The retching was just the start. The moment the haze of violence passed it was like sobering up, I started to periodically catch my breath between the retching that left my throat burning and my nose stung.

My heart, which had been screaming to slow down, started to slow down, and with it, I suddenly felt drained. My body started to twitch, and I started to feel very cold as the reality of my situation returned to me.

I checked myself over, looking down at myself, and I found that I was still the same as I expected. My Front was a blood-soaked mess, slick with both mine and my opponent’s gore. The horrible reek of it all, along with my sick, was just too much for me in conjunction with everything else.

Everything else being the pain and the fear. The pain was self-explanatory, I could see why I was hurt, but what I couldn’t see was what in all the heavens and hells had come over me. It wasn’t the first time I had been overcome with a feeling like that. The overwhelming surge of emotion, the need to live, was in a way like the compulsion with the fog, and with it coming from within, it was even closer when I had been overcome with the need to kill the random [Hunter], the overwhelming urge to kill was certainly there.

But even when it was from manipulating me from within, even when I was compelled, I broke out of it. I had broken out because it wasn’t me.

But the overwhelming urge was me, or at least a part of me. The same part that let me pick up and understand smells, the same part that looked at the dark as a child and saw monsters. The part that was there to keep me alive.

I suppose it never got the letter that I couldn’t die. But I supposed I also hadn’t noticed.

When I had been chained, and when I fought the first [Hunter], it had been there, right next to me. It had been there when I was running through the darkness with a concussion. The only reason I had noticed it at all, was that this time, it was not next to me, I was next to it.

“Say, Selly, can you heal?” I asked her, looking back down at myself.

“I have skills to tell if you need healing like [Triage], but no healing, no. And don’t call me Selly,” Selly told me.

“This sucks,” I told her, making my way down and away to hide me from the smell a little. Then, I curled up to keep myself warm as my shivering got worse.

“Are you. Giving up? Just like that? Little miss, I’ll save your queen curls up to die the moment she gets cut? It’s bad, I’m not going to lie, but you get back up,” she told me.

“It hurts, and it’s really cold. I don’t think I can stand up,” I shivered.

“Of course, it hurts, you were in a fight, but you kind of need to get up so you don’t stay here.”

But right now, I didn’t need to live, I needed to get back to fighting shape. I needed to stop being a shivering mass of Kobold.

I would survive this, I thought, I couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t check my [Status] with one arm while on the ground yet, but I could guess that I would get back up, maimed and would go on living, at least for a while.

I reached around behind me clumsily and found the arrow in my back. Gripping it, I went to pull, and the panic settled it.

What am I trying to do? Die? What the hell is wrong with me? Just because I can, doesn’t mean I should. Oh, gods, what is wrong with me?

“Hey, what are you doing!” Selly asked, drawing my attention back to her.

She sat on my nose, looking me in the eye with quite a lot of intensity. I could see her mumble something like, ‘Something is happening, something your eyes.’

“I… I don’t know,” I told her.

“Well, stop it whatever it is.”

“It hurts, and I’m so cold…” I told her, shivering at the cold and the pain.

I just couldn’t work with it all. The cold and pain paralyzed my body, and the fear paralyzed my mind.

“That’s why you have to get up! You need to get off the ground, Saphine!” She yelled, pulling first on my nose, then my eyelids and lashes.

She was strong enough when she wanted to be, at least compared to how she looked. Lifting my lids from my eyeballs far enough for it to feel weird and hurt a little before she let go, and my lids slapped back into my eyes. It might have been effective if I was not in pain if I wasn’t paralyzed by it, but it was just a fart in a gale.

Barely noticed at best.

“Stop that, it’s not helping.”

“You want help to get up? THAN! GET! UP! [Stand] and [Find your Footing] damn you,” she shouted.

I stood and found my footing before blinking. My knees and body started shaking, but I managed to use my shovel as a stave, and it took some of my weight handily.

I looked at her with all the annoyance in my quivering body.

“Why couldn’t you do that in the fight? If you have skills to help like that,” I asked pointedly.

“Because… Because… Well, I forgot? I’m sorry I didn’t think about it. I probably should have. You're aiding me, but you're pulling all the weight while I’m just sitting around.”

I wanted to point out she didn’t weigh much, but my mind swivelled a little, my feet being under me surprisingly did help a little. It forced me to pull out of the pain, just enough to stand, but it helped.

“Well, think now, then. Can you help me, do you have anything that might help?”

“I… Maybe, but it won’t be much, I can’t heal, but I can hold off the wounds.”

“Well,” I started, a bit angered at her hesitance, “Either help me or kill me, as long as it helps me, I don’t particularly care.”

“Kill you? Why would I kill you?”

“Because I can come back, healed of my wounds, no catch.”

“Then do it, you silly long-eared oaf. T’would be easier than me supporting you with buffs.”

I hesitated.

“I… I can’t,” I admitted.

“What do you mean ye can’t?” she asked, a note of her thick accent peeking through.

“I. I just can’t do it. I can’t do it on my own. I suppose it’s just like everything else, I need someone to help me do it instead.” I could tell I had let slip a little too much how I felt. But I couldn’t not. I couldn’t bring myself to do anything alone, not even die.

“I don’t know if I can, the arrow is quite big, at least in comparison to me. But removing it would also make my skills harder to use. Either way, it would just make you bleed out a little more, as is you should be fine, probably.” She told me, hedging on the last part, not quite sure if I was going to be ok or not.

“Then do what you can, just whatever you can, I can barely stand with the cold and the pain and your skills helping.”

“OK then, here goes nothing, now it’s a bit of a stretch, I’ll have to hold on to keep it going. These are [But a Flesh Wound],” she said.

The relief was instant, near euphoric in its release. My wounds hurt less, my gut-wrenching pain, my shoulder and the somewhat painful numbness of my arm and the two arrows in it didn’t scream when I moved it, and the arrow in my back didn’t make my guts ache. My mind, overwhelmed by pain and fear, was now only overwhelmed by my newfound fear of myself, but with the extra space in my mind, I was able to push that down.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

I pushed that horror of what happened down as far as I could. I could go over that later, walk through how my body would not let me die, how it would not let me go softly into death, even though I could not die. How it overcame me and forced my action.

When I had been panicked, it came out of nowhere and pushed my fight into a horrible gory mess of terrible fighting instinct that left me with very little in the way of control, that stole my mind and body from me.

I took it, put it in a hole at the bottom of my mind, and buried it.

“I suppose I should have asked for help in the first place,” I told her.

“You were doing fine, if you had armour, I think you would have been fine.”

I wasn’t, I was very obviously subpar. Two weeks of training, and I am still crap at fighting? I could barely fight a likely slightly weaker opponent. Who was I kidding? Selly, apparently, because she thought I was doing fine.

I wasted two weeks trying to copy what was, by all of my reckoning, the most basic, most simplified way of wielding a shovel as a weapon, and I failed to use it properly in a fight, resorting instead to thrashing like a child.

I wouldn’t even be standing now without someone else.

“What’s with that face?” She asked, interrupting my internal monologue.

“Just realizing how much of a total fuck up I am,” I told her, bitterly.

“Look at me, just for a second.”

“I am.”

“No, you’re not, not really, so pay attention for a moment.”

I focused on her small form, with her mothlike, humanoid appearance.

“What- Ow, fuck.” I started to ask when she poked me in the eye.

I swatted at her, but she held on to me, tucking her tiny form down so I didn’t knock her off.

“Don’t be such a baby, of course, you made mistakes. You’re obviously not a [Fighter], and you came out of a fight, one against five, against [Warriors] and [Archers] with blood in your mouth. So, how’s about you stop talking down to yourself, you dolt.”

“Fuck off, what would you even know? I’ve been practicing for weeks, and I have nothing to show for it.”

“I know plenty. I might use a sword, but most Sprites use weapons like spears to drive off bigger creatures; I’ve fought more than you, I can tell, but for someone new to a weapon, you were fine. Get that through your thick head.” She berated me, punctuating it by punching me in on the bridge of my nose, although it felt more like a poke.

“But-”

“NO BUTS! How were you training? What have you been doing for these weeks of training? Were you sparing or just drills?” She interrupted.

“Uh, drills?”

“Then you’re totally green, have you even fought something with skills before? Have you ever killed anything?”

“I fought someone, they were a [Hunter].”

“Just one? Congratulations. Fighting is like any other skill; you’ve done it six times now with a tiny amount of training. Sure, they were slightly lower level, but that doesn’t mean anything. You won, and that’s what matters. They’re dead, they lost. Stop getting down on yourself for barely winning when you should be sparing instead of fighting. So, get ahold of yourself, we're in the middle of hostile territory, there could be more of them coming around the bend any time now, so stop moping and get yourself in check.”

I opened my mouth to say something, to cuss her out or to make a no doubt poor rebuttal, but I didn’t.

Regardless of what I thought, I took her words as advice and thoughts about our situation, our very vulnerable situation. I also should hide the bodies, that would let me hopefully not get found out, and by burying them I would get some more experience with my [Grave Digger] class.

As for her talk, I didn’t know if she was right or not.

My heart, the part of me that felt, felt she was wrong, felt that I had done poorly, even for someone of my experience. That I should have done better with what I had and that my lack of experience, my lack of skill, was a fault that I was lacking, something I was lesser for lacking.

But much like I had with the fear, I was able to push it down, to bury it, even if it was something that wouldn’t stay down for long. It would come back, like a zombie, to gnaw at my brain later.

Using my new technique, I turned the partial hole into a proper hole, taking what patches of blood I could find and burying them with the bodies. They had nothing I found of worth; I didn’t know how to fire a bow worth a damn, and their weapons were shorter and poorly made. So their rancid smelling blood and bodies went into the hole.

I picked up the souls, their chittering language skittering away while I sent them to whatever afterlife awaited them, but something in the back of my mind stopped me from taking the last one. I got a half-decent idea.

I had learned two spells in the two weeks I had been training, two spells of dubious usefulness. But I could use one.

Of the three spells, well, four but [Cantrip] was barely a spell, [Status] was the first one, with the second being [Appraisal], which was just status with slight changes cast on another person. Funny enough it could be practiced and cast onto nothing, giving a void sheet. But it took about a minute for me to cast, and it was a bit overkill. I found projecting harder than drawing something to me, but there was something else.

The third spell I now knew was [Inspect].

I started casting the spell. It was simpler than [Appraisal], simpler than [Status] even, which I had gotten down to a good twenty-second cast, at least when I had both arms.

It left a circular pattern in the air, almost eye-like, but with a slit pupil that ran vertically from top to bottom, two loops above and below like circular eyelashes. There were no dead ends in the spell, which left all of them slightly loopy. But it was so small I could cast it fast and with low mana use, even though it had the downside that I had to aim it, before simply throwing it out at someone or something.

I could use it on objects, too, but there were only so many times I could cast it and read the description of a tree or grass.

But I wasn’t casting on trees and grass, I was casting it on the soul, and I wasn’t disappointed.

I finished the spell, gave it the mana, and threw it forward and out, I had gotten to the point where the pleasant feeling of casting a spell was just a light tingle of my mana rushed out of me as I spoke: “[Inspect].”

The pattern flew through the air as a visible ball of sky-blue light the size of a candle flame, dragging the invisible mana with it in a pattern until it struck the soul and bounced a wisp of the same coloured light back to me before fading into the background mana.

It resolved into a familiar blue panel.

Level 15 Gremlin Soul, Condition: Poor, Type: Disembodied Spirit.

Description: The disembodied Spirit of an unnamed gremlin. The soul is small and mostly unformed, with little in the way of anima. The spirit contains traces of non-transferable corruption that linger after it’s death.

“Say, Selly, what's a Gremlin?” I asked, she was sitting on my nose and had continued to face away to watch me flail and read the blue box.

“I don’t particularly know, we don’t keep bestiary or many stories remember. But you might find the name in one of your books. They just look like starving sick animals to me, with their big, pointed ears and whatnot.”

OK then, not much to say, except they were lower than me in level, and they had streaks of corruption in them, apparently. I don’t know what it means by condition, but that’s not my problem.

I sent the Gremlin to its no doubt horrible fate and finished burying them.

Then, I reached out and encouraged the grass to grow. the ground was a bit sick here, the effect of whatever was at the lake acting like a poison that slowed its growth, but I got it to grow. It looked like a regular space again. I even compacted the soil before releasing my auras to save mana.

I started paying attention to the landscape around me and the way mana flowed. Funnily enough, I was causing little eddies in it around me. I was emitting life mana with my [Wellspring of Renewal], and it was agitating the environment, forcing the land to become renewed while the world around us was otherwise hostile to the idea. I passed through and left a little life in my stead.

It couldn’t have been much in the face of the terrible dark power at the lake, not a blow against its power, but a stone tossed at a Titan. The blow was unknown, a tickle that would result in nothing.

I wish I could get that life mana to heal me. Even just a little. I might be able to cast a healing spell with it if I knew a healing spell. That would sure make my life easier, but honestly, it’s just another thing on the pile of ever-growing things I want to do.

Wait.

Do I need a spell? Would adding life mana to my wounds do anything bad if I were to do it?

I couldn’t see a reason why I couldn’t do that. It would probably be a crappy, unfocused and slow healing, but it was based on the fundamental and most common method of magical healing.

Teas and ointment gave way when you wanted to make a succinct method of healing. You used magical ingredients, and instead of extracting whatever healing properties the leaves had, you extracted the mana in the plant to heal. I was just getting really creative with the idea.

“I thought of something. It might be dumb, but it might help me a bit take some of the load off your skill,” I told her.

“Truly? Well, go on then, keeping you upright is a chore, it’s making my fingers tingle. If yeh can take a bit off, I won’t complain.”

With that settled, I took a quick walk off the path until I was hidden from it and tried to push mana into it. The draw was immense, it sucked up mana and doubled in size. I could feel the ground tremor a bit as the life mana intensified.

It trickled up from below, reinvigorating the brush, which sucked it up greedily like a man dying of thirst. It sucked and sucked, and the response was immediate.

I heard the land speak to me then. It was not in words but ideas. I could feel its enjoyment in what I was doing, even if it was small in scope. A part of itself was healing.

“Hello, trying to help a bit, might get better.” I sent it.

“Gratitude,” it returned.

It wasn’t much, but they did start filling up with life mana, they were processing it fast, but not fast enough. I could see the blades of grass and leaves and bushes fill themselves up, a portion going to leaves and another to root.

Most of it went to the roots, but the leaves, too, started to fill.

I flexed the skill after a moment, trying to focus on the leaves, but it didn’t work.

Instead, I focused on the aura or tried to. Even with a bit of help using Visualization, it only focused down a little.

But it still worked.

I stood there, mana pouring from me like a river, each moment I grew emptier, I watched life bloom around me. Then, I stopped.

I pulled back from it, gently pulling my mana back into its reserve.

I felt less than half full, but that didn’t matter.

I reached down and plucked at the grass until I had a ball, putting some of the life mana grass in my mouth and chewed it before, like with a more mundane poultice, I pressed it into my gut wound.

I took a smaller bit and just chewed on it and got back on track.

Selly and I headed off down the path, looking for more centuries or a path inward, and as we did, another thing started to dawn on me. A small horror as my mind started to spin and the wound tingled.

I had felt nothing killing those gremlins either, not one thing.