meal from her old world. Now she had... well currently she only had a few small strips of jerky left and a balled-up piece of hard tack. Oh, and they were covered in bits of gore and dirt from when she dumped her bag out. Still, it was better than nothing, and she had an infinite water source.

What even was that spiked abomination? She tried to think, feeling as though it looked familiar. A Travellers Handbook: Monsters had probably featured the beast somewhere in its pages. Maybe she could look it up? Ah, but she would need light to read the ink. At best, she could make out rough shapes and changes in depth, nothing more detailed. It would be impossible to read the ink.

Quinn continued to drearily drift from subject to subject until her already stilted vision faded to complete darkness.

Quinn woke later in a fevered haze. She barely had enough presence of mind to eat a tiny bit of food, drink some water, and cleanse her wounds of any infections. Hundreds of random thoughts, ideas, and memories floated through her noggin, fading and blending in with darkness as she saw shapes dance around. The disordered ball that played out was confusing to watch, and she couldn't tell what was happening as the darkness twisted and churned. This kept up until she thankfully passed out once more onto the cold stone floor.

This repeated again and again, though her memory of the delirious moments was lacking. All except one of them. She remembered waking up once and going about her routine, patching herself up while daydreaming about the home. Her movements and shuffling of her arm as she cast multiple spells came to a silent halt as a sniffling sound came to her ears through the deafening quiet of the cave.

Quinn’s entire body locked up as she suppressed her breathing to the minimum. In an ever so slow movement, she wrapped her sagen tighter around her until only her eyes were visible. Outside of the drab gray hole of the crevice, she could see the cave’s floor and the eerie abyss just past it in dull gray tones. A form slowly entered her viewpoint with its head down. It was huffing and sniffing, pausing right around where she fell. Although it was barely visible, she caught a dried substance stuck to the ground right below the dog-like creature’s nose. Blood. Her blood.

As she was watching, it arced its head up directly to her as if sensing her gaze. She froze in pity, her breathing entirely stopped as the creature looked at her. Well, ‘looked’ wasn’t quite right. The poor dog didn’t have eyes, just a fur-coated head and a large nose. Its two wide ears flapped in her direction as if waving hollow. It listened patiently while its nose twitched like it was seeking out a dog treat. She was equal parts confused by the appearance of the creature, and sad that she couldn't go out to play with the doggo due to her incapacitated state.

Sadly, it turned around shortly after and continued to walk along the cave, ignoring her. Maybe it was due to her perfect stealth skills. Probably it was thanks to the enchantment woven into her sagen that it didn't notice her. The creature began walking away. It slowed down a couple more times, but eventually left her view of the dark cave. She suspected if she hadn’t cast Cleanse to remove the scent of blood from her little hidey-hole, the creature would’ve most definitely found her. It was just too bad. If it reached her, she would've been able to pet its grimy fur... And dogs were supposed to help the healing process, right?

Aside from that one, her memories were at best a haze of confusion and torment. Quinn had no clue how long it had been, but when she awoke for the final time her injuries were mostly healed. Surely it hadn’t been too long since she had one small bit of jerky left. Maybe a couple of days at most? If it was only a few days, however, how had she managed to heal so much?

A theory had formed in her head, though she wasn’t quite sure if it was even possible. Every time she woke up after an injury, about half of her mana was gone permanently. The speculation was simple; her body automatically healed itself by taking her mana. She wasn’t sure how that was even possible, but it was the only idea that made sense. Her lack of mana was the only common factor between the time in the forest, after the zombie got her, and now.

Quinn inspected herself, finding most of her external wounds had either turned into scars, scabbed over, or healed completely in the case of the smaller ones. Her internal broken bones were still sore, but she could at least move them about now without too much discomfort. Her head was almost entirely healed except for a patch of her scalp that was still tender.

Remarkably, she had turned from a woman on death’s door to roughly capable of movement. And move about she did. Quinn wasted little time repacking her meager belongings and crawling out of the hole in the wall. Every movement irritatingly pulled at her injured chest, though she didn’t have the choice to wait and heal. She was almost out of food and needed to get out of this underground hell immediately.