Lucy released her mana lantern familiar as they started down the stairs, it served as an actual lantern, letting out a soft blue light. They wound down three staircases and into a rough stone chamber. There were old, well used home comforts, an old rug, a lumpy sofa, basic cooking equipment. At the far end there was a wall of rubble, in the rubble they could just see half a face with a shock of dark hair covered in dried, crusty blood and one arm poking out.
They rushed towards the wall. Rashid made to dig him out but Kyra stopped him before he could move more than a few stones. An ominous rumble from the rock at such a small amount being moved.
“This will have to be done delicately!”
She hit the trapped man with her Life Aura power, the read back she got from it was that he was silver rank but dangerously starved of magic and extremely injured. It was a shock to see a silver ranker so injured, they had an incredibly high constitution that as a healer was hard to believe. Kyra gently touched the rubble wall and closed her eyes. She slowly had the wall melt away exposing his face. It was rugged and swarthy beneath the damage and the blood. She pulled a mirror from somewhere and looked at her hand, a silver rank coin appeared and she opened the mans mouth and fed it to him without hesitation. The mans shallow breathing shuddered and deepened and she let out a sigh of relief.
“He’s going to be ok for now.”
She hit him with a Life Charge, as strong as she could.
“He is incredibly magic starved. His body has been trying to heal the damage that he sustained from whatever caused this collapse and then continued trying to heal him but couldn’t whilst he is trapped. I need to stabilise him which he mostly is now, then slowly peel back the wall to get him out. Lucy can you set up the grand healing ritual with him still trapped in the wall?”
Lucy opened a rune portal and they saw books whipping past inside the opening. She pulled a few out as they passed and a large sheet of paper.
“Give me a few minutes, I can alter it.”
She then started drawing on the large sheet of paper on the floor with a charcoal stick in neat lines, mapping out the runes, referencing her books she had grabbed. Kyra turned back to the wall and shot out earth spikes from either side of her to brace the wall around the man.
“Teddy, James, can you start excavating the rubble as far away from him as you can? Work from the bottom and try and get as high as you can so there’s less chance of it falling on top of him? I’m not going to be able to earth shape and heal at the same time, I only have so much mana. Rashid, unless you have a specific power that can help then please help the boys..”
“Most of my support spells for healing require enemies and combat. I’ll get my hands dirty with the guys.”
He rolled up his sleeves and started shifting rocks, tucked up as close as he could to the wall furthest away from the pinned man. Teddy and James pitched in, using more powers as their base strength was nowhere near the silver ranker’s. James used his prehensile tail to grab rocks and move them until it went on cooldown and a mix of either snake arms or literal bear arms complete with shaggy hair. Teddy opened a rift portal, the other end he said was up in the desert near where they came in, all the boulders pulled off the wall went in so they could make space in the underground room. He used his dimension blade to make room for the others to dig in and grab rocks. There was limited room and they all had to be careful of not only hurting each other but the possibility of a cave-in, more than once Kyra had to tell them to stop, having felt vibrations through the the ground with her seismic senses. She shored up the areas that needed it with more earth spikes; low mana and low cooldown they worked well to brace the loose rubble.
After a little while Lucy was ready with her draft design, as she drew it out on the smooth stone floor she explained to Kyra.
“So most rituals are drawn in a circle because geometrically the math in a circle is easy, I wont bore you with why it all needs setting out geometrically but what I’ve done here should funnel the effect to one end.”
She had drawn a large tear-drop shape, with the apex right up against the wall with the trapped man. She put stacks of quintessence and coins into the design as she had in the village. For the grand healing ritual it did involve a number of silver rank coins, the team were fortunate they had enough so far to keep the silver ranker alive, Kyra was having to feed him another as soon as she could gauge his body was capable of absorbing it.
“Before you activate the ritual, this will probably wake him up, I just wanted to warn you all. Also Lucy I had an unpleasant idea. Your illusions and telepathy would be really useful to calm him so he doesn’t thrash and cause any more damage to himself or cause the rocks to shift, I’ve solidified the rock around him but he is silver rank and we don’t know how strong.”
“But he’s silver rank, how would my abilities…” Lucy stopped as she rubbed a thumb over the silver rank coin in her hand she was about to place in the ritual. “You want me to artificially boost my powers to effect him.”
“Yes, no lasting harm to you but the backlash will be unpleasant. In his weakened state you should have no problem effecting him. You should have long enough on boost to explain to him what’s going on, if you can encourage him to meditate and relax it will make everything much easier for us.”
As Kyra spoke she was still healing, Lucky was curled up underneath the man, looking asleep but his healing aura doing it’s work.
“Ok, no problem, time for scary mind witch on ‘roids.”
She placed the last coin in the ritual and had another in her hand ready to go. The ritual flared, the materials sinking in as normal, what was different to the one they had seen in the zombie village was the flare was directional, all the light coalesced towards the tip of the teardrop and out towards the man. Lucy let out a sigh, the relief that such an expensive ritual had worked. Unlike with the team that Kyra could keep an eye on with the interface she had to monitor the man with continual hits of Life Aura, the read backs she got showed the now plentiful healing was having effect. Now the body was in slightly better shape she got more status and condition information, along with the multiple stacks of ongoing regenerative buffs from her massive life charge spell and multiple weak ones from Life Aura she could see how broken his body was in the rock.
Lucy was waiting for the flicker of the man’s eyes before she took the coin, she didn’t want to take it too soon and try and use her illusion powers on a sleeping man. She saw the tell-tale signs and his eyes fluttered and opened, staring straight forward at the wall he was facing, his brain catching up to his condition. Before he was too awake she placed the coin in her mouth. The rush of energy was like nothing she had felt before. The academy had them all try bronze coins to know what it felt like if they ever needed to use them in combat but it wouldn’t have wasted silver coins. Her whole body was suffused with potential energy waiting to be unleashed, she felt like she could have dug the man out in seconds with her bare hands, or tunnelled to the surface without the stairs or… She remembered what she was meant to be doing rather than get carried away with the power.
“While the left hand waves the right makes the move.”
The illusion she had chosen was a simple white room with only herself and the man in it, as the illusion was in his mind he appeared as he thought himself. He was short, extremely short. At maybe four and a half feet tall Lucy grimaced at what the boys were going to say about dwarves. He was in metal capped boots and thick trousers, he only wore a black vest under a thick, heavy leather apron that had tools in various pockets. He had a long black beard that must’ve been lost in the explosion, wild eyebrows set over equally wild eyes that were deep set and dark. He had wild dark hair that stuck out in thick spikes all over the place. Her illusions normally ran their own course but with her temporary silver rank she was able to use her telepathy whilst inserting herself.
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[Sir, we don’t have a lot of time, I need you to listen to me. You’ve had an accident in your workshop. We’re trying to rescue you but you are badly injured. We need you to remain completely still otherwise you are going to do more damage to yourself. Do you understand?]
The man looked around the stark white cube he was in and the woman he had never seen before in front of him. He nodded slowly.
[We’re getting you out as fast as we can, if you can meditate my team healer can help you more. Good luck.]
Her illusions didn’t last long and even with the boost she felt it running out. The man sat cross legged on the white floor and put an elbow on one knee and rested his chin on his fist, his other fist going on his hip as he closed his eyes. Lucy tilted her head like an owl as she looked at him, surprised by his pose, looking like a replica of the thinking man sculpture. She caught herself and shook her head, picking up physical habits from her owl familiar was a good way to look like a weirdo.
She withdrew her attention from the illusion, looking back at the man in front of her, with half his hair missing, his face battered and bruised and no beard he looked so different to his illusionary self. She watched the moment his illusion ran out and he became aware of himself again, his body shuddered slightly then stilled. Kyra hit him with another Life Aura and saw he was stable.
The boys had cleared a lot of the rubble from either side so it now resembled a pyramid with the body stuck in the middle. Kyra had taken the time to inspect the walls and ceiling and declared them safe. They now started the more delicate operation of removing the stone from around the injured man. Kyra could now directly help as the healing was being robustly given by the ritual, the lingering buffs and Lucky. None of it was particularly strong but all together was slowly driving the silver rank health up. The top of the body started to be exposed, the legs cruelly twisted by the accident, his torso was pounded and chest caved in a way that no one other than an essence user could survive, most of the internal organs being replaced by the time they reached silver rank and the need to breathe having gone. Kyra did her best to straighten his legs and make him comfortable, with the last of the stone removed from on top of him she used her earth shaping powers to fashion a crude stone stretcher under him and the team lifted him down. Another silver coin was fed to him and she hit him with another Life Aura spell to see that as he was now removed from the rock his recovery attribute was rapidly healing him much more than it had been before. Kyra took Rashid away to have a quiet word away from the small man.
“Rashid, even with magical healing I’m not sure he’s going to fully recover, I’ve been studying healing as much as I can and unless you tell me that at silver it’s different I think it’s going to be a long time before he can use those legs if at all.”
“I’ve seen many injuries, but having a silver rank impeded like this is different, I think you may be right, but we will have to see.”
The team rested and ate from their storage spaces. The excitement of everything that had just happened made everyone strangely quiet. The small man continued to appear asleep in front of them, the recovery taking everything he had.
Once Kyra had rested she got up and walked over to the rubble wall, although they had dug a lot out to free the man they had no idea how far back it went, she put her hand against the fall and focused. She stepped back and raised her arms up and to the left, when she swiped her arms down and to the right a large section of stone melted like concrete and swept down. When Teddy saw what she was doing he stood and started creating rifts for her to pour it into. Being able to focus on earth shaping without having to heal she was working as fast as the three had been together. She slowed down after a while, a mana headache forcing her to stop.
“You guys can take over, we’re getting to the back of the room, there’s what I think must be the remains of a workbench and then a couple of doors that I think are intact. It’s all ceiling from above the workbench, I’ve sealed the top so as you clear no more should come down.”
She flopped down to the ground in a tired heap. The others started moving forward and clearing more rubble. When they were done they were in a huge underground cavern, made even bigger by the chasm above them where the roof used to be. Rashid had come forward and put layered bubble defensive shields around the workbench area as soon as it became exposed, not knowing what had caused the accident he was taking no chances.
They all congregated by the stretcher, knowing that it was going to take a while for the man to heal and he would be done only when he was done. They all started taking what could only be described as ‘glamping’ equipment from their storage space. Rashid shook his head at the team again.
“So prepared, for everything.”
They set up a small indoor camp and took out their cards again and taught Rashid how to play.
The next morning they woke up and shuffled about having some breakfast. The injured man heard them and opened his eyes. He grunted trying to sit up and Kyra made a motion like a closing clam with her hand and the stone stretcher bent up like a recliner. The man silently took in the adventurers then panned his gaze around the room, lingering on the bubble shields at the far end that Rashid kept topped up.
“How are you feeling?” Kyra asked him gently.
There was a long silence as his eyes rested on Lucy as if he was reading her face. He then turned to Kyra.
“I can’t feel my legs.”
The team were suddenly gripped with a horrible feeling. That feeling when you’re on an icy lake and you hear the ominous cracking. Or the danger fart when you’re out and about and you’re not sure if it was just a fart… the team had been riding a high since they had got to this world, with one of the first powers they had as a team being magical healing they had thrown themselves into all challenges, knowing there was a safety net. The amount of healing Kyra had dumped into this man, the expensive ritual and just how ridiculously powerful he was meant that what he said caused a gut punch of reality. The realisation that they were in the middle of a very dangerous world that could have real consequences.
“Sir, you’ve just come out of a very bad accident. Your body was taken to the extreme of what damage it could take and then was starved in that state. There is going to be a protracted healing time.”
Kyra was putting on her best ‘professional healer’ voice but no one missed the fact she had omitted any detail about his legs.
“Craftsman, I am Rashid, chief instructor of the Greenstone Remore Academy Annex and am escorting this team here on behalf of the Greenstone adventure society, do you need us to call for aid in helping here?” He looked pointedly at the workbench under the bubble shield.
The squat man grumbled and his hand went to his chin to play with the now missing beard and they heard him mumble barely audible.
“Blow up a few empty square miles of desert an a small army of automatons get loose with no safety measures and suddenly you cant be trusted.”
He looked around the room surveying the damage. Then coughed and said at normal speaking volume.
“Nae, the workshop should have contained whatever is left, it should have contained it in the first place and I’m not sure why it didn’t. The people I sell to call me the Craftsman, anyone who saves my life and my workshop can call me by my real name; Efkycharkzshyn.”
“Efky, Efkychar, Eefky. How about Charlie for short?” James said, struggling to pronounce it.
The man smiled and barked a short laugh, they only knew it was a laugh through context as it sounded unusual and barely used.
“Aye that’ll do, no ones called me that before but I’ll allow it. C’mon, take me over to the bench, lanky can lower the shields and I can get some of mah dignity back.”
All silver rankers had the power to levitate a small amount if they concentrated, at the moment Charlie needed all the mana he could get to circulate around his body and heal him some more. Rashid lifted him up and carried him down the long room to the end to the solitary workbench. Rashid dropped the shields then immediately dropped the man as the magic the shields had been holding back burst towards them. He cooly manifested a wedge shaped water shield in front of him and the blast passed either side.
From the floor the man looked up, rubbing his coccyx.
“I didnae see no hand waving there, did ya have to droop meh?”
“Mr Efkycharkzshyn, you’re earning your reputation as dangerous right now.”
“I’ll show you my reputation for dangerous if yah droop me again.” He grumbled.
Rashid picked him up again and took him over to the bench. Opening a shallow drawer the man pulled out a long stool, far taller than the draw was deep. He then sat on the stool so he could reach everything. The others watched in fascination as he pulled magical tools from everywhere and when he pulled out a small crystal land speeder, looking like a direct copy of Star Wars. He pulled on opposite corners of the small model and it expanded to fit the bench.
“Ah, thats exactly what we came for in the first place.” Rashid said. “The Adventure society was hoping to collect the favour owed when you said you would give one of these models.”
The man didn’t stop his work or look around.
“No.”
And preceded to rip parts of the model off.