Tom pushed himself up from his doubled-over position and wiped the vomit from the corners of his mouth. He was very aware of the wasps above him, and Danger Sense was screamed at him pointlessly. He wanted to tell it to shut up, but it was a passive skill, and didn’t work like that. What made it useful when the danger was unknown was frustrating when the threat was staring him in the face like this. He knew exactly how much danger he was in. April was merciless when it came to these types of situations. He only gave himself a fifty percent chance of surviving, which he considered a more than acceptable risk. If it helped him to get Heal Organs, it was worth it even if he died poorly a couple of times. The end result was going to justify his personal suffering.
Danger Sense’s tone changed, and the insects attacked. They drove at him from multiple directions. Spark crackled out from his hand, fuelled by precognition mana. It spread out seemingly randomly and struck a dozen of them. Every bug that was struck tumbled from the sky, and Tom understood instinctively that they were stunned and not fried.
The wave of suspiciously directed electricity had disabled about a third of the enemies, and the rest made it through, and, almost as one, stung him. Tom stamped down on his instincts. There was a reason why he was here, and, while usually as a first step, he would have attempted to quarantine the venom at the point of injection, doing so now was running counter to why he was here in the first place. He suppressed the itch, and focused instead on both stepping on the stunned insects and jabbing down hard with his spear butt to kill them.
Almost instantly, he realised the attempts were futile. These were not insects from Earth - these were rank-one creatures from Existentia. Their tough bodies, cushioned by the soft dirt and grass, couldn’t be crushed by any pressure that he could bring to bear.
Cursing his slow thoughts, and the lack of foresight that had led to wasting time, he switched his approach up. Instead of stamping, he stabbed them, flashes of Power Strike enhancing his spear tip to a perfect cutting edge and doing what raw physical power couldn’t. Every stab split a wasp in half and killed it. As he mechanically eliminated the stunned insects, his mind raced to consider options and strategies.
No brilliant ideas presented themselves. He lacked the resources at his current level of development. His skill, Power Strike, was already threatening him with skill exhaustion after only killing ten. There was no way he could kill forty like this. Even the half-application he was doing instead of a full strike wouldn’t let him extend the ability for long enough. His reserves were going to burn out.
Not that it mattered - the spear skill was not his only bottleneck. He was also lacking the magical reserves to stun them all in a timely manner. As an offensive strategy, Tom realised, it was doomed to failure, so he changed his approach. All he could do was to kill as many as possible until the skill became unreliable, and then, hopefully, use his healing to outlast the rest.
As he killed the creatures manually, he formed the Heal Organ spell. It was rushed because of the circumstances, but that stress was the point of being here. The precognition affinity mana, as always, worked with the released fate to deform his spell. He had long since given up fighting against it, and accepted the changes the undefinable magic wrought. The spell clicked into existence with surprisingly little pushback.
Tom examined what the interplay of his limited manual mana manipulation, knowledge, fate, and rogue precognition affinity mana had produced. The resulting framework wasn’t exactly like the wireframes he had painstakingly remembered and was attempting to mimic, but it was close. It was as sleek as expected, with additional flourishes that did not belong, but made it less like a blunt instrument and more like a piece of art.
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It existed fully formed, and, when he prodded it, he discovered it was suspiciously stable.
Tom could feel the poison that April had made him ingest and the venoms pumped in by the wasps collide together in his blood stream. The potency of both was raised because of the interaction.
Internally, he groaned. He had been expecting April to have set something like this up, but it was still frustrating to have his fears confirmed. As much as undoing and reforming the spell felt like the best solution, the circumstances meant there was no time. He poured his available resources into the spell – namely, eight normal mana and more than twice that of the precognition affinity flavour. In total, it was three times what someone his age should have possessed, which was a massive advantage, but one he rarely thought about.
Fifty milliseconds later, the spell, finished and fully powered, sank into him with the slightest of nudges.
Tom could feel it working, and there was an immediate ding.
Yes, he exclaimed internally as a thrill of triumph went through him. He had the spell, and now, if the trial killed him, it was worth it. The cost would be only embarrassment and a bit of pain. They were both outcomes that Tom was happy to suffer in order to advance his spell repertoire.
Then, a moment later, he realised what he was thinking. No, he scolded himself harshly. Accepting that outcome was not okay. He buried the defeatism attitude. He didn’t want to die, and April never sent him into unwinnable situations, even if it often felt like they were.
Metaphorically, he rolled up his sleeves. He was going to survive this.
Heal Organs had a diagnostic component to it and it immediately assessed his entire body. The breakfast April had made him eat had contained devastatingly powerful poisons, all perfectly timed to go active at the moment the wasps hit. Multiple organ systems were on the verge of failure and that was only compounded by the venom injected by the wasps.
There was no way to address all of the problems with a single cast. He slipped into the familiar pattern of triage and focused on the most pressing issues; If I don’t stop that heart failure, I’m going to die in ten seconds-kind of problems. The heart, lungs, and brain became his sole focus. Problems that were as potentially equally as lethal but wouldn’t cause issues for longer - like kidneys, bladder, intestines and the skin - were pushed back to be addressed later.
The wasps were still stinging him, and, thankfully, April had stripped out the pain components of the venom they usually delivered – otherwise, without the ability to turn his pain off, he would have been overwhelmed by the spikes of agony. The continual introduction of new venom was an issue he had to solve, but his spear was useless unless he stunned them first, and he could tell by how close his body was to shutting down that directing magic to that purpose was not acceptable.
He switched to using his daggers instead. With careful movements, he plucked one from where they were stinging him and then cut it in half. All those hours chasing butterflies helped, and that was why he didn’t catch a wasp every time or even every ten attempts.
He did succeed, and the numbers dropped.
Whenever over four mana had regenerated, he would recast his new spell, and had enough leeway to switch his focus onto preventing organ death beyond the big three. Whichever of them were closest to the tipping point was patched up. For a life-or-death situation, Tom realised, that he was surprisingly relaxed. Danger Sense was not even screaming at him anymore. His healing was outpacing new damage, and his effort with his knife was reducing the number of enemies he faced. He had gotten it to the point where there was less than a dozen left, and, if he understood how precognition affinity mana worked, the most deadly of the swarm had been the first to die. He was winning.
Two hours later, he finally reached the point it was clear that he was no longer in danger of dying, and then April brought him back to the café. The residual organ damage was fixed up immediately, and he felt refreshed.
Tom patted himself down and stretched luxuriously. There was not a hint of the pain he had been feeling. Then he grinned at April. “Did I get anything good?”