Turning Point (Part 3)

A dozen of the creatures shot from the wall, running randomly at whatever they caught sight of. Eana ran to engage one that had set upon a prone adventurer, a young Scout she had not yet been able to attend to when an armored body slammed down in front of her. One of the men from the wall, big and wearing plate, groaned from where he lay trying to get his breath back and return to his feet. He had a massive dent in his breastplate and, at a glance, Eana could tell he likely had broken ribs beneath it.

Working as quickly as she could she stretched out a hand and buffed his health regeneration with a quick cast of Recover and leapt over the top of him to save the woman who was almost helpless against the Drone that stood over her, raking at her with claw-like fingers.

Eana held off on imbuing her attacks, knowing that whatever strange quirk let her use skills without a cooldown forced her instead to tap into her mana pool. And she would need it for all the healing in front of her.

Unimbued, her staff was enough for Drones.

With several quick strikes it was down and Eana was tending to the screaming woman who continued to flail and fight at her as Eana attempted to close the worst of her wounds.

The sound of insect chittering was all around her now. She glanced up to check on the defenders. The entire line had broken and the adventurers were in full retreat.

A man ran past her and unthinkingly, blind in his panic, shoulder checked her right into the ground.

Eana’s vision flashed. She must have lost consciousness for a few seconds because she seemed only to blink and the man who had knocked her to the ground was down himself, backing away and staring as a hulking Hive Soldier rushed forward and skewered him with the long, bone like protrusion that stuck forward from its arm like a short spear.

One of the Black Hats, a Swordsman and would-be rescuer, took up a quick position with an overturned wagon at his back and began sweeping off heads, limbs and even in one inspired moment, cut one of the things entirely in half. Behind him his companion, an Archer, held what high ground he could and fired skill enhanced multi-shots into the milling throng of approaching insect men.

A bug man Soldier came rushing forward and the Swordsman, body glowing with power and sword imbued, swung to intercept its thrusting arm. He lopped it off at the elbow but the Soldier seemed not even to notice as it thrust the sharp fingers of its other arm into the gap made by the man’s haymaker swing, tearing out his throat. Blood spurted as he collapsed and behind him a creature leapt, frog-like, and tackled the Archer from his perch. The flowing army of hive monsters covered him before he finished skidding.

The entire “rescue” had devolved into a massacre of panicked adventurers fighting to extend their lives for just one more terrified second.

Any semblance of coherent thought left Eana and she stood, useless amid all that death and horror.

She wasn’t the only one. The man with the painted blue kite shield, whose guts had laid in front of him so little time before was hunched against the wall, too scared to move and looking as though he hoped the Drones would forget he existed.

One of the mutated monsters, a massive mouth nearly as large as its misshapen body, approached him and almost casually, knelt down and grabbed him by both shoulders. He screamed as it turned its whole body sideways to open that oversized maw, sinking its jagged fangs into the man’s head with an awful crunch audible even in the din and chaos of the route happening all around them.

The man’s screams quit abruptly and his body went limp. The thing stood and walked off, taking the front half of his skull as its grizzly meal.

Claws sank suddenly into the soft skin of Eana’s upper arm. Reflexively she yanked away, screaming and taking a long step to make space as she raised her staff to strike.

“Time to go!” Gendra shouted.

Not wasting another moment the woman shuffled off toward the the exit for Irondale. Eana caught up and took her arm, urging both of them to move faster. And for just a moment, so brief she would forever after wonder if she had imagined it, Eana caught in Gendra’s expression a glimpse of gratitude.

And then she gasped. Falling away from Eana’s grasp.

“Come on! Get up old-” Eana cut off. Behind the prone old woman one of the new monsters, all mouth and body, had already swallowed the womans leg up to her knee and it was chomping furiously higher.

“GET OFF!” Eana screamed.

She imbued her staff and struck, the force of the blow breaking off the top half of the thing’s head. The jaw though, reflexively continued biting down on Gendra’s mangled leg.

The old woman groaned and shuddered.

Eana had to do something! She jammed her staff into the clamping mouth and attempted to pry it open but at each attempt to lever Gendra cried out.

“I know!” Eana said, still levering, “I have to get it off!”

“You have to-” the woman gasped, “Get out!”

“What?”

“Just don’t leave me,” Gendra grunted out through gritted teeth, “for them!”

Eana couldn’t understand. How could she run away and not leave Gendra… and then she did.

“I’m in a lot of pain,”Gendra groaned, “Please, be quick.”

The screaming around them was beginning to die down, replaced by the weak, despairing cries of the wounded being dragged back to be absorbed by the Hive, and through all of it the incessant chittering of the bug men.

Eana raised her staff.

“Please,” Gendra said again, eyes closing.

Eana’s scream echoed across the redoubt as she imbued her staff and swung, crushing in the fragile old bones of the woman’s skull.

A notification flashed into her vision, accompanied by a massive rush of hundreds of XP. There was no reason to cast a spell to confirm Gendra’s death. Humans could make mistakes, but Order did not.

She looked around at the chaos ensuing all around her, at the screaming, running and dying men and women. It was too horrible. She should never have come.

And as she had done so many times before, as she had promised she would no longer be made to do again, Eana ran.

She ran right past the wounded. Off to one side she saw a besieged Galvar go down under the sheer weight of grasping insects.

She kept running. Eyes ahead, straight out of the gap in the redoubt walls that had been left for the whole group to retreat once the wounded were ready to move out.

Behind her the bug men flowed over the wall and swept away any adventurer in their way.

And just like that, in a much more violent repetition of history, she found herself once again alone among the trees. Dirty, sweating, blood stained, out of breath, and running.

But alive. She was still alive. She had done it before, she could do it again. If the adventurers at the redoubt could last even a short time she could put enough distance between herself and the bug men that she could make it back to the node. She just had to keep moving.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

The sound of thundering footsteps, running and gaining on her startled her out of her panicked planning. She turned in time to see Tomme’s bearded face, blood stained and frenzied, bearing down on her.

“Not this time!” he shouted as he shoved her with the full force of his momentum, sending her sprawling.

She skidded to a halt, face scraped up, tasting dirt and blood she scrambled to her feet and managed to pick up her staff. She turned to him, taking up a terrified fighting stance.

“Bet you thought nobody saw!” Tomme shouted, still moving forward, “Bet you thought you could get away.”

She swung the staff and he leaned, almost casually dodging her clumsy attack.

“It was YOU!” he snarled, “It’s always been you! You’re the reason they hit us like that, you’re the reason they’re all dead, and there’s nobody - ” he cut off to stifle a mad chuckle before coming completely unhinged, “nobody left but us!”

He took a menacing step forward, “Just you,” another step, “and me.”

“No! I didn’t- ” Eana said.

“Didn’t do it? Didn’t mean to call up the entire Hive to come kill us? It was an accident! You’re just a healer, there to help!

“It wasn’t you who murdered the Healer, either, was it,” he said, taking out a long knife and pointing it at her as he approached.

She swung wildly, trying only to keep him from closing the distance, too shocked, too terrified to do anything other than swing in her blind animal instinct to survive.

Bizarrely, he stepped into her swing and with his free hand, eyes filled with hatred and disdain, caught her staff mid blow.

“I’m glad you’re not denying it. Saves me needing to cut out your lying tongue before I send you back to the Chaos that spawned you.”

Eana screamed as she invoked Psych Up, enhancing her strength. She kept on screaming as, unburdened by cooldowns, she invoked it again, and again. Her strength climbed higher and higher and beneath everything she felt the last of her desire to help, the last of her fraying instinct to heal vanish as this man became to her the symbol of every injustice she had suffered ever since becoming a healer.

She had killed Gendra in what even the most unkind observers could have seen was a mercy! It was an impossible situation! But it was that moment and some unknowable connection between her magic and the Hive attack that this man reduced her to.

Every life she saved, every fighter she put back on those walls, everything she had done to keep them all alive and fighting, everything she had ever done since she first took this cursed class, all of it meant nothing to him.

It meant nothing to any of them.

And it never would.

She wrenched her staff out of Tomme’s shocked hands, her strength now approaching levels where even Idris might struggle to manage her.

Tomme recovered and continued his advance, knife out and shining in the rain and rays of gloomy light filtering through the trees.

With all her strength ready and a mana headache forming at her temples letting her know she was almost entirely drained of magical energy, she swung.

Tomme was fast.

He was skilled.

He was dangerous.

But right now, more than any of that, he was a high level adventurer bearing down on a twelve year old girl. A Healer.

And that made him arrogant.

He intercepted her blow once again, hand raised to catch and this time take away her only defense.

But just before he closed his fingers around the staff, in the final moment before wood met flesh, Eana invoked Imbued Strike.

The red energy formed, coalesced, and released with a snap as the force of her strength and magically enhanced attack shattered Tomme’s arm into a useless bag of flesh and shards of bone.

He didn’t even scream. Just looked down at his useless off-arm, his weapon hand lowering as he stared in complete shock at the impossibility of what she had just done to him.

Eana imbued her staff a second time, head bursting in pain as her mana pool ran dry, and with a primal roar of anger and defiance shouted into Tomme’s face, “NOT THIS TIME!”

With a crack her staff slammed down over the top of his head, dropping him instantly to his knees. He looked up at her with a dazed, confused look and she knew if there was any ability left in him to form words he would be asking, “How? How was this possible?”

She screamed into that vacant, confused face the final words Tomme would hear before he became nothing more than another massive rush of XP to join Eana’s growing reserves. And as she did she punctuated each word with blows from her staff.

“NEVER!” crack “AGAIN!” crunch.

Tomme was dead before the last attack landed.

And this time Eana didn’t banish the notification that popped up:

Feat of Strength Performed

Defeat an opponent ten levels higher.

Reward: 1000XP

Kill Reward: Opponent’s unspent XP plus a percentage based on total XP invested - 3738XP

Total reward: 4738XP

She breathed heavily, adrenaline, fear, and anger all coalescing into shivers that brought her to her knees. The blood on her staff where she had hit Tomme had some strands of his black hair caked into it. She plucked them out, dimly thinking how gross it would be to leave them.

Then she realized she wasn’t scared anymore. It wasn’t fear that had her shaking, adrenaline sure, but this was something new entirely. It was a thrill.

It was victory.

But that was wrong, wasn’t it? That wasn’t who she was. She forced herself to look at his crushed, stupid face. A crumpled heap of a man, years of experience and fighting - an entire life - come to an end by her hand.

Eana wanted to feel bad about it. But as she looked at his corpse, damp and dirty with mud, blood, and all manner of insect detritus covering it, she just couldn’t muster two points of sorrow. He had gotten what he deserved.

She thought of Gendra and found that there too she didn’t feel much. In the end, she may have shown she could overcome her own petty dislike of Eana, but after two years of mistreatment? Eana’s thoughts told her she should let it go, but her feelings? To them it just wasn’t enough.

Had Gendra gotten what she deserved too? Maybe not, but Eana was done ruminating on the experience.

She turned her attention to her newly flushed reserves of XP. Where previously she had always needed to think carefully on her choices, weighing one skill vs the next, now she was staring at a number higher than she had ever thought possible.

Immediately she invested in the Inventory ability and, picking up Tomme’s knife, sent it away to storage.

The yells and battlecries of the redoubt had dimmed to nothing and all Eana could hear any longer was the cacophonous clicking of thousands of hive monsters. There wasn’t any time left to loot. She turned and continued back toward Irondale.

As her feet ate away the distance between her and safety, her mind drifted back to the Shimmering Rocks and what she had learned there - the real reason, she was sure, for Tomme’s and everybody’s animosity.

Eana had been given a unique class tome. That class had been what made her valuable to the newborn dungeon, and had been the source of her ability to push its level further and faster than it could possibly have done on its own.

But no, she realized that wasn’t right. She had already been valuable to the dungeon - the skills contained in the class were skills she already possessed. How it was possible she didn’t know, but after taking in the knowledge offered by the tome she saw that she had already learned and even moved forward in proficiency on all of the skills made available to her.

Shimmer had given her the tome to give her conscious mastery over abilities she already possessed.

The moniker that Order - or was it Chaos? - had given to her class made sense now, all things considered. She hadn’t invested and grown into her abilities. They had always been there. Always leaking through in everything she did, in her spells, the very energy she summoned to use her abilities as a Healer. She was born to these abilities, and so it made sense that her class fit that attribute.

Eana was a Child of Chaos.

And now with all of this XP at her disposal, she could invest in the last of the spells and abilities she hadn’t yet grown into. And with a little time, she was sure to break through to the next tier of her unique class. She had to. There was nobody to mentor her, not any longer, and not ever in this.

As always though, the first thing to do was to get out. To survive.

Things would be different now.